What Are You Reading Wednesday

[highlyeccentric]

WAYRW feels a bit redundant right after the year-end post, but here we are!

Currently Reading:
Fiction: At Swim, Two Boys, which I am DETERMINED to get through now
Lit Mag: Meanjin 77.3, from which recs below in the links section
Academic: 'Performing Emotions in Early Europe'. Today I read about shame, corporal punishment, and erotic flogging in early modern London, and I think the chapter author draws a flimsy distinction between shame and humiliation.

Recently Finished:

Ana Mardoll, No Man of Woman Born: exactly what you would expect from Ana Mardoll. You know going in this is a book in which the answer to the prophecy is going to be trans people, and only one of them had an even slightly surprising twist on it. Good, overall. Full review to come.

Yangsze Choo, The Night Tiger: loved it. Also full review to come.

Up Next:
I've got quite a few ARCs. Maybe Virtuoso, by Yelena Moscovitch, will be next. Maybe not.

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Music notes:

Did you know Avril Lavigne released a new track last year? I didn't but now I do. It's kind of... country-pop?

Also, sometimes I watch old music videos and realise that the whole time I was a nice, straight, late bloomer, some shit was definitely embedding itself in my id that was sure gonna come out in interesting ways later:

"Shania Twain - Man! I Feel Like A Woman (Official Music Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

Links of note:

From Meanjin 77.3

The Piping Shrike on politics and populism. I don't know that I agree, but it's worth a read.

So the concept of democratic representation is changing. Mainstream political parties seem less intent on representing particular sectional interests out in society than claiming to represent society as a whole through the composition of the party. Internal obsession with ethnic and gender quotas has increasingly replaced any obligation on parties to pursue agendas of those same groups in society. In Australia, for example, increasing female and Indigenous representation in the major political parties has in no sense been matched by an increased focus on political agendas that advance the interests of those groups in society at large.

It is not just that mainstream political parties seem to see themselves as being an idealised cross-section of society, but that they seem to see themselves as synonymous with democracy. It is as if representative democracy of the twentieth century is being replaced by what can be best described as ‘political democracy’ of the twenty-first. The measure of democracy has become less the extent to which sectional interests in society are represented but the health of the existing political establishment regardless of whom they represent. It explains why the detachment of political parties from society, and their eroding democratic content, can also lead them to see themselves as the bulwark of democracy.

Until recently this association of parties with democracy was mostly confined to interminable self-important discussions about ‘party democracy’ and membership drives. Such party reform has usually been about distancing from the sectional interests that formed them (such as unions) and is arguably a response to the erosion of representative democracy. Nevertheless, while mainly about reviving flagging political organisations, and of little interest except to careerists in them, the rest of us are expected to view them as major advances in the working of democracy for the common good.

However, with political turmoil intensifying in 2017 and 2018, this tendency of political parties to identify with democracy has led to the point where they now see threats to their own survival as threats to democracy. Such threats are increasingly characterised, and isolated, by established political parties under the label of ‘populism’.

And Cameo Dalley on live export and rural industry. The animal rights arguments vs the business case for live export have been done over and over again: this piece offers a new perspective, in terms of local economy and worker's rights.

The next day at a café in a shopping centre in suburban Perth I meet two other men who worked at the Wyndham meatworks. Roger and Frank swap comical stories from the 1970s and 1980s, but clearly the nostalgia has an effect and the men become very earnest when telling me it was the best times of their lives. Then without prompting, and in much the same way as CC did on the previous day, the men discuss live export as the end of their trade. ‘That killed it: the live export. Which we all thought was very sad … When it finished it was so sad, like there was suicides [among the meatworkers]. There was blokes committed suicide. I know of two.’ These opinions signal what might seem to be an unlikely alliance, one between Australian meatworkers and animal welfare campaigners. Both oppose live export, albeit for different reasons.

From elsenet:

KJM Stewart, A Changeling in My Own Skin (Electric Literature), on changeling stories and trans identity.

Meagan Day, You Don't Want Hygge, You Want Social Democracy (Jacobin Magazine): perfectly sums up my feeling on that Hygge book.

siderea has thoughts on economics, class, and the Vimes Boots Theory.

And then there's another thing. It is not really knowable what role my having reliable boots – and not needing to scramble to get or replace boots in the middle of the winter should the cheap boots fail precipitously – had in my being able to get and keep the internships and jobs I had that let me make it to private practice.

One of the big differences between being a programmer and being a therapist – at least how it played out in my life – is that as a programmer, I went approximately nowhere, but as a therapist, I was schlepping all over the place. As a grad student, I was attending classes on two different campuses (both in Cambridge), and had three different clinical internships across four different sites (Arlington, Lexington, Waltham, and Boston); at all three interships my responsibilities included errands out into the community. My first clinical job after graduating, I got on the agreement I was willing to do housecalls throughout East Boston. I was doing housecalls in Eastie off and on for seven years, including through the brutally snowy winter of 2015, walking the narrow chasms built and then carved along the sidewalks, between the mountains of snow against the houses and the chin-height walls of snow at the curbs. I trudged through the snow to my job interview at what became my second clinical position in Medford. It was ten minutes hike to the bus stop to catch the bus there, and then another ten minutes walk from the bus stop at the other end to get to the clinic; my commute entailed twenty minutes of walking, each way, which was fine in good weather.

I don't know that doing all this in the cheap boots would have been impossible. Perhaps in an alternative reality where I never got the expensive boots, nothing bad happens. Or maybe I pay a little extra for cab rides in bad weather on a few more occasions.

Or maybe I don't declare during the interview for the position in Waltham that taking public transit all that way out into the suburbs – a good 20 minute hike from the commuter rail station, and that in fair weather – wouldn't be a problem. Maybe when I learn that the position in Eastie requires a willingness to do housecalls, I think about cold wet feet, and decide to hold out for better – and not find it.

...

We can't know the effect of my having reliable boots on my getting licensed as a medical professional, because we can't know the alternative reality in which I didn't have them. But it does seem like there was some positive benefit. And there was nothing inevitable about my making it to licensure. Other therapists fail to make it all the time. Every little bit helps.

Adam Gopnik, How Cafes created modern liberalism: partly a review of a book specifically about cafes and modern (American) Jewish culture, interlaced with a broader overview of Habermas' theories on cafes and civil society.

David at Raptitude, Why the Depth Year Was My Best Year Yet: this was shared by a friend whose variety of cosy-wholesome-minimalist doesn't normally appeal to me. As a chronic do-er of new things, I'm not sure why this account appeals to me so much, but it definitely has the effect on my brain that reading about the Marie Kondo method does for people who wish they were minimalists. I'm still turning over how that intersects with me right now, and what if anything I should do about it.

Comments

[greghousesgf]

I always wanted to hear that song covered by either a drag queen or a very butch lesbian.