What Are You Reading Wednesday
Jan. 16th, 2019 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricCurrently Reading:
Fiction: At Swim, Two Boys, which is still slow going but phenomenally well executed. Virtuoso, by Yelena Moscovitch (e-ARC), which I haven't got far into but it seems interesting. Ali Smith's 'Winter', which hasn't grabbed me the way 'Autumn' did.
Non-fiction: Performing Emotions in Early Europe
Recently Finished:
Karis Walsh, 'Seascape': Good, but confirmed that I am really not in the headspace for romance novels right now
Meanjin Vol 77 No 3 by Jonathan Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved a lot of things about this edition, particularly the essays by Bruce Pascoe and Belinda Rule. I am however starting to suspect Meanjin run Shannon Burns essays precisely because they know they will subsequently get spot-on responses by women/poc and then they get to feel good for publishing those people AND please whoever it is that likes Burns' monofocal rants.
I am so far behind in my Meanjin reading that it's no longer worth keeping up the subscription, at least not until I can afford to re-subscribe to the hard copy. I'm sad about that, because I make this decision just as the Australia Council funding announcements came out, and Meanjin didn't get their funding. Neither did The Lifted Brow, though, and I will retain my subscription to them.
Further links/recs from Meanjin below, in the online reading section.
Up Next:
Oh my. I have to either read a LOT in the next two months, or aggressively cull, or preferably both. Library books and ARCs first, so Stephanie Trigg's festschrift and Hannah Kent's The Good People are priorities, as are Diane Setterfield's 'The River' and... whatever else is in my Netgalley account.
Online fiction recs:
I have listened to all the extant episodes of The Strange Case of Starship Iris and I really recommend it as a podcast. It's... imagine that Star Trek fanwriters invented Firefly from the ground up, I guess? The storytelling work is phenomenal - the pilot episode is a really great scene-setter and generates wonderful suspense, episode 4 is a brilliant bottle episode that deepens character and backstory really well, and the later episodes do amazing work with the framing conceit of the whole podcast, which is that episodes are covert transmissions relayed by mysterious 'agents' who are monitoring the crew of the Rumour. In episode 8 the crew become aware they're being monitored, and begin censoring themselves: so you get to see them planning a Cunning Plan, but not to know the details. It's a great way to maintain tension while showing the characters engaging in foresight and planning.
I enjoyed A Pilgrim's Guide To The Lighthouse of Quvenle the Seer at Lightspeed magazine.
I really loved Grandma Novak's Famous Nut Roll, also at Lightspeed, which is a one of those stories that's less about a plot than about a specific conceit guiding you through a world. The conceit is recipes and you have to piece together the references to build up a picture of what is going on in the world of this family sharing the recipes.
Worth a read: Mrs Longfellow Burns at Electric Literature, titled for the web 'the woman behind the man is literally on fire'.
From Meanjin, Karen Wyld: For their own good, a fictional account in the form of letters between white authorities, which traces the fortunes of a family of girls from Jigalong mission in the early 20th century. Content warnings provided at the site.
Online essay, memoir, life writing, poetry:
From Meanjin, Kelly Peiopha, The Hands of a Woman, which is about domestic violence, and art, and Artemesia Gentilleschi. I am surprised that the author doesn't seem aware that the surviving Gentilleschi Susannah painting has a palimpsest in which she is looking straight at the men.
Also Meanjin, Sylvia Martin, Shadowing the Boyds. This seems to be a different Sylvia Martin to the academic who wrote 'Passionate Friends'. Interesting memoir piece about art, music, and the Boyd family of artists/potters.
Meanjin again, Grazyna Zajdow, Syzymon in Spain, an accounting of and reckoning with her father through the lens of his time with the Dabrowski regiment in the Spanish Civil War.
Further Meanjin, Andrew Ford and Anni Heino, The Song Remains the Same, a musicological piece on Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. I don't have a very musicological mind, but I have loved this series in Meanjin, and this piece in particular I loved for its analysis of the music as well as its provision of context.
Meanjin's poetry section, Eileen Chong, My mother talks in numbers
The Public Domain Review, Angus Trumble, O Uommibatto, on the Pre-Raphaelites and wombats. Contains some great descriptions of 19th century European encounters with Australian fauna in general - I'm fond of the story about the london woman who woke up to find a kangaroo in her bed, and of this story of Rosetti's wombat solving the problem of a tedious houseguest: 'Rossetti gleefully reported to William Bell Scott on September 28, 1869 that the wombat had effectively interrupted a long and dreary monologue from John Ruskin by patiently burrowing between the eminent critic’s jacket and waistcoat.'
Buzzfeed, Tiana Clark, This is what black burnout feels like: deals with some of the class issues as well as race issues that the viral Millenial Burnout essay skims over.
Wasafiri.org, Len Lukowski, Diary of A Teenage Boy. Life-writing reckoning with the author's body, self and identity after some time on transition-related testosterone. I can't really put my finger on why, but a lot of this spoke to me in that odd way that things do which aren't by any measure about your experience but which resonate with something deep in you.
Online journalistic / op ed type pieces:
Electric Literature, Carrie V Mullins, The disastrous decline in author incomes isn't just Amazon's fault
Wired.com, Gretchen MucCullough, Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning: sadly contains no actual linguistics research, just a journalist's collection and sorting of examples, but enough to convince me I would very much like to see linguists research this.
Bloomberg.com, Builder of 200-million-dollar Turkish chateaux project goes bankrupt. That's not one 200 million dollar chateau, but an entire estate of cookie-cutter faux-riviera chateaux, intended for wealthy gulf clients. There's a lot of weird going on here.
Music notes: Spurred by the Meanjin piece I noted above, I bought Tracy Chapman's first album, and I love it. A lot.
Fiction: At Swim, Two Boys, which is still slow going but phenomenally well executed. Virtuoso, by Yelena Moscovitch (e-ARC), which I haven't got far into but it seems interesting. Ali Smith's 'Winter', which hasn't grabbed me the way 'Autumn' did.
Non-fiction: Performing Emotions in Early Europe
Recently Finished:
Karis Walsh, 'Seascape': Good, but confirmed that I am really not in the headspace for romance novels right now
Meanjin Vol 77 No 3 by Jonathan GreenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved a lot of things about this edition, particularly the essays by Bruce Pascoe and Belinda Rule. I am however starting to suspect Meanjin run Shannon Burns essays precisely because they know they will subsequently get spot-on responses by women/poc and then they get to feel good for publishing those people AND please whoever it is that likes Burns' monofocal rants.
I am so far behind in my Meanjin reading that it's no longer worth keeping up the subscription, at least not until I can afford to re-subscribe to the hard copy. I'm sad about that, because I make this decision just as the Australia Council funding announcements came out, and Meanjin didn't get their funding. Neither did The Lifted Brow, though, and I will retain my subscription to them.
Further links/recs from Meanjin below, in the online reading section.
Up Next:
Oh my. I have to either read a LOT in the next two months, or aggressively cull, or preferably both. Library books and ARCs first, so Stephanie Trigg's festschrift and Hannah Kent's The Good People are priorities, as are Diane Setterfield's 'The River' and... whatever else is in my Netgalley account.
Online fiction recs:
I have listened to all the extant episodes of The Strange Case of Starship Iris and I really recommend it as a podcast. It's... imagine that Star Trek fanwriters invented Firefly from the ground up, I guess? The storytelling work is phenomenal - the pilot episode is a really great scene-setter and generates wonderful suspense, episode 4 is a brilliant bottle episode that deepens character and backstory really well, and the later episodes do amazing work with the framing conceit of the whole podcast, which is that episodes are covert transmissions relayed by mysterious 'agents' who are monitoring the crew of the Rumour. In episode 8 the crew become aware they're being monitored, and begin censoring themselves: so you get to see them planning a Cunning Plan, but not to know the details. It's a great way to maintain tension while showing the characters engaging in foresight and planning.
I enjoyed A Pilgrim's Guide To The Lighthouse of Quvenle the Seer at Lightspeed magazine.
I really loved Grandma Novak's Famous Nut Roll, also at Lightspeed, which is a one of those stories that's less about a plot than about a specific conceit guiding you through a world. The conceit is recipes and you have to piece together the references to build up a picture of what is going on in the world of this family sharing the recipes.
Worth a read: Mrs Longfellow Burns at Electric Literature, titled for the web 'the woman behind the man is literally on fire'.
From Meanjin, Karen Wyld: For their own good, a fictional account in the form of letters between white authorities, which traces the fortunes of a family of girls from Jigalong mission in the early 20th century. Content warnings provided at the site.
Online essay, memoir, life writing, poetry:
From Meanjin, Kelly Peiopha, The Hands of a Woman, which is about domestic violence, and art, and Artemesia Gentilleschi. I am surprised that the author doesn't seem aware that the surviving Gentilleschi Susannah painting has a palimpsest in which she is looking straight at the men.
Also Meanjin, Sylvia Martin, Shadowing the Boyds. This seems to be a different Sylvia Martin to the academic who wrote 'Passionate Friends'. Interesting memoir piece about art, music, and the Boyd family of artists/potters.
Meanjin again, Grazyna Zajdow, Syzymon in Spain, an accounting of and reckoning with her father through the lens of his time with the Dabrowski regiment in the Spanish Civil War.
Further Meanjin, Andrew Ford and Anni Heino, The Song Remains the Same, a musicological piece on Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. I don't have a very musicological mind, but I have loved this series in Meanjin, and this piece in particular I loved for its analysis of the music as well as its provision of context.
Meanjin's poetry section, Eileen Chong, My mother talks in numbers
The Public Domain Review, Angus Trumble, O Uommibatto, on the Pre-Raphaelites and wombats. Contains some great descriptions of 19th century European encounters with Australian fauna in general - I'm fond of the story about the london woman who woke up to find a kangaroo in her bed, and of this story of Rosetti's wombat solving the problem of a tedious houseguest: 'Rossetti gleefully reported to William Bell Scott on September 28, 1869 that the wombat had effectively interrupted a long and dreary monologue from John Ruskin by patiently burrowing between the eminent critic’s jacket and waistcoat.'
Buzzfeed, Tiana Clark, This is what black burnout feels like: deals with some of the class issues as well as race issues that the viral Millenial Burnout essay skims over.
Wasafiri.org, Len Lukowski, Diary of A Teenage Boy. Life-writing reckoning with the author's body, self and identity after some time on transition-related testosterone. I can't really put my finger on why, but a lot of this spoke to me in that odd way that things do which aren't by any measure about your experience but which resonate with something deep in you.
Before I was on testosterone, before the world saw me as male, most people called me ‘she’ all the time, no matter how much I asked them not to, but I knew who I was. I’ve never thought of myself as anything other than male for the last ten years. It was they who had the problem. Seems like now I’m doing their job for them — passing gives me the feeling I’m faking it. Passing is conditional on them not knowing I’m trans. If I tell them, they will stop seeing me as a man. It happens with some cis people I know now; even though I pass as male completely they cannot bare to call me ‘he’. They knew me before I passed, and all they can think of is my vagina.
What does the accidental mental uttering of my former name signify? Of ‘she’ not ‘he’? If I’m meant to be Len how could this be happening? Does it mean the me before is the real me, and I’ve been lying to myself? It’s all over the Internet now, even the papers members of my family read: we’re a cult, we’re liars, mentally ill. I mean, I am mentally ill, but who isn’t? What if we are a cult? What if Len is just an illusion because it’s easier to live as a man than a gender non-conforming woman? What if—
Returning to the pier I get a terrifying feeling of unreality, layers of myself unravelling, and I begin to think this trip was a mistake. Alone for a week with my neuroses, what was I thinking? Didn’t I know it would spiral? It’s happened before. The thoughts were a different shape but I recognise the feeling. It’s landed me in hospital, but I thought that was over a long time ago. I’d been feeling so much better.
I am disconnected from my body. What the fuck have I done? I burn my tongue with coffee, can’t wait till it cools to drink it, need to stay occupied. This time it’s windy on the pier and the sea is rough. The sand dippers have abandoned their perches and high waves crash on either side. Water from the splash back hits me. I keep my legs bent to root myself, focus on some graffiti at the end. Keep moving forward until the foot high writing becomes legible: RIP LIL PEEP. I take a picture and post it to Instagram along with everything else I’ve seen and my own face. I feel the stubble on my chin, the hairs I’ve come to love. What if I’ve ruined myself? What if my face was better before? I practically crawl back to the beach.
Online journalistic / op ed type pieces:
Electric Literature, Carrie V Mullins, The disastrous decline in author incomes isn't just Amazon's fault
Wired.com, Gretchen MucCullough, Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning: sadly contains no actual linguistics research, just a journalist's collection and sorting of examples, but enough to convince me I would very much like to see linguists research this.
Bloomberg.com, Builder of 200-million-dollar Turkish chateaux project goes bankrupt. That's not one 200 million dollar chateau, but an entire estate of cookie-cutter faux-riviera chateaux, intended for wealthy gulf clients. There's a lot of weird going on here.
Music notes: Spurred by the Meanjin piece I noted above, I bought Tracy Chapman's first album, and I love it. A lot.