WAYRW: Online essays edition

[highlyeccentric]

I haven't done links for quite a while, so there's a bit of a backlog. I'm only catching up to about ten days ago right now, so there's no BLM related content here.

David L. Uilin (LA Times), Against consolation in quarantine reading. This is a variation on a theme I come back to a lot: there is value in dark, unsettling, disconsolate literature (and music, and art, and).

Wordsbetwixt (Policywonksocial blog), Letter from a senior lesbian to her successors on the occasion of her exhaustion. This is just... incredibly good writing, incredibly evocative, and precisely depicts the double (nay, triple, quadruple) bind of the queer public servant.

Elizabeth Lothian (Guernica), Interview with Stephanie Danler: Empowered by choice. Title is wishywashy, content is fascinating, as Danler talks about writing a memoir after having written a novel, and about moving back to rural California after New York, and more. Strong sense of place, which is my kryptonite.

A. Kendra Greene (LitHub), Meet the stone collector of Iceland's eastern coast. Pretty rocks! Pedantic collecting! A+++ story would read again.

Maggie Nelson (The New Yorker), Finding moments of calm during a pandemic, which has convinced me I need to read Natalia Ginzburg.

Keith Thomas (LRB), Working Methods. In which Thomas describes the practicalities of his historical research. I now know how index cards are supposed to be used!!

Bec Zajac (Meanjin blog), But what about the fish? Jews in lockdown. I really like her observation on trauma and logic/illogic responses to threat.

Robyn Ochs (personal website), Bisexuality, feminism, men and me. This is an older essay, predating same sex marriage and I think perhaps predating Och's current relationship (at least, Peg isn't named). It deals with Och's changing expectations of men after dating women, and the ethical stances she took and practical limitations she placed upon herself as a bi woman dating men. I have a lot of respect for these choices.

KJ Charles, Yes and No: Consent in Sex Scenes. A good essay on sex writing and characterisation.

Margaret Simons (The Saturday Paper), The Real Reason Our Shelves Were Empty. This: phenomenally detailed, should be compulsory reading re: food supply chains. It looks at data going back to 2012 to demonstrate that Australia's supermarket COVID crisis was part of a series of known vulnerabilities: just-in-time stocking, fewer warehouses, increasing reliance on offshore supplies of food *packaging* even for domestic products, and more. Apparently Australia nearly had a pasta sauce shortage because a shipment of bottles out of Naples was unaccounted for during Italy's COVID chaos (it turned out to have sailed, but not been logged or tracked or whatever it is that ships carrying glass bottles need to be).

Sam McBean (The White Review), Bent Out of Shape. Art review piece, on the work of Ren Hang.

Caroline McCoy (Electric Lit), The past is present in The Snare. Review/essay/thing on a 1972 novel, with attention to its portrayal of trauma internalised.

Anonymous Juror (The site formerly known as Buzzfeed Au), “How Do You Find The Accused?” A Rape Trial Through The Eyes Of A Juror. Really moving.

Julia Serano (personal blog, c 2014), A personal history of the T word. In which Serano talks about early 2000s movement towards reclaiming 'tranny', and subsequent reversals. What I find particularly poignant is that she talks about 'queer' as an uncontroversially reclaimed term. Oh the innocence of that assumption!

Meleika Gessa (The Spinoff), The real tongan boys of 'Ata were not the real Lord of the Flies. Whole essay is worth a read, but particularly notable is a detail Gessa reports was left out of the version that made it to the Guardian: the boys were able to survive because the island had not always been uninhabited: its population had been kidnapped into slavery, and their infrastructure was available to draw on. The boys did so, working together in the cooperative fashion that's an essential part of Islander cultures.

Gold and Kyratsous (Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, Oct 2017), Self and identity in borderline personality disorder. This article, which is open-access, is fascinating: it looks at three models of defining 'a self', and ways in which those models do or do not help understand some of the impulsivity, difficulty making plans, unreliability with promises, and self-neglect associated with BPD diagnosis. They argue for an 'agentive' self model, in which the self is actually a cluster of temporal selves (basically, the internet meme of 'past me is a bitch / that's a problem for future me), and that self-coherence is the ability to work together with past and future you as a coherent team.