What Are You Reading Wednesday
Jan. 2nd, 2019 07:48 pmWAYRW 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.
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:
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.
( Dense blockquote hereunder )
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.
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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
siderea has thoughts on economics, class, and the Vimes Boots Theory.
( The most interesting/novel addition IMHO quoted hereunder )
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.
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.
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:
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.
( Dense blockquote hereunder )
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.( The most interesting/novel addition IMHO quoted hereunder )
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.