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highlyeccentricThe most exciting thing I read this week was two paragraphs I wrote this afternoon. It's been a long time since I felt this excited about my own writing, good work me. I've been working on framing my erstwhile PhD, which is not about queer people and nor is it necessarily a queer reading of... as one done with queer theory and from a queer position, and finally, by a queer person. I wrote the two scary paragraphs about I, A Known Bisexual, Have A Vested (And Vexed) Interest In The 'Men And Women: Friends?' Question today, and I feel really good about it.
Currently Reading: Oooh, too many things, as usual. Up to 10 in the goodreads list.
Fiction: Jeannie Lin's 'The Lotus Palace', which is a delight, and I would love to binge-read it, but *waves hands*.
Poetry: Further progress with Paradise Lost. FINALLY finished bk 9.
Lit Mag: Up to the Autumn Meanjin. Only three beind!
Non-Fiction for Personal Interest: I'm reading, in fits and starts, Tillie Walden's graphic memoir about figure skating. It's lovely, but a physically heavy book so I don't carry it around much!
For work: Both Foucault's History of Sexuality and bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center have come off the personal-tbr and been fished around in for the book intro; I plan to keep going with both. Also working through a book on feminist theatrical revisions of classic texts, and reading a weird Canadian skiing retelling of the Canterbury Tales.
Recently Finished:
Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800 by Juanita Ruys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For an academic review. Short version: very good at what it does, which is an analysis of the terms affectus, affectio and affection over the stated period. Not what the title suggests it is, in that it doesn't deal with *other* emotion words, least of all sensory ones.
Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature by David Clark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have a very odd history with this book! I think I have dipped into it for cites before, but only now read the intro properly. And more importantly, until recently I had it confused with... I don't know what book. But one published before this one. I remember being warned about *someone* over-determining homosexuality into Old English and Norse heroic masculinites, circa 2007/8 (the book may have been older than that), and when i returned to my MPhil as a now queer scholar I just assumed this must have been the book in question (which had come out in 2009). It does not do that! Nor does Frantzen, the only other logical contender - in fact if anything Frantzen UNDER-determines sexual possibilities in favour of weird noble homoerotic but not sexual bonding, something that makes much more sense now he's taken a turn toward the alt-right. Read David Clark, not Frantzen, if you are looking for early medieval homosociality.
ANYWAY. One day I will actually read all of this book cover-to-cover but for now I have read the intro and Ch1, and found them Good, Actually.
Online Fiction:
Salah Abdoh (Guernica), Exerpt from Out of Mesopotamia. Striking - fiction set in Iran during the American invasion.
P.H. Lee (Lightspeed Magazine), Ann-of-Rags. Nice creepy fairy-tale stuff. Excellent podcast.
Up Next:
Next priority, as soon as I get the book proposal off my desk, is to read down the current reads and then the work TBR. So who knows what will come up first?
Some links:
Bellcourt, Dust and Gabriel (The New Inquiry), Top or bottom: how do we desire. This is a critical theory informed take on the 'top shortage' amongst gay men. They argue this is an abdication of responsibility for desire, and some... other things that are both foreign to me and sort of... adjacent, in a way, to my experience as a woman often read by both men and women as a prospective top. I do rather want to know if all the authors are writing AS self-proclaimed bottoms, and if so, what a top's perspective might have added.
Allison Meier (Atlas Obscura, 2013), An overstuffed taxidermied walrus comes home. On my post-pandemic list now: visit the Horniman and its too-smooth walrus.
Page Turner (own blog), What is proto-abuse. The author is kidding herself if she thinks her caveats at the end will decrease potential Drama for having talked about this relationship example, but I like the thinking-through. I like the stressed point that there are behaviours which, in and of themselves, might be either the start of an abusive pattern OR a bad day's bullshit with no trajectory.
Luke Henriques-Gomez (Guardian AU), It was life or death: the plane hijacking refugees Australia embraced. I'm annoyed I didn't know about this before! I'm also, like Henriques-Gomes, very sad we are no longer the country who welcomed those refugees.
Franki Cookney (Own blog), The gayer I get, the more I like penises: on the weird heteronormativity of, yanno, not actually being attracted to men's bodies.
Jules Gill-Peterson (The Rambling), On wanting trans women and children. This is dense, but every bit as good as Twitter said it was.
Currently Reading: Oooh, too many things, as usual. Up to 10 in the goodreads list.
Fiction: Jeannie Lin's 'The Lotus Palace', which is a delight, and I would love to binge-read it, but *waves hands*.
Poetry: Further progress with Paradise Lost. FINALLY finished bk 9.
Lit Mag: Up to the Autumn Meanjin. Only three beind!
Non-Fiction for Personal Interest: I'm reading, in fits and starts, Tillie Walden's graphic memoir about figure skating. It's lovely, but a physically heavy book so I don't carry it around much!
For work: Both Foucault's History of Sexuality and bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center have come off the personal-tbr and been fished around in for the book intro; I plan to keep going with both. Also working through a book on feminist theatrical revisions of classic texts, and reading a weird Canadian skiing retelling of the Canterbury Tales.
Recently Finished:
Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800 by Juanita RuysMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
For an academic review. Short version: very good at what it does, which is an analysis of the terms affectus, affectio and affection over the stated period. Not what the title suggests it is, in that it doesn't deal with *other* emotion words, least of all sensory ones.
Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature by David ClarkMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have a very odd history with this book! I think I have dipped into it for cites before, but only now read the intro properly. And more importantly, until recently I had it confused with... I don't know what book. But one published before this one. I remember being warned about *someone* over-determining homosexuality into Old English and Norse heroic masculinites, circa 2007/8 (the book may have been older than that), and when i returned to my MPhil as a now queer scholar I just assumed this must have been the book in question (which had come out in 2009). It does not do that! Nor does Frantzen, the only other logical contender - in fact if anything Frantzen UNDER-determines sexual possibilities in favour of weird noble homoerotic but not sexual bonding, something that makes much more sense now he's taken a turn toward the alt-right. Read David Clark, not Frantzen, if you are looking for early medieval homosociality.
ANYWAY. One day I will actually read all of this book cover-to-cover but for now I have read the intro and Ch1, and found them Good, Actually.
Online Fiction:
Up Next:
Next priority, as soon as I get the book proposal off my desk, is to read down the current reads and then the work TBR. So who knows what will come up first?
Some links: