highlyeccentric | Weekend Reading hasn’t finished any books (Reply)

I am overwhelmed with incoming content. I still use an RSS reader, but I’ve come to accept that it’s primary function is to aggregate things I /might/ read, or used to read and don’t want to let go. I keep an unread list in pinboard and open tabs in my phone browser. And then there’s the Saturday Paper subscription and the Meanjin one. Too many things!

I know too many books not enough time is hardly new, and that the intelligentsia classes of a century ago kept up a brisk flow of letters where we have social media, but still. Were I a lady of letters in 1920 I’d have a couple of academic journal subscriptions, a couple of literary magazines (Meanjin not yet founded, but the Bulletin still going strong) and probably an actual daily paper. Maybe a pull list with a bookseller, like comics readers have still. And I’d be living in the lap of luxury (and consequent blind privilege- which, lol, my best off ancestors were farming chickens and tomatoes in 1920, not reading literary magazines).

I’m currently ensconced in a hotel in Geneva, wanting the security of being near L while I try out new meds. Thus the email post.

Currently Reading: Fiction: I think only the Shafak, which slipped into hiatus again.
Poetry: Still forging ahead with Paradise Lost. I’m about halfway through Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The World’s Wife’, which... the combined power of wit is spoiled rather by the transphobic weight of ‘Mrs Tiresias’. And I’m conscious of how few of them characterise their female protags as actually /desiring/ their husbands... which isn’t surprising, the unsatisfactory nature of heterosexual marriage is a longstanding feminist talking point. And yet. It strikes me that very often /neither/ lesbian feminists like Duffy not straight feminists seem to actually want to grapple with the fact that many women genuinely desire men: sometimes even the same men they’re married to!
Non-Fiction for fun: all on furlough
Lit Mag: autumn Meanjin, still
For work: Still working through Heng’s The Invention of Race; Jost’s collection of essays on Chaucer’s humour (mostly terribly stuffy)

Recently finished:

No books, but I recommend these two pieces of fiction:

T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon (Uncanny Magazine): Metal Like Blood In The Dark

Ladee Hubbard (Guernica, 2018): False Cognates (1991). The ending to this is skillfull and unsettling.

I don’t often put poetry in these posts (poetry comes up over at speculumannorum, currently dubiously formatted as I work out the limits of email posting), but I strongly recommend Julia Rios (Strange Horizons), Where To Find Strange Horizons, and how to get there, both as a generous hearted commentary of The State Of SFF and because it contains the line ‘Space is made of trains’.

Up Next: I’ve got Marcia Williams’ reportedly very weird comic form Canterbury Tales with me this weekend.

Some links, although my patience for hand-coding them in email wanes:

Joe Van Malachowski, interview with Lady Kitt (Unicorn Mag), Sappho, Sculpture and Social Practice.

Chris R Morgan (Lapham’s Quarterly), The Art of Upsetting People. On Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade.

Eba (a Good Dog) as ‘told to’ Amy Sutherland (Hakai Magazine): Coastal Job: Whale Dog. Part of a series interviewing people (and dogs) who work on the Salish Sea.

Eleanor Parker (History Today), The Lives of Others. Learning about the past frequently means trying to understand people who are fundamentally unlike us in countless ways, formed by cultural values, social expectations and life experiences that no one today can entirely share. A bit short and maybe rather shallow in its brush over ‘distasteful’ aspects of history, admittedly.

Regan Penaluna, interview with Briana Toole (Guernica): How To Corrupt The Youth. Toole founded a non-profit that runs intro to philosophy courses in predominantly Black schools.

Daemonum X (Dead But Delicious, own blog): Leatherdyke Gender Technology. Stepping into leatherdyke community, it’s a totally normal thing to reimagine gender in ways that might make people’s heads spin—a woman daddy fucks his creature boy in both of it’s cunts at once. This is the perspective with which I engage with the world and I have no time for modern queerness or feminisms that severely lack gender imagination or project notions of respectability onto bodies..I... this essay! Made things go whirr in my brain!!!