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What are you Reading Weekend?
Jan. 19th, 2020 02:21 pmCurrently Reading:
Fiction: None for "fun"
Poetry: Back to episodes here and there of Anthony Oliviera's Paradise Lost podcast, and loving it.
Non-Fiction for fun: Maeve Marsden's 'Queerstories' edited collection, which I bought in a fit of Queer Angst. It is helping.
For work: working my way through Boss MF's recent publications, and Kim Zarins' YA Canterbury Tales novel 'Sometimes We Tell the Truth', which is hitting me for six.
Recently finished: for certain values of "recently".
From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith Brett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I deeply and unironically loved this book. The contemporary stuff was good enough, I guess, but I devoured with joy the 19th and early 20th century history. I had forgotten that the 'secret ballot' format is known elsewhere as the 'Australian ballot'! I had never known that having a centralised Chief Electoral Officer was an Australian (specifically South Australian, I think) innovation!
Somewhere in the early chapters Brett advanced the thesis that Australian is a peculiarly *bureaucratic* democracy: that, in part due to the generous subsidisation of the colonies by the British state, and then due to low income tax and govt income primarily from duties, Australians (at least, on average, an average that by its nature excludes marginalised groups) were/are particularly likely to regard the government as an ideally-benign provider of services. Government makes our lives easier, rather than necessarily making us More Free. Thus, Brett argues, when it came to it we had relatively little problem with first compulsory registration (objections were primarily bureaucratic rather than ideological) and then compulsory voting. I'd like that a little more nuanced (are opponents of compulsory voting particularly likely to be from groups that experience the government as punitive? I don't think so, although there have been some high-profile indigenous abstainers), but it seems overall a sound thesis.
The True Queen by Zen Cho
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was disappointed in this, after 'Sorcerer to the Crown', for reasons it's hard to put my finger on. It's not as... tight, that's part of it. The ending was too rushed, on all axes, but especially on the Sakti-Murna conflation and separation process. I was also really disappointed by the f/f romance - although I could see it coming, there was too little backstory on one character's part, and almost no character development to show interest on the other's. The key thing that satisfied me immensely was the marriage, and the non-residential resolution of the love arc: but I would have been more happy with these solutions if the build up had been better developed.
Meanjin Spring 2019 (Meanjin, #78.3 by Jonathan Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a pretty good edition, overall. The lead essay, which was opened from the paywall early for the September Climate March is... a gut punch, and absolutely an eerie reading experience if you're reading not in spring, but in the middle of the apocalypse summer. Bradley goes through the fire seasons of 2017 and 18, looking at smoke haze, at environmental devastation, at recovery funding, and at the fire-flood cycle we seem to be moving into. Thus when it started raining this week and the news were all "you might not expect it, but rain has its own problems...", I... wish more people had read this. (Also, I lived in the Hunter Region during the millenium drought. We had higher rainfall than most regions... which meant we got heavy rains on dry topsoil, this isn't new information to me.)
Also notable:
Maxine Beneba Clarke's memoir piece, Son of a Preacher Man.
Gavin Yuan Gao's poem The Resurrection, which was not positioned with Bradley's 'Unearthed', perhaps because that would be Too Blatant.
Maria Takolander, Writing and Its Demons, of which:
Michael Mohamed Ahmed, Reading Malcolm X in Arab-Australia.
Karyn Wyld, Thirteen Jetties and a Man on a Hill, a study of the colonial landscape.
Khalid Warsame, This vast conspiracy of memory.
David Carlin, The historian, about an old lady who preserved the effects of her family in hoarder-esque but excellent fossilised condition. Kayloulee in particular would enjoy this.
Glyn Davis, A poet and politics. I really like Davis' reading of Tennyson's Ulysses, while strongly objecting to Davis' entire ideological freight about Western Literature and its place and so on.
Matthew Rickettson, The ghost in the memoir machine. On the role of ghostwriters in memoir production. Pairs really well with Michael Mohamed Ahmed's comments on the autiobiography of Malcolm X. It is followed by a memoir essay written by a ghostwriter, but that was less striking.
I also pointedly Did Not Read the Shannon Burns piece and feel better for it.
Finally, I note that I re-read Anne of Windy Poplars in early December, and then most of it again as bedtime story with my sister. I didn't put up a review of it, because it's not showing in 'my books read' by recent>earliest, despite me having added the most recent read dates in the appropriate re-read field. Ugh, goodreads, why.
Online fiction:
Nina Maclaughlin's Aracne, from 'Wake, Siren', introduced at Electric Lit by Mary Norris. Wake, Siren is Ovid retellings.
Ava Wolf, Not What I Ordered, in Okay Donkey magazine. Contains the excellent line, "
“I’m a little disappointed,” he replied, looking into my eyes very seriously. This was excellent news. I loved to disappoint men.".
Rachel Swirsky, The problem with my dachshund, at Guernica Magazine. This is... impressive. The protag is harming herself, and ultimately the dachshund, but it's almost impossible to side with the parents who want her to do basic things like... not live in a caravan soaked in dog pee.
Howard Fast, The general zapped an angel, introduced by Molly Jong-Fast at Electric Lit. Opening line gives a great sense of the piece: "When news leaked out of Viet Nam that Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie had shot down an angel, every newspaper in the world dug into its morgue for the background and biography of this hard-bitten old warrior."
Katherine Robb, A consumer's guide to shopping with PTSD, alternatively titled at Electric Lit as "A mattress that will muffle the screams".
Jemma Louise Payne, Air Holes, in Meanjin Spring 2019. I didn't actually read this one online, but it's in this section because... reasons. It's a slow, character study story of a f/f couple raising a son while one of them is neck-deep in an election campaign. It's not ground-breaking or anything, but I liked it.
Alex Cothren, Let's talk Trojan Bee, Meanjin Spring 2019. Told in news headlines and snippets - I love it when that technique is done well.
Nicolette Polek, The Dance, alt-titled at Electric Lit 'Why is it so hard to just say what we mean?'.
Danielle Dutton, These Bad Things at Guernica Magazine. "One night, when he was seven or eight, she read her son a story from a book called These Bad Things. It was surprisingly scary, and she knew she should stop, but they were so far in. She wanted to see how it ended."
JZ Ting, Transplant, at Mascara Literary Review. On family, migration, grief and travel.
Notable Essays online: You may note I have given up the regular link posts. I was getting way too... completeist for it to be either useful or healthy. Here's some stuff I've read lately, though.
Anonymous (Longreads), Whatever Happened to ________?. In which it is dangerous for a woman to marry within her field, essentially.
Caleb Luna, (The Body is Not An Apology), Romantic Love is Killing Us.
Anna Spargo-Ryan (Medium Blog),How to be mental in the apocalypse.
T.S. Elliot, just released, Statement on the opening of the Emily Hale letters. Unfortunately, TS-bro did not anticipate that by 2020 this would put *literally everyone* on Team Emily.
Cameron Dezen Hammon (Guernica Mag), The ways we take ourselves apart. Subtitle line: "While I am texting the man who is not my husband, bacteria is growing inside the bodies of my daughter and her best friend."
James Hatch (Medium blog), My semester with the snowflakes. A veteran attends Yale at 52, is surprised.
Michael Dango (LA Review of Books), Meme formalism: "Indeed, the popularity of memes shows that people aren’t just reading for content, but reading for shape: for how something is said, for the kinds of sentences it might appear in, for how the parts relate to the whole, and how the container for a thought changes the thought itself."
Marissa Korbel (Guernica), I speak into the silence: interview with Carmen Maria Machado.
Jenna Kadlec (Longreads), In Jo's image: talks about the 1994 Little Women in light of the more recent film.
Up Next: Well, I have an MA thesis to read over, and plenty of work reading. For myself, I want to start the next Meanjin, and make a bit more of a dent into my podcast pile. Kobo reading, once 'Queerstories' is done, might be another KJ Charles.
Music Notes:
I bought Dessa's 'Parts of Speech' just before getting on a plane at the end of 2019, and I have no regrets:
I am just starting to listen to King Princess on Spotify, on the basis of a review at Bitch Media.
Sorry this is enormous, folks! That's about a month's worth of online fiction, and the best of a month's worth of Other Online Stuff I read.
Fiction: None for "fun"
Poetry: Back to episodes here and there of Anthony Oliviera's Paradise Lost podcast, and loving it.
Non-Fiction for fun: Maeve Marsden's 'Queerstories' edited collection, which I bought in a fit of Queer Angst. It is helping.
For work: working my way through Boss MF's recent publications, and Kim Zarins' YA Canterbury Tales novel 'Sometimes We Tell the Truth', which is hitting me for six.
Recently finished: for certain values of "recently".
From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith BrettMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I deeply and unironically loved this book. The contemporary stuff was good enough, I guess, but I devoured with joy the 19th and early 20th century history. I had forgotten that the 'secret ballot' format is known elsewhere as the 'Australian ballot'! I had never known that having a centralised Chief Electoral Officer was an Australian (specifically South Australian, I think) innovation!
Somewhere in the early chapters Brett advanced the thesis that Australian is a peculiarly *bureaucratic* democracy: that, in part due to the generous subsidisation of the colonies by the British state, and then due to low income tax and govt income primarily from duties, Australians (at least, on average, an average that by its nature excludes marginalised groups) were/are particularly likely to regard the government as an ideally-benign provider of services. Government makes our lives easier, rather than necessarily making us More Free. Thus, Brett argues, when it came to it we had relatively little problem with first compulsory registration (objections were primarily bureaucratic rather than ideological) and then compulsory voting. I'd like that a little more nuanced (are opponents of compulsory voting particularly likely to be from groups that experience the government as punitive? I don't think so, although there have been some high-profile indigenous abstainers), but it seems overall a sound thesis.
The True Queen by Zen ChoMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was disappointed in this, after 'Sorcerer to the Crown', for reasons it's hard to put my finger on. It's not as... tight, that's part of it. The ending was too rushed, on all axes, but especially on the Sakti-Murna conflation and separation process. I was also really disappointed by the f/f romance - although I could see it coming, there was too little backstory on one character's part, and almost no character development to show interest on the other's. The key thing that satisfied me immensely was the marriage, and the non-residential resolution of the love arc: but I would have been more happy with these solutions if the build up had been better developed.
Meanjin Spring 2019 (Meanjin, #78.3 by Jonathan GreenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a pretty good edition, overall. The lead essay, which was opened from the paywall early for the September Climate March is... a gut punch, and absolutely an eerie reading experience if you're reading not in spring, but in the middle of the apocalypse summer. Bradley goes through the fire seasons of 2017 and 18, looking at smoke haze, at environmental devastation, at recovery funding, and at the fire-flood cycle we seem to be moving into. Thus when it started raining this week and the news were all "you might not expect it, but rain has its own problems...", I... wish more people had read this. (Also, I lived in the Hunter Region during the millenium drought. We had higher rainfall than most regions... which meant we got heavy rains on dry topsoil, this isn't new information to me.)
Also notable:
Maxine Beneba Clarke's memoir piece, Son of a Preacher Man.
Gavin Yuan Gao's poem The Resurrection, which was not positioned with Bradley's 'Unearthed', perhaps because that would be Too Blatant.
Maria Takolander, Writing and Its Demons, of which:
I have tried to think of an alternative, non-violent way of writing. One which would guarantee that literature truly offers a safe space. I picture only an instruction manual.
Charles Baxter similarly ponders what a happy literature might look like. He concludes that a literature of happiness—a state that can only be achieved by ignoring the cruelty or pain of others living alongside us in the world—would be immoral. It is a clever argument. Writers are good at clever arguments, at justifying what they do.
Michael Mohamed Ahmed, Reading Malcolm X in Arab-Australia.
Karyn Wyld, Thirteen Jetties and a Man on a Hill, a study of the colonial landscape.
Khalid Warsame, This vast conspiracy of memory.
David Carlin, The historian, about an old lady who preserved the effects of her family in hoarder-esque but excellent fossilised condition. Kayloulee in particular would enjoy this.
Glyn Davis, A poet and politics. I really like Davis' reading of Tennyson's Ulysses, while strongly objecting to Davis' entire ideological freight about Western Literature and its place and so on.
Matthew Rickettson, The ghost in the memoir machine. On the role of ghostwriters in memoir production. Pairs really well with Michael Mohamed Ahmed's comments on the autiobiography of Malcolm X. It is followed by a memoir essay written by a ghostwriter, but that was less striking.
I also pointedly Did Not Read the Shannon Burns piece and feel better for it.
Finally, I note that I re-read Anne of Windy Poplars in early December, and then most of it again as bedtime story with my sister. I didn't put up a review of it, because it's not showing in 'my books read' by recent>earliest, despite me having added the most recent read dates in the appropriate re-read field. Ugh, goodreads, why.
Online fiction:
“I’m a little disappointed,” he replied, looking into my eyes very seriously. This was excellent news. I loved to disappoint men.".
Notable Essays online: You may note I have given up the regular link posts. I was getting way too... completeist for it to be either useful or healthy. Here's some stuff I've read lately, though.
Up Next: Well, I have an MA thesis to read over, and plenty of work reading. For myself, I want to start the next Meanjin, and make a bit more of a dent into my podcast pile. Kobo reading, once 'Queerstories' is done, might be another KJ Charles.
Music Notes:
I bought Dessa's 'Parts of Speech' just before getting on a plane at the end of 2019, and I have no regrets:
I am just starting to listen to King Princess on Spotify, on the basis of a review at Bitch Media.
Sorry this is enormous, folks! That's about a month's worth of online fiction, and the best of a month's worth of Other Online Stuff I read.