What Are You Reading Weekend

[highlyeccentric]

Currently Reading: Too many things!
Fiction: 'Three Daughters of Eve', which isn't really grabbing me. AJ Demas' One Night In Boukos, which I'm also finding it hard to focus on - the problem may be with me, not the books.
Poetry: Continuing on with Paradise Lost, via podcast; I've also started AJ Odasso's 'The Sting of It', which I highly recommend.
Lit Mag: Some progress in the Summer Meanjin, from which recommendations below
Non-Fiction for fun: still 'The Queer Child'.
Academic: Two Chaucer books, plus Tyson Pugh's 'Sexuality and its Queer Discontents', of which i am really impressed with the intro.

Recently Finished: Nothing much, actually, except Riddick's 'The Shock of Medievalism' for work. A difficult book to wade through, and I can't figure out how the end relates to the beginning.

Online Fiction:

Theodora Goss (Lightspeed Magazine) A Statement in the Case - this is really neat, mostly quiet detailed portrait of a post-soviet immigrant and then a sharp swerve to the urban fantasy, with a deeply unreliable narrator.

Richard Ford Burley (Apex Magazine), A Study in Pink and Gold. An artist begins drawing the extraterrestrials who have occupied inner space, and finds several kinds of love.

Ada Hoffman (Strange Horizons), Across the Ice. This is just... very sweet.

Yoon Ha Lee (Lightspeed Magazine), The second last client. I loved this so very much.

Nancy Ludmerer (Electric Lit), So gentle you don't feel it. There's a quiet precision to this, but I'm not sure I'll remember it for long.

Online Essays:

Maddison Griffiths (Meanjin Summer 2019), Sex, Vaginismus and Reality TV.

Tracy Crisp, (Meanjin Summer 2019, currently behind paywall), The Forgettory. The paywall isn't letting me through, which is annoying. I guess I didn't have a subscription for that edition, but I thought subscribing (which I did the other week) got you immediate digital access.

Myra Schlosberg (Going Down Swinging), No shame in the void. I liked this bit: "I love being a dyke like being held in something solid. Dyke like an exoskeleton when I’m just ??? inside it. Dyke like a big cocoon and me the disintegrated part of the caterpillar-to-butterfly cycle—opalescent goo."

Erin Bartram (Contingent Mag), Don't we have to judge people by the standards of their time? A really useful, concise approach from a working historian.

Guy Atkins (History Today), The Edwardian Social Network. Postcards! This is a delightful romp. People were concerned about women receiving unwanted lewd postcards, which goes to show: humanity is predictable (although now it's the reverse; there's less social concern and more actual problem).

Sarah Parker (The Conversation UK), Poets and lovers: the two women who were Michael Field. Two Australian poets and one male pseudonym!

Danielle Scrimshaw (Overland) What a feeling! The eroticism of Flashdance. I appreciate how hard this article commits to its premise.

Patricia A. Matthew (The Atlantic), On teaching but not loving Jane Austen. As someone who does not love Austen (and has been shamed for it), and who also does not really love Chaucer (but is working on him!), I appreciated this article a lot.

Theresa de Lauretis (Labris, 2003), When lesbians were not women.

Leslie Kern (Verso) Love in the feminist city. Managed to say more meaningful content about women and urban space in a single article than that entire 'Flâneuse' book.

Elizabeth Rush (Guernica), The marsh at the end of the world. On climate change and rotting bogs. May particularly interest monksandbones

Jini Maxwell (Meanjin blog), What I'm reading. Interesting thoughts on queer reading.

Erin Maglaque (LRB), Inclined to putrefecation: fascinating snippets of the plague in Florence, from documentary sources

William Davies (Guardian UK), How the humanities became the enemy within. I find this broadly convincing but can see some overlooked aspects/gap (not all STEM subjects are equal in the new conservatism, for a start).

Tonnian Fernandez (Paris Review), Sex in the Theatre: Samuel Delany and Jeremy O Harris in conversation. Really fascinating tangents on writing, race, gender, theatre, and quite specific kinks.

Up Next:

As usual, I need to finish some things, before I start others! I have Carissa Harris' Obscene Pedagogies, and a book about adapting from classic lit; I have some fiction on my tbr back in my hands again; I just unearthed my Everyman 'Three Arthurian Romances' and a mate has been reading 'The perilous cemetery' on twitter so I might have to do that too.

This has been: what are you reading Weekend.