Strong Verbs Are Just Better

That's two fortnights now I've resumed my average of 3 books/2 weeks. At this rate I won't make my goodreads goal, or have read nearly all I Ought to have read for work, but it's something.

This past fortnight, a lot of reading and feels have circled around Gender. In Bowden's anthology of 18th c Chaucer modernisations, I found a 1715 Reeve's Tale in the style of a mock epic, which does some really odd stuff around the daughter: calls her the miller's 'female son', and a 'filiaster', and stresses her towering height and girth, in a way that if it was a text from 1915 I'd be happy calling transmisogyny - not that the daughter has ever been anything but assigned female, but in that by that time I'd be confident the joke was "she looks like a man in a dress". Here, I'm less sure. I talked about it a bit on the COMMode project twitter account. In part I'm hesitant to call it transmisogyny because the mockery relies on *person assigned female fails to grow up physically feminine OR act feminine* (elsewhere the poem stresses her failures in cooking, and her clumsiness), in a way is more reminiscent of the combo gender-policing and transphobia that trans men get, in being seen as defective women. Or, for that matter, the gendered mockery directed at cis women who just happen to fail at feminine tasks and tropes - I'm a pretty clumsy gal myself, clumsiness as unfeminine is *absolutely a thing*. Anyway, I settled on calling it 'oppositional-sexism based misogyny' (I'm not quite sure there's any other kind of misogyny, but so as to distinguish it from, say, oppositional-sexism based toxic masculinity).

At the same time, I was reading Kate Bornstein's 'Gender Outlaw' (updated edition) - I know Bornstein's been something of a contentious figure, and can see why from the book, certainly. What really struck me was the part where, under definitions of gender, she breaks down a list of bodily, behavioural and social codes that make up 'feminine' and therefore 'woman'- things a trans woman has to do in order to override automatic gendering based on facial structure, for instance. She talked about not meeting people's eyes as you walk around in public; flirting by looking at-and-back; various spoken language codes; ways of holding your body; ways of relating to others. Some of them had never occurred to me at all (not looking directly at people on the street? I mean, of course I do, especially if they're coming toward me and we have to non-verbally negotiate who's going to dodge). Bornstein describes them all as, in essence, signals of submission, which: huh. (I think that's not entirely true of some of 'feminine' conversational patterns - asking more questions than you give opinions isn't necessarily submissive.)

I knew I had never fully internalised the norms of young women's behaviour, because everything ever written about how girls (especially co-ed educated girls) behave in classrooms is entirely inaccurate if applied to me. And I knew that when I was put through actual workplace communication training, in a govt job, I was punished for offering constructive critique ("okay, but what about x?") without padding it with praise in a way that both the men in the room and the woman with an MBA were not. I put it down to neuroatypicality: I just missed the memo on a lot, which was mostly productive in terms of my self-esteem and confidence, but increasingly likely to backfire as an adult. But that those codes, combined with certain codes of body language and eye contact, are codes of submission - well I assume I don't have those mastered either (idek, everyone agrees I Make Good Eye Contact, but if women are supposed to make less of it, perhaps I am OVERdoing it). Which probably explains why in sex-positive spaces I get read as Dominant with a capital D even when I'm not trying to be (and/or why men who think of themselves as Dominant with a capital D saw me, when I was younger and more impressionable, as secretly craving submission).

Ugh. Genders. Why. And you're about to say 'that's not gender that's gender roles / misogyny / etc', but it -is- gender in the sense that it's used to either gender you (determine what gender you are) or to react to you based on a system of gendered norms (aggressive for a woman is assertive for a man - variable by race, mind - intense intellectual engagement in a same-gender context reads as intimate in an opposed-gender one, and so on).

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: I'm a little way into Balli Kaur Jaswal's 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows' and am currently annoyed with the protagonist and the premise (specifically that she gets a job teaching writing classes with no writing CV. C'mon. This is 21st c London, even if you limit to the Sikh community there should be a small handful of experienced writers desperate for that job). Three Daughters of Eve on hiatus again - I'm still enjoying it but you know how you avoid the Inevitable Embarrassment in romcoms? I'm avoiding the Inevitable Seduction By Teacher part even though I expect it to be done interestingly and well.
Non-fiction for Personal Interest: Only The Queer Child, still on hiatus.
Poetry: I haven't listened to Paradise Lost for quite a while, I should fix that.
Lit Mag: Still very slowly working through Autumn Meanjin...
For work: I'm partway through The House of Fame on audiobook, and still puttering through The New Companion to Chaucer at times. Main focus at the moment is Forni's Chaucer's Afterlife, which is giving me even more things for the TBR. I've ordered a personal hard copy, as this one is due back soon.

Recently Finished:

Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales by Betsy Bowden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Actually WAY more interesting than I expected. I now need to know a lot more about mock-epic, stat.


The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ooof. Big. Wide-ranging. Incredibly useful. I'm aware of the trenchant critique esp of her treatment of Islam, but as that hinges on 'too reliant on the literary imaginary' it's not a huge barrier for me. I *am* rather more skeptical of the last two chapters, on the Mongols and the Romani respectively - the former, for about half of it, doesn't seem to as carefully distinguish between 'to European observers Mongols SEEMED animalistic because of...' and giving an emotive paraphrase of 'they were x and y'... Heng is much more careful with this re: Islam, and, hmm. Ditto the Romani chapter: I don't know enough to critique the historical claims but it seemed very obvious to me that a lot of the authoritative secondary sources she quotes are deeply prejudiced, and she doesn't really get into that (eg: why assume that the Romani devised the story about wandering in exile due to ancestors having abandoned Christianity as a _cunning plot_, at all? Given many Romani are *now* usually Catholic, could not the same influences identified as giving them the info on Christianity needed to devise such a story actually have resulted in conversions and the creation of such a narrative within some groups?).


Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is... a bit patchy, variable, I think? I haven't read the first edition, so I don't know how much of that comes from the updating process. There are certainly things in here that I stared at and thought "... if a trans woman said that on Twitter she would be excoriated by other trans people at the speed of retweet". In particular Bornstein seems comfortable attributing some women's discomfort with her 'male energy' early in transition to her own 'vestigal male privilege' and to her having not fully adopted the less explicit codes of feminine body language and communication at that stage, which... is not something most trans women would endorse as an explanation, let's say. Anyway. Bornstein has been thoroughly cancelled at least once in the internet age, and survived it, so, let's not hash that out.

Without necessarily ENDORSING that, I did really appreciate how much Bornstein talked about gender's implicit codes of body language and communication - somewhere she describes femininity's signals as all 'signals of submission', and, uh. Oh. Right. Yeah. That would explain a LOT of gendered social problems I encounter, both in very everyday spaces and in queer / sex-positive spaces.

I don't feel like I can give a coherent review because the book itself isn't trying for coherence. I can say that what REALLY stood out to me was the playscript at the end - I want a production, at once. I want to LIGHT a production, there's so much scope for storytelling through lighting there.

Online fiction: Patrick Dacey (Guernica), Counter Waves.

Up Next: More work stuff, at as quick a clip as I can manage.

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Links of note, assorted:

Guy Rundle (Crickey), The Uniquely Australian Violence of the Brereton War Crimes Report, and

Boubuq Sayed (Meanjin), A New Generation of Australian War Criminals. These two make very similar points, with the exception that Sayed also notes that the major outlets, by providing links to veterans' counselling services but nothing for or about Afghan Australians, are continuing to centre soldiers over victims. Guess which of the two got splashed over the Murdoch press and hounded on social media and had his follow-up essay rejected by the Guardian? No prizes for guessing.

Damon (own blog), The uncanny valley of culture: on making english-language media while not being American.

James Wright (Triskele Heritage), Medieval Mythbusting blog 2: the man who invented the spiral staircase myth.

Naaman Zhou (Guardian Au), Australia's delivery deaths: the riders who never made it and the families left behind. Naaman Zhou (the man who brought you 'Australian scientist gets magnet stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device) is honestly one of the best culture/society-side economics reporters out there at the moment. Which is to say he's not reporting from parliament or on business forecasts, but on the practical realities: delivery drivers, university enrolments, underpayment scandals, and so on.

Michelle Toole, Brendan Crabb and Suman Majumdar (The Age), Blaming and shaming breaks a cardinal rule of public health.

Jamey Jesperson (History Workshop), Honouring trans lives, historicising trans death.

Shookofeh Rajabzadeh (ACMRS Arizona), Is your bread white enough? King Arthur baking company's racist marketing history.

Dan Charles (NPR, 2019), From cullinary dud to stud: how dutch plant breeders built our brussels sprouts boom. TL,DR, unlike most things, mass-market brussel sprouts have got rapidly BETTER in the last twenty years.

I taught the Old English Apollonius of Tyre followed by Gower's Apollonius, over a two week block earlier this month. It was really striking how much the students found the OE Apollonius inaccessible - unemotional, lacking in character development (true, i'll grant, for most characters), and Gower's more accessible on account of it's greater degree of emotionality.

What I found really odd was that *I* saw emotions in the OE - especially in the part of the narrative where Apollonius is overcome with homesickness in the great hall, and his hosts observe his grief and send the princess to talk to him. He's reluctant to talk, but he does give some of his story, and then he finds solace in music.

My boss-colleague had taught the Old English elegies (two of - The Wanderer and the Seafarer) in a two week block before that, and we'd spent ages talking about the passage in the Wanderer where the speaker remarks that it is an 'indryhten Þeaw' to 'bind fast' one's 'ferðloca' and keep his thoughts to himself. Now, MF and I had a bit of a wrangle in class over indryhten Þeaw, which the Longman edition translates as 'courtly virtue'. Virtue, I'll grant, but I want to translate that as... 'with-lorded', I think. I see why the translation 'courtly' works, but still, it's so lexically anchored to the concept of having a dryhten. ANYWAY. One who is worthy to belong to a lord will exhibit the virtue of binding fast his soul-locker.

I never did care for the elegies much; I hadn't re-read them since literally undergrad (and I couldn't swear I'd actually read them all; certainly not translated them) before this. But even without that, I guess I'd picked up, partly from the ethos of OE prose and partly from secondary lit, how this works - that it's exposing and shameful to have to exteriorise your emotions. The elegies are a particular exception, in that while they have a LOT of emotion going on, they're specifically designed to lament - to give shape to the emotions otherwise bound in the soul-locker.

The end result was I had a WILDLY different experience of the two Apolloniuses to my students. I've taught these two together before, and I don't recall being so struck by this part. (A current student has really interesting ideas about a throughline between the Seafarer and Gower's Apollonius, which I would never have thought of!) And I just... really struggled, I think, to get across what I saw.

Something I thought of, in the shower later, was that the OE prose narratives, and to a certain extent the *narrative* poetry, reminds me of modern Japanese fiction, in the way it handles emotion. Hard to say, I've read a lot more of the former than the latter, and I haven't read the big names (Murakami, etc) that people will immediately think of. But in my mind are things like Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, Takaishi Hiraide, and even this short story by Aoka Matsuda I read this week. Apparently I didn't comment on this when I finished Convenience Store Woman but I remember thinking about it at the time: how Japanese first person narratives manage to be immediate, close first person, but still give the speaking protagonist a sort of... emotional privacy. You can tell there are emotions there, but you don't get the up close nitty-gritty of it. I forget the words for the distinction between emotional-bubble and emotional out-bubble people, but I don't think it's that the audience are emotional out-bubble. It's that the audience are expected to do some WORK, as emotional-in-bubble, and not demand complete cathartic emotional immersion.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I've become close with someone who's a native German speaker (although not Swiss), and discovered that my emotional expression arsenal is wildly ill-suited to people who are neither Australians/Kiwis nor Brits nor steeped in Old English lit. I LOVE understatement, you see. 'You're not so bad yourself', for instance, is a well known example, meaning 'I am quite fond of you' (insert US-UK problems for quite - Australians use both meanings, although mostly the UK, and usually intuit which). I use all those 'praising with faint praise' idioms and then have just... wildly overcommited to litotes as a rhetorical device. 'Not the worst thing that happened to me' is probably Pretty Damn Good. And I think it's, in my case, actually partly influenced by OE lit, where pronouncements like 'he was not unworthy to ...' are high praise. (Right after having a communication fail on this axis I opened something to find bedlamsbard describing a moderately useful work event as 'not unuseful'. It's the medievalism, I tell you. But I would use that phrase for either something moderately useful or something AMAZINGLY useful, and I'm not sure Bedlam would for the latter. I wouldn't for something *fairly* useful, though. LITOTES!)

There's a whole complex here where I'm BOTH someone who is emotionally transparent, and someone who has trouble emoting on *purpose* (let alone co-emoting. I don't like people seeing me to the airport, oh no). And where I'm someone who has, let us say, not the most stellar track record with social nuance, AND a huge love of figurative language, especially for emotion. I am enormously on team 'straight up explicit communication' and also intensely into oblique communication, especially as expression of care.

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Currently Reading: Much the same as last time, honestly. I... read stuff. Every second day at least? But I never finish anything.
Fiction for fun: 'Three Daughters of Eve' is coming along. It's not what I really want to be reading right now (I feel like brain candy, but very little of that is ON my tbr, since I took an indefinite break from indie romance, so here we are). I'm enjoying the retrospective timeline and finding the grown-adult one tedious, but I assume that's intentional. I can also tell, loud as a clanging bell, the retrospective is going to end with a student/teacher affair, which is... not what I signed up for, but I suppose it's a strength of Shafak's craft that I'm still on board even though that's obviously how it's going to pan out?
Poetry: Still enjoying The World's Wife. Still not sure that ANYTHING in here beats Mrs Icarus. I am making headway again with Paradise Lost courtesy Anthony Oliveira; just got to the critical splitting point in Book 9.
Lit Mag: Hey I read THREE whole things from the autumn Meanjin. Never mind that it's nearly time for the summer issue and I haven't read winter or spring.
Non-fiction for fun: All on hiatus.
For work: still puttering through Jost's collection on Chaucerian humour, which remains stuffy (but sometimes in useful ways). Almost finished Heng's The Invention of Race but got stalled halfway through the Mongol chapter, a bit... o_0 about the way she writes about them. Certainly she doesn't execute the same careful disambiguation between what her Latin SOURCES say about barely-human Mongols and her own narrator voice as she does with the Arabs. (Also... clashes wildly with Lomuto's take in 'The Mongol Princess of Tars'???)

Recently Finished: Two whole things!

Trelawny of the 'Wells': A Comedietta In Four Acts by Arthur Wing Pinero

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I made it to the last of wildeabandon's playreadings and I'm really glad I did. This was a whacky play, SIMULTANEOUSLY a 19th c melodrama and a late 19th c drawing room comedy, and if I was a 19th century-ist I would be putting it on undergrad syllabi at once. A++ work, Arthur Wing Pinero, whoever you were.

Would LOVE to be involved in a production, but as it would lose ALL its attractions if it had anything less than full 1860s dress, I doubt I ever will be.



View all my reviews

I also finished Miroirs arthuriens entre images et mirages, with... mixed feelings. Next week will be devoted to figuring out how to give a mixed review that showcases its best aspects (as I think a bilingual french/english collection that's mostly French in... approach? I guess? is an important thing to exist) without overselling it. I think my basic takeaway is: if your institution TEACHES both medieval French and Medieval English, order it. If not, perhaps not.

Online Fiction:

Aoko Matsuda, trans. Polly Barton, introduced Carmen Maria Machado (Electric Lit), Peony Lanterns. A ghost story. A story of an unemployed salaryman.

Eris Young (The Selkie), The Archivist. Dark; several kinds of violence. But oh. It's... a thing. Oh yes. I think it will appeal to people who liked My Love, Our Lady of Slaughter in particular, although in some ways it has more in common with A voyage to Queensthroat.

Up Next: So many things I feel dizzy. I really want to finish either Three Daughters or Meanjin so I can move on to something else for fun. For work and work-adjacent I just have an Endless Pile. I'm trying to install a half hour reading segment each day, with... less than total success.

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Links of Note:

Barbara Caine (History Workshop), Reading and writing friendship: Ruth Slate and Eva Slawson. This is the GOOD SHIT, yes.

Lorrie Moore (The New Yorker), Face Time. On COVID, care, and death.

Michael Blair Mount (Longreads), My year on a shrinking island. For some reason I missed the author's name and (inferred) gender and for 2/3 of this thought it was by a woman. It's interesting, though not surprising, how my response changed when I realised not. Oh, right, you're (read as) a MAN, that explains how you can up and move to Martha's Vineyard with no context. Oh, right the women you're going home with make you STRAIGHT, that's why there's no ~extra guff~ about partner choice. Right. Regardless, as an essay, it has the thing I most value: sense of place.

Therese Mailhot (Guernica), I used to give men mercy. This is... notable. I'll be adding her memoir to my (unfeasible) TBR.

Rachel Sugar (Vice), What was fun. This is both interesting and unsatisfying. I hope to come back to it and write a post on Fun.

Lidia Thorpe (Crikey, 2019), Djab Warrung people have been failed at every turn. If you've been keeping tabs on the destruction of the Djab Warruing trees, and like me were wondering what was up with the Vic govt claiming they had consulted traditional owners while many Djab Warrung claim they hadn't: here's an explanation.

Roland Betancourt (Time), The Hidden Queer History of Medieval Christianity. Some of this is same old, same old, but really !! is Betancourt's account of a document *condemning* the Byzantine adoption-of-brotherhood rite as inviting immorality. It goes a long way to confirming Boswell's reading of that rite, and, like... I was so suspicious. So were many other people. It was the LEAST supported part of Boswell's second book. Anyway. Will be reading Betancourt's book as soon as I beat down the TBR a bit.

Mary C. Flannery (TLS), Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?. There are, I suspect, things missing from this, but I know writing it meant a lot to MF and going by Twitter it has spoken deeply to other Americans (and not all of them white). I'm still a bit ??? at the idea of having feelings about one's anthem other than an impulse to satire that ends up more moving than the original, so I am ill equipped to comment.

Carmen Maria Machado (Guernica, 2017), The trash heap has spoken. On fat women taking up space.

I did get more work done than usual in the past two weeks, despite the rollercoaster of meds roulette, but apparently it didn't take the form of finishing books for work, and I lost most of my leisure time to side effects.

One thing I *have* been enjoying lately is 'Other people talking about Moby Dick'. This started with the 'Ahab's Wife' chapter in Spengler's Literary Spinoffs; then I, in small chunks, listened through the Spouter Inn's 2019 Moby Dick episode, and last night their bonus episode on Moby Dick with Damien Fleming. Somewhere in there I also read Hermin Melville Hates Penguins, a post from 'secret base club', which argues (as Damien had in the 2019 episode: no citation, might be independent recognition of the Truth) that Herman Melville is a 'god-tier shitposter'. And then there's... well i haven't exactly READ it, but Damien Fleming brought its existence to my attention: the 2014 Clickhole spectacular, "The time i spent on a commercial whaling ship totally changed my perspective on the world".

I'm still fairly sure I don't want to read Moby Dick (although, if I do, it will be probably via the Whale Whale Whale podcast), but I really enjoy other people talking about Moby Dick. Are there books like that in your life? (James Joyce's Ulysses could be one? But mostly I have discovered that I don't like the things people say about Joyce, and am therefore disinclined to bother.)

Currently Reading: Not much change from last fortnight, honestly.
Fiction for fun: Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve is on hiatus again
Poetry: I'm still enjoying The World's Wife, in fits and starts, and Paradise Lost via podcast.
Lit Mag: Making small headway with the spring Meanjin, finally.
Non-fiction for fun: All on hiatus
For work: A fair few things, including Heng's 'The Invention of Race', Jost's collection on Chaucerian humour, and a bilingual collection (fr/eng) from the Int'l Arthurian Society congress 2015.

Recently Finished:

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by Marcia Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am deeply bemused by this book, but in a good way.

Online fiction:

Margo Lanagan (The Saturday Paper, paywalled), Solomon Grundy XVI. I'm still dissatisfied with the Saturday Paper having cut the poetry section to replace it with fiction, and even less so when I realised they did so the moment Omar Sakr put up a piece about Palestine - Schwartz Media have, apparently, a silent policy of publishing no work on palestine, least of all by palestinians (although work on *Israel*, of course, is fine). This particular story, though, is a good 'un.

Up Next: Ugh so many things, as usual. I've been loaned a copy of the graphic memoir 'Spinning', though, so that's high on the list.

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Essays and Misc:

David Donaldson (The Mandarin), Contracts and Convicts: how perverse incentives created the death fleet. The Second Fleet: case study in terrible government outsourcing.

Guy P. Raffa (Zocalo: Arizona State University), How Dante's Divine Comedy Speaks to 2020. On the misattributed claim that for Dante those who remain neutral are the worst of all sinners (no: but they get a special place just outside the first circle of hell, and no personal sympathy from Dante)

Timmah Ball (Meanjin Autumn 2020), why Write?. I think I already flagged this one in the preamble to a previous post. Wrestles with the appetite of white readers for indigenous stories, but not for indigenous-centred change. Pairs well with...

Alison Whittacker (Meanjin Papers Autumn 2020), So White, So What. I would do this a disservice to summarise it, so I will only note that personally I was fascinated by its definition of "Whiteness Studies" as distinct from Critical Race Studies. I feel like a substantial portion of premodern race studies (esp the literary versions, due to source bias), even those that like Heng are anchored in CRT, is actually Whiteness Studies.

Laura Miller (New Yorker), Susanna Clarke's World of Interiors. Guess I gotta put the new book on my tbr too.

Eve Rickert (own blog), What I got wrong in More Than Two. Part of the fallout of the great Frankin Veaux Debacle, which I am still following. This writeup is focused on specific kinds of advice given in More Than Two, about emotion management in polyamory, and it is good to read.

Regan Penaluna, interview with Elizabeth Catte (Guernica), Appalachia isn't Trump Country. For some reason I read a lot of what goes past me on the internet that touches on Appalachia. This is a particularly good example.

Eryn Brothers (CountryQueer), Is this the first queer country song?

Sulaimann Adonia (LitHub), The Wound of Multilingualism: On Surrendering the Languages of Home.

McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar), What the Performative Can't Perform: On Judith Butler.

Tanya M Howard (The Conversation AU), The NSW koala wars showed one thing: the Nationals appear ill-equipped to help rural Australia. ICMI, the minor coalition partner in NSW tried to go rogue over... opposing koala protection laws. It didn't end well.

Sarah Manavis (NewStatesman), Why Goodreads is Bad for Books. Looks at some alternatives, and largely confirms my regretful opinion that TheStoryGraph is not for me.

Nora Samaran (Own Blog), The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture. I come back to this one every so often, like a loose tooth. This time I'm struck by the fact that, although Samaran is not wrong that many men lack nurturance skills (but that some have mastered them, and that is a good thing), it is my experience that a great many *women* also lack these skills. In fact, in my teens *among my age peers*, if other girls had nurturance skills they rarely desired to extend them to me. I also think that, among women a certain discourse of homosocial yes-womaning often takes the place of true nurturance: the expectation of emotional labour in friendship is a 'Squad' vibe, eternally available but rarely challenging.

One thing I read in the past fortnight that will keep tickling my brain for some time is Timmah Ball's essay Why Write?, from the autumn edition of Meanjin. Unlike, say Alexis Wright, Ball is not steadfastly convinced of the value of storytelling for Indigenous Australian culture, or at least, not for achieving the material social changes needed to preserve the lives and health of Indigenous Australians - to create the material conditions not just for cultural survival but for cultural thriving. Ball, a geographer by training, is as disillusioned with the audience of white readership (which, of course, includes me) as she is with architects and planners who seek to build homage to Indigenous cultures into new developments, but who shy away from incorporating affordable housing and other intiatives which might address the immediate needs of local Indigenous people. And yet, after time away, she returns here to writing: to writing about frustration with writing.

This is something I've been thinking about as I'm thinking about teaching 'Refugee Tales'. The group who put this together (the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group), and presumably the detainees who contributed, seem to believe in the power of storytelling - or storytelling combined with the ritualised process of walking through Kent, sharing stories along the way - to build solidarity, to affirm belonging, and effect change. And yet. Refugee Tales began in 2015, and is still assembled annually, and there has been no material change in UK asylum seeker policy - if anything, the situation has become worse. What purpose, then, do the volumes serve? A rebuke? A testament to history? A salve to the mostly-white readership of the books?

I don't have answers here, only a sense of frustration.

On a rather different 'why read' front, I have been wondering again about my own attraction to those most stereotypically-feminine of genres, the personal essay and the advice column. Growing up, I read a few books in the genre not yet called YA realism / contemporary - Looking For Alibrandi and Something To Tell You being the stand-outs, naturally. I read a fair few Margaret Clark novels, but I obsessively read her advice collection 'Secret Girls Stuff'. I had almost ZERO of the problems therein: I had a crush on boy, sure, but there was so spectacularly no prospect of reciprocation that I didn't waste time angsting about how or whether to ask him out. My friends had drama around me, but I was not close enough to any of them to experience the feelings of betrayal sketched out in the friend pieces. Many years later, having exchanged these books first for SMH Life And Style columns and then for Dan Savage and then for the weirder corners of the sexblog internet, and eventually for polyamory guidebooks and Captain Awkward - well, many years later I realised that although in some of those cases the draw is 'figure out how to negotiate my own feelings by example', the bigger draw has always been 'find out what the other humans are feeling'.

Perhaps that, too, has been driving my compulsive reading of lockdown memoir pieces. Not so much to validate my own feelings, but to place them as one tiny point in a big, big map of individual experiences. Hillery Stone's Fever In The Woods got its claws in a little deeper than I expected. It has that strong sense of place that is my kryptonite; I empathised with Stone's confusion upon finding that her children, unlike her, cannot or will not self-occupy when plonked in the woods (I don't think I ever realised how solitary a child I was, until Ms Now-11 got to the age range where I *remember* being her age). And then the description of both her son, in her present, and her much younger brother in her childhood taking sick with serious fevers. I don't know if I *remember* my brother's babyhood illnesses, per se, or only fragments of them, but the fear - the fear has stayed with me, and it's not the fear Stone describes herself feeling as a parent, it's the same fear that resurfaced from her childhood: the alarmed confusion of one who is not responsible, but who is suddenly both very confused, and very insignificant.

And with that, onward to the recap.

Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: Elif Shafak, Three Daughters of Eve. Making small headway again, and empathising very much with young, anxious, study-absorbed Peri; slowly more with her adult self, too.
Poetry: I started Carol Ann Duffy's 'The World's Wife' as soon as I finished 'Ovid Resung'. I loved 'Little Red Cap' instantly; nothing else so far has caught my breath quite so well. Meanwhile, I'm continuing to make headway with Paradise Lost courtesy of Anthony Oliveira's podcast.
Lit Mag: Not exactly rapid, but some progress with the Autumn Meanjin
Non-fiction for personal interest: All on hiatus.
For work: Jost's collection 'Chaucer's Humour', which is full of stuffy people being stuffy and conservative and thinking they're very smart. Useful as a barometer of how many ways one can be stuffy about Chaucer. Also Heng's 'The Invention of Race', which I am loving, although i also have a 46-page (! and also ?) negative review of it bookmarked to read afterward. And finally, 'Miroirs Arthuriens', an edited collection in French and English, which I have a review copy of and had forgotten about until quite recently.

Recently Finished:

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved this book. It was not easy reading: it's sharp, and bitter, and rarely shies away from depicting the brutality and callousness of rape and other violations at the heart of so many myths. I found myself tracking in careful comparison: which stories were bluntly anatomical, which more evasive, which metaphorical. And the story in the voice of Salmacis was a BRILLIANT choice, a narrative of feminine hunger and violation of a beautiful young man, and it too does not shy away from the violence she does to him.


The remainder for work, and none of them worth giving individual reviews to: the Blackwell Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c 1350-1500; a book of essays in honour of James M. Dean (the contributors of which were ROBBED, i tell you, by James M. Dean's search-engine clever choice to include his initial in his professional name); and Helen Young's 'Constructing England', a book which seems pretty good, and I can't figure out why she didn't pitch and revise it with a legit publisher instead of going through Edwin Mellon with what's clearly a serial-numbers-filed off PhD and which suffers as a monograph because of that.

Online Fiction: Both from Strange Horizons; I recommend both in podcast format.

Christine Lucas (Strange Horizons), My love, our lady of slaughter.

Anya Johanna de Niro (Strange Horizons), A voyage to Queensthroat. I particularly loved the deft use of narrative time here - the slippage between the narrator-now, the story-now, and the past. A+++.

Up Next: I think i've ploughed through the most significant teaching related books I have out, so what's up next is things on the reserve shelf, and/or saved articles. More reading on Chaucerian humour. When the Shafak is done, onward to ... whatever I fancy at the time, I guess.

---

Some other links:

Sophie Lewis (Mal journal), Collective turn-off. Right now – even when they publish ostensibly optimistic books about how, for example, ‘women have better sex under socialism’ – female leftists sometimes seem unable to envision outright good sex, indeed, unable to dream up anything better than, simply, an absence of domestic abuse. Fascinating take on the 'heterofatalism' trend, and touches on some things that I sense as a bisexual woman that I can't quite articulate.

Tara Haelle (Elemental), Our brains struggle to process this much stress. Not really new news, but delivered well, and with enough context that the advice isn't trite.

Rebecca Watson (LitHub), The Internet has split our sense of self: can the page reproduce that?

Melissa A. Fabello (Human Parts), The joys of queering your relationships. A nice chill complement to the Lewis piece above; may be needed to fortify oneself to tackle the Giovannitti one.

Sophia Giovanniti (Majuscule), In defense of men. Honestly the best take on the 'we should stop saying UGH MEN' discourse I've found yet, especially as it acknowledges this bit: The performative online displays of man-hating stem from a longstanding in-person sociality: the age-old tradition of straight women bitching about their boyfriends to one another, which they do precisely to feel a sense of community with other women. I have been known to UGH MEN, but I am very quickly alienated from the conversation when straight women do so, because it's so bound up in the functioning of heteronormativity in that context.

Suzanne Conklin Akbari (LitHub), Can the essay still surprise us?. (I wonder, do we demand surprise?)

The Saturday Paper, Editorial, A Revenge on Theory: a scathing take on the current AusPol higher ed policy debate.

Jami Attenberg (NYT), Is Resilience Overrated?

Irina Dumitrescu (Longreads), The Masterclass Diaries: How To Learn Everything. A great example of personal essays I enjoyed not because they gave me any great critical insight, but because they evoke one person's thoughts and feelings very well.

Jenny Bhatt, interview with Shruti Swamy (Electric Lit), Stories About the Worst Things Possible. I just really liked Swamy's way of talking about her process here - especially that she stressed she wrote about mothers and motherhood *before* she was a mother, because the experience fascinated her, not because she had autobiographical experience.

I did not achieve the complete brain reset I hoped for while I was away this past week, but I did snap myself out of some of my rut. I took only 'fresh' books, and alternated reading with podcasts.

I finally got to starting - and in short order, finishing, Jocelyn Playfair's 'A House In The Country', which I have owned since summer 2018 and carted around the world with me, but only now read. It is, it turns out, perfect pandemic reading: in style and genre it is clear and straightforward, not difficult to get into; but not unserious, and it handles emotions and character beats with a light touch that made it easier for me to engage with than much Genre Fiction currently is.

A House In The Country is set in the midst of WWII, at a point where no one knew which way the hand of fate would fall; and it was published before the war hand ended. Unlike much war fiction, therefore, it does not have the arc toward victory or defeat; its resolution is only in the mind of its protagonist, and cannot rely on the prospect of national or global happiness. For a book which delves deeply, if gently, into the question of how such brutality returned - how the war to end all wars had failed to end war and why - and which turns over and over the failings of the present and the prospects of the future, that's quite an achievement. Readers who demand romance genre like Happy Endings won't be pleased here, but I am.

Another way in which this is a perfect pandemic read is that Cressida, its protagonist, and her lodger and would-be-lover Tori (an exiled Pole), grapple with the different impacts of the war - the 'ruin' of Poland compared to the comparative calm of England; the tangible destruction of the Blitz in comparison to the quiet, fraught normality of rural England. And they seek, over and over, ways to make peace with the fact that some people around them cannot or will not appreciate the gravity of the situation. Late in the book, the gardener Northeast observes 'there's some as won't give nothing up til it's took from them', and that is, in context, not a bold stubborn holding of the line, but a refusal to engage with tragedy - a drive to go 'back to normal' after the first war, that lead only to the next one.

Here is a page shot of an early discussion that rather impressed itself upon me. 'There are still so many people who simply don't notice the war, except as a sort of boring obstruction to their own comfort. [...] Heaps of them have sons and relations to worry about, and, of course, they do worry and go through the tortures of the damned about them, but for themselves, personally, the war seems to mean practically nothing. They don't see why they shouldn't wangle petrol and hoard biscuits and run the central heating and have three lights in the drawing-room and hot baths up to their necks ...'

I also ploughed through an assortment of essays, which only lead me to open more links and save more. I am making my peace with the fact that I will *never* get through my unread list on pinboard. COVID is proving a veritable wellspring of thinkpieces on the nature of isolation, and solitude (which are not the same thing), and the choices by which we structure our lives. I am drawn, predictably, to those of single and solitary women, sometimes in validation as they articulate a pleasure in solitude that echoes my own current comfort, and sometimes in slight bafflement as they articulate the common crushing loneliness that I just... seem to have bypassed, for now. Danielle Evans, in the Sewanee Review (link below) had a particularly apt line, one that rings true for many of my life choices (but not, really, the singleness one): "It is possible to feel stuck with your choices even without wishing you’d made any differently."

Right, on with the update.

Currently Reading: The same recurring offenders, really.
Mostly for fun:I picked up Elif Shafak's 'Three Daughters of Eve' and finally made enough headway through it that I think I understand the pattern of storytelling, and why I didn't find the adult protagonist particularly likeable (OR, in herself, very interesting - it's only with retrospective narration of her childhood and undergraduate years that I'm seeing the interest, which is, how did she get to be so uninteresting?).
A little more headway with 'Wake, Siren': I'm up to Procne and Philomela, now.
Mostly for work: I started reading 'Refugee Tales', volume 1, and am already grappling with something that came up in the last first-year class I taught. A student, a rather brash young guy, asserted that if only we LISTENED to STORIES, people would understand about the refugees coming to Europe and things would change. I'm afraid I laughed in his face. Behrouz Boochani had not long published 'No Friend But The Mountains': did that change anything? No. The audience for the book, and for his twitter account, are people already sympathetic to the cause - doesn't change the bipartisan agreement on border control one bit. Same with Refugee Tales, which is up to three volumes now, I think, and holds regular 'pilgrimages' of solidarity walks. I'm sure I've read someone (is it Boochani? Is it the RISE twitter account? I need to look this out, before teaching Refugee Tales), either an Australian Muslim or someone detained by Australia, excoriating the white liberal desire for 'stories' over action.
Also puttering through Pugh's Chaucerotics, which is... alternately useful and High Theory, and even the useful bits are very much the kind of Queer Studies written by A Gay. 'Eroticisms of the past allowed homoeroticism and heterosexuality to coexist! We need a completely new paradigm to think about this! Bring on the THEORY!' Meanwhile, I, Known Bisexual: Ah. Yes. A truly astonishing idea. Utterly paradigm-shifting.

Recently Finished:
Alisoun Sings by Caroline Bergvall

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I... am struggling to decide what I think of this. Since it does touch briefly on sex, I will need to make reference to it, but I don't think it's interested in *obscenity* per se - except perhaps using the figure of Alisoun of Bath as a sort of... license-giver for potentially shocking personal discussion? I think I'll refer this on to the PhD student, who'll be working on the WoB.

What I want to figure out is... what accent Caroline Bergvall is trying to produce with her phoenetic spellings? I'm not very good at accents. In best case scenario, it's a representation of one or several UK accents; at worst, it's a bad pastiche of Afrio-English accents via Patience Agbabi. I believe Bergvall has given readings, so my next order of business is to watch some on youtube. And some of Agbabi's while I'm at it.

A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have owned this for... about two years, and carried it around the world with me, and only now got around to reading it. That is a shame, because it's lovely; and also ideal, because it is PERFECT pandemic reading. I am struggling with the attention / mental effort required by Serious Fiction, but also can't get immersed in high-affect genre fiction (romance, some sci fi, etc), and this was the perfect alternative. It's... calm, and easy, but not *light* reading. It handles big serious emotions and issues, but it does so with a gentle touch. And generically, it's a very straightforward novel - it's not trying to make you work to figure out what it's doing from one page to the next. That's not a slight: as the intro notes, Playfair uses the familiar setting - big country house, smalltown England, etc deftly, so the focus is on the human elements rather than the worldbuilding.

SPOILER but I'm putting this on a mental list of 'books where the main function of men is to set a woman up for life and then vanish'. It's a lot less grim than Villette, though. Its observations on human foibles - particularly those of the portion of the population who resisted wartime strictures, or regarded them as for other people - are sharp and to the point, and very often apt for right now. One observation, that many people will not give anything up until it's taken from them... definitely rings true in the age of COVID.

On the 'wildly inaccurate' side, however, there is a whole page devoted to how the 'British character' is not given to hatred, LOL WHAT. Unlike, apparently, the German character. Extremely of its time, but also, I feel like many in its time might disagree about the whole 'British not given to hatred' thing. Unless you suppose that merely despising people is not a form of hatred, but the problems of empire are very much Not Dealt With Here.

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I (re)read this in an Alps-inspired binge, largely because I couldn't get hold of The Chalet School. It's... oh, it's good at what it is good at (Mountain Scenery) and infuriating at what it is infuriating at (classism, moralism, etc). I am particularly annoyed with a few glaring improbabilities. Peter not knowing that mountains have names? PuhLEASE. What does Spyri think, only city people are smart enough to name mountains??? Also, the whole 'walking again by the power of cheese and grit' plot is, as we know, Problematique, but I am also stuck on the image of Grandfather carrying a *fifteen year old girl* for what seems to be quite a hike from his hut to the pasture??? That is not how old men, or fifteen year old girls, work!

I remain fascinated by the extremely 19th century idea that a diet of bread and cheese, milk, potatoes and occasional sausage, is Extremely Healthful. I mean, it'll keep you going! There's a reason rösti and raclette and fondue and oddly specific sausages are the traditional foods of the alps, but you're telling me Grandfather doesn't even grow chard or kohlrabi or lettucey things? The 19th c Swiss diet was not very varied, but this is set *after* the trainline went in - he should also be picking up some foods in Maienfeld, trading for... whatever it is he has to trade. Cheese or wooden whatsits.


Also finished: KJC's latest, Slippery Creatures, which was... okay, but didn't grab me. Might be my fault. And Jack Monroe's 'Tin Can Cook', which - likewise, actually. Some good stuff, but no 'Cooking on A Bootstrap' or 'A Girl Called Jack'.

Online Fiction:

Tony Birch (The Saturday Paper), Riding Trains With Thelma Plum. I'm still peeved they replaced the poetry section with fiction, but this is pretty good.

Up Next: I never did get around to that book on desire in Dante...

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Online essays of note:

Jason Wilson (Guernica), On Travel Writing. " Now that I sit with the nostalgia of the pre-pandemic places I once loved to visit, perhaps those landscapes I carry inside will become the only authenticity worth exploring."

Danielle Evans (The Sewanee Review), Corona Correspondences #28

Angelica Baker (LitHub), Reading every unread book on my bookshelf during the pandemic.

Mona Elthaway (NBC Think, 2018), I swear to make the patriarchy uncomfortable. I've been thinking a lot lately about why I swear, along with why I am so stridently interested in *talking* about sex (as opposed to having it), and such considerations. This is a good contribution to think with.

Michelle Harper (Zora), The police tried to make me medically examine a man against his will. This has... haunted me.

Maren Tova Linnett (LitHub), Viewing literature as a lab for community ethics. This works beautifully with my own understanding of the function of narrative (or at least, the function in which I am most interested in - one which is often NOT of interested to Literary Scholars, I find).

Ed Yong (The Atlantic), COVID-19 can last for several months. 'Long Covid' is a chilling idea (except to those with ME/CFS, for whom it is presumably very familiar as well as worrying). Ed Yong's work is, as ever, brilliant.

Jessica Jernigan (Electric Lit, 2017), The book that made me a feminist was written by an abuser. Good to have a solid cite for what is now a Known Fact about MZB; I didn't realise it was actually quite a recently Known known fact (2014). Jerinigan's working through here of the author/work ethical problem is also a gentle but sound one.

Katherine Eban (Vanity Fair), How Jared Kushner's secret testing plan went poof into thin air. One of the list of 'headlines that would make no sense to someone from 2010'.

Joe Van Malachowski, interview with Zachary Zane (Unicorn mag), Where are all the bisexual men?. Both these men sound like decent chaps, and I shall put Zane's memoir on my tbr.

Currently reading:
Fiction: I made some further progress with Garth Greenwell - still struggling with embarrassment squick and the audiobook format. Otherwise... not a strong showing for fiction this fortnight. Wait, no, I did read a couple of stories from Wake, Siren.
Non-fiction for fun: Also not a strong showing. I think I read two pages of The Queer Child and lbr that's 60% personal interest 40% work.
Poetry: None. Nothing new, and no progress on Paradise Lost. I am re-reading Agbabi's Telling Tales, but that counts as work.
Lit Mag: None, I'm between issues.
Academic: I don't actually have a currently reading because I've been ploughing through them so fast. That's good news! Plus a re-read of Agbabi in light of new ideas.

Recently Finished: Much work, little leisure.

Feminist Theory And The Classics by N. Rabinowitz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Only read intro and Shelley P Haley's contribution; intro good, Haley BRILLIANT.



Transporting Chaucer by Helen Barr

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


some good stuff, but the style really isn't my thing


Meanjin Summer 2019 by Jonathan Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I FINALLY FINISHED THE THING. It had a lot of good non-fiction and i wasn't super taken with the fiction or poetry.


Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio by Carol Falvo Heffernan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An odd genre of book: book that is not actually very good, and at times infuriatingly negligent, but provides incredibly useful references. Old fashioned source studies, so if one isn't all up on 14th c italian lit it's strategically useful (but it massively overstates the marginalisation of Boccacio in Chacuerian studies). Doesn't appear to realise that misogyny is a problem, let alone a core factor in a lot of comedy. Replicates some misogynistic tropes in very useful quotable ways. And yet I got so many useful cites out of it.



Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation by Sorcha Gunne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Only read the intro and forward, but: YES. EXTREMELY USEFUL YES GOOD THANK YOU



Up Next: Still trying to hold myself to finishing Shafak or Greenwell before starting more fiction. Book club read is Girl, Woman, Other, but while I intend to read it I might not actually make it to the meeting, for various reasons. I have Jeff Sparrow's 'Money Shot' pulled out of the tbr shelf and set to go for work-but-not-medieval reading, either tomorrow or monday (a re-read).

Once again, I should make a links list, i have read many important essays, but... nope. I cannot with the braining.

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.

Currently Reading:
Fiction: Garth Greenwell's "What Belongs To You" (audioboo, narr. Greenwell); Nina MacLaughlin, "Wake, Siren". Both sooort of for work (I want to compare, although not in depth, MacLauchlin to some modernisations of the Physician's Tale; Greenwell keeps name-dropping Chaucer in interviews), but mostly for interest. Elif Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve remains on hiatus.
Poetry: The Sting of It is still getting leafed through a little at a time. Some minor progress on Paradise Lost via podcast.
Plays: 4/6 episodes through Good Omens (TV) with wildeabandon et al
Lit Mag: Lol, summer Meanjin still. Autumn hasn't arrived, I emailed about that.
Non-fiction for personal interest: The Queer Child remains on hiatus.
For work: Need to get back to Solga's Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance; am making some headway with Holy Sh*t.

Recently Finished:

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I... was not expecting this to be so RIDICULOUS. I don't think I've actually read it before; I saw it live in eighth or ninth grade. It made a bit of a Formative Imprint on me, vis a vis cross-dressing comedies, but for Reasons it's Twelfth Night I've seen and read repeatedly. These Reasons, it turns out, might be because Twelfth Night is just better. And of course I've read *chunks* of As You Like It, the All the World's A Stage speech gets quoted constantly, and with great seriousness; thus I had been lulled into thinking this might be a serious play, or as serious as Shakespeare's comedies get.

LOL NOPE.

On the other hand it just... goes there, huh. Straight up calls the boysona Ganymede, no beating around *that* bush...

American Chaucers by Candace Barrington

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Surprisingly useful to me, for a book that deals with obscenity not at all.


Online Fiction:

Porpentine Charity Heartscape (Strange Horizons), Dirty Wi-fi. It's weird and futuristic and worryingly present and gritty and erotic and did I mention *weird*? Do recommend.

Madeline Trebenski (McSweeney's), The girl from Avril Lavigne's Sk8r Boi responds 18 years later.

Daniel Lavery (The Shatner Chatner), The prodigal parable of the son. The sheer righteous fury in this, wow.

Up Next: First priority has to be to clear off some of the currently-reading decks, but also looming is Kiran Millwood Hargraves' The Mercies, for a remote book club. I've just ordered that in hard copy - while the kobo ebook is on deep discount, it's not available at all through kobo AU! I presume for parallel import reasons. Meanwhile the audiobook IS on Kobo AU? But given the trouble I'm having keeping my brain tuned to the Greenwell audiobook, I opted for ordering the hardcopy from a Swiss bookstore chain.

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Online essays:

Lili Loofbourow (Slate), 1918 flu pandemic: a letter from a relatable past. Not just relatable - Loofbourow unpacks with care and nuance the emotional fluctuations and coping mechanisms evident in a letter from Lutian van Wert, a young Native American girl who had served briefly as a nurse in Washington DC, and pays careful attention to the historical *specificities* of her situation as well as the commonalities.

Domnhall O'Sullivan (SwissInfo), How a Zurich epidemic helped birth Swiss direct democracy. Zurich radicals leveraged cholera into demands for more representative democracy.

Charles Louis Richter (Contingent Mag), The trouble with triscuits. Not Electricity Biscuits, after all.

Irina Dumitrescu (LRB), Making my moan. On the one hand, this is a really good intro to the wonders of medieval obscenity. On the other hand, it's a review of Carissa Harris' 'Obscene Pedagogies' and I'm starting to become uncomfortable with how many people are citing and retweeting this as an *essay* by Dumitrescu, rather than as a review of Harris' work. (Is race a factor? I bet race is a factor.)

Lech Blaine (The Monthly), Hillsong's Strange Tides. Yup, that sure is Hillsong, terrible in their own right and getting their fingers all over Auspol these days.

Agnes Callard (Point Magazine), Family Feuds. This is part of a series of 'public philosphy', and this one focuses on games and gameplay in forced community.

Jen Manion (Aeon Magazine), Female Husbands. This is... odd. It's an extract or a summary of the author's book Female Husbands: A Trans History. The reading seems, yeah, fair enough. It uses 'transing' as a verb, though, with no context. The author is non-binary, and I ASSUME this is a corollary to 'queering', but I am astonished neither they nor the magazine editor felt a definition was necessary, given that the standard use of trans as a verb is by TERFs.

The Athiest Nun blog, Anxious Feminism. Not sure why the author, who I know on twitter, has this backdated, but it sure did give me some Feels and Thoughts.

Sabrina Orah Mark (The Paris Review), Fuck the bread. The bread is over. Notable for being the first time a viral Feminist Internet Essay/Story didn't leave me feeling Weird Queer I Don't Quite Get It / You Don't Quite Get Me feels.

Denise Gellene (NYT), Overlooked no more: June Almeida, the woman who discovered the first coronavirus. That's one of the ones that causes something like a common cold.

Susan Harlan (Guernica), Where lost luggage goes to be found.

Sam Wallman (Overland), Vale Jack Mundey. Australia lost a giant of the worker's movement last week.

Jessica Machado (Guernica), The Shame We Carried. I've been thinking a lot about shame, lately, and this is a good 'un.

Jennifer Wilson (The Nation), The long shadow of cultural anthropology. Did you know Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were lovers? Now you do. If you read this you will also know a lot about the weird mix of progressive ideals and racism-cloaked-as-cultural-relativism of their whole set.

Devin Kelly (Longreads), What I want to know of kindness. I have read a lot of absolutely incandescent, insightful pieces on toxic masculinity, by women and by men and by men-adjacent people. I have read few that acknowledge the toxicity head on and yet produce something warm. This is one.

Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: none / all on hold
Poetry: AJ Odasso's 'The Sting of It'; Paradise Lost via podcast
Lit Mag: Summer Meanjin (my spring copy hasn't arrived yet. I might still finish summer before it does...)
Non-Fiction for fun: Still slow progress on The Queer Child; Jack Monroe's cookbook Vegan(ish)
For Work: Kim Solga, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance, which is so far really good!

Recently Finished:

Both for work: Birgit Spengler, 'Literary Spinoffs', and the full Canterbury Tales. Plus some articles and so on.

Online fiction:

Bernadine Evaristo (New Statesman), The White Man's Liberation Front. Everyone found this a hilarious satire, but I found it deeply unsettling.

Carmen Maria Machado (Granta), The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror. I was very taken with this, and read it aloud to my partner over several days. Only some time later, courtesy of Kim Solga, did I find out that the theatre and the actress in question are historical figures, so I will need to read again with that information. Warning for... oh, it's hard to say, but it deals with some extremely messed up f/f dynamics. I could see the influence of Sarah Waters, but it really commits to the manipulative vibe, and the POV character doesn't seem to be *utterly clueless* of it, so where I found Tipping the Velvet impossible embarrassment-squick wise, I loved this even at its most fucked up. I think I love it extra because fiction that really bites into fucked-up f/f dynamics (and doesn't make it about a Treacherous Bisexual trope) is such a rarity.

Seanan McGuire (Lightspeed Magazine and Podcast), Hello, Hello.

Lu Fine (The Fiction Pool), Give it to me as if I knew I wanted it. This one also deals with messed-up dynamics (and in this case, with a protag who doesn't really understand the social rules around them, but does learn to use sex), and medical... trauma? Lack of information? The fact the protag is trans might also compound the above for some audiences.

Online Essays of Note:

Elisabeth Hanscombe (Meanjin Summer 2019), A finger laid upon the lips. This is an essay with strong memoir components, about incestuous child sex abuse.

Bri Lee (Meanjin Summer 2019), How We Keep Our Pens Mighty. This one (by the author of Eggshell Skull) is about sexual assault survivors and the legal system.

Sinead Roarty (Meanjin Summer 2019), Life on the Edge - a sort of place-study of The Gap (Sydney's notorious suicide hotspot).

Liz Kinnamon (Feminist and Women's Studies Association blog), The male sentimental. The “sensitive guy” should be understood through the lens of what pop psychologists call emotional manipulation, and his proliferation is the result of two things: the rise of feminism and the rise of immaterial labor.

Steven Morris (Guardian), New twist in mystery of Brunel's birthday sunrise. Historical sourcework, and trains!

Kate Armstrong (MOAD/APH blog), Hanging on the computerphone: on the sole Telecom Computerphone held at the Museum of Australian Democracy: what was it, who had one, and why they didn't catch on.

Dave Gershon (OneZero), Our government runs on a 60-year-old coding language and now it's falling apart: on the sudden dire shortage of COBOL programmers.

Olivia Durand (Conversation UK), Quarantine used to be a normal part of life, and wasn't much liked then either.

Elizabeth Yuko (CityLab), How Infectious Disease Defined The American Bathroom.

Various, (The Point Mag), Quarantine Journal. Rolling contributions, some really good, some meh.

Siri Hustvedt (LitHub), Fairy Tales and Facts: Siri Hustvedt on how we read in a pandemic.

Lauren Markham (LitHub), The Last Train Trip Before Everything Changed.

Am I reading a LOT of 'how we live now' thinkpieces? Yes, yes I am. And a lot of news. I read a LOT of analysis of the Pell appeal verdict, which I have spared you links to. If it's something you're following, you'll have found them yourselves.

Up Next: My brain is starting to get itchy, at last. Unfortunately many of the things it itchily wants to read are not things on my current TBR stack / kobo unread pile. Hopefully this week I can finish the Solga book and get back to 'American Chaucers', then Carissa Harris' 'Obscene Pedagogies'; and when I've finished the summer Meanjin maybe I'll start White Teeth.

Currently Reading:
Fiction: All the same as last time: I have made desultory progress on 'One Night in Boukos', and more or less nothing else. First moving flats, then State of Emergency, have eaten my brain.
Lit Mag: Partway into Meanjin 78.4, haven't touched it for a while.
Poetry: A few more episodes worth into Paradise Lost (via Anthony Oliviera's podcast); have aquired and begun reading AJ Odasso's 'The Sting of It'
Academic: Largely disrupted, but I'm still working through Spengler's 'Literary Spinoffs' and enjoying it
Other non-fiction: The Queer Child is on hiatus.

Recently Finished:

Tison Pugh's 'Sexuality and its Queer Discontents', which is good, but one of those books where the best part is the intro?

And, uh, Love’s Labour’s Lost, courtesy of wildeabandon’s zoom-based readthrough.

Online Fiction

I think none?

Notable essays:

I've been reading bits and pieces from the blog Poly.land. Of her own writing I particularly noted Who are you rehearsing to be, and I really enjoy the Psyched for the weekend series where she summarises, well, pysch research, on the weekends.

Sara Fredman (Electric Lit), Margery Kempe had 14 children and she still invented the memoir. Although, as many grumps on Twitter pointed out, she hardly invented confessional writing (Augustine, anyone?), this essay brought me closer to understanding Margery-mania than anything in the actual scholarship on her. (That is, not Margery's mania, but the frenzied enthusiasm for her exhibited by a great many female medievalists.)

Hannah J Elizabeth (History Workshop), The slippery history of the dental dam

Ellen van Duyne (Lit Hub), Sylvia Plath and the Communion of Women Who Know What She Went Through. Much like the Margery essay, this illuminated something for me in the intense identification with Sylvia that so many women espouse and that I just don't share.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Danny Lavery) (Lit Hub), Upon realizing the golden girls was coming to an end I sat down and wept. I understand this is an extract from the recently released memoir, which, if it all has the tempo of this, promises to be something of a fever-dream read.

Yardin, Franks and McKeown (The Conversation), Science continues to suggest a link between autism and the gut: there's why that's important. I wasn't a fan of the part that talks about measuring the success of fecal transplants in terms of 'reduction in autistic behaviours' (geez, can you not just measure it in terms of... i dunno, improved gut health?), overall interesting stuff.

Tiffany at Don't Waste the Crumbs, How to soak and cook beans from scratch. I had success with this. Note, however, the blog sidebars are super Jesus-y. Sigh.

Ed Yong (The Atlantic), What we know so far about SARS-COV-2. Not about the disease, about the virus itself, and the until-now niche field of coronavirus research.

Up Next:

I have SO MANY books arranged in little piles (no shelves yet) and yet am very short on attention span. Possibly a book on feminist performance of Shakespeare.