What Are You Reading Weekend: Links Version

I do not have capacity to update my Goodreads rn. Haven't since December. The task gets Worse by week.

What I am currently reading:
- the poems and essays for the next 3 weeks of teaching
- More about John Donne than I'd planned, for same
- the 2021 anthology "Nonbinary Lives" ed Meg-John Barker et al.
- Ivan E Coyote and Rae Spoon "Gender Failure"
- re-read of Monstrous Regiment
- The Play issue of Archer mag
- a bunch of other stuff on hiatus

Why YES there's at theme there why do you ask.

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Some much belated but interesting links:

Kirby Conrod (own blog), So you're ABD and you're beginning to suspect you have undiagnosed ADHD

Alexis Nowicki (Slate), "Cat Person" by Kristin Roupenian drew specific details from my life. This pales in comparison to the later Bad Art Friend debacle, but what's fascinating is that I HATED Cat Person and I found Nowicki's account of her actual experience much more compelling.

Ange Mlinko (LRB), Waiting for the Poetry, on Adrienne Rich.

Huw Lemmy (own blog), Meanlingless Sex. Has some great stuff on queer storytelling.

Aviva Stahl (New Inquiry), Trust in Instinct. I've still not read Conflict Is Not Abuse, but between observing the kind of people who evangelise that book, and this (and a few twitter threads) response, I am no longer interested in doing so. As well as a response to Schulmann, this has some interesting things to say about harm and shame.

Joe Pinkser (The Atlantic), School Days start and end too early

Lincoln Michael (own blog), Art should be a doorway, not a mirror. Response to the Isabell Fall fall-out, but insightful in its own right.

Christina Tesoro (The Toast), "Not So Bad": On Consent, Non-Consent, and Trauma.

Benjamin Riley (Overland), How To Come Out At The End of Queer Community. Aside from talking queer community dynamics at large, this one might be of interest to those of you who are churchgoers or involved in other religious communities - it's got a chunk talking about how MCC (Sydney's Officially Gay Church) is now attracting more "unchurched" young people than gay Xns.

Da'Shaun Harrison (own blog), Committing harm is not the same as being abusive.

Rafael Tonon (Gastro Obscura), The team resurrecting Ancient Rome's favourite condiment

Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future

Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark.org), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. Might be out of date by now.

Kirsten Leng (Notches blog), Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany 1900-1933.

Cathy Free (WaPo), Three women dumped their cheating boyfriend and went on a road trip together

Maclean's magazine (CA) 1962, How to tell the Grits from the Tories. This is marked fiction but I suspect a metadata error. It reads like moderate political satire.

Matthew Sherril (Outside Online), The ghost trail hunters of Mount Desert Island

Kyl Myers (Archer Magazine), Gender socialisation: rethinking our inherited structures. I know there's a lot of pushback at the moment to the concept of "socialisation" because somehow it's taken that if
[transmasc / cfab / tmab / whatever term we're using to catch both trans men and enbies who were assigned-and-parented-and-may-have-continued-on-assumed-female today] talk about being socialised female/girl it must be the case that trans women and trans femmes were (assumed: successfully) socialised male/man. This... does not seem to me to be at all obvious! I have no idea why everyone assumes there must be polarity at all times! (When trans women assert they in fact internalised harmful female socialisation, eg, that femininity requires subservience, they do not usually imply that trans men 1:1 picked up the corresponding male socialisation and privileges?? I don't think??) Here endeth my necessary disclaimer for this link.

Craig Robertson (Places Journal), The filing cabinet and 20th century information infrastructure. This was, no joke, one of the best things I read last year.