Weekend Listening Post

Music:

According to Maria Dhavana Headey's twitter, I think on Thursday, her small son advocated a policy of hugging one's stuffed dragon tight and dancing to 'This Year' by the Mountain Goats. I embraced this policy, although I do not have a stuffy dragon.

Yesterday I marked the calling of the race with The Carolina Chocolate Drops. Today I have remembered that The Mountain Goats have a new album out, and am checking that out on Spotify.

Perhaps the best thing I listened to all week though was this:

Watch on YouTube

Podcasts:

I am up to Mag 54. I quite liked 53, Crusader - didn't LOVE it but approved of its attention to detail. Special bonus points for having a Hospitaller knight instead of a Templar. <3 I LOVED 54, 'Still Life', chiefly because I loved the narrator, a man whose great passion is the prevention of money laundering, and who, having encountered unearthly horrors, ran away very fast, made a report to what seemed to be the correct body, and declared "well whatever they have going on, it's not money laundering" and plans to never think about it again. A+ priorities my dude.

I particularly enjoyed how he enthused about the proprietor of the shop being "a good audience" for his money laundering infodump, except for the oddity of not making eye contact, "but I have a cousin with autism so that didn't bother me too much". My dude. My extremely special-interest-focused dude.

Audiobooks:

I've made it through the first part of the House of Fame, via the Chaucer Studio. I once had hopes of collecting the Chaucer Studio CDs, but I gotta admit, the download versions are cheaper and are what I actually *use* anyway.

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Some links:

Cord J. Whittacker, The secret power of white supremacy and how anti-racists can take it back. Whittacker gave a related talk at Notre Dame's Conway Lectures this week, but I wasn't able to make it due to time zones. I am... not exactly comfortable with the idea of reclaiming the language of chivalry and protection as leftist discourse, in much the same way as I am not comfortable with queer-inclusive religious discourse at the centre of queer politics: not comfortable but recognise the utility. I was a little surprised Whittacker didn't mention the Black Panthers in this article - you'd think they'd be right up the front of one's mind when thinking of anti-racist discourses of protection?

Kelly Connaboy, interview with Patricia Lockwood (The Cut), On Miette. Twitter's most important cat has an important backstory.

Kerrie Handasyde (AWHN blog), Women Preachers: What to Wear. On the politics of dress for early Australian preaching women in certain denominations. I have questions about Handasyde's interpretation of Violet Callanan (Churches of Christ) and her bible college photo in blazer, shirt and tie: Handasyde reads this as part of her self-styling in the vein of a male preacher, and the way it's presented in the text of the post you'd think the photo she referred to was taken AFTER Callanan was called to act as full-time preacher for a congregation unable to attract a minister. It's not. It's from her early training. Her masculine dress stands out from the other women in her cohort. I... have questions. The associated article may answer them, but I haven't read it yet.

Brian Resnick (Vox), How to talk someone out of bigotry with deep canvassing. This strikes me as the only reasonable halfway point between 'reach out to a trumpist' and 'ignore them and push the country forward', and applicable in a great many other situations likewise. Worth stressing though that it's emotional labour you need *training* in. There's no guarantee that untrained attempts will have simliar effect.

These two are a pair, both from LAST US election cycle: Peter Kruger's Quora answer to What don't most liberals realise, originally given I think in early 2017. And David Wong at Cracked, How half of america lost its damn mind, from after Trump won the 2016 nomination. Both of them, I think, drop the ball on race (Wong in interesting ways, given he's writing as an Asian-American from a rural area - it's like he doesn't quite see that there's layers of antiblackness completely different to the 'as long as they're just like us' factor governing his experience), but they have a LOT of good stuff to say on rural service provision and the fact that leftist organising focuses so much on cities. Both are writing about rural areas *without* a high number of black and hispanic agricultural workers, I note, but don't quite seem to realise that's a distinction they're making - but nor do the 'actually the agricultural working class are POC' takes note that they're talking about very specific agricultural areas. I dunno. I've been reading a lot of twitter threads, which I haven't saved, about the impact of county-level organising since 2016: the difference it makes, for instance, to polling station access if you get a democrat or independent in as ... whatever the US equivalent of Returning Officer is. County recorder?

Leslie Goldman (Marie Claire), To End Sexual Abuse in Churches, Dismantle Purity Culture

That's it, that's the links for the week. Obviously I have read a LOT of current US election articles, but none of them stood out as astonishingly different to what I can expect you've all read.