Strong Verbs Are Just Better

In the past two days I’ve listened to almost all of the audiobook of Felix Salmon’s The Phoenix Economy. I have some niche critiques of it - the chapter “Workspace” could really have done with the distinction between space and place which is pretty widely made in humanities circles, but which originates with human geography. Given the overlaps between geography and economics, I would have expected Salmon either to be able to deploy an accessible version in his discussion, or not explicitly state it but write in a way that means I could see the ghost of that theoretical frame. But neither are true.

In one of the later chapters, Salmon quotes someone - Keynes, I think? - who was being grilled about his proposition for massive rebuilding and revitalisation programs for every major civic centre in the UK, in the aftermath of World War Two. But where will the money come from, journalists asked? Can we afford all this? Sayeth the economist: “if we can physically do it, we can afford it.”

One of the recurring motifs of my political consciousness - at least insofar as I have kept track of economics - is the refrain that the federal budget is not a household budget, and government debt cannot be looked at the same way is individual or household debt. The link I just gave is to a Conversation article from 2014, but Australian politicians have been keen to crow about budget surpluses for my entire adult life, and hence I’ve been aware of this talking point (said, frustratedly, usually by persons further left of either major party) for much longer than a decade. The topic flared up again in 2020, too.

Lately, though, I’ve been listening to Greg Jericho’s podcast Dollars and Sense: Somewhere in there I think he made the point that there is good debt at an individual or household level, actually. Education debt: many of us have HECS debts because we believe education is worth it and/or that it will increase our later earnings (we have become much more critical of educational debt when the combination of price hikes, changes to indexing and repayment, lower-than-expected earnings and much much higher housing prices mean the educational debt is no longer resulting in net comfort for the majority of millennials).

The other line Jericho quotes a lot is Julia Gillard’s ”budgets are about choices”. We should care less about whether the current federal budget forecast that the country will be 9 billion dollars in surplus five years from now, and more about what is and isn’t funded in that. We could have made the choice on budget night - or any time before - and we still could make the choice any time now to lift jobseeker payments out of abysmal poverty (up to, say, the Henderson poverty line). That we do not is a choice.

It struck me that Jericho’s use of “Budgets are about choices” is the closest I’ve seen anyone get to pointing out that - especially when you’re in surplus, national budgets are actually quite a lot like household budgets. If I earn, say, $70,000 per year, and I have a plan to save $9,000 over five years, that sounds pretty good, right? That surplus will provide me with wiggle room for unexpected negative changes in circumstances, or be saved for the future. But if I save that $9,000 while my children are going hungry, then that is not good money management, it’s terrible priorities. (70,000 is slightly above the median individual income for Sydney. Someone with one adult income and two or three dependents would struggle to save on that income, but could probably feed and house themselves and their family.)

But if I earned $107,000 per year, and I had a plan to save $90,000 over five years - that’s house deposit money we’re talking about: as long as my hypothetical children are fed and their needs met, that’s good money management, right? Well, sure, but if I and my hypothetical children are fed and renting, but my mother or grandmother is homeless, then no, that’s not good money management, that’s terrible priorities. Now, in a household budget situation exactly WHAT I could or ought to offer my relative would depend on a great many factors, but I feel reasonably certain in saying I ought to do SOMETHING at the expense of my $90,000 five year savings plan. If instead of a household operating in the tens of thousands, I’m a nation operating in the billions… uh.

I guess I’m mostly confused that no one uses the household budget analogy to justify spending - only ever to justify NOT spending money in the national budget.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction:
Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox. I might not be quite ready for a Novel About A Trans Man Literature Prof.
Maurice LeBlanc, Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur (in English, via Phoebe Reads a Mystery). My hope had once been to read it in simultaneous audio and text in French, but I needed a new chores book and the English version was right there.
Non-fiction:
Lea Devun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, in fits and starts
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, also in fits and starts
Monisha Rajesh, Around the World in Eighty Trains - a good “keep in the work go-bag” choice
Felix Salmon, The Phoenix Economy - in audiobook, with about an hour left
Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue - in audiobook, and honestly I might DNF it. It’s depressing reading and not telling me anything I don’t know

Read Recently:

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It took me literal years to get through this, but in this last attack upon it (starting a few months ago), I loved it. The careful engagement with various aspects of women's precarity really is striking.

It also struck me, back when I FIRST started reading it, that Walter is, essentially, the male counterpart to the governess in the Turn of the Screw, or to Jane Eyre. I don't know quite what to do with that insight, but a while back I read an interesting paper on sibling performance in the work of Wilkie Collins. It stressed the general sibling-like relationship between Walter and Marian (that is, in their chosen sibling-hood, each exhibits some masculine and some feminine traits and positions toward the other). Reading Walter as, essentially, a male governess-figure both highlights how his character is not constructed as either a romantic hero or a bildungsroman protagonist - and also underlines the class commonality between him and Marian. Laura, by contrast, is Walter's love interest and Marian's foil, but very much less compelling a character.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was much less mind-bending and complex than I had been lead to expect! I liked it, but nothing about it boggled me. In fact, if I had been told it was a book about the trauma of portal travel, I would have read it before now!

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine by Thomas Morris

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Solid Dad Book right here.

Backdated Reviews (2021-22)

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


What I learned from this book is that I do not like books or TV shows about circles of Women Existing In New York.

I gather that if you do like books about circles of Women Existing In New York it's great for that.

I have some other personal bugbears, but I shan't air them here.


Home by Stephanie Alexander

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Got an excellent recipe for "popcorn lamb" out of this.


Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I do like these BL Crime Classics. This one I thought at the time would be a bit meh - initially the characters didn't grab me - but not only did I end up enjoying the mystery plot, I find myself thinking about some of the characters off and on years later.

Short Fiction:
Addison Evans, An Itemised List of Charitable Contributions (Wyldblood Press)
Amy Barnes, On rainy nights I smell shoe leather (Scrawl Place) - the conceit / premise of this one tickled me, although I wonder if the author intended when writing that there would be an image that gave it away before you get past the first paragraph.
Shannon Savas, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Woman. I don’t know why I like this one but I do.

Recent additions to the TBR
Fiction: Brood, by Jackie Polzin, which appears to be a novel about someone raising chickens
Non-fiction: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, which appears to be a memoir about walking from the Netherlands to Constantinople

I have for some years now read, with fascination and frustration, a genre of essays (and occasional short story) which I short-hand under heteropessimism, although much of it is in fact so earnest (Sereisin's description of heteropessimism begins with Maggie Nelson's "heterosexuality always embarrasses me", requires a sort of ironic self-deprecation) that it might better be described as Sad Girl Content. It is the literature of shared (hetero) feminine abjection (in at least one prior post I called it the disappointment memoir mode).

I don't quite know what to do with this fixation, as I am no longer a usefully called a woman. The only kind of woman I find myself reflexively thinking of as akin to me is bi women, and so it continues to frustrate me that bi women are utterly absent from the communal literature of feminine (women-who-date-men) abjection.

There's a lot to commend in this recent essay by Ellie Anderson, on heteropessimism as feminist complaint. Anderson rightly takes a scalpen to Sareisin's slipshod use of "performative" to mean insincere.

Philosopher Kathryn Norlock argues that complaints may have intrinsic value even in cases when they do not aim for a transformation of circumstances in the way Ahmed describes. Norlock suggests that complaining can be recognized as valuable in itself once we take seriously the "interaffective dimension of ethical and social life." Specifically, complaint is a plea for validation that "one's pains are not insignificant," and for the company of others who recognize one's suffering as significant. Complaint has historically been disparaged by virtue of its associations with the feminine — specifically, with the feminine desire to share one's pains rather than remain an upright individual who acts in the public sphere — as in Aristotle and Kant. Norlock argues that rejecting this masculinist value system reveals that complaining is an activity that "regulates the emotional life, articulating and discerning the causes of pains, affirming the feelings of others or oneself, or inviting disclosure and commiseration." Complaining performs key functions in our collective and individual emotional lives.

This is true, and yet. Sara Ahmad, who Anderson cites extensively, would also direct us to attend to whose complaints are given space. Whose complaints are able to become a point of community, are allowed to make meaning. (Interestingly, the genre of heteropessimist complaint has several well-established women of colour in it - Christine Emba, for instance. Class, and access to the opinion essay industrial complex, seems a key factor.)

Bi women are not afforded the same authority to complain. The very structure of the complaint - that dating men flays one's dignity alive, and yet, one must, or withdraw entirely - means bisexuality is impossible. Perhaps some bi women married to men (especially, I expect, those with children) do participate in this discourse, but I can't remember the last time I read an essay grappling with the realities of heterosexual partnership/marriage from a bi perspective (maybe back in the era of feminist blogs? Perhaps these essays exist, and I'm not seeing them because of the glut of "I am an invisible queer" content from bi women; but I'd expect a good essay from a bi woman about having queer experience/identity and yet being stuck in the Crane Wife/Cat Person universe to generate HUGE amounts of biphobic discourse, the kind the "invisible queer" essays regularly attest to). The women writing the heteropessimist essays don't even seem to be aware that bi women are among them! This includes both Anderson and Sareisin (nb: Sareisin has since come out as nonbinary, but was writing as a lesbian at the time).

Sareisin rages that the heteropessimist does not meaningfully disengage from heterosexuality, Anderson argues that complaint is meaningful (but does not, I note, argue that constitues disaffiliation). Neither seem to have any sense what "disengage" or "disaffiliate" might look like. I did not get the sense, when I first read the Sareisin essay, that the author would have any time for me, a bi queer (then)woman who didn't move in lesbian circles.

Meanwhile, for a long time, I have felt that I had more in common with ostensibly straight or bi women who were single by choice or not seeking to date anymore than I did with most lesbians. Is that not also a form of disaffilation from heterosexuality? It certainly puts those women outside of many of the privileges of heterosexuality (economic, social, etc), while not actually marking them as queer unless they also display some other marked trait.

I don't have an answer. I don't even need to answer the question of which group of women I affiliate with, any more. And yet.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction:
- Omnibus of Mercedes Lackey's Mage Storms books, still. Slow going but still pleasing.
- Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man, in audiobook. It is not read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, so I am sad. The voice actor DOES do a good job of "Educated German-speaker speaking English" accent, though, and it's set in wine country, and I'm sort of... whatever the opposite of homesick is. Not even homesick for Switzerland, exactly, but nostalgia-frustrated because I have some cultural context for that area of DE but didn't spend much time there. Anyway. I am soured on Peter Grant (see below), but it has been suggested that I might resent the tie-ins less. We shall see.
- I am in fact partway through the short story The Death Haiku of the Azure Five, in Clarksworld (by L Chan) and enjoying it but I keep forgetting I'm reading it and reading some piece of news or essay or something instead.
Lit Mag: I have, in the past month, been picking up and putting back down the Lapham's Quarterly "Friendship" issue. This is improvement upon not picking it up at all.
Poetry: Nil, nada
Non-fiction for personal interest:
- I am finally making headway in Marion Turner's "Chaucer: A European Life". For a bunch of reasons, it's a perfect sort of book to keep in my go-bag for on site work at my current job, and on some remote work days I have a weird amount of standby time where it is preferred that we read books rather than be on our phones. I have learned a lot about the London wool staple!
- Still pottering through Danny Lavery's "Something that may shock and discredit you" for the second time, reading aloud to my partner.

There are many more things which I am nominally reading but haven't really picked up since last post.

Recently Finished:
Actually Recent:
Archer: the First Nations Issue by Maddee Clark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It took me a damn long time, but I finally finished this.

Two stand-out essays:

Q&A with SJ Norman

Anonymous: Pronoun Trouble

Neither makes me comfortable, and maybe I'll talk somewhere else one day about what in them hit home and what hit a nerve. Not on Goodreads, I think.




Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Things this was:
- a fun historical romp through periods and subjects largely outside my prior interests (except for Lord Byron, bless his weird over-dramatic socks)
- a MASTERCLASS in accessible citation. I listened in audio, and I had no idea there *were* footnotes at all, because Jenner weaves "as the such-and-such scholars say" in so well.
- a MASTERCLASS in breaking down theoretical concepts, see above

I also keep thinking about the section on celebrity photographs and early photographic manipulation. One actress, whose name I forget (and I can't check because I don't have hard copy) sued over manipulated images of her face over risqué nudes, and lost. I keep thinking about this in context of the current SAG strike, and AI, and being confused that no one is pitching hot take essays about the connection.



Semi-recent, IE, this year:
Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved the opening, framing, premise, and most of the execution of this. I enjoy the podcast, and I *particularly* appreciated the way that chapters of this sewed together what had been 2 or sometimes 3 podcast episodes to produce a chapter which had a sort of... preview and a chunky case study (Bosey and Roger Casement were a great combo).

However, I have two complaints:

1. the conclusion was MEH. It did not say anything the introduction didn't say and it said it more boringly. Perhaps this is a product of the public history style? But I have definitely read pop history which doesn't do that (see: Greg Jenner's Dead Famous).

2. The final chapter, which sewed together Andrew Sullivan and Pym Fortuyn, with a contextual segue through the AIDS crisis, was a HOT MESS. It gave no specific contextual attention to AIDS or gay public health in general on the continent, aside from one note that Amsterdam had dealt pretty well because of pre-existing good links between gay community and health services over a hepatitis outbreak. In general, it was written as if the US's approach to AIDS was paradigmatic for the world, which it just wasn't. Australia in general, and Sydney specifically, was a lot closer to Amsterdam (perhaps because of better responses to earlier outbreaks? I don't know and my epidemiology history insiders are only confident to speak on AIDS>COVID trajectories). There's a lot that Pim Fortuyn and centrist-to-right US gays have in common, of course, but you can't just take New York's AIDS history and treat it as standard for the developed world. And the authors should BOTH KNOW BETTER and also have the resources to do better, because one is English and one is an American working for the Gay Museum in Berlin!

I am still, however, very much on board with their project of "bad gay" history: the history, specifically, of how "reclaiming" gay figures from the past has fed into dubious contemporary politics. Something I feel the trans community should think more carefully about before going all in on reclamatory and redemptive premodern narratives, but I appear to be rowing my boat upstream on that count.



View all my reviews

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a difficult and important read. I marked it to-read back when I was madly collecting books about the trauma of being Assigned Girl, hoping that reading enough feminist rage and trauma would anchor me in my assigned gender. By the time I got around to reading it, that was a lost cause.

This was very much a book about early (peri-pubsecent) sexualisation, and the project of reclaiming one's sexuality from a barrage of constant sexual predation. I was about to say that "although I was in an abusive relationship, Febos' experience is wildly different to mine", but it... isn't, not entirely. The age parameters, now that I think about it, are oddly similar, but the frequency and (forgive the legalese) severity, and above all the impact upon me, are widly different. I can't even put that latter down to gender, because I know many trans men whose lives and indeed adult selves walk much closer to Febos than to me.

I spent most of this book ping-ponging between "yoewch, to accurate", and "... wtf i thought this sort of thing was mostly a scare story they told you in school health class". Much like how I offhandedly said to a friend a while back "everyone knows Go Ask Alice was a hoax, that's not how peer pressure ACTUALLY works" and the friend went... "well i read it and it seemed pretty close to my experience. I'd call it plagiarism rather than a hoax." (the author of Go Ask Alice, in case you didn't know, was a conservative therapist working with young women).

Things I particularly resonated with:
- Febos' description of how her parents were not at all prepared to either help or protect her from what was going on. Same, except wildly different. Mine, for instance, were not equipped to help a kid who didn't experience sexuality as just... a natural thing that happens. Who might need to THINK, read, compare, consider, etc. I don't think they'd have coped better with Febos per se, but they were running on a script for a normative daughter halfway between us.
- The chapter about the cuddle party, and feeling obliged to offer affection/consolation to the Sad Man. I particularly appreciated that Febos gave equal weight to discomfort with the attentions of an Enthusiastic Woman And Her Male Partner, because were it about Sad Man alone... I'd be thinking of all the weird physical dynamics which come up with people OTHER than the Sad Straight Man.

Things I didn't but which were elucidatory: I won't go into all of them. But even though I've ditched my project work on Chaucer, I retain my fascination with Kim Zarins' "Sometimes We Tell The Truth". Her WOB's prologue gave me instant "erk". Like... okay, I get where you're going here but this feels wrong, it feels like a story they tell in health class not... a thing that actually happens. (A friend who HAD been subj to advances from older men at age 12 thought I meant I didn't think anyone was. No, I get that... happens... but something about the narration felt like an /extrapolation/ of how that might happen rather than either actually how it happens or how the young girl in q might re-tool the story later) On first read of Febos I didn't make the connection. On second read... the way Febos characterises her younger self feels like the kind of narration Zarins' WOB didn't hit; but Zaris' 17 y old Alison doesn't sound as far removed from Febos' 12 y old self as I thought. If that makes sense? Of course adult Febos isn't trying to paper over her wounds: her whole brand is Trauma Writing. But if she did... maybe it might come out closer to Zarins' Alison than I initially thought.



All About Yves: Notes from a transition by Yves Rees

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Proper review coming but:
1. Rounded up by reason if “I like to read about people like me”.
2. However, I’m pretty sure I’d rather hear from Yves 2025 than Yves “I could never use a men’s bathroom” 2021. There’s a lot that’s gauche here, and ffs. Your trad pub memoir doesn’t count for “publish or perish”. The academic audience might not be here in 2025 but the queers will.

---

23.07.23 Note from later me: I read this as audiobook, I don't have a hard copy, and I'm really not up to re-considering the Saga of Nonbinary Academic right now. Maybe another year. Maybe another decade. This memoir was immensely important to me but didn't review it at the time and I cannot now.



Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


THAT WAS BOTH VALIDATING (yes, i guessed who nona was) and NOT WHAT I EXPECTED AT ALL. A+, ROUND OF APPLAUSE.

...

HOWEVER I would like to register a growing sense of wtf re the charactisation of the genocidal apocalypticist as Maori? It became really explicit in this book and ... no? Love the kiwi localisation, but... Uh. Weirdly I have seen no pushback, and I am not committed enough to this book or genre, nor informed enough about the NZ context specifically.

I note my discomfort, I hope it doesn't snowball, and in the meantime I will do as I have resolved to do instead of pontificating about Books I Read For Fun: bump something else up the tbr. In this case, Alexis Wright's The Swan Book.



Bonus: One(1) Deep Backdated Review. The next in queue is Manion's "Female Husbands", and I do not have the werewithal. But I promised a trans woman pal I'd dig out the applicable-to-her-interests bits, so I might re-read it soonish and then it can go into the recent queue again. Instead:

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am really souring on these books, which I don't think is necessarily a flaw in Aaronovitch's work so much as my increasing distaste for the built in copaganda of much crime fiction. I remain UGH that Peter has not left the Met.



Online Fiction: two recent two backdated
Recent:
- Kehkashan Khalid, The Petticoat Government (Fantasy Magazine). Set in something approximating Mughal India, I think? It actually provided a fleshed-out sense of how female regnancy could work in highly spatially segregated societies, something I *technically know* with my research into gendered space in high and late medieval Europe, but haven't got a really graspable characterised handle on.
- L Chan, Re/union (Clarkesworld). One daughter, of several siblings, is the only remaining family member observing the pious New Year rituals with the ancestors: who are now, for both better and worse, represented by AI simulations at a banquet table. I don't have the cultural context for this and yet it both gripped and gutted me in places.

Backdated
- Rob E Boley, The Assembly of Graves (Diabolical Plots). Sometimes, I read depictions of lesbian relationships, written by (apparently cis and straight, although frequently one only assumes that because Queer Authors have their ID front and foremost) Men, which seem incredibly realistic and Relatable (TM) to me. It is possible this is a sign of my Gender (TM), given I frequently have the opposite relationship with Lesbian Fictions (TM). I dunno. I do know this is a neat horror story and I did not predict the twists to it even though perhaps I should have.
- Cheri Kamei, Blood in the Thread (Tor dot com). This is, I think, a pretty good story in its own right. Nevertheless. I said; I have said over and over and I'm sure more often than that but in keywords I can't recall to fling at site search; that I wanted a queer take on the Cat Person/Crane Wife problem. This is not what I wanted. If I wanted the abjection of the More Queer (butchness optional) partner faced with a Femme and/or Bi partner I could consume anything from The Well of Loneliness to Rent. And yet. I don't think this is a BAD short story, just. One I'm inclined to be bristly at.

Recently Added To The TBR:
Fiction:
- Alis Hawkins, "A Bitter Remedy", from a series called The Oxford Mysteries. KJ Charles gave it a mixed review but I think I like the things she likes and the things she dislikes in this one would be balanced out by my love of weirdly specific academic history.
- Patrick DeWitt, "The Librarianist". Got the rec from the twitter account "Caustic Cover Critic", who is one of my few sources of non-gay capital L Literary recommendations.
- Bruce Pascoe, "Salt: Selected Stories and Essays". I've had Dark Emu on my kobo for ages, but first burnout happened and now my work reading needs to be hard copy. I am intruiged by the idea of mixing fiction and essay, and have earmarked this as a possible library read, esp when I run out of work-appropriate things from my already owned hard copy pile.
- Se-hee Baek, "I want to die but I want to eat Tteokbokki". I saw a really strong rec for this as a depiction of Depression Et Al, and hey, I've never read Korean fiction before.

---

Some links: past and present:

Past: The dates on these are mid 2021, and hoo boy, let me tell you, scrolling back two years in my pinboard is, quite literally, scrolling back two years in terms of gender dysphoria and career anxiety. Still. Some stuff that, now that I look at it again, stuck with me!

- Isabelle O'Carrol (Refinery29), ADHD and gaslighting in women. TLDR neurodivergent women (people? I suspect people) more vulnerable to manipulation.
- Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future. I get a lot of reading recs from SE Smith on Twitter and I think this is one of them.
- Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. By now, in 2023, most of the Long Covid content i see online (perhaps due to Twitter algorithm) is outright misinformation, albeit often driven by understandable trauma and self-protection. I believe I was already noticing this trend by 2021, and this particular article did not trip that alarm. I'm interested in MAST cell activation syndrome, in and of itself, because friends have it and I suspect at least one relative does, and also it's weird and I am interested in weird things.
- Paige Turner (own blog), The healing process can be traumatic. I got bored of Paige's blog within six months of this post, but this one remains both short and true.

Recent: Other than ones linked earlier in this post, I give you the following:
- The Carapan gallery of Mexican art (own blog), What is an Alebrije: TL;DR man has hallucinations in the 1930s, makes art, accidentally sets off a folk art tradition.
- JP Brammer (own blog), Food Fight: on "ethnic" food and percieved authenticity. I love many things Brammer writes and this is a fine example.
- Chelsea Watego (Indigenous X), Voice To Parliament: Why Mob Are Staying Silent.
- Joseph Earp (Guardian), My mentor John Hughes taught me how to write then he plagiarised my work. Supplementary to, and bafflingly uncited in, the next link;
- Anna Verney and Richard Cooke, Being John Hughes (The Monthly). I was fascinated and apalled and at times discomfortingly empathetic to Hughes. I, too, was a kid from the periphery of the Hunter Region, said to be brilliant and promising. But I didn't go to Newcastle for uni, and I was not said to be the Next Big Thing (even at school: partly gender, but lbr the only Next Big Things my school at large was interested in was next big evangelist, and so my male peers as scholarly high achievers were in fact less lauded than I, at least I had the humanities teaching lead on my side). I too went abroad for a PhD and came home less than I had hoped to be. But I came home crippled by all the things I could not speak to, while Johnny Boy seems to have come home and determined to... speak to everything, by plagiarism if he can get away with it. (The worst is his remixing of the Bringing Them Home report's accounts, but he also felt the need to plagiarise a relatively privileged male student? Why?? Baffling.)

I didn't do the 2021 round-up, and I barely posted any reading posts at all in 2022. I've been doing just great.

According to goodreads right now I read 33 books in 2022. Now, I know I didn't add most of the rare books I consulted in the UK, and with goodreads having made it very difficult to add indie books I suspect I won't be able to add everything... but I'll add some of them and see how I go.

To the Meme!

2020 edition

( Memesheep )

This has been 2022 in books.

I suspect I ought to come up with a similar quiz/meme for podcast content, given how much I have consumed in the past two years...

Oof, it has been a long time since I posted one of these. October last year! Welp. Nine whole months.

I present to you this excellent New Yorker essay, from the editor of the Norton Book of Ghost Stories (Brad Leithauser), on The Turn of the Screw. I tried to get my students to look away from "is she mad?" and even beyond "the text invites multiple interpretations" to "the text invites any single reader to hold multiple interpreations at once - and then remember it's serial fiction in a magazine, ie, would be COMMUNALLY read". I'm not sure how well I succeeded.

All such attempts to “solve” the book, however admiringly tendered, unwittingly work toward its diminution. Yes, if we choose to accept the reality of the ghosts, “The Turn of the Screw” presents a bracing account of rampant terror. (This is the way I first read it, in my teens.) And if we accept the governess’s madness, we have a fascinating view of a shattering mental dissolution. (That’s the way I next read it, under a professor’s instruction in college.) But “The Turn of the Screw” is greater than either of these interpretations. Its profoundest pleasure lies in the beautifully fussed over way in which James refuses to come down on either side. In its twenty-four brief chapters, the book becomes a modest monument to the bold pursuit of ambiguity. It is rigorously committed to lack of commitment. At each rereading, you have to marvel anew at how adroitly and painstakingly James plays both sides.
...
“The Turn of the Screw” provides an unrivalled opportunity to read in a bifurcated fashion, to operate paragraph by paragraph on two levels. Logically, the effect of this ought to be expansive. James is trafficking in openness; readers can shift, at whim, from ghostly tale to character study.

Yet—the book’s greatest feat, its keenest paradox—the ultimate effect is precisely the opposite of openness. “The Turn of the Screw” may be the most claustrophobic book I’ve ever read. Yes, you’re free to shift constantly from one interpretation to the next, and yet, as you progress deeper into the story, each interpretation begins to seem more horrible than the other. As the gruesomeness gathers, the beautiful country house effectively falls away, like flesh receding from the skull of a cadaver, and we’re deposited in a hellish, plantless, low landscape of bone and stone: plenty of places to run, but nowhere to hide.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction: Alexis Hall, "The Affair of the Mysterious Letter". Which is a romp and a delight and a fantastic piece of metafictional snark - the narrator plays with retrospective narration while the author plays with his-and-the-audience's shared knowledge of Holmes and post-Holmes genre conventions. The way that Hall pulls off the 1st p narrator being a giant prude in print while making it, a, perfectly clear what is said and/or done in front of him and b, that he actually doesn't mind: beautiful.
Non-fiction for personal interest:
- Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote, "Gender Failure". This has been on my shelf for about a year, and I've been putting it off, lest it Awaken Something In Me, etc. Too late now, and I'm loving it.
- Twist, Barker, Vincent and Gupta (eds), "Non-Binary Lives". Featuring a contribution by none other than sfred. Some bits I'm like "yes, this I must find this person and read anything else they've written", and some I am not. Par for the course.
Lit Mag: Finally started the Lapham's Quarterly "Friendship" issue
Poetry: Nothing right now
For work: Oh so many things, in such chaos. Notably, however, Leah DeVun's "The Shape of Sex", and Marion Turner's "Chacuer: A European Life"
On hiatus: Most notably, "Women of a certain rage", and "The Body Keeps the Score".

Finished, at some point, not all that recently:

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had somehow picked up, from a twitter conversation that I had misinterpreted, that this was, like, dubcon lesbian Kushiel's Dart, with necromancers.

It is not that.

It is pretty great, though! It juuust about holds together the flimsy worldbuilding that it has at this stage, and the anachronistic narratorial voice. It has many things I like in pulp sff and/or fanfic.

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A solid second book. I enjoyed it at the time; however, unlike Gideon the Ninth, relatively little of the plot has stuck in my head. I do remember enjoying the elaborate switcheroos in terms of whose "side" we're on - reminds me of Sara Douglass at her best.


Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


On the one hand: I'm delighted Ursula turned her hand to queer romance, and I have hope for more.

On the other hand: it has a very "test case" feel about it, like the author isn't quite used to thinking outside how she is attracted to people, yet. At times it's very clear that Ursula's modus operandi involves plump women and lorge men, and it's difficult for her to convincingly write about being attracted to men who aren't lorge, or to lorge men from some position other than that of plump women.

But I havve every confidence that the way to fixing that is, well, to write more things that aren't m/f, and I have great hopes for Judith's book.


The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this a lot! Delly Wells makes for a great POV narrator, a delight.


A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I know lots of people loved this, but I just didn't. I know Ursula originally had a teen narrator, then aged her down for trad pub then up again. I'll put it bluntly: aging her up again was a mistake. She doesn't think or act like a teen protagonist. The plot is flabby, and its devices swing wildly between middle grade or even kidlit and YA level logics. The best bits are the bits that felt like they were written for 9-y-olds. Most of the book is not those bits.


So there you go, I was unimpressed by the 2021 Lodestar winner. Grumblebum that I am.

Other things that I've been unimpressed with since October 2021 include: Annie Bellet; Aliette de Bodard; Ben Aaronovitch; Freya Marske; Torrey Peters; Tad Williams.

Recently added to my TBR:
Fiction: Most recent additions are Maya Deane's "Wrath Goddess, Sing", which appears to be a trans femme revisioning of the Illiad; and the 90s lesbian fiction anthology "Leatherwomen".
Non-fiction for personal interest: That would appear to be Alex Iantaffi's "Gender Trauma"
Academic TBR: Kadji Amin's "Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History". I've put this under Academic because the thorny question of how to deal with the entanglement of not only queer figures but also key queer theorists with pederasty, either in attested practice or really quite adamantly in theory keeps coming up in work contexts.
Other: Only the stack of back issues of Meanjin and Archer and Laphams that I've accrued.

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There will be no links today, beyond what is embedded above.

Something that fascinates me deeply is what do we expect when we read particular books? This is most obvious in genre fiction - romance readers, for instance, expect a HEA (and seem to define that as approximating marriage as closely as possible, if not actually being marriage). HFNs remain a bone of contention in the genre.

I think lit fiction readers have set expectations, too - one of them is that their expectation be met without being too obvious about it. But a lot of expectations are conveyed by, say, cover art. Author reputation, obviously. Who any given author appears on panels with at certain lit festivals, even.

Somewhere back in the archive of Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap (I didn't note the episode, because I didn't expect it to stick with me.), around the time Ursula was working 'Swordheart' up into a novel and realising she didn't actually know how to write A Romance Novel (as opposed to a novel with romance as the b-plot), she and Kevin were talking at some point about what people EXPECT of any given genre. What they read them for

And, if Kevin and Ursula are correct... I do not read romance or mystery "right". I'm sort of in the correct ballpark for a fantasy reader - in fact, I might read romance and mystery like a fantasy reader, per their definitions (although, arguably, I read all three like a historical fiction reader.... which is odd, because I don't read much historical fiction that isn't histrom, mystery historical or historical fantasy).

As they outlined it:

Romance readers read for the empathetic experience of the romance arc, ending at HEA.

Mystery readers read to pit their wits against the narrative, try to guess the whodunnit before the big reveal.

Fantasy readers, or at least those Ursula caters to, read because you open my book and you know you're going to see some shit. It needs to surprise as well as entertain you.

As we know, I my relationship with the empathetic arc of romance is fraught, for reasons of gender, queerness and general objection to the marriage plot. I thought that was just a Me Thing. But I also do not, by any measure, read mystery novels trying to SOLVE them!

Romance and mystery fiction sit squarely in the same reading spot for me: I read them to be immersed in a specific niche topic. I read very little contemporary romance/erotica, and when I do I want it to be deeply immersed in either a. a queer subculture or b. one or both character's very specific lives and interests. I also don't read much mystery-thriller, the kind of mystery plots driven by 'wtf is going on in this scary contemporary world': I read things like the Phryne Fisher books, or mystery-erotica (KJ Charles' early works), or Sujata Massey, or Sulari Gentil, or... Usually historical (but a Sujata Massey I read in my teens, set in 90s Japan, in no small part concerned with flower arranging, sticks in my mind). I read not to learn about The Thing, per se, although I enjoy it when I do learn about a new thing: I mostly read to enjoy the interaction between Character and Thing, and the craft skill of the author balancing the mystery plot, the Thing, and the character arc.

The same is largely true of my favourite romances. I read the second of Jeannie Lin's Pikang Li series - published by Harlequin, but it's very hard to say, aside from that factor, whether the romance is the A or the B plot compared to the mystery. And the star of the show is really the historical work: Tang Dynasty China, imperial capital, pleasure quarter politics. I thought the second book did a much better job of balancing these three plots than the first did, and am holding off on buying the third for a special occasion - but also scrounging around for something similar. There's Jeannie Lin's Tang Dynasty romances, which I will read, but would be surprised if I enjoy them as much as I would a historical mystery. For a start, I suspect they won't involve anyone decapitating pigs for forensic purposes.

Anyway, per Kevin and Ursula's schema I could be reading both romances and mysteries to 'see some shit', except the shit would ideally be 'historical detail'. Or perhaps I'm reading both romances and mysteries like a historical fiction reader, and same goes for my fantasy reading - certainly, I apply the "sausage test" (how do sausages get made in this universe, and could this author set a key plot scene in a sausage-making or similarly mundane process) to both historial fiction and fantasy. Which, hah, no shit, would be why I enjoy Ursula's work but even the ones that are Peak Ursula are just a bit... not... quite.. satisfying, to me. Ursula writes like a gamer, ie, sausages not required. Although in the White Rat universe books there is suitable attention to details like 'bodies, who disposes of them?' and 'how do we treat a seriously wounded gnole, given different physiology' and even 'postpartum fistula, of course this character knows about that'. Enough to keep me happy, but not a core plot mechanic.

My penchant for (Genre)+(Thing) explains why I enjoyed Annie Bellet's first installment in 'The Twenty-Sided Sorceress' series, which was a kobo freebie and which the author cheerfully admitted (on Productivity Alchemy) isn't all that great, she churned out the first two books fast to net what money she could and only really got into her stride for book three. Sorta Tanya Huff/Charles de Lint type urban/rural fantasy, with shapeshifters, except those shapeshifters play DnD? Yeah, I'm in.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction: Aliette de Bodard, In the Vanisher's Palace. This is definitely in the 'you will see some shit' category of sci-fi fantasy. I'm enjoying it!
Non-fiction for personal interest: The thing in this category turned out to be work-relevant, so, nothing? All on hiatus, anyway.
Poetry: Nil zilch zip
Lit Mag: Also nil, although the tbr piles up
For work: Many. Trying to salvage my overdue library book situation, by annotating things which have lingered too long. Working through Jen Manion's Female Husbands: I don't think their choice to refer repeatedly to 'transing gender' was a good one, despite my fondness for verbs over nouns, but in most other respects I really like their approach.

Recently finished: So many, because I've been reading rather than keeping up with t'internets.

Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I liked this a lot. At first I thought it was a bit flimsy, in that there was this background plot that was never resolved (but then again, I liked that: the core plot, Two People Fall In Love, and the next layer around it, Seven Paladins Try To Get Their Shit Together Post-Trauma, were just... happening in one bubble of something much bigger, involving interstate diplomacy! Individuals actually might never find out why the duke of somewhere tried to kill the prince of whatever!). But as I've read more of the White Rat books that slipped to being a Definite Strength, rather than a weakness.

Other good things:
- oddly specific details (in this case, perfume making)
- handling of sexual preferences: there is a sex act which character B fantasises about, which, it turns out character A doesn't want to do (possibly because their ex was a bastard), and character B is just like... cool let's do something else! We did not get Magic Healing Not-actually-dick! Hooray!
- everyone wallows but like, in a good way.
- excellent supporting cast. Marguerite especially, I hope she reappears at some point.

Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This one is just... perfect. This whole series was predisposed to hit my buttons, because, hello, 'deity suddenly disappeared on me, how shall I conduct myself henceforth, etc': relevant to my id. This particular example, with Clara and Istvhan's WILDLY different experience of being in religious orders: YES GOOD. Also, large dangerous lady and large dangerous man, together? I know Lorge Men and fat women (some short and fat, some tall and fat, some Lorge) are What Ursula Does, but this is a fine example.

( spoiler the final scenes )


Swordheart by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Excellent. A straight-up romance, except involving a long-dead guy trapped in a sword. Love it.

I also really loved the inversion of the Man In Love With Heroine's Competence vibe that Ursula does tend to favour. The heroine here is a complete scatterbrain - oddly competent, from her own unique angle, but in a baffling rather than impressive way. And yet she's not *patronised* by the hero or the narrative.

Also, Zale, the lawyer of the White Rat? Love them. Love them lots.


Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a book and I liked it. You could definitely tell where the duology arose from chopping one book in two, though; and in some ways I feel like it might have benefited from being beefed up into a trilogy.


The Wonder Engine by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Enjoyed this duology a lot! You can definitely tell, especially if, as I had, you've come off the back of two Paladin books plus Swordheart, that Ursula has a set type in romance plots and it involves Lorge Men having crises of faith and/or intense guilt. But that worked particularly well here.

I enjoyed the gnoles a LOT. More gnoles, please. Gnole romances?

Annoyed by some of the trailing threads - I know trailing threads is how Ursula works, but I REALLY felt like we should have found out something about the wonder engine in the end of book 1, by the time we got to the end of book 2.


Also: Tamsyn Muir; CM Waggnoner; more Ursula; Jeannie Lin.

Online fiction:

Abbey Fenbert (Catapault), Not kinky. This reads like a personal essay, but is apparently fiction. It has some pretty good Takes, and those of you who were unimpressed with Garth Greenwell and with the anthology 'Kink' would probably like it.

Nathalie Lima (Guernica), For a good time, call. Not easy reading, but good.

Megan Arkenberg (Beneath Ceaseless Skies), The oracle and the sea. I love the way Arkenberg writes character stories around the edges of some kind of bigger political or apocalyptic Event.

Recently added to the TBR

This is too new news to even be on the TBR yet, it came via book contract aquisition news: Oliver Darkshire, the guy who runs the Henry Sotherans twitter account, is writing a madcap book about antiquarian book dealing.

After finishing a Jeannie Lin book I scoured the internet for historical mystery and/or romance set in east asia *by writers of east asian ethnicities*. Very difficult to find, turns out the 'oriental mystery' is a subgenre in white people fiction. I have marked Laura Joh Rowland and Seishi Yokomizo.

Kevin Sonney was talking up Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams in an episode of Productivity Alchemy. Apparently the anthropomorphic cats are still believably cat-like.

This has been: weekend reading with Amy. Now, I shall go and amuse a kitten.

The most notable thing in my reading life this past fortnight has been the Radio Canada audio-livre of Anne... la maison au pignons verts, which is free to listen online and downloadable to the 'OHDio' app (which I recommend - pause and restart glitches a bit online). I recall the last few times I started the Anne series from the beginning (I often pick up from Anne of the Island, and in 2019 joined Mum and Ms-then-10 partway through Anne of Avonlea) I have started getting a little choked over either the death of Matthew or Anne's decision to give up her scholarship, but apparently, give it to me in French and in audiolivre format and I sob from the 'my girl, of whom I'm so proud' conversation with Matthew right through Anne giving up college and on to the end of the book.

Mercury doesn't care at all for my feelings, and so please imagine me sobbing to French narration while sitting on the floor wiggling a chasey toy.

Something that struck me on this read through is that 'English' as a subject of study seems to be firmly established in both secondary and tertiary education. Anne's scholarship is won in 'English and English Literature' (the French narration had English OR English literature, but I'm fairly sure they would have been one class), and there are plenty of references to literary classics (some fairly recent - The Lady of Shallot, f'r ex, is only about fifty years older than the setting, although sixty-something older than the book itself) 'prescribed' by the English curriculum. The narration frequently mentions that it's a NEW curriculum, and I kind of wonder if there might have been a big change in high school education around the 1890s in PEI. All I could find was that public education (including, I think, local tertiary education - unsure about the Catholic university in Charlottetown though) had been free since the 1850s.

'Queens' of Anne's day (and LMM's) is Prince of Wales College, which in the 80s was combined with the 'Normal School' teacher training instittue, so as to offer both teaching certificates and something like the first year of a bachelor's degree - apparently modelled on the system of colleges in Quebec, where a collège diploma is required for entry into university. Fascinating.

At any rate, English was definitely a subject of study at Queens (and presumably at Prince of Wales in LMM's day), and seems to have been at Redmond. I've read a fair bit about the formation of the modern 'English department' in the UK (or specifically England - there's always a caveat about Edinburgh having had a chair of Rhetoric and Literature since 1790). The story as I knew it is that UCL was the first to offer English, although it turns out that rumours of its English degrees were greatly overstated, per UCL themselves - they had a Professor of English, but BAs at the time were a broad sweep liberal arts program with various compulsory subjects, and English was only an elective until 1858, and thereafter only assessed at the interim exams; the first graduates 'in English' graduated in 1903 after a curriculum shake-up.

Dalhousie, LMM's alma mater, have rather less historical detail available on their site, but they credit the foundation of the department to the 1865 establishment of a chair in Rhetoric. While they don't state when the first undergrads in English graduated (perhaps because I think they run a more American-like system, where majors are a thing but not the be all and end all of your degree?), they state their first MAs graduated in 1903, the same year UCL's first BAs graduated (and offering postgrad courses were part of the same shakeup at UCL). I would hazard, then, that LMM probably did not 'study literature' as per her wikipedia page, and Anne neither - likely they took a broad-swathe Liberal Arts program, which would be why there's very little mention of subject choice anywhere in the books. Although it IS notable that there's no complaining about geometry in Anne of the Island (whereas at UCL mathematics was required), so perhaps Dalhousie was even more flexible.

I would really like to know when 'English' became a subject for secondary study, though, and how its subject goals varied across the Anglosphere. ... Fortunately I have some schemes in mind that may lead to finding this out.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter: picked this up from hiatus, again, and am enjoying it. Particularly liked 'Erl King'. Cleanness, Garth Greenwell: picked this up from hiatus, too, and while the next chapter isn't as compelling as either of the first two, I continue to enjoy his style and perspective.
Poetry: still nothing
Lit Mag: am making small progress with my backlog of the TLS, but not Meanjin or Archer.
Non-fiction for personal interest: I got back to 'The Queer Child', although really by now I should consider it a work interest, and skim the bits I can't use accordingly.
For work: Finished the intro to 'Indecent Exposure', and am looking forward to the chapter on the Reeve's Tale.

Recently Finished:

The Longest Memory by Fred D'Aguiar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was one of the assigned readings for high school exams that I was examining, and it was REALLY well chosen for that purpose. The students struggled massively with the narrator's status as a slave who had moralised against challenging his lot (in a way that, lbr, *even granted* the way the narrative unfolds, I would be leery of from a white author - but unlike many of the other short readable slavery-era novels I've encountered in this context, it's not by a white author), either because they didn't pick up the current of self-recrimination as he recounts his former beliefs or because they couldn't talk about it in English. In itself, though, it's masterfully handled, with the narration given by a later-protag who regrets earlier-protag's choices but withholds the full details of how that regret came to be.

Then there are sections in different narrator voices and styles - poetry for the main narrator's son, diary excerpts for the oversee, newspaper clippings and letters, and so on. A really interesting mix, and yet the novel is fairly short, and the language pretty accessible (I would hesitate to set, say, The Colour Purple, to low B2 students, for the density of the dialect - although I juré'd one exam on it this year that went well).

Paradise Lost by John Milton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I FINALLY FINISHED PARADISE LOST. Welp. That sure was an experience.

I forbear to try to review it, as a work in its own right. I will say that the medium by which I experienced it - Anthony Oliveira's podcast 'The Devil's Party', consisting of readings followed by 30-40 minute discussion episodes, was great. I've tried before and cannot get through it on the page (what that says about me, given I can read Middle English off the page, I do not know), and even in audio format my attention kept straying. The reading followed by the discussions, in which Anthony goes back and quotes chunks, was absolutely the necessary format (well, save for 'taking a class on it') for my little brain.

It took NEARLY TWO YEARS. I will not be doing Paradise Regained. I would, however, very much like something similar for The Faerie Queen, early modernists, please and thank.

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was a deeply infuriating mix of 'things I wish I had read ten years ago' and 'wow, heteronormative, cisnormative, much?' Wild one-two of validation-invalidation.

The best chapter by far is the last, and that would be because that's the chapter which engages in depth with queer theory - Foucault and Edelman in particular. There's a shorter version at Granta if you're interested.

The problem with this book is it pronounces repeatedly on what 'women' are like, and while very often it says things about women that are true of me and which I have not seen articulated as such outside of weird Christian discourses (or kink discourses- but there, rarely limited to 'women'), it ... just... keeps doing the thing. With the essentialism. Angel acknowledges there are wide variances not only to individual women's makeup but to social structures bearing upon women - she makes no claim to speak for Black women, but does regularly nod to Black writers who have written on adjacent topics. Whereas for trans and queer women, and indeed queer men, she merely footnotes in the first chapter that she thinks it likely what she has to say will resonate but it's for someone else to do the work.

... as if trans and queer writers haven't been *doing* that work, of unpacking what it means to desire, the difference between arousal and desire, the intersection between sex and and sexual self, and so on. As if trans and queer communities haven't been forging that themselves, while the sexologists whom Angel rightly critiques have been busy measuring engorgement and the straight ladies busy telling each other that you cannot really enjoy sex with others until you know exactly what you want, somehow divorced from who you want.

Even when Angel draws on queer theory, she doesn't... engage... with queer anything. In fact it's almost as if she doesn't engage with *gender* despite writing about the gender binary?

She's an academic: she can do better. I'm reasonably certain that if this went to peer review someone would demand she do better, but here it is, and she hasn't.

Anne, la maison aux pignons verts by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read the Radio Canada audiolivre version, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. The narration pace is clear enough for my inexpert ears, and warmly read with a nice range of "voices" (none of them as farcical as the fr. audiolivres of Harry Potter, either, which is nice). I now have a whole suite of delightfully archaic vocabulary at my disposal, too: fear me.

Online Fiction: Stephanie Burgis, 'The Wrong Foot' (Podcastle, 2014). This is very cute and yet... I was not entirely satisfied with the romantic arc. At first I thought 'missed opportunity queer', and then I thought that, queer or not, I might have preferred this story through the _other_ young woman's eyes. Why the girl trying to get out of being Cinderella, and not the girl *helping* her escape?

Up Next: Well I'd LIKE to think I'll finish some other things, get through some more of the TBR. But we all know the audio-livre of Anne of Avonlea beckons me.

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Some links!

Maha Nassar (Forward.com, 2018), "From the river to the sea" doesn't mean what you think it means. There's a lot here, including a very valuable recap of Palestinian positions on statehood prior to the adoption of the two-state position by Fatah.

Kim Tallbear and Angela Wiley (Imaginations 10.1, 2019), "Critical Relationality: Queer, Indigenous, and Multispecies Belonging Beyond Settler Sex & Nature".. This is so good! I need to work some acknowledgement of it into my Book1 intro, I think, because it's doing work rarely done by white people, even white queer thinkers. Vis:

The naturalization of settler monogamy depends as much upon distinguishing love from friendship and other forms of affinity as it does the pathologization of promiscuity or non-monogamy (Willey 2016, 72). The valuation of friendship as a site of intimacy, meaning-making, resource sharing, and transformation has the potential to unravel stories about the specialness of sex and to fuel our imaginations to rethink forms and structures that exceed the ideal of the settler family, which may sustain and remake us.

Also, the description of co-writing as a Relationship will, I think, resonate for a lot of us who've done our time in fandom.

Elisheva Goldberg (Jewish Currents, 2020), The road to nowhere: gives case studies and a legal history of one type of "illegitimate" Palestinian town within Israel, the kind which are frequently slapped with demolition orders.

Dorothy M. Zellner (Jewish Currents), What We Did: How the Jewish Communist Left Failed the Palestinian Cause. Obviously polemical, but I also found this really interesting as a personal history of American Jewish newspapers through Zellner's eyes.

Franki Cookney (Own blog), Feelings don't exist in a vaccuum. This could double as two of my pet peeves: Problems With Polyamory Discourse and Problems With Millenial Straight Women Sex Discourse- it's actually mostly the latter, which is par for the course for Cookney, who is in fact polyamorous and bi but mostly engages with straight women centric sex writing.

Emily Hunsinger (The New Yorker, 2019), How to draw a horse. Apparently the difficulty of drawing horses is a meme amongst comic artists, here deployed to good memoir use.

Chris Baranuik (The Atlantic), Whatever happened to the phone phreaks. Analog telephone hackers, oh my! Loved this, do recommend.

Courtney Cook (Guardian US), Exerpt from 'The Way She Feels. This seems like a good memoir, but also, *startlingly* positive depiction of inpatient treatment and DBT therapy - I read this right off the back of having read a few #madcovid blog posts and it gave me mental whiplash.

Ky Merkley (Society for Classical Studies home page), In dialogue: trans studies and classics: a conversation with Vanessa Stovall and Mary Beard. This, following an indident where a trans student from Brisbane tweeted to the void that MB (not tagged) follows a lot of TERFS, and MB put said student on blast, was... disappointing to me at the time (for one thing, I drew from it the probability that MB does not read her twitter timeline; but it never actually... dug into that, while nevertheless repeating that different 'generations' use twitter differently), and is laughable given she did the same thing to another trans classicist recently who *hadn't even mentioned her by name*. But, yanno, it exists. I read it. I admire Stovall and Merkley for trying.

Missed a week there, due to the Great Transphobic Book Debacle. I don't have the energy to rehash it, but here's a tweet thread in french with some english images and links:

Aujourd’hui c’est #IDAHOBIT, et j’ai envoyé ma lettre de démission comme juré du Matu à une collège Genevoise, en raison du caractère transphobique de l’un de la liste des des livres d’examen. Les jeunes Genevoises méritent mieux.#transphobie #TransRightsAreHumanRights pic.twitter.com/51hBQDQFtb

— Amy, botherer of cats (@amisamileandme) May 17, 2021

So that's the most stand-out thing I read since I last posted: parts of Robert Jensen's The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men. Possibly the most interesting thing is also by Jensen, this essay at 'Killing the Buddha', on his having been expelled from the presbyterian church, and his career as a 'radical christian' non-theist. That explains a LOT, including why the book reads so much like one of those 'Christian masculinity' books: it's just that it's about his conversion to (very shallowly understood) radical feminism, which is holding the place of 'godly masculinity' in his worldview. HUH. He's not even the only one- the teacher I dealt with mentioned Chris Hedges, whose name has been doing the rounds lately in connection with Palestine. He's a Middle East socio-political analyst, with some writing on techno-capitalism, who is also an ordained pastor, and who firmly believes that pornography is destroying modern masculinity.

So, y'know, it's not that I can see no classroom use for Jensen. If I'm ever assembling an 'American Protestantism ruins everything' syllabus I'd be tempted to include extracts.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber and other stories'. I'm discovering that, since I grew up with fairy-tale adaptations in part made possible by Angela Carter, I admire her lush prose and find it interesting to trace her literary/generic influences but am neither absorbed by the stories nor the adaptive choices.
Non-fiction for interest: Still puttering through bell hooks.
Poetry: Not much progress on Paradise Lost, and nothing new.
Lit Mag: Behind on the TLS, and on everything else
For work: Puttering through Helen Vnuk's 'Snatched', and Elin Diamond's 'Unmaking Mimesis'.

Recently Finished:

Anna Zabo, Outside the Lines: I had an itch, and this scratched it. My previous review stands.

The Miller's Tale: Wahala Dey O! by Ufuoma Overo-Tarimo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The editing of this annoyed me a bit - inconsistencies, over-glossing, and the like. The play itself seemed great fun. I have Thoughts about Overo-Tarimo's understanding of Chaucer, as expressed in the paratext.



View all my reviews

The Canterbury Tales: A retelling by Peter Ackroyd by Geoffrey Chaucer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There is adaptation and there is translation, and this is the worst of both worlds. With extra 'fuck' swears.



View all my reviews

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I found this very slow to start with, partly because I was erroneously expecting a singular plot. The other problem I had was the ironic treatment of Yaz, in the second POV section - yes, everyone in this book is treated with some irony, but Yaz felt like a stereotype of a Gen Z know-it-all, and the part about faking mental illness to get bigger dorm rooms was, well. Hiss. The second most flimsily-treated character was Morgan, the 'other' of the title list, a millenial nonbinary person. And yet: these are the things that bugged me, they are small beans compared to the breadth of story and characterisation for Afro-British women.

I bought this for a book club, and I'm ultimately glad I didn't show up for this meeting, I don't think my experience would have been improved by dissecting it with mostly-white mostly-cis-women.


An Unconditional Freedom by Alyssa Cole

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


On the one hand: this is very good historical fiction.

On the other hand: this would have been better AS historical fiction, rather than historical romance. There was too much else going on, crowding out the romance arc, and literary-historical-fiction would, I think, have had more room for the complex layers wherein both protags are lying to each other, and withholding from the audience at the same time.



View all my reviews

Online fiction:

Thank God Nothing Lasts Forever, Carl Lavigne. Did you order some pining and denial and messy dynamics? Because I read this last night and my soul hurts, in the same way my soul hurts from Call Me By Your Name, or from bare: A Pop Opera. The protagonist here is not being his best self, I warn you! He behaves in unethical ways toward a an out gay femme classmate! But oh. Ow.

It Won't Be Long, It Won't Belong, Carl Lavigne. Same protag, older. Both are excerpts from a book that's in progress but not, afaik, contracted yet. This is unfair because I require it at ONCE, to feed my hurting soul.

What Stays Locked, Carl Lavigne. Short, also pining, not as striking.

The Walking River, Carl Lavigne. VERY striking, not at all pining.

Up Next: I don't know but I'm not satisfied with it. My copy of CMBYN is in the UK, and I ditched my copy of 'Someday this pain will be useful to you' years ago, so how am I supposed to assuage this soul-ache of pining, exactly?!

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I haven't the werewithal to do links today. The internet, it's full of stuff. I'll post links to some of that stuff Another Day.

One of my preoccupations, as you may have noticed, is the question: why do we read? Why do we read fiction, or any kind of narrative? What are we finding there? I am also currently frustrated, from both fandom and the popular-fiction-sphere (literary fiction isn't quite subject to the same pressure, although marginalized authors very often are), with what seems to me to be a stifling call for 'good' representation, morally upright stories, heartwarming narratives at the expense of ones which challenge, ones which excavate pain and rage, ones which ask why and how human beings hurt each other and ourselves. These shouldn't be contradictory needs, but it often seems like few people can imagine a story-selling market where the two needs can be met.

The best thing I read about fiction and fictionality in the past fortnight, and indeed for quite some time, was Meredith Talusan in conversation with Torrey Peters at Electric Lit. I did not have Detransition, Baby on my to-do list, because I thought I was going to be very uninterested in a 'queers settling down and having babies' story. I have rectified this erroneous assumption and ordered a copy.

TP: I see Twitter encouraging a particular type of politics. An attack or defend mindset. Fiction is a space for a different kind of mindset. A slower more meditative mindset which may still be political, but in a different mode. When politics are slower and more personal and there is less need for rapidly deployable defenses, I sink into my own way of seeing the world.

I say things in this novel that I would never air on Twitter, and then I get to watch how those statements land with different characters. So it becomes very personal, very open. It was less a deliberate thing or an unconscious thing, just that I think fiction as a mode allowed me to not be anticipating my attacks and defenses. I could write a sentence or joke and know that no one would read it for years. And that space and time allowed for watching and feeling. And because my vantage is a trans vantage, that became the natural vantage of the book—I didn’t choose it for political reasons, but because it was simply the vantage from which I see, although that has political implications, of course. But the emphasis on that vantage arose from a mode of fiction that encouraged an impulse to share and see what happens, rather than an impulse to attack or defend politically. Long-form fiction has been for me, in the age of Twitter, a refuge of honesty and openness and even a different kind of humor.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction For Fun: Girl, Woman, Other, in fits and starts; the erotica collection 'Say, Please', edited by Sinclair Sexsmith, in a non-linear way.
Poetry: Still puttering on with Paradise Lost
Lit Mag: None, although I've caught up on my TLS subscriptions.
Non-Fiction for interest: Actually picked up 'Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre' again.
For work: The only active one is a book called 'Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom', which is very good.

Recently Finished:

The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting by K.J. Charles

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Good: engaging, sparking romance, I liked what happened to the secondary relationship plotline. Unfortunately, for a 'plots schemes and frauds' book, the actual scheme had some obvious flaws that surprised me, coming from KJC - and there wasn't a point where the characters were like 'ah... well, that wouldn't have worked, bugger' and revealed their wishful thinking, they just... were saved by Key Scheme Thing never happening so Problem Result never came up.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this! I keep thinking I've read it before, but no, I haven't. I think I've read the first page or two, in a critical context, but not the book itself.

I liked that the secondary plotline characters' patronising attitude toward the Africans they were working with (they themselves African-American) unravelled, but what *didn't* seem to be challenged was the African-American characters' placing of blame for their ancestors' slavery on the current peoples of Africa. It really surprised me to see what I knew as a white supremacist apologia - well, AFRICANS traded in slaves too you know! - coming from Walker's characters, and it didn't seem to be unpicked. I rather thought a lot of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was captives of war, and individuals seized for assorted colonial enforcement purposes?


Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine by Ritchie Robertson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Rather ponderous to read, and overly invested in strict genre boundaries, but useful.

Online Fiction: It's actually been a while since I updated out of this bookmark tag.

Carribean Fragoza, Lumberjack Mom, Electric Lit: Enjoyed.

Ken Liu, An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition. Link goes to Lightspeed Magazine; I read it as an Escape Pod podcast (and it's a re-read, from the Paper Menagerie onthology

Charlie J. Stevens, Black Arion. Electric Lit, where I read it because of the clickbait-title 'When I grow up I want to be a genderless mollusc'. That title does far less for it than the actual title, but did get me to read it.

Ursula Vernon (RedWombatStudio), Elegant and Fine. I feel like maybe I read this back on LJ, but it had slipped my mind. An indisputably better Problem of Susan story than Gaiman's (although I continue to like that far more than many people do).

Up Next: Any one of the umpty million books on my TBR cart, of course! I need to pick another Chaucerian adaptation and run with it...

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Some links:

Kathy Davis (Guernica), There's no simple way to make it okay: on grief and growing a meadow.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Meanjin blog), What if we never recover?

Anna Weerasinghe (Nursing Clio), Sister Mariana's spyglass: the unreliable ghost of female desire in a convent archive. Great read.

Namwali Serpell and Maria Turmarkin (Yale Review), Unethical Reading and the Limits of Empathy: on the problems of reading for identification, and many other things. Dense. Challenging.

Tom Woodhouse (MERL blog), The Horseman's Word: A Secret Society of Horse Wizards. I had heard of the Horseman's Word, before, but I didn't realise it didn't grow up around horse *riding*, but around ploughhorses!

Karen Weise (Bloomberg Businessweek), The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide: Inside the viral story of Gravity CEO Dan Price.. TL;DR fishy legal dealings implied.

Meredith Talusan, interview with Torrey Peters (Electric Lit), Let us be negative role models for each other

James Cahill (TLS), The face of an angel: Beyond the myth of Francis Bacon. Very interesting, but the most important thing this article offers is enough information on Francis Bacon that I will stop getting utterly thrown by 'but what has a 17th century philospher to do with modern art?' (Never mind that whenever I hear about the philosopher Bacon I think of the 13th century Roger Bacon instead)

Irina Dumetrescu (TLS), Let us now tell stories: Why we might write about trauma.

Michael Saler (TLS), Making something of ourselves: the history of character and how we shape it.

Alice Wadworth (TLS), Review of Food 4 Thot and Wheels on Fire, both podcasts.

Desirée Baptise (TLS), Review of Bright Burning Things by Lisa Harding

Claire Lowden (TLS), review of Taking A Long Look, by Vivian Gornick.

Jonathan Egid (TLS), Work–life balance: Applying the ‘project view’ to the life of John Stuart Mill.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape (TNI), Hot Allostatic Load. On intra-community abuse in queer and kink/poly communities.

Amanda Mull (The Atlantic), Why Americans Love Giant Closets.

In a new peak of middle-classness for me, I have taken out a subscription to the TLS. This feels especially egregious, because unlike Meanjin, it isn't a subscription justified by homesickness, nor backed by a desire to Support Australian Literature. I just kept hitting paywalls on articles I wanted to read - book reviews and reflection pieces on interesting topics, or related to work but not quite work, and so on.

Very often these articles are by Irina Dumitrescu. My first hard copy issue (last weekend's, because international mail) arrived and sure enough, there's an Irina article I'm interested in.

Irina herself, meanwhile, seems to be having a bit of a crisis of direction. These two tweets, one as part of a longer thread, generated some interesting responses:

There are so many ways but right now what riles me up is the way the academic industry alienates people from the things they loved and found meaning in.

Ideas. Teaching. Books. Writing. Discovery.

How many literature scholars do you know who rarely read for pleasure anymore?

— Irina Dumitrescu (@irinibus) March 19, 2021

#AcademicTwitter, have you found the intellectual life you were looking for in academia? And if not, where have you found it (if at all)?

— Irina Dumitrescu (@irinibus) March 19, 2021

I don't really know; I am both stifled and frustrated. I envy Irina her public-facing writing (and desire to do some myself, but am stalled, not for lack of starting places but for lack of someone to talk me through the process, and also, I am doing so many things). I feel more stifled, I think, not for lack of 'intellectual community' but for lack of clear connection between ideas and, as they say, praxis. I know a lot of paradigm-shaking things; I can think and write about The State of Everything; but between being abroad, language barriers, academic stultification, what have you, it's difficult to make the connections I'd need to do anything actually PRACTICAL.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Girl, Woman, Other, on which I am stalled again.
Poetry: Paradise Lost, but I haven't touched it for a while.
Lit Mag: Still very slowly plodding through Meanjin Winter 2020. Autumn 2021 is due out soon!
Non-fiction for interest: Both hooks and Foucault; more progress on the hooks.
For work: 'Disgust in Early Modern English Literature', and 'Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine'. Elin Diamon's Unmaking Mimesis.

Recently Finished: Or, in one case, given up on.

The Fabliau in English by John Hines

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Largely boring, which is why it took me so long to wade through. As ever, I find Hines' approach too rigid, too reliant on a definition of fabliau that is strictly based on the small French corpus - and yet at the same time I would rather read the English fabliau through scholarship on the French ones, as Hines is pretty stuffy. HOWEVER. Source studies are solid, and this time I found the last chapter very useful and generative.

Murder on the Canterbury Pilgrimage by Mary Devlin




I decline to rate this book. It is all three of racist, boring, and startlingly lacking in obscene humour.


Bodyservant by Kit Fryatt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I liked the first quarter of this book a lot, and then my appreciation tapered off (my appreciation for an Arthurian reference is generous, but can be over-taxed). I found the much longer poems in the latter third were Not My Jam.

( Poetry and ethics and sexual assault )

Online Fiction:

Elizabeth Flux (Meanjin Winter 2020), Call him Al. Another Disappointed Woman story. Neat conceit, didn't grab me.

Up Next: Well, my book piles are overflowing again. Next week I'm writing a paper on an 18th century text, so the EM books get priority. And, for another thing, I need to start on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 'The Forest of Enchantments'.

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Some links: I didn't post last weekend so they're a bit old now.

Tony Dunell (Atlas Obscura), Gouwe Aqueduct. Why build a raising bridge when you can build a boat-carrying aqueduct over the highway?

Guy Rundle (Meanjin Winter 2020), Callback setup in the funny factory. Rundle misses the days of skit TV, as opposed to the era of standup. Something he doesn't comment on is that there are now a lot more women stand-ups than there were women on skit TV (although he does tell a funny story about the frustration/humiliation of a woman standup turned skit comedian forced to dress as a rotisserie chicken).

Jennifer Mills (Meanjin Winter 2020), Walking Maps of Bruny Island: a nice slow peaceful read.

Linton Besser (Meanjin Winter 2020), Whither Democracy?: a depressing read.

Michael Cathart (Meanjin Winter 2020), A tale of four ludicrous deaths: much more cheerful. Dying explorers! Womanising colonial bourgoise! Snakes! Also, quite interesting from my point of view, some exerpts from a letter written to the ill-fated Burke (of Burke and Wills) by a female friend of his.

McKenzie Wark (The White Review), Girls Like Us. This is, broadly speaking, *about* trans memoir and about trans women's pain as marketable commodity, but it is also incredibly, strikingly well written as creative non-fiction.

Liv Lansdale, interview with Garth Greenwell (Guernica), Incredibly Vulnerable Beings. "I think it’s an assumption on my part about human beings: that we don’t know ourselves, that we are much more mysteries to ourselves than we are clear, and that someone who feels they are not a mystery to themselves is deluded. It always seems to me that there’s a great deal of ourselves we don’t know, and that we don’t want to know."

Bethane Patrick, interview with Melissa Faliveno (Electric Lit), The bad things we have to do to be good girls.

Katherine Angel, exerpt from 'Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again' (Granta), On vulnerability. "There may, however, be some wishful thinking at work in insisting that we have a sexuality that can be discovered separately from interaction with others. The difficulty with the notion of what one ‘really really’ wants – finding that out, and bringing it, as if it were an object, to sex." This essay talks about sexual curiosity and uncertainty in ways that I have rarely seen directed at (presumed) straight women outside of a. bdsm (and not even always then) or b. evangelical marriage guides. It was something I needed to read.

Lucy Fleming, review of Anne Louise Avery's Reynard the Fox (TLS), Up to his old tricks.

Hattie Porter (Recovery in the Bin), The politics of an unstable sense of self: on being a slightly mad queer. ("Is it that I don’t know who I am, or is it that I’m not who they want me to be?")

Courtesy of, well, the inevitable result of reading 8-10 things at once, and also of spending a week cat-sitting in Fribourg. Why working in someone else's house should get more reading done than working in my own, I do not know, but that's how it is.

Meanwhile, the most striking thing I read this fortnight, I think, is the essay Fucking Like A Housewife, by Jamie Hood, in The New Enquiry. It's a personal essay, with an artful mix of abstraction, self-exposure, and ironic reflexive comments, by a trans woman on desire and disappointment. I picked up the link from the substack/blog 'It's David', on the basis of this incredibly striking line: "A fantasy is at its heart a survivalist lie."

Cast your minds back to July 2019, when The Crane Wife came out. I posited that The Crane Wife is just one in a recurring genre of women's writing (although I wouldn't be surprised if there were also similar from gay men, or nonbinary people; I would be very surprised and FASCINATED to find its like from cis straight men). I can't exactly define it: the Disappointment Memoir, perhaps? The short story 'Cat Person' belongs here, too, although personally I didn't find it that engaging. But just as important as disappointment is desire, thwarted potential, hunger. Jess Zimmerman's Hunger Makes Me is another example. I'd put Lucia Osborne-Crowley's Meanjin Papers essay from Winter 2020, Depreciated: The Price of Love in there, too, although it was far too niche and Australian to go viral.

When these essays go viral, they seem to spark cathartic identification. And they do in me, too (to varying degrees; Cat Person was a particular low). And yet I find myself frustrated, over and over, at how... straight they are. The disappointment and despair that pervades them is, on the one hand, familiar: I, too, have dated Men (TM), but the sense of compulsion, that this must work because this is all there is? It's... odd, to read, as a queer woman. I could say yes, this is the double bind of the heteropatriarchy: how lucky for me, that this is not all there is for me. And I'm not arguing that it *isn't* structural. But I don't think it's actually limited to heterosexuality, the gaping void of desiring and needing and loving and somehow never being enough to get your own needs met or even, it feels, acknowledged. You can find its threads in all kinds of queer memoirs, and complicated tangled versions: of giving and loving and yet not being able to provide what the other party needs, and so on. Never surfaces in viral essay form, though, which is a shame: my gut instincts tell me that for queer women, especially, the ways in which this story grows in us aren't so far off from the ways - especially the ways outside of primary partnership - that the same story grows in straight women.

Let me know when someone writes a queer woman Disappointment Memoir Piece.

Hood's essay isn't the one I'm looking for; for one thing, nowhere does it suggest that Hood would identify as queer (perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn't; this essay is exclusively about her as a trans woman dating men). But it IS a version of the Desire/Disappointment memoir that won't go viral on account of not being "relatable" to enough people - in fact it's probably actively off-putting to most people who identified with 'The Crane Wife'. The desire in which Hood is repeatedly thwarted is the desire to be "a Housewife": to be allowed, invited, cherished in that most protected of feminine roles; to be able to offer love-as-service; all the things that her straight cis counterparts find constraining. She interrogates this desire, it's playing out as kink, it's function as a "survivalist lie", and the ways in which that fantasy might be a vehicle for desires more basic and more terrifying not to receive. I recommend it, both as a piece that deserves to be alongside the viral Desire/Disappointment genre, and as a fine example of personal essay craft in its own right.

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Currently Reading: Oh so many things, as usual
Fiction for Fun: Bernadine Evaristo's 'Girl, Woman, Other', and Tamora Pierce's The Magic in the Weaving. I've been craving the Circle books since March, for obvious Pandemic reasons; bought them for Xmas and only got around to them now. I'm finding them so soothing. The Evaristo.. hmm. It's mostly portraits of people, so far, through the perspectives of first Amma, a middle-aged dramatist, and then her daughter Yazz. I was enjoying it until the switch to Yazz, and then... Evaristo is gentle with Amma's foibles and failings, but Yazz feels like a sharper satire, in places. Her apparently unassailable confidence in her own rightness and the wrongness of adults may yet be modulated, but the bit about her faking anxiety to get a larger room in halls gives me pause. She's starting to feel like a straw-gen-z, I suppose.
Poetry: puttering onward with Paradise Lost
Lit Mag: Not quite halfway through Winter 2020 Meanjin
Non-fiction for personal interest: I haven't picked up the hooks or the Foucault since l last did a Reading Post, oops.
For work: Got to get back to 'The Fabliau in English' now, I guess.

Recently Finished: 'The Lotus Palace' should've gone in last update, actually, as opposed to 'ABSOLUTELY NOTHING', which is what I claimed.

The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this and will definitely be following up on the series. It's a combo historical mystery and historical romance, set in the pleasure quarter of Tang Dynasty Chang'an. The worldbuilding / historical research is rich and rewarding without ever overwhelming the plot. Protags fascinating, Our Heroine's occasional bits of unreliable (or withholding) narration deftly deployed. My quibble with it is the pacing / twining of the mystery and romance plots and their respective generic demands. The fortuitous mechanics to allow the Happily Ever After come too quickly and with too little detail in comparison to the mystery plot, which might be okay if they were a rapid fade-out, but then we stick around for the last odds and ends of the mystery plot to be likewise deus-ex-machina'd.

Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I devoured this and enjoyed it, and yet. I read it and loved it in its prior online existence, and wasn't sure how it could be improved. For the most part it IS significantly improved: the worldbuilding and political plot are much strengthened. Oddly, though, some things were lost in the shift that make the mystery plot - and the villain of the final crisis- less compelling. And I am not happy with the logics of how gender and sexuality work in this expanded universe: long story not for covering here, I feel. (DW note: that's a post under lock if you have access but missed it.)

A Companion to Literature and Film by Robert Stam

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think I had this out by mistake (instead of A Companion to Film and Adaptation). Couple of useful essays though.



Spinning by Tillie Walden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was beautifully executed, but oddly difficult to read: the art style and minimalist text somehow really effectively conveys a sense of trapped combination drive and despair that's a Lot.


Pending next update: a couple of weird Canterbury Tales adaptations, and 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works'

Online Fiction:

Adam Ouston (Meanjin Winter 2020), The Velvet Plain. This is... as close to sci-fi as Meanjin gets. Surrealist. Maybe it's enviro-fiction? Maybe it's not. Warning for some brutality.

Rebecca Slater (Meanjin Winter 2020) Scales. This one definitely is climate fiction, and the surreal elements more easily interpretable as metaphor. Not one that will stick with me for a long time.

Pauline Melville (Electric Lit), Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary discuss their suicides. I definitely want to read the collection from which this draws, and am slightly annoyed it has no online footprint beyond this so I can't file it in goodreads.

Phoebe Barton (Lightspeed Magazine), The Mathematics of Fairyland. This is sweet (cn: suicidality), but not as mathematical as I had hoped.

Up Next: I need to prioritise for work: stuff on fabliau as genre, stuff on violence and humour. Everything else as whim takes me.

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Some links:

Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon (LitHub), Taking Kink Seriously: A Reading List.

Cara Giamo (Atlas Obscura Feb 2019), The celebrity tortoise breakup that rocked the world

Franki Cookney (The Overthinkers Guide to Sex, blog), The best bad sex I ever had. At the time I couldn’t quite articulate it. It felt like having sex with someone who didn’t actually like sex, I remember saying to a friend. Cookney connects that to Peggy Ornstein's reseach on (straight) young men and sexuality in a way that is, shall we say, Not Wrong.

Atlas Obscura place entry, Méret Oppenheim fountain. Saw this unexpectly this past week in Bern. It is WEIRD.

Douglas Dowland (The Rambling), Flirting with Foucault. Dowland uses Eric Wade's memoir of Foucault's time in California, during which Wade (and his partner) "flirted" (per Dowland) with Foucault, to put forward an argument about flirting as generative of thought, friendship, philosophy. I would like to be on board with this argument, I really would, but I am thrown by the fact that from Dowland's description what happened here is Foucault turned down a speaking invitation, Wade ambushed him at a different event and wangled his way into his graces by offering to drive him to a site he wanted to see, plied him with substances and asked him wildly personal questions about his sex life. Nice to know even Foucault gets sexually harassed on the job??

Lizzie O'Shea (Overland), Facebook vs the media code: whoever wins, we lose. I read this trying to figure out what the rationale for the 'make google and facebook >>pay for news<<' thing is. I have gone from baffled to impressed at the gall. It's not a copyright based argument at all, it's a sheer power grab. And one that will profit Murdoch more than most.

Amanda Meade (Guardian), Google and Facebook: the landmark Australian law that will make them pay for news content. I had to read this one to check I wasn't misunderstanding.

Ketan Joshi (RenewEconomy), Google's Sky News Australia team-up will make it a climate misinformation powerhouse. This is Not Good, folks.

Sonja Blignaut (Own blog), On depletion - as different to fatigue.

Julia Ftatek (The Rambling), Jonathan and Taylor: the two Swifts. I really enjoyed this one, do recommend.

David (own blog/substack), David Davis XVIII: Part 3, 'good for you'. Cautions against 'therapeutic' justifications for kink. I don’t care if it’s good for me. It doesn’t need to be good for me for me to be allowed to do it.

Robin Craig (Looking At Porn blog/substack), Tickling. I love humans, humans are so great and come up with so many niche things.

Neelanjana Banjeree, interview with Randa Jarrar (Harpers Bazaar), There is a bigger world: Randa Jarrar on her memoir 'Love is an Ex-Country'.