Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Currently Reading:
Fiction: At Swim, Two Boys, which is still slow going but phenomenally well executed. Virtuoso, by Yelena Moscovitch (e-ARC), which I haven't got far into but it seems interesting. Ali Smith's 'Winter', which hasn't grabbed me the way 'Autumn' did.
Non-fiction: Performing Emotions in Early Europe

Recently Finished:

Karis Walsh, 'Seascape': Good, but confirmed that I am really not in the headspace for romance novels right now

Meanjin Vol 77 No 3 by Jonathan Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I loved a lot of things about this edition, particularly the essays by Bruce Pascoe and Belinda Rule. I am however starting to suspect Meanjin run Shannon Burns essays precisely because they know they will subsequently get spot-on responses by women/poc and then they get to feel good for publishing those people AND please whoever it is that likes Burns' monofocal rants.

I am so far behind in my Meanjin reading that it's no longer worth keeping up the subscription, at least not until I can afford to re-subscribe to the hard copy. I'm sad about that, because I make this decision just as the Australia Council funding announcements came out, and Meanjin didn't get their funding. Neither did The Lifted Brow, though, and I will retain my subscription to them.

Further links/recs from Meanjin below, in the online reading section.

Up Next:

Oh my. I have to either read a LOT in the next two months, or aggressively cull, or preferably both. Library books and ARCs first, so Stephanie Trigg's festschrift and Hannah Kent's The Good People are priorities, as are Diane Setterfield's 'The River' and... whatever else is in my Netgalley account.

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Online fiction recs:

I have listened to all the extant episodes of The Strange Case of Starship Iris and I really recommend it as a podcast. It's... imagine that Star Trek fanwriters invented Firefly from the ground up, I guess? The storytelling work is phenomenal - the pilot episode is a really great scene-setter and generates wonderful suspense, episode 4 is a brilliant bottle episode that deepens character and backstory really well, and the later episodes do amazing work with the framing conceit of the whole podcast, which is that episodes are covert transmissions relayed by mysterious 'agents' who are monitoring the crew of the Rumour. In episode 8 the crew become aware they're being monitored, and begin censoring themselves: so you get to see them planning a Cunning Plan, but not to know the details. It's a great way to maintain tension while showing the characters engaging in foresight and planning.

I enjoyed A Pilgrim's Guide To The Lighthouse of Quvenle the Seer at Lightspeed magazine.

I really loved Grandma Novak's Famous Nut Roll, also at Lightspeed, which is a one of those stories that's less about a plot than about a specific conceit guiding you through a world. The conceit is recipes and you have to piece together the references to build up a picture of what is going on in the world of this family sharing the recipes.

Worth a read: Mrs Longfellow Burns at Electric Literature, titled for the web 'the woman behind the man is literally on fire'.

From Meanjin, Karen Wyld: For their own good, a fictional account in the form of letters between white authorities, which traces the fortunes of a family of girls from Jigalong mission in the early 20th century. Content warnings provided at the site.

Online essay, memoir, life writing, poetry:

From Meanjin, Kelly Peiopha, The Hands of a Woman, which is about domestic violence, and art, and Artemesia Gentilleschi. I am surprised that the author doesn't seem aware that the surviving Gentilleschi Susannah painting has a palimpsest in which she is looking straight at the men.

Also Meanjin, Sylvia Martin, Shadowing the Boyds. This seems to be a different Sylvia Martin to the academic who wrote 'Passionate Friends'. Interesting memoir piece about art, music, and the Boyd family of artists/potters.

Meanjin again, Grazyna Zajdow, Syzymon in Spain, an accounting of and reckoning with her father through the lens of his time with the Dabrowski regiment in the Spanish Civil War.

Further Meanjin, Andrew Ford and Anni Heino, The Song Remains the Same, a musicological piece on Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. I don't have a very musicological mind, but I have loved this series in Meanjin, and this piece in particular I loved for its analysis of the music as well as its provision of context.

Meanjin's poetry section, Eileen Chong, My mother talks in numbers

The Public Domain Review, Angus Trumble, O Uommibatto, on the Pre-Raphaelites and wombats. Contains some great descriptions of 19th century European encounters with Australian fauna in general - I'm fond of the story about the london woman who woke up to find a kangaroo in her bed, and of this story of Rosetti's wombat solving the problem of a tedious houseguest: 'Rossetti gleefully reported to William Bell Scott on September 28, 1869 that the wombat had effectively interrupted a long and dreary monologue from John Ruskin by patiently burrowing between the eminent critic’s jacket and waistcoat.'

Buzzfeed, Tiana Clark, This is what black burnout feels like: deals with some of the class issues as well as race issues that the viral Millenial Burnout essay skims over.

Wasafiri.org, Len Lukowski, Diary of A Teenage Boy. Life-writing reckoning with the author's body, self and identity after some time on transition-related testosterone. I can't really put my finger on why, but a lot of this spoke to me in that odd way that things do which aren't by any measure about your experience but which resonate with something deep in you.

( Quote hereunder )

Online journalistic / op ed type pieces:

Electric Literature, Carrie V Mullins, The disastrous decline in author incomes isn't just Amazon's fault

Wired.com, Gretchen MucCullough, Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning: sadly contains no actual linguistics research, just a journalist's collection and sorting of examples, but enough to convince me I would very much like to see linguists research this.

Bloomberg.com, Builder of 200-million-dollar Turkish chateaux project goes bankrupt. That's not one 200 million dollar chateau, but an entire estate of cookie-cutter faux-riviera chateaux, intended for wealthy gulf clients. There's a lot of weird going on here.

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Music notes: Spurred by the Meanjin piece I noted above, I bought Tracy Chapman's first album, and I love it. A lot.

Why is so much 80s feminist criticism so annoying? And 80s lesbian-feminist criticism even more so?

Aaaargh. I do these things to myself on purpose, I know, but aaaack.

*headdesk*

Someone in Scotland has their head screwed on!

( Trigger warning: this is a good but possibly confronting anti-rape ad )

This ad is brilliant. I presume its meant for screening on TV, though, and I wonder about the trigger risks for the viewing public? I wonder if that's something they thought of at all? COULD you do a good anti-rape ad without running a significant trigger risk?

What's with all the Justin Bieber-bashing, universe? So, the kid's baby-faced and has a high voice and is attractive to fourteen year old girls.

What, exactly, is wrong with that?

All I'm seeing is a fear of and condemnation of young girls' desire. Bad, bad girls! Manifesting - and sharing - your desires! Causing ruckus! Being impolite! Bad girls.

Ok, granted, that was a Miranda Devine article - what else did you *expect*? But it's a blown-up version of the finger-pointing and disapproval evident across the whole media coverage of the Justin ruckus. (For those not in the know, a free JB concert in Sydney was cancelled when the crowd of teens and preteens got out of control - waiting up all night for the star to appear, those with mobile phones were excited by a false twitter rumour that JB had arrived in Sydney early, and the crowd surged, injuring several. The concert was cancelled, and the crowd moved to the Sunrise studio. Efforts seem to have been made to cancel that show as well, but JB insisted on performing one song for his fans. The media then go to town on the hilarity/depravity of these teenage girls and their desire for the effeminate singer and his not-especially-meaningful lyrics.)

Meanwhile, my facebook feed is flooded with guys joining groups with titles like "don't worry Justin Bieber, I used to sing like you - then I turned four". Groups calling to vote him out of their gender, and asking God to exchange Kurt Cobain (dead, manly musician) for Justin Bieber (live, insufficiently manly musician).

Amusingly, all the guys I know who are joining these groups are either:
1. Gay
2. Not especially macho
3. Socially awkward
or
4. All of the above.

So what have we here? On the one hand, adults and the media are uncomfortable with teenage (and pre-teenage) girls manifesting desire (be it sexual or otherwise - believe it or not, a seven-year-old COULD idolise a singer and manifest her desire in ways which are imitative of older girls without *actually* wanting him in the pants - and yet the media persist in acting as if Bieber's pre-teen fans are some weird two-headed breed of predatory sexualised babies). Accordingly, adults, the media, and older teens react by mocking and/or damning the girls in question. This is not new news! It's the Edward Cullen Underpants Conundrum, with a slightly younger target market.

So what, universe? Crowds of (young) women want to look at a man? (Young) women behave in uncouth ways when satisfying their desire for said man? (Young) women make fools of themselves trying to touch this man? (Young) women make this man into an object of their desire, more about fulfilling a need of theirs than any innate quality he has?

SO WHAT? Nothing men haven't been doing to all women for centuries. Millenia.

And on the other hand, we have a group of men - many older than Bieber, some probably his age-peers - slandering him and emasculating him. Now, I don't know if Bieber is known for particularly gender-transgressive behaviour: it's possible he is, I've never seen him perform, but it certainly hasn't featured in the media coverage. Yet the male reaction seems to be trying, violently, to police gender performance.

Whose gender performance, exactly?

Is it Bieber's?

It could be.

But I think it's actually about Bieber's fans. These "febrile, hyperventilating girls" who dare to manifest their desire, and who dare to desire an insufficiently masculine object. I think this outbreak of man-rage on Facebook (and probably other places, too) is part of male desire to shame these girls for not desiring/affirming... well, them. And, if my friends feed is anything to go by, it's not coming from macho men. It's coming from men who themselves aren't achieving an ideal masculine gender performance. It's coming from shy men, gawky men, flamboyant men, gay men: men who are used to not receiving heaps of social approval and accolades for their manliness, and they're lashing out at Bieber because Bieber's fans are too young to have internalised the same codes of masculinity as they have.

Those who feel more secure in themselves resort to mocking the mysterious ways of attraction which lead girls to desire Bieber. Which is really no better.

All this makes me want to buy a Justin Bieber album. Or maybe relive my childhood and lay hands on a Hanson album.

1. Stephen Conroy has announced that the internet filter will go ahead. According to the SMH:

The blacklist, featuring material such as child sex abuse, sexual violence and instructions on crime, would be compiled using a public complaints mechanism, Government censors and URLs provided by international agencies.

Now, in theory, government censors should be apolitical etc etc blah blah blah public service code of conduct. We all know that could go any which way in practice. BUT AT WHAT POINT IS IT A GOOD IDEA TO RELY ON PUBLIC COMPLAINTS AND 'INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES'?

You know where that leads us? LJ STRIKEOUT. #AMAZONFAIL. YEAH.

Not happy. Plan on writing to Minister Conroy. Can I encourage you to do the same? Sounds boring, but apparently when the original policy was announced, the flood of letters forced his Department to take on a whole slew of temps. Write. Write now. Write over Christmas, when half the public service are away AND YET THEY STILL HAVE TO ANSWER LETTERS WITHIN THE SPECIFIED RESPONSE TIME. Write big letters and small letters, send goddamn Christmas cards, they still have to answer. And answering costs time and money, which are things the government does not have much of.

2. SPEAKING OF LJ. This morning, they announced that in the next code push, they would add a "gender" field to the sign-up page, and make it mandatory to display it on your profile. Said field included no "unspecified" or "other" option. Check out Synecdochic's post on the matter for details. She has since heard from the manager of US operations, and the code was a beta test and will not be pushed live. The gender field will be added to the sigunup page but it doesn't look like they're going to make it mandatory after all.

If they're not going to make it mandatory, this is... good. However, what's also come out of it is something I hadn't realised: all those ugly diet ads on my LJ page, the ones that made me decide to lock it down and migrate to DW? They're targeted at me BECAUSE I HAVE SELECTED FEMALE AS MY GENDER. I have now unspecified my gender and encourage you to do the same.

I quote thingswithwings:

This is pretty much horrifying. I mean, some companies and governments have that kind of policy in place from the getgo, which is one kind of ignorant bullshit, but to have a more open policy and then reduce it to the oppressive binary system later in order to better target ads for weight loss and viagra? I mean, it's a perfect demonstration of how institutions force people into these gendered roles/scripts, then calls them into being as such - "great, you're a woman: now let us tell you how your body isn't attractive enough." This is, right here, how women and men are produced, and in the countries I live in at least, it's part of why women and men are produced (there's money to be made in the manufacturing of gender, in addition to the other paradigms of power that are created/reinforced by that process).

I don't trust LJ any more than a snake in a box. synecdochic has (repeatedly) stated that DW is a queer-friendly, trans-friendly, just-plain-don't-want-to-be-limited-by-my-gender friendly space, and is offering DW codes to anyone negatively affected by LJ's policies. I still have a few codes myself: if you want 'em, let me know.

For now - since LJ have declared that they will not be pushing this code - I will not be making any further changes to my blogging habits. I will think about disabling comments on my fandom journal, and see how that goes over. Sooner or later, I will be disabling comments on this one. I hope later rather than sooner.

Alice, Lucymonster and I are mooching around my house, listening to music and complimenting one another. For reasons unknown, I decided to paint my nails, and then Lucy painted Alice's.

Says Alice, staring at her fingers: This nail polish thing is such an exercise in gender performativity! I almost feel like a real girl now...
Me, holding out a hand to be carefully shaken without disturbing the nail polish: Excellent. It has been an honour to perform gender with you. We should do it again.
*Alice and Amy burst into gales of laughter*
*Lucy looks terrified*