What Are You Reading Weekend

Currently Reading:
Fiction: Garth Greenwell's "What Belongs To You" (audioboo, narr. Greenwell); Nina MacLaughlin, "Wake, Siren". Both sooort of for work (I want to compare, although not in depth, MacLauchlin to some modernisations of the Physician's Tale; Greenwell keeps name-dropping Chaucer in interviews), but mostly for interest. Elif Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve remains on hiatus.
Poetry: The Sting of It is still getting leafed through a little at a time. Some minor progress on Paradise Lost via podcast.
Plays: 4/6 episodes through Good Omens (TV) with wildeabandon et al
Lit Mag: Lol, summer Meanjin still. Autumn hasn't arrived, I emailed about that.
Non-fiction for personal interest: The Queer Child remains on hiatus.
For work: Need to get back to Solga's Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance; am making some headway with Holy Sh*t.

Recently Finished:

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I... was not expecting this to be so RIDICULOUS. I don't think I've actually read it before; I saw it live in eighth or ninth grade. It made a bit of a Formative Imprint on me, vis a vis cross-dressing comedies, but for Reasons it's Twelfth Night I've seen and read repeatedly. These Reasons, it turns out, might be because Twelfth Night is just better. And of course I've read *chunks* of As You Like It, the All the World's A Stage speech gets quoted constantly, and with great seriousness; thus I had been lulled into thinking this might be a serious play, or as serious as Shakespeare's comedies get.

LOL NOPE.

On the other hand it just... goes there, huh. Straight up calls the boysona Ganymede, no beating around *that* bush...

American Chaucers by Candace Barrington

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Surprisingly useful to me, for a book that deals with obscenity not at all.


Online Fiction:

Porpentine Charity Heartscape (Strange Horizons), Dirty Wi-fi. It's weird and futuristic and worryingly present and gritty and erotic and did I mention *weird*? Do recommend.

Madeline Trebenski (McSweeney's), The girl from Avril Lavigne's Sk8r Boi responds 18 years later.

Daniel Lavery (The Shatner Chatner), The prodigal parable of the son. The sheer righteous fury in this, wow.

Up Next: First priority has to be to clear off some of the currently-reading decks, but also looming is Kiran Millwood Hargraves' The Mercies, for a remote book club. I've just ordered that in hard copy - while the kobo ebook is on deep discount, it's not available at all through kobo AU! I presume for parallel import reasons. Meanwhile the audiobook IS on Kobo AU? But given the trouble I'm having keeping my brain tuned to the Greenwell audiobook, I opted for ordering the hardcopy from a Swiss bookstore chain.

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Online essays:

Lili Loofbourow (Slate), 1918 flu pandemic: a letter from a relatable past. Not just relatable - Loofbourow unpacks with care and nuance the emotional fluctuations and coping mechanisms evident in a letter from Lutian van Wert, a young Native American girl who had served briefly as a nurse in Washington DC, and pays careful attention to the historical *specificities* of her situation as well as the commonalities.

Domnhall O'Sullivan (SwissInfo), How a Zurich epidemic helped birth Swiss direct democracy. Zurich radicals leveraged cholera into demands for more representative democracy.

Charles Louis Richter (Contingent Mag), The trouble with triscuits. Not Electricity Biscuits, after all.

Irina Dumitrescu (LRB), Making my moan. On the one hand, this is a really good intro to the wonders of medieval obscenity. On the other hand, it's a review of Carissa Harris' 'Obscene Pedagogies' and I'm starting to become uncomfortable with how many people are citing and retweeting this as an *essay* by Dumitrescu, rather than as a review of Harris' work. (Is race a factor? I bet race is a factor.)

Lech Blaine (The Monthly), Hillsong's Strange Tides. Yup, that sure is Hillsong, terrible in their own right and getting their fingers all over Auspol these days.

Agnes Callard (Point Magazine), Family Feuds. This is part of a series of 'public philosphy', and this one focuses on games and gameplay in forced community.

Jen Manion (Aeon Magazine), Female Husbands. This is... odd. It's an extract or a summary of the author's book Female Husbands: A Trans History. The reading seems, yeah, fair enough. It uses 'transing' as a verb, though, with no context. The author is non-binary, and I ASSUME this is a corollary to 'queering', but I am astonished neither they nor the magazine editor felt a definition was necessary, given that the standard use of trans as a verb is by TERFs.

The Athiest Nun blog, Anxious Feminism. Not sure why the author, who I know on twitter, has this backdated, but it sure did give me some Feels and Thoughts.

Sabrina Orah Mark (The Paris Review), Fuck the bread. The bread is over. Notable for being the first time a viral Feminist Internet Essay/Story didn't leave me feeling Weird Queer I Don't Quite Get It / You Don't Quite Get Me feels.

Denise Gellene (NYT), Overlooked no more: June Almeida, the woman who discovered the first coronavirus. That's one of the ones that causes something like a common cold.

Susan Harlan (Guernica), Where lost luggage goes to be found.

Sam Wallman (Overland), Vale Jack Mundey. Australia lost a giant of the worker's movement last week.

Jessica Machado (Guernica), The Shame We Carried. I've been thinking a lot about shame, lately, and this is a good 'un.

Jennifer Wilson (The Nation), The long shadow of cultural anthropology. Did you know Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were lovers? Now you do. If you read this you will also know a lot about the weird mix of progressive ideals and racism-cloaked-as-cultural-relativism of their whole set.

Devin Kelly (Longreads), What I want to know of kindness. I have read a lot of absolutely incandescent, insightful pieces on toxic masculinity, by women and by men and by men-adjacent people. I have read few that acknowledge the toxicity head on and yet produce something warm. This is one.