Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: None. Three Daughters of Eve is on hold, and I might try it again, or I might poke my to-read list.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Slow progress on the summer Meanjin. Haven't touched 'The Queer Child' for a while.
Poetry/Plays: Haven't picked up The Thick of It for a while, nor got back into the Paradise Lost podcast. I AM, as of today, working through the Good Omens script book with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wildeabandon et al. I'm surprised to find that, although I love the TV script, I'm finding it a lot harder to get into as a reading than I do early modern plays - I think it's the choppiness. Very few scenes are long enough to build up momentum, and only A, C and God are consistent enough (maybe Anathema, in episode 2, but not yet Newt or Shadwell) to have a strong through-line.
For work: Still puttering through 'American Chaucers'. Need to get back to Kim Solga on violence against women in early modern drama (which reminds me -wildeabandon, not a strong preference by any means, but if you're short ideas, I'd be keen on the Duchess of Malfi!). Melissa Mohr's 'Holy Sh*t' is amusing reading, but I'm aggravated by it being a trade book - some of her claims about Latin dirty words need citations, and preferably showing-the-working.
Recently Finished:
The White Devil by John Webster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Read this with wildeabandon's playreading group, and ... well it sure was SOMETHING. Lots of people died in many fascinating ways.
Vegan(ish): 100 simple, budget recipes that don't cost the earth by Jack Monroe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Already suspect I will love this, but not quite as much as I love A Girl Called Jack. Par for the course, really.
One Night in Boukos by A.J. Demas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Apparently I forgot to note when I started this, so I've arbitrarily set it as 1 March. Somewhere between Feb 16 and 1 March would be more accurate. I found it really hard to get into, but the problem is definitely me, not the book. First New Country Stress and then pandemic brain - I've only been able to focus on fiction in the past couple of weeks. When I did I liked it, quite a lot. I can't think of any particular complaints, but I'm struggling to think critically about things that aren't Chaucer or Bad Op Eds right now.
Online Fiction: This week's short fiction update is definitely apocalypse themed.
Veronica Roth (Lightspeed Magazine and Podcast), The least of these.
Preemee Mohammed (Curious Fictions), No one will come back for us.
In the first, two women selected as representative of humanity, Best and Least, must make decisions about whose lives are worth saving. In the second, a white guy reporter from America finds himself out of his depth reporting on an epidemic in a developing country, where it's not clear if there's something they're not telling him, or something no one can see...
Up Next: I need to decide which way to go in my reading for fun: slow and demanding fiction (which i feel like i crave) or brain candy (which is probably all I can concentrate on). I have not yet decided.
Online content of note:
Cara Strickland (JStor Daily): The top secret feminist history of tea rooms. American. I'd like to see a European comparison.
Kelly Blewett (LARB): What Greta Gerwig got right: thinking about Amy March in light of May Alcott Neiriker. I feel a bit baffled, because it feels like everyone expects me to have disliked Amy and always been 'a Jo', and I think perhaps I was as a pre-teen? But while everyone else has been discovering Amy, I'm rediscovering Jo - having shifted my affections to the glamorous Europe-travelling globetrotter quite early on! (I blame Good Wives and What Katy Did In Europe for many of my life choices, those that aren't explained by Anne of the Island.)
Jack Halberstam (Feminist Art Collective's 'Notes on Feminisms' series), Off Manifesto. This is more of an experimental avant-garde essay than an analytical one, but it's definitely got punch. I like the strong repetition of it, and the... well, it's in many ways an extended zeugma, and I love zeugmas.
Michael Seidlinger (Believer Mag, which appears NOT to be weird religious content), Interrupted Reading. This describes itself as interviews with big readers who 'fell out of love with literature' and back in again, but very few of them actually ever completely ground to a reading halt. Interesting interviews though.
Mark Brown (Guardian Science), Century old antartic journal reveals survival and sexed-up penguins. The NHM has acquired a journal from the Scott expedition, and its author is most shocked by penguin sex.
Aisling McCrea (The Outline), The magical thinking of guys who love logic.
We have all met this man. He is not even limited to the Internet Right - McCrea discusses New Atheism, and you see a fair bit of it amongst the kind of person who calls themself a Marxist over and above either a socialist or a communist or an anything-elseist.
Huw (Utopian Drivel blog), I sing for two. On queer history's 'ephemeral' form.
Stephanie Land (Longreads), Grieving, but calmed by a different storm: note, deals with both pandemic and miscarriage.
Jenny Turner (LRB, back in 2001), Reasons for liking Tolkien. Also a lot of reasons for NOT liking Tolkien. Turner is pretty scathing in places - when comparing the complexity and referential depth of Pyncon and Tolkien she notes the two have a similar brain-puzzle effect but takes for granted that the former is superior *solely because* its referents are real artists and historical events outside the text. (Which, uh. Also suggests she's unaware how very freakin' many medievalists and classicists started with Tolkien):
I am in this picture and I'm perfectly happy about it, thanks.
Ed Yong (The Atlantic), The pandemic doesn't have to be this confusing. I'm trying not to link to all the COVID opinions I read, and stick to a. cool virus science and b. history/culture of epidemic stuff. This does a bit of both, but it's also an absolutely superb piece of writing, distilling political, epidemiological, cultural, and historical factors incredibly clearly.
Liz Crow (from 'Exploring the Divide' ed Barnes and Mercer), Including all of our lives: renewing the social model of disability. Approaches the *weaknesses* of the model and the situations where impairment could be productively recentred.
Alex de Waal (The Boston Review), New Pathogen, Old Politics. Mostly focusing on Cholera, and mostly on the 1892 Hamburg outbreak, looks at a bunch of cultural and political factors that recur in epidemic response. Warning: deals with cholera. I now know in a great deal more detail about the exact symptoms of cholera, and, well, safe to say, I have a new Worst Nightmare, and it involves "people being struck down by cholera in trams".
Jonathan Kauffman (Hazlitt), Get fat, don't die: on the AIDS circular 'Diseased Pariah News', and the recurring cookery column 'Get fat, don't die'. The journal used black humour as a way to approach HIV/AIDS in all its gritty, unsightly detail, filling a gap that the AIDS literature of the period wasn't quite touching (although I note that 'Holding the Man' does - in the memoir, at least, I'm not sure if the play, which was earlier, goes into the gross detail. Anyway the author of this piece seems to only know about American and European AIDS literature).
Greg Jericho (Meanjin Summer 2019), The trouble with journalism. None of Jericho's points about false balance are at all outdated.
Gregory Day (Meanjin Summer 2019), Otway Taenarum. I empathise strongly with Day's thing for literature and sense of place.
Maja Amanita (Meanjin Summer 2019), We come from the sea. This is a memoir of psychosis. It does fascinating things with tense and person of narration to convey the processes of psychosis, but do handle with care - i don't *have* Amanita's symptoms and this still set me off into a major emotional funk.
Also, this: Siderea has crowdsourced a list of 'things turned upside down' by COVID. Like: unsafety in numbers. Kids miss school. Fresh veggies available, canned scarce. Etc.
Whew. Believe it or not, that was NOT everything I bookmarked in the past two weeks (some are older - I missed some two weeks ago).
Fiction for fun: None. Three Daughters of Eve is on hold, and I might try it again, or I might poke my to-read list.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Slow progress on the summer Meanjin. Haven't touched 'The Queer Child' for a while.
Poetry/Plays: Haven't picked up The Thick of It for a while, nor got back into the Paradise Lost podcast. I AM, as of today, working through the Good Omens script book with
wildeabandon et al. I'm surprised to find that, although I love the TV script, I'm finding it a lot harder to get into as a reading than I do early modern plays - I think it's the choppiness. Very few scenes are long enough to build up momentum, and only A, C and God are consistent enough (maybe Anathema, in episode 2, but not yet Newt or Shadwell) to have a strong through-line.For work: Still puttering through 'American Chaucers'. Need to get back to Kim Solga on violence against women in early modern drama (which reminds me -
wildeabandon, not a strong preference by any means, but if you're short ideas, I'd be keen on the Duchess of Malfi!). Melissa Mohr's 'Holy Sh*t' is amusing reading, but I'm aggravated by it being a trade book - some of her claims about Latin dirty words need citations, and preferably showing-the-working.Recently Finished:
The White Devil by John WebsterMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Read this with wildeabandon's playreading group, and ... well it sure was SOMETHING. Lots of people died in many fascinating ways.
Vegan(ish): 100 simple, budget recipes that don't cost the earth by Jack MonroeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Already suspect I will love this, but not quite as much as I love A Girl Called Jack. Par for the course, really.
One Night in Boukos by A.J. DemasMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Apparently I forgot to note when I started this, so I've arbitrarily set it as 1 March. Somewhere between Feb 16 and 1 March would be more accurate. I found it really hard to get into, but the problem is definitely me, not the book. First New Country Stress and then pandemic brain - I've only been able to focus on fiction in the past couple of weeks. When I did I liked it, quite a lot. I can't think of any particular complaints, but I'm struggling to think critically about things that aren't Chaucer or Bad Op Eds right now.
Online Fiction: This week's short fiction update is definitely apocalypse themed.
In the first, two women selected as representative of humanity, Best and Least, must make decisions about whose lives are worth saving. In the second, a white guy reporter from America finds himself out of his depth reporting on an epidemic in a developing country, where it's not clear if there's something they're not telling him, or something no one can see...
Up Next: I need to decide which way to go in my reading for fun: slow and demanding fiction (which i feel like i crave) or brain candy (which is probably all I can concentrate on). I have not yet decided.
Online content of note:
But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by extension, makes you both smart and correct, regardless of the actual rigor or sources of your beliefs.
We have all met this man. He is not even limited to the Internet Right - McCrea discusses New Atheism, and you see a fair bit of it amongst the kind of person who calls themself a Marxist over and above either a socialist or a communist or an anything-elseist.
This or something like it is what Freud called the Unheimlich, ‘the uncanny’: ‘the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality’.4 [..] The kicks I used to get from The Lord of the Rings were sensual, textural, almost sexual, a feeling of my mind being rubbed by the rough edges of the different layers.
I am in this picture and I'm perfectly happy about it, thanks.
Also, this: Siderea has crowdsourced a list of 'things turned upside down' by COVID. Like: unsafety in numbers. Kids miss school. Fresh veggies available, canned scarce. Etc.
Whew. Believe it or not, that was NOT everything I bookmarked in the past two weeks (some are older - I missed some two weeks ago).