Two Poems, Saturday

I actually owe three, but let's say two tomorrow as well.

#Computation
Carl Walsh

A reworking of Ezra Pound’s ‘Salutation’ for the 21st Century

O generation of the absolutely online
   And absolutely connected,
I have seen fisherpeople on YouTube,
I have seen them with their unreliable internet,
I have seen their smiles full of Bluetooth
   And heard of unwelcome download speeds
And I am more ‘liked’ than you are,
And they were more ‘liked’ than I am;
And the fish swim in the ocean
   And don’t even own an iPhone.

Meanjin, Summer 2019

I also recommend, but cannot bring myself to hard-code the layout of, Ursula Robinson-Shaw's Everything Is Nice, a poem about the end of everything, including munitiae.

Weekend Listening Post

Music: Continuing my adventures in queer country, I'm still very much loving Clyde Petersen with Your Heart Breaks, 'Drone Butch Blues'. I also bought Bethel Steele, 'Of Love and Whiskey', which is good background noise but no particular song has grabbed me yet.

Podcasts / Youtube:

Fiction:

Further progress on Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve have received their eviction notice.

Ken Liu, An Advanced Reader's Picture Book of Cognition, Escape Pod recording. Listened to this with Shiny and Metamour. Described it as 'some of the rare hard sci-fi I like'. Mr Trains, conversely, described it as 'designed to appeal to female sci-fi fans'. Shiny cried at it. My efforts to recommend not distressing fiction are going well, as you can see.

Discussion, Lit, etc:

Julia Ftatek (Romancing the Gothics Youtube class), Byron, Manfred and the Transgender Self. I love how Ftatek navigates historicity and trans readings.

Ian Burrows (A Bit Lit - both podcast and youtube), Shakespeare for Snowflakes, in conversation with Emma Whipday.

Academic Events / Round Tables / Etc:

A talk from UCD that I can't remember the title of, on researching distressing topics. Mostly about doing oral history, but very interesting.

Part two of the Shakespeare, Race and Queer Sexuality series from Lafeyette College, a conversation between Simone Chess and actor Skyler Cooper. I really loved the way Cooper talked about gender in general, and especially about Shakespeare as a site for gender exploration for him - although he put that down to 'he writes *human* stories', very bardolatory, which I find unsatisfactory. (I need to catch up on part one)

Sex, Rage and Change: Feminist Adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, from the Classical Reception Studies Network and the University of the South in Sewanee - Stephanie McCarter (academic translator), Paisley Rekdal (poet) and Nina Maclaughlin (short stories) in conversation. Sadly no public video after the event.

The latter two really threw my sleep cycle out this week, but were totally worth it. Although it was annoying that I only discovered AFTER opening the link to the Skyler Cooper one that it wasn't a YouTube livestream, it was an unlisted recording, despite the program having a time on it. Could've watched it the next morning...

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Some links, of many links I have backed up:

Sophie Lewis (Nplusone Magazine), My Octopus Girlfriend: On Erotophobia. Remember the twitter Discourse about the sexy octopus? I never even saw the original tweet. This is by the woman who had got high, watched a documentary, and described the relationship between a guy and an octopus as erotic. It's a very good analysis of, amongst other things, the documentary My Octopus Teacher; the backlash to her tweets; and porous boundaries of concepts like sex and eroticism. Also it includes the line 'who among us can be sure that we have not had sex with an octopus?'

Kristin Hussey (Kopenhagen museum of medicine), Saving the sunshine: health, chronobiology and daylight saving time. On the origins of daylight saving time (nothing to do with cows).

Esther Anatolis (Meanjin, Winter 2020), The long tail of the Bauhaus. Meanjin sometimes runs interesting articles on urban planning and design, and this is one of them.

Karen O'Connel (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Inheriting Hunger. On food, love, and intergenerational trauma.

Muhunnad Al-wehwah (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Mixtape, Side A: on cassette tapes used to record and send messages between Australia and Palestine.

Claire G. Coleman (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Hidden in plain sight: on discovering her grandfather was Indigenous, and the 'Hidden Generation' of those who, like her father, grew up unaware that one parent was Indigenous (a tactic that saved them from removal by the government of the day).

Daniel Nour (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Mamas boy. On growing up as an Arab-Australian man.

Sarah Sasson (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Attachment. Every so often Meanjin publishes pieces on traumatic birth, miscarriage, and other fertility related issues. This is a traumatic birth one. Very striking, in a lot of ways. Not least because Sasson brushes so quickly over the part where she was traumatised and her husband complained he was 'ruining the happiest day of [his] life'. Inexplicably, she does not seem to have yeeted him into the sun right then or at any time since.

Matilda Dixon-Smith (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Taking female queerness from subtext to text: review of Laura McPhee-Brown, Cherry Beach. Weird stance to take that there isn't non-subtextual f-queer lit out there? But convinced me to add Cherry Beach to my list.

Ben Eltham, The Class of Culture: a rather sceptical review of Brook, O'Brien and Taylor, Culture is Bad For You that both summarises said book's apparently quite interesting proposition and then pokes some holes in it in interesting ways.

Matthew Wills (JStor Daily), The Bluestockings

Xanthe Mallet (The Conversation AU), Cultural Misogyny, and why men's aggression to women is so often expressed through sex.

Paulina Bren (LitHub), How the Barbizon gave Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion freedom and autonomy. This essay, extracted from Bren's book on the Barbizon, doesn't quite... work as an extract (assumes too much background knowledge) and doesn't actually do what the title says it does but it IS interesting and I am interested in the book from which it comes.

Tom Woodhouse (The MERL blog), The Tractor Whisperers: my favourite April Fool this year.

Christina Forgarasi (Public Books), Empathy beyond therapy: a review of Sigrid Nunez's latest, that linked me to a few other interesting reads.

Tom Geoghegan (BBC, 2013), Why do so many Americans live in mobile homes?. Something on Twitter made me realise that when Americans talk about mobile homes / trailer parks, they don't just mean Caravans and RVs (which I would also call caravans). So I read this article about them.

Merve Emre (LARB), Critical Love Studies. A response and homage to Sam See.