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highlyeccentricMerry Christmas, those who Christmas!
Currently Reading:
Hard copy fiction: At Swim Two Boys, slowly
E-book fiction: Ana Mardoll's 'No Man Born of Woman', Yangtzee Choo's 'The Night Tiger', both Netgalley ARCs. I think I'm going to love The Night Tiger.
Lit Mag: Meanjin 77.3, from which I particularly recommend Jonno Revanche, Flitting Between Many Middles. I like the way Revanche thinks about identity as communicative, a product of class and society and individual relationships, rather than a fixed internal state.
Recently Finished:
The Dressmaker of Draper's Lane:, Netgalley ARC, not super impressed.
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was... beautiful, and painful, and very insightful. I found it slow going, initially, not for its own merits but because I kept cringing in anticipation of the disaster that was coming. The protagonist's disdain for Giovanni was difficult to live with, even though the aspect which *he* was unaware of (that disdain for Giovanni is reflected self-loathing) was very well signalled by the narrative.
Essentially, I loved it, but I did not find it necessarily *fun*.
Victoria Blud, 'The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Europe', review copy. Did like!
Up Next:
I've got another journal review copy, a Brepols history of emotions collection. I need to start that ASAP; otherwise, the goal is to finish a couple of the current reads before New Year.
Links of Note: I've read quite a few interesting pieces on t'internets of late, here are some links.
Vox Magazine Explains the Alice Walker NYT David Icke shenanigans. Anti-semitism, conspiracy theories, etc.
Peter Donahue for Electric Literature, Processing Trauma by Overthinking Bubble Guppies:
This Broadly interview with Sandy Stone on living as a trans women among lesbian separatists in the 1970s. (Sandy Stone is the recording engineer who worked for Olivia Records and was targeted by radical transphobic feminists).
Possibly the greatest thing I've read all week: What is Glitter? (NYT)
Glitter is, it turns out, mostly from New Jersey, and a highly secretive industry.
Music Notes:
This is the second-greatest Christmas Song, after Fairytale of New York:
Currently Reading:
Hard copy fiction: At Swim Two Boys, slowly
E-book fiction: Ana Mardoll's 'No Man Born of Woman', Yangtzee Choo's 'The Night Tiger', both Netgalley ARCs. I think I'm going to love The Night Tiger.
Lit Mag: Meanjin 77.3, from which I particularly recommend Jonno Revanche, Flitting Between Many Middles. I like the way Revanche thinks about identity as communicative, a product of class and society and individual relationships, rather than a fixed internal state.
I notice that after making new friends amid a period of resettling, many of whom were from disparate backgrounds and previously did not know each other, we began picking up on each other’s traits. Like complementary bacteria combining, we bonded over the infinitesimal links we then shared. We cut our hair similarly, swapped clothes and mended broken items in a meditative and careful way, lent each other books with dog-eared pages and shared poetry, favourite movies and food. Gender might be a query in which we attune more to the focuses and parallels of each other’s lives, in which we can better serve those we care about outside the prescribed formats, to understand others the more we begin to understand ourselves. It means doing our best to temporarily break down toxic social expectations, creating healthier dialogues in place of the old ones.
Non-binary can be seen as a reflexive nexus that enables us to fill many roles among the circles and social theatres we frequent, stepping outside the allotted binaries, even if it places us in precarity. If we are to abandon the gender stations we were placed in at birth, it needs to be in some way multi-faceted and unselfish. We must take into account why gendered discrimination is part of the colonial floorplan that pits us against each other and keeps us down and makes things more convenient for capitalism. Yet still, we are pushed without warning into a merciless world upon coming out as trans. Maybe it’s natural to tap into the power of individual desire if it’s what comes first.
...
Still, I try to distance myself from the flippant, libertarian form of identity politics that rules the mainstream trans politic, that feels divorced from a trans lineage and relies too much on ideas of destiny. I reject the popular categorisation of ‘brain sex’—although I think dysphoria as it has been medicalised is categorically psychological—I argue this role modelling isn’t separate from my individual conception of gender identity. I don’t think I am exempt from the power that comes with being seen as male—having once being seen as pure sinew in denim—but the overwhelming proof has been that the social class assigned to me has become illegitimised by my incidental, and then purposeful, deviation from a gender binary. I often joke that I don’t identify with womanhood like trans women might, but in a Kate Bornstein kind of way I feel confident identifying myself with ‘grandmotherliness’ or alternatively ‘boyishness’ or even ‘sissyness’. The reality is that we all cling to stereotypes and mythologies before we can metabolise that into something less scripted. If I have to adhere, at least let there be some degree of dictation in the process.
Recently Finished:
The Dressmaker of Draper's Lane:, Netgalley ARC, not super impressed.
Giovanni's Room by James BaldwinMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was... beautiful, and painful, and very insightful. I found it slow going, initially, not for its own merits but because I kept cringing in anticipation of the disaster that was coming. The protagonist's disdain for Giovanni was difficult to live with, even though the aspect which *he* was unaware of (that disdain for Giovanni is reflected self-loathing) was very well signalled by the narrative.
Essentially, I loved it, but I did not find it necessarily *fun*.
Victoria Blud, 'The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Europe', review copy. Did like!
Up Next:
I've got another journal review copy, a Brepols history of emotions collection. I need to start that ASAP; otherwise, the goal is to finish a couple of the current reads before New Year.
Links of Note: I've read quite a few interesting pieces on t'internets of late, here are some links.
Vox Magazine Explains the Alice Walker NYT David Icke shenanigans. Anti-semitism, conspiracy theories, etc.
Peter Donahue for Electric Literature, Processing Trauma by Overthinking Bubble Guppies:
If you are me, and have inadvertently become the leading expert in the Betty Boop mythos, you know she has changed appearance because the Talkartoons present us with reality from Bimbo’s subjective viewpoint. He, being attracted to Betty, sees her as a dog like himself. But in the Betty Boop series, we see her as she really is, a human.
The results of the experiment are in. You discover — that is, if you are me — that you have become a practitioner of a dark fandom art. You have developed a headcanon.
This Broadly interview with Sandy Stone on living as a trans women among lesbian separatists in the 1970s. (Sandy Stone is the recording engineer who worked for Olivia Records and was targeted by radical transphobic feminists).
Possibly the greatest thing I've read all week: What is Glitter? (NYT)
Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.
Aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate settles over store windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like hot, molten gold across the nail plates of young women. It sparkles like pure precision-cut starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a car towing a camper van. Indeed, in Clement Clarke Moore’s seminal Christmas Eve poem, the eyes of Saint Nicholas himself are said to twinkle like aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate (I’m paraphrasing). In homes and malls and schools and synagogues and banks and hospitals and fire stations and hardware stores and breweries and car dealerships, and every kind of office — and outside those places, too — it shines. It glitters. It is glitter.
Glitter is, it turns out, mostly from New Jersey, and a highly secretive industry.
Music Notes:
This is the second-greatest Christmas Song, after Fairytale of New York: