Weekend Listening Post

Music: More of the same, with the addition of The Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks, good on them for changing it) 2020 album 'Gaslighter'. I quite like this one:

Watch on YouTube

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Podcasts, Live Lectures, and Audio Fiction:

Fiction:

I finally caught up with the Penumbra Podcast! I was stalled over the holiday special episode, because it involved people EMBARRASSING THEMSELVES aaargh. Including Damian embarrassing himself by just being Damian. I could probably write a character as irritatingly devout as Damian and not be irritated by him, but he's very difficult to be audience to.

Paradise Lost: Sin and Death have descended into the mortal plane. God continues to be an absolute arse. The earth has been tilted on its axis, unless of course the heavens have been tilted around it. So it goes in book 10.

Starship Iris: With the Penumbra under control, I have turned my attentions to Starship Iris s2: The Mini Episode was a good plot refresher.

Non-fiction:

The Spouter Inn: I listened through both the episode on Hemingway's A Moveable Fest, and the special guest episode on Hemmingway generally. I enjoyed the latter in particular, with its gossipy tone, special notes on Hemmingway's thing for Fitzgerald's dick. And I enjoyed guest Simone de Rochefort's enormous enthusiasm for Hemmingway and the way she held that *as well as* knowing he's an arse. I dunno, often people seem to be... soberly appreciative of his Literature and the 'well I know he's an arse but' part comes off as either weak, or sort of implying *other* people should Move Past It. Whereas de Rochefort's bubbly fannish enthusiasm exists with an 'oh god Ernest you trash man' sense, her conflict isn't *in the fact she likes it* but only in terms of her concern that her enthusiasm will lead her not inconsiderable following to think *they* should like Hemmingway too. ANYWAY. I liked it. I also really liked the episode on MK Fisher's How To Cook A Wolf, which I still haven't read but which has definitely been having a comeback of sorts in the last few years - every few months some outlet or other will run a piece on it. None I'd read so far mentioned what a cool and alternative life MK Fisher lead, though, so that was new and cool.

A Bit Lit (youtube series): Andy Kesson with Rose Biggin and Keir Cooper re their Midsummer Nights Dream novel 'Wild Time', very good, do recommend. And Andy Kesson with Julia Ftatek on trans readings of 18th century (English) literature. Have you ever considered that Gulliver's Travels might encode some form of dysphoria? Julia has. Also good, also recommend.

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Some miscellaneous links:

Eric Levitz (NY Mag), The Game Stop Rally exposed the perils of 'meme populism'. This was a nice antidote to the person on my twitter feed who was convinced Stonks were the awakening of class consciousness.

Michel Summer, twitter comic, Interview with Beowulf. I want copies of this to send to Many People.

Franki Cookney (The Overthinkers Guide To Sex), How NOT to start a conversation about sex. On the weird but apparently common phenomenon of (straight) men approaching (straight) women on dating apps with unsolicited explicit kink propositions.

Dr Rachel Clarke (Guardian UK, Books), I've been called Satan: On abuse of Drs during the COVID crisis.

Michael Beckerman and Katherine Lebouw (New Fascism Syllabus, Dec 2020), In support of difficult history: Open letter in support of Anna Hájková, regarding the ethics investigation she was facing at Warwick. I read this as background after hearing that the investigation found against her. Hájkoá, whose piece at Notches I read some time ago, is a Holocaust researcher, whose book on Thereisenstadt details a coercive relationship between a Jewish inmate and a female guard (as well as with a male guard at Auschwitz). The inmate's daughter first sued her under a German law that protects the reputation of the dead (usually, the dead in question are former Nazis); the court found her research was within reason, but ordered her to use a pseudonym for the woman. Subsequently, she was fined because she was unable to scrub all uses of the woman's name from the internet. Although her research had ethics approval from Warwick all along, the daughter brought complaints to the university, and the university found against Hájková. The press coverage was pretty sensationalist (amongst other things, the press reports say Hájkova asserted a 'lesbian relationship' - Hájková avoids the word lesbian for very good reason), and I'm still unsure what the consequences of the Warwick decision are.

Rachel Handler (GrubStreet), De Cecco Finally Reveals What the Heck Is Going On With Its Bucatini. Follow-up to the all important pasta exposé of late December.

Jennifer Down (Meanjin Blog), What I'm Reading. This piece, one of many in the identically-titled series Meanjin run, is about struggling to read in the pandemic. Big Mood. I really appreciate Jennifer's bloody-minded determination to re-teach herself how to read, though, using pomodoros and reading in French because the effort keeps her engaged. I often feel like my tracking and monitoring and goals-based reading, for both fun and work, is... sad, somehow. It's nice to know it works for others, too.

Jinghua Qian (Feminist Writers Festival), Walking away, backwards; or, woman-lite in women's lit. On being a nonbinary writer.

The entire Howl Round Theatre Commons series Staging Gendered Violence.

Alison Phipps (European Journal of Culture Studies, 2021, issue/vol unclear), White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism. Contentious online; pretty valid if you read the whole thing instead of just the abstract. I do think the first part, on the #metoo movement, needed a little extra framing - both author and journal should have predicted it would be received as 'author says #metoo accusations are White Tears'. I think what's underlying this is the author is fundamentally sceptical of the movement, as one that insofar as it provides a movement for women does so through 'politics of injury' - that's the whole Wendy Brown section - but that definitely needed more space.

Jules Gill-Peterson (Sad Brown Girl blog), Fight or Flight in six acts (cn: trans medical trauma).