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Weekend Listening
Jan. 26th, 2020 04:03 pmLet's separate these from the books & stories & online content post, or every second week I will overwhelm my circle.
Music:
Thanks to the dubious graces of Twitter, I am informed that there is now an Evanescence cover of 'The Chain'.
Is it good? No idea. Do I love it, in a pre-ironic way? Yes. Although I'd like it more if Amy Lee's vocal pitch was a bit lower.
Regardless, I have purchased it. Also purchased (as self-bribery for habit chart success): the Greatest Hits of Shania Twain.
This, meanwhile, might be the best thing added by a man to the contemporary folk genre this century:
Postcastery: I have resumed consuming podcasts, fuelled by the realisation that I can get through an episode of many things in a day's commute.
Literary:
I've listened to several recent episodes of the Slightly Foxed Podcast. I particularly enjoyed episode 12's focus on antiquarian bookselling, especially the discursion on how academic buying has changed in recent years. I really enjoyed the poetry recommendations in episode 15. However, as with the last time I forayed into Slightly Foxed, it didn't take long before I found something that made me cringe, hard: episode 14, in which Gail and Hazel completely rebuff the idea that demographic diversity (by which they seem to mean race, with a side order of gender) is or should be important in backlist reading.
I am making headway again with Anthony Oliveira's The Devil's Party, in which our host (self described 'PhD and dumpster racoon') reads chunks of Paradise Lost and then unpacks them in... it's described as a reading group, and perhaps if I was participating in the forums it would be, but honestly it feels like the best, most stimulating kind of undergrad lecture, except it goes on forever and has more sex jokes and musical interludes in it.
Other:
I listened to Forgotten Australia's first episode, The ghost of Mount Victoria Pass, which is really good, class-aware, quite chilling, narrative history. I intend to listen to more from that podcast, but they're quite long.
I'm two episodes into You Kant Say That by Na'ama Carlin and Melanie White, an accessible intro to sociology podcast. The first episode kind of annoyed me (they... uh... leaned quite heavily on definitions of 'what it is to be human' that relied on either speech or cognition in ways that have been very problematic; hopefully they will unpack this in time), but I enjoyed the second, on Descartes.
I attempted Bitch Media's POPAGANDA episode on Talking about Sex and gave up halfway through on account of excessive hetero-cis normativity. When talking about the patriarchal structure of language we use for talking about sex you can't, you simply cannot, say "if you're sleeping with men, with people with penises, you're approaching this as an outsider". Firstly, some people who are sleeping with men/people with penises are ALSO men and/or people with penises; and secondly the obvious category of non-men with penises are trans women, who... look, I geddit, you're straight women, you're allies, you believe trans women are women, and thus they are not in your dating pool so you don't think about how sex scripts itself for them, or for the people they sleep with, but damnit, this is NOT HARD TO RESEARCH. Also, if your list of supposedly-unsatisfactory words for cis female genitalia doesn't include cunt, and *nor* does your list of alternatives, you can just... get in the sea.
I completed a first listen-through of Carbonne 14's Lascaux episode, but I need to go back around again, as I lost chunks while changing trams and the like.
Fiction:
First news is that while I was on a podcast break, the Penumbra Podcast started back up and no one told me! I have not resumed listening yet, because I would like not to be swallowed for six straight hours.
For, uh, infatuation reasons, I have embarked upon The Magnus Archives, and find i am really enjoying it (in single episode doses). I wouldn't normally say I like horror, but I do like... supernatural realism? Uncanny narratives with a strong sense of place, which these have. I really like the understated spook - so far, I've not actually *found out what anything is* (although I'm told some elements of early episodes recur, building up pictures). This is much more my jam than jump-scare horror.
Music:
Thanks to the dubious graces of Twitter, I am informed that there is now an Evanescence cover of 'The Chain'.
Is it good? No idea. Do I love it, in a pre-ironic way? Yes. Although I'd like it more if Amy Lee's vocal pitch was a bit lower.
Regardless, I have purchased it. Also purchased (as self-bribery for habit chart success): the Greatest Hits of Shania Twain.
This, meanwhile, might be the best thing added by a man to the contemporary folk genre this century:
Postcastery: I have resumed consuming podcasts, fuelled by the realisation that I can get through an episode of many things in a day's commute.
Literary:
I've listened to several recent episodes of the Slightly Foxed Podcast. I particularly enjoyed episode 12's focus on antiquarian bookselling, especially the discursion on how academic buying has changed in recent years. I really enjoyed the poetry recommendations in episode 15. However, as with the last time I forayed into Slightly Foxed, it didn't take long before I found something that made me cringe, hard: episode 14, in which Gail and Hazel completely rebuff the idea that demographic diversity (by which they seem to mean race, with a side order of gender) is or should be important in backlist reading.
I am making headway again with Anthony Oliveira's The Devil's Party, in which our host (self described 'PhD and dumpster racoon') reads chunks of Paradise Lost and then unpacks them in... it's described as a reading group, and perhaps if I was participating in the forums it would be, but honestly it feels like the best, most stimulating kind of undergrad lecture, except it goes on forever and has more sex jokes and musical interludes in it.
Other:
I listened to Forgotten Australia's first episode, The ghost of Mount Victoria Pass, which is really good, class-aware, quite chilling, narrative history. I intend to listen to more from that podcast, but they're quite long.
I'm two episodes into You Kant Say That by Na'ama Carlin and Melanie White, an accessible intro to sociology podcast. The first episode kind of annoyed me (they... uh... leaned quite heavily on definitions of 'what it is to be human' that relied on either speech or cognition in ways that have been very problematic; hopefully they will unpack this in time), but I enjoyed the second, on Descartes.
I attempted Bitch Media's POPAGANDA episode on Talking about Sex and gave up halfway through on account of excessive hetero-cis normativity. When talking about the patriarchal structure of language we use for talking about sex you can't, you simply cannot, say "if you're sleeping with men, with people with penises, you're approaching this as an outsider". Firstly, some people who are sleeping with men/people with penises are ALSO men and/or people with penises; and secondly the obvious category of non-men with penises are trans women, who... look, I geddit, you're straight women, you're allies, you believe trans women are women, and thus they are not in your dating pool so you don't think about how sex scripts itself for them, or for the people they sleep with, but damnit, this is NOT HARD TO RESEARCH. Also, if your list of supposedly-unsatisfactory words for cis female genitalia doesn't include cunt, and *nor* does your list of alternatives, you can just... get in the sea.
I completed a first listen-through of Carbonne 14's Lascaux episode, but I need to go back around again, as I lost chunks while changing trams and the like.
Fiction:
First news is that while I was on a podcast break, the Penumbra Podcast started back up and no one told me! I have not resumed listening yet, because I would like not to be swallowed for six straight hours.
For, uh, infatuation reasons, I have embarked upon The Magnus Archives, and find i am really enjoying it (in single episode doses). I wouldn't normally say I like horror, but I do like... supernatural realism? Uncanny narratives with a strong sense of place, which these have. I really like the understated spook - so far, I've not actually *found out what anything is* (although I'm told some elements of early episodes recur, building up pictures). This is much more my jam than jump-scare horror.