Weekend reading still hasn't finished much

I did get more work done than usual in the past two weeks, despite the rollercoaster of meds roulette, but apparently it didn't take the form of finishing books for work, and I lost most of my leisure time to side effects.

One thing I *have* been enjoying lately is 'Other people talking about Moby Dick'. This started with the 'Ahab's Wife' chapter in Spengler's Literary Spinoffs; then I, in small chunks, listened through the Spouter Inn's 2019 Moby Dick episode, and last night their bonus episode on Moby Dick with Damien Fleming. Somewhere in there I also read Hermin Melville Hates Penguins, a post from 'secret base club', which argues (as Damien had in the 2019 episode: no citation, might be independent recognition of the Truth) that Herman Melville is a 'god-tier shitposter'. And then there's... well i haven't exactly READ it, but Damien Fleming brought its existence to my attention: the 2014 Clickhole spectacular, "The time i spent on a commercial whaling ship totally changed my perspective on the world".

I'm still fairly sure I don't want to read Moby Dick (although, if I do, it will be probably via the Whale Whale Whale podcast), but I really enjoy other people talking about Moby Dick. Are there books like that in your life? (James Joyce's Ulysses could be one? But mostly I have discovered that I don't like the things people say about Joyce, and am therefore disinclined to bother.)

Currently Reading: Not much change from last fortnight, honestly.
Fiction for fun: Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve is on hiatus again
Poetry: I'm still enjoying The World's Wife, in fits and starts, and Paradise Lost via podcast.
Lit Mag: Making small headway with the spring Meanjin, finally.
Non-fiction for fun: All on hiatus
For work: A fair few things, including Heng's 'The Invention of Race', Jost's collection on Chaucerian humour, and a bilingual collection (fr/eng) from the Int'l Arthurian Society congress 2015.

Recently Finished:

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by Marcia Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am deeply bemused by this book, but in a good way.

Online fiction:

Margo Lanagan (The Saturday Paper, paywalled), Solomon Grundy XVI. I'm still dissatisfied with the Saturday Paper having cut the poetry section to replace it with fiction, and even less so when I realised they did so the moment Omar Sakr put up a piece about Palestine - Schwartz Media have, apparently, a silent policy of publishing no work on palestine, least of all by palestinians (although work on *Israel*, of course, is fine). This particular story, though, is a good 'un.

Up Next: Ugh so many things, as usual. I've been loaned a copy of the graphic memoir 'Spinning', though, so that's high on the list.

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Essays and Misc:

David Donaldson (The Mandarin), Contracts and Convicts: how perverse incentives created the death fleet. The Second Fleet: case study in terrible government outsourcing.

Guy P. Raffa (Zocalo: Arizona State University), How Dante's Divine Comedy Speaks to 2020. On the misattributed claim that for Dante those who remain neutral are the worst of all sinners (no: but they get a special place just outside the first circle of hell, and no personal sympathy from Dante)

Timmah Ball (Meanjin Autumn 2020), why Write?. I think I already flagged this one in the preamble to a previous post. Wrestles with the appetite of white readers for indigenous stories, but not for indigenous-centred change. Pairs well with...

Alison Whittacker (Meanjin Papers Autumn 2020), So White, So What. I would do this a disservice to summarise it, so I will only note that personally I was fascinated by its definition of "Whiteness Studies" as distinct from Critical Race Studies. I feel like a substantial portion of premodern race studies (esp the literary versions, due to source bias), even those that like Heng are anchored in CRT, is actually Whiteness Studies.

Laura Miller (New Yorker), Susanna Clarke's World of Interiors. Guess I gotta put the new book on my tbr too.

Eve Rickert (own blog), What I got wrong in More Than Two. Part of the fallout of the great Frankin Veaux Debacle, which I am still following. This writeup is focused on specific kinds of advice given in More Than Two, about emotion management in polyamory, and it is good to read.

Regan Penaluna, interview with Elizabeth Catte (Guernica), Appalachia isn't Trump Country. For some reason I read a lot of what goes past me on the internet that touches on Appalachia. This is a particularly good example.

Eryn Brothers (CountryQueer), Is this the first queer country song?

Sulaimann Adonia (LitHub), The Wound of Multilingualism: On Surrendering the Languages of Home.

McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar), What the Performative Can't Perform: On Judith Butler.

Tanya M Howard (The Conversation AU), The NSW koala wars showed one thing: the Nationals appear ill-equipped to help rural Australia. ICMI, the minor coalition partner in NSW tried to go rogue over... opposing koala protection laws. It didn't end well.

Sarah Manavis (NewStatesman), Why Goodreads is Bad for Books. Looks at some alternatives, and largely confirms my regretful opinion that TheStoryGraph is not for me.

Nora Samaran (Own Blog), The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture. I come back to this one every so often, like a loose tooth. This time I'm struck by the fact that, although Samaran is not wrong that many men lack nurturance skills (but that some have mastered them, and that is a good thing), it is my experience that a great many *women* also lack these skills. In fact, in my teens *among my age peers*, if other girls had nurturance skills they rarely desired to extend them to me. I also think that, among women a certain discourse of homosocial yes-womaning often takes the place of true nurturance: the expectation of emotional labour in friendship is a 'Squad' vibe, eternally available but rarely challenging.