Weekend Listening would like to recommend you some queer swing-band vibes

Music:

Did anyone order queer swing-band vibes? Because I found queer swing-band vibes:

Watch on YouTube

I found Hen in the Foxhouse with Jem Violet (no album or ep, but four singles out) via the Queer Country blog, but their oevre is more indie miscellaneous than country, and this piece is leaning toward jazz and swing. It is Good, Actually.

Otherwise, I've been listening to Flume's album Skin on repeat. I bought it back in 2016, for the track with Kai, and liked it but never got _fixated_ until now. Strange are the ways of the neurodivergent brain, I knew it was hyperfixation material, I just didn't know when its moment would come:

Watch on YouTube

Podcasts / youtube discussions:

I've been puttering ahead with Paradise Lost (now past the tower of Babel! Getting there!). The two stand-outs of my week though were from the A Bit Lit podcast (links go to the website with youtube, look them up on your podcast app if you prefer):

Bodie Ashton on German nationhood, unexpected snails, and the pet shop boys. I have a very transparent brain and sartorial crush on Bodie, and perhaps this is a good case study in why.

Becky Yearling on early modern satire.

A Bit Lit is really a saving grace of 2021 for me: when I've failed to get much done in a work day, I scan through the podcast for items vaguely related to my research interests and listen while cooking. It's filling a ton of knowledge gaps, at a far lower executive function cost than sourcing, sitting down to read, and then annotating, books.

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Some links of possible interest:

David Clark (own blog), Losing and Finding My Voice. I really admire Clark's academic work, and this is a lovely little personal piece about work, embodiment and creativity.

Arundhati Roy (Guardian UK), We are witnessing a crime against humanity. On COVID in India.

Monica Hesse (WaPo), Philip Roth and the sympathetic biographer: This is how misogyny gets cemented in our culture. Went back to re-read this after reading Elaine Showalter's review in the TLS. I have great respect for Showalter (Teaching Literature made quite an impact on me) but wow, that showed a startling lack of feminist interrogation of the Roth-Bailey relationship, even granted that it came out before the accusations against Bailey surfaced. Hesse is better.

Paul Collier (TLS), The days of rampant individualism are over. I mostly hate-read this. Collier describes himself as a '68er, but puts today's social frictions down to his generation destroying the cohesion that comes with conservatism (I think? It's a little hard to tell), apparently entirely unaware of, like... leftist collectivisms? Baffling. I suppose it's what one gets when one reads the TLS.

Peter K. Andersson (TLS), Monarcho: A Megalomaniac Jester at the court of Queen Elizabeth. Some cool historical information here, although I would have appreciated a little more interrogation of the 'megalomaniac' framing via critical disability studies.

Andrew Motion (TLS), Dreams that take my breath: the reserved defiance of Charlotte Mew. TIL: when people talk about 'georgian' and poets, they don't mean the Georgian period!

James Romm (TLS), In the footsteps of Alexander: review of Wheatley and Dunn's 'Demetrius the Beseiger'

Ophelia Field (TLS), Marriage à la mode? A notorious case of high-society bigamy. Review of Catherline Ostler's book on Elizabeth Chudleigh.

Laura O'Brien (TLS), Lives less ordinary: How a family prospered from the French Revolution. Review of Emma Rothschild's 'An Infinite History', which seems to be an example of that excellent genre of tightly-focused archival history studies, following one provincial family through the post-revolution years. Paging monksandbones, suspect this is your jam; if it's paywalled hit me up via email.

Lindsay Hilsom (TLS), Red ink and machetes: Ethnic strife on a Rwandan hilltop in Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga. Added THIS to my endless TBR, yes yes.

Emma Smith (TLS), Getting the Measure: The character and development of the Arden Shakespeare. This is ostensibly a review of the latest edition of Measure for Measure, but it's also a really cool historiography of the Arden series.

Jaime Herndon (Bookriot), Dead women poets are not your punchline. Herndon is overcoming a sense of cringe at their love for Plath and Sexton. As someone who was told I *should* like Plath (because I was a teenage girl writing angsty free verse) and bounced off her hard, I actually really appreciated this take.

Brandon Hogan and Jacobi Adeshi Carter (NYT), Opinion: there is no Classics catastrophe at Howard. Both work at Howard (although not in the Classics department); the piece is a reply to Cornell West, but also a really interesting take on what we consider essential 'cultural' education and why.