highlyeccentric: French vintage postcard - a woman in feminised army uniform of the period (General de l'avenir)
Apparently I haven't made one of these since mid-2024. I remember getting wildly overwhelmed by not being able to keep track of what podcast episodes I've particularly enjoyed. I can't easily just save a pinboard pin from apple podcasts, the way I save links from my phone browser. For a while I was trying to cross-post to Twitter, then Mastodon, and now I try to remember to use highly-reckons at bluesky.

Whatever, I clearly can't catch up now, so let's look at some recent listening.

Music:

Apparently, this is about Bob Hawke. It is telling that I had to look this up, as it could describe any number of Australian politicians before and after Redgum's day:



On the subject of blokey music, would you like a song that sounds like 90s queer-ish britpop is being belted in a scrappy Aussie pub, only it's extremely queer?



Podcasts, Fictional: Lately I have been watching Dimension 20: Fantasy High (eg, today, I sat on the parental couch and painstakingly sewed a trouser-hem, grumpily used resistance bands, and got through 3 episodes of the sophomore year series). At the end of the freshman series I had WITHDRAWALS and yet had too many chores to do that couldn't be done in front of a TV.

Enter, Worlds Beyond Number, a high fantasy RP adventure DMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan. The tone is very different - there is a little leavening humour, and I wouldn't say it's DARK per se, but it's not a comedy. Something it carries off very well is that the DM and players had conducted a campaign zero, prior to starting the main campaign - so they know backstory that the audience doesn't. This feels very different to the DM knowing things that neither the players nor the audience know - it feels less like "fly on the wall watching your parasocial pals play DND" and closer to an audiodrama, I guess, while still having the the narration and choice-reaction-improv aspects.

Podcasts, informative:

I really enjoyed Margaret Killjoy's Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff two-parter A madhouse against the Nazis.

The first episode, which is the one I've linked, actually looks at Françoise Tosquelle's life in and flight from Catalonia, and his early innovations in the field of psychiatry during the Spanish Civil War. Tosquelles was with the POUM, the same anti-stalinist anti-fascist group George Orwell volunteered with, in anarchist-controlled parts of Catalonia. The history of shellshock>PTSD as I know it (and I've been reading up a bit lately), filtered through mainly UK/US histories of both war and medicine, doesn't talk about much between WWI and WWII. But out there in Catalonia, Tosquelles was working out that his traumatised soldiers needed to stay in community, in or near their homes and/or the communities who had been housing them as volunteers.

So Tosquelles set about setting up psychiatric hospitals close to the front. Local monastic institutions worked with him, providing the physical infrastructure and some staff. But where would he get nurses? Insead of sending for medically trained nurses from the cities or appealing to the red cross, he looked to the local area, and enlisted other professionals to do shifts as psych nurses (in this context, doing jobs that would be later specialised to social work or occupational therapy). Apparently lawyers were common (keen to support, not usually keen soldiers), as were artists, writers, teachers and... sex workers. You see, anarchist Spanish regions had usually legalised sex work and set up worker-owned brothels. The soliders were already their client base. So Tosquelles went around looking for women who wanted a second job: they couldn't see the same clients in both roles, but one imagines they already had a good understanding of the psychological fragility of the war-traumatised soldier.

By the end of episode one, Margaret has followed Tosquelles over the Pyrennes and into a refugee camp in France, where he promptly sets up a makeshift psychiatric unit under dire conditions, before eventually being sought out and transferred to work - not initially as doctor, oh no, just a nursing assistant - at a nearby asylum. The second episode follows the asylum's radical transformation during the Vichy regime (with no ration cards for mental patients, the patients, staff and doctors began to work together to pool resources, trade labour on local farms for produce, get locals to teach foraging classes - and meanwhile radically restructure the heirarchy of the institution), with the spectacular highlight in Margaret's eyes being their work (colletively agreed upon by all at the hospital) housing and even running guns for the resistance.

I really enjoy Margaret Killjoy's take on this, as I have some of her other health-focused work. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them I think is that as a trans woman she's both acutely critical of pathologising institutions, but also... hardly anti-treatment, anti-medication, etc. (The other axis, and this isn't true of all anarchists any more than it is of all trans women, that I think I particularly appreciate is a streak I'm starting to see in the anarchist-leaning podcasts I follow, where the commitment to something radically better, no better than that or that or anything else on offer, seems to come with an openness to positives that aren't Total Movement Success / Total Revolution.)

At any rate, I trundled off to do some further reading afterwards. This essay by Ben Platts-Mills was clearly one of Margaret's key sources. This interview between Platts-Mills, Camille Robcis (a scholar of the psychiatric movement which arose out of St Albans after the war), and Martine Deyres, who had made a docummentary about St Albans, is also worth a read - I particularly appreciated Martine Deyres' comments about how St Albans was, yes, physically and politically isolated during the Vichy regime (allowing its survival), but that the psychiatric community and the leftist-communist community was very well networked, even during the war. One of the key resistance fighers who was there during the war - his grandfather had been a previous director at St Albans, and as a communist in the 30s, this chap had known of Tosquelles' work in Catalonia.

Finally, Margaret describes herself as a "simple girl" and not a theory-head, but she does a good job of breaking down the wild inter-group tensions, and paradigm-shifting historical differences, between and across far left history. She says she ended up reading more about Tosquelles in the context of Theory than she wanted (I'm guessing because Camille Robcis is really the only anglophone scholar to have touched on him), but there were questions *I* had that she put aside, and some basic Theorist Facts I didn't know (like Franz Fanon's career trajectory). I found this article on the APA blog a great supplement there.

In fact I shall leave with a blockquote from that post (Gregory Evan Doukas, 2023):

Institutional psychotherapy also attended to the ways that institutions not only are shaped by but shape human action. Many make the error of associating institutions intrinsically with coercion; institutional psychotherapy took seriously the capacity of institutions to instead empower. The institutional psychotherapy advocated by Tosquelles also differed from anti-psychiatrists who rejected all neurological bases for mental illness. Evidence of this is that they often prescribed medication. Following Lacan, who Fanon argued in his medical dissertation was correct when asserting that “madness is a pathology of freedom,” the Saint-Alban school argued that the goal of therapy was freedom. This meant that the job of the psychiatrist was to reinstitute the social in the human personality. For Hermann Simon, an important influence on Tosquelles, this necessitated a “more active therapy,” one which took advantage of the organization of the hospital, the land it was on, and the patients’ families and social networks (22). It required revolutionizing the hospital staff and breaking down both physical and logistical barriers, de-carceralizing the institution. The nurses were asked to take off their uniforms and dress indistinguishably from the patients. “Walls” separating the administrative and medical divisions of the hospital were torn down; everyone who worked there, including the patients, began to take responsibility for running the institution and playing an active role in the healing process.
highlyeccentric: Image of a black rooster with a skeptical look (gallus gallus domestics)
Currently Reading: Too many things!
Fiction: 'Three Daughters of Eve', which isn't really grabbing me. AJ Demas' One Night In Boukos, which I'm also finding it hard to focus on - the problem may be with me, not the books.
Poetry: Continuing on with Paradise Lost, via podcast; I've also started AJ Odasso's 'The Sting of It', which I highly recommend.
Lit Mag: Some progress in the Summer Meanjin, from which recommendations below
Non-Fiction for fun: still 'The Queer Child'.
Academic: Two Chaucer books, plus Tyson Pugh's 'Sexuality and its Queer Discontents', of which i am really impressed with the intro.

Recently Finished: Nothing much, actually, except Riddick's 'The Shock of Medievalism' for work. A difficult book to wade through, and I can't figure out how the end relates to the beginning.

Online Fiction:
  • Theodora Goss (Lightspeed Magazine) A Statement in the Case - this is really neat, mostly quiet detailed portrait of a post-soviet immigrant and then a sharp swerve to the urban fantasy, with a deeply unreliable narrator.
  • Richard Ford Burley (Apex Magazine), A Study in Pink and Gold. An artist begins drawing the extraterrestrials who have occupied inner space, and finds several kinds of love.
  • Ada Hoffman (Strange Horizons), Across the Ice. This is just... very sweet.
  • Yoon Ha Lee (Lightspeed Magazine), The second last client. I loved this so very much.
  • Nancy Ludmerer (Electric Lit), So gentle you don't feel it. There's a quiet precision to this, but I'm not sure I'll remember it for long.


  • Online Essays:
  • Maddison Griffiths (Meanjin Summer 2019), Sex, Vaginismus and Reality TV.
  • Tracy Crisp, (Meanjin Summer 2019, currently behind paywall), The Forgettory. The paywall isn't letting me through, which is annoying. I guess I didn't have a subscription for that edition, but I thought subscribing (which I did the other week) got you immediate digital access.
  • Myra Schlosberg (Going Down Swinging), No shame in the void. I liked this bit: "I love being a dyke like being held in something solid. Dyke like an exoskeleton when I’m just ??? inside it. Dyke like a big cocoon and me the disintegrated part of the caterpillar-to-butterfly cycle—opalescent goo."
  • Erin Bartram (Contingent Mag), Don't we have to judge people by the standards of their time? A really useful, concise approach from a working historian.
  • Guy Atkins (History Today), The Edwardian Social Network. Postcards! This is a delightful romp. People were concerned about women receiving unwanted lewd postcards, which goes to show: humanity is predictable (although now it's the reverse; there's less social concern and more actual problem).
  • Sarah Parker (The Conversation UK), Poets and lovers: the two women who were Michael Field. Two Australian poets and one male pseudonym!
  • Danielle Scrimshaw (Overland) What a feeling! The eroticism of Flashdance. I appreciate how hard this article commits to its premise.
  • Patricia A. Matthew (The Atlantic), On teaching but not loving Jane Austen. As someone who does not love Austen (and has been shamed for it), and who also does not really love Chaucer (but is working on him!), I appreciated this article a lot.
  • Theresa de Lauretis (Labris, 2003), When lesbians were not women.
  • Leslie Kern (Verso) Love in the feminist city. Managed to say more meaningful content about women and urban space in a single article than that entire 'Flâneuse' book.
  • Elizabeth Rush (Guernica), The marsh at the end of the world. On climate change and rotting bogs. May particularly interest [personal profile] monksandbones
  • Jini Maxwell (Meanjin blog), What I'm reading. Interesting thoughts on queer reading.
  • Erin Maglaque (LRB), Inclined to putrefecation: fascinating snippets of the plague in Florence, from documentary sources
  • William Davies (Guardian UK), How the humanities became the enemy within. I find this broadly convincing but can see some overlooked aspects/gap (not all STEM subjects are equal in the new conservatism, for a start).
  • Tonnian Fernandez (Paris Review), Sex in the Theatre: Samuel Delany and Jeremy O Harris in conversation. Really fascinating tangents on writing, race, gender, theatre, and quite specific kinks.


  • Up Next:

    As usual, I need to finish some things, before I start others! I have Carissa Harris' Obscene Pedagogies, and a book about adapting from classic lit; I have some fiction on my tbr back in my hands again; I just unearthed my Everyman 'Three Arthurian Romances' and a mate has been reading 'The perilous cemetery' on twitter so I might have to do that too.

    This has been: what are you reading Weekend.
    highlyeccentric: I happen to like it here in my shell (My shell)
    There's a reason that I used to do these fortnightly: when I'm actually having a life, I may finish three books in a fortnight, but usually all at the /end/ of the fortnight, leading to a lot of 'well I read stuff but finished nothing' posts.

    Currently Reading:
    Fiction: At Swim Two Boys (... slowly); Giovanni's Room (picking up pace now); The Dressmaker of Draper's Lane (doggedly because it's an ARC)
    Non-Fiction: Victoria Blud, 'The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Europe'
    Lit mag: Meanjin 77.3

    I'm reading Meanjin online (I have a subscription, although this time I didn't even start reading until after most of it was out from behind the paywall), and enjoying it. Because it's online I can recommend and link!Links with recs and pull quotes below. Mention of sexual assault. )

    Recently Finished: Nothing. Big fat zip.

    Up Next: Ugh so many ARCs. Plus my physical TBR is overflowing again! And I have library books!




    Other Media: Still enjoying The Penumbra Podcast - working through the Second Citadel episodes.

    Music: Slightly confused to report that I really like Zayn's new album, Icarus Falls. I looked it up 100% because my inner sixteen year old REQUIRES I consume melodramatic Icarus references, but... like... it's Good. Currently I'm two for two on liking ex-1D member's solo albums.
    highlyeccentric: A green wing (wing)
    I went to a pretty good concert last night. It's kind of difficult to retain the appreciation of that in my mind, when... everything.

    This piece I read yesterday sticks with me:

    Of course the protesters know that no one will be returning anywhere at the end of this march. Of course they have no plans (or means) to remove the fence. And of course this protest isn’t an attempt to somehow remove or negate the state of Israel. Any suggestion that these are the aims or expectations is ridiculous. The protesters merely want their voices to be heard; they merely want the Nakba, and its decades of repercussions, to be included in the rest of the world’s narrative, rather than dismissed. It is only the hope of becoming a fully recognised state one day (with all its accompanying freedoms) that has kept Palestinians alive these last 70 years – alive through wars, blockades, endless indignities and uncertainties. Those 70 years have turned the Gaza Strip into a prison where everyone is serving a life sentence; and everyone’s children will serve a life sentence too; and their children’s children, and so on.

    The protest’s message is simple: We cannot live like this for ever; even after 100 years Palestinians will still be born with inalienable human rights, however much the Israelis want to stamp them into the dirt. Israel cannot expect to enjoy peace, stability or prosperity while we are still penned in like animals on a factory farm. The fence is not only a physical border between two nations. It is also a conceptual, discriminatory line between two worlds, two realities. The misery of one world is the happiness of the other; the dreams of the former are buried beneath seven decades of sand in the latter.


    Atef Abu Saif, for The Guardian
    highlyeccentric: A seagull lifting into flight, skimming the cascade (Castle Hill, Nice) (Seagull)
    1. I recommend this essay from the latest Meanjin: 'Seeing Landscape', by Jennifer Mills. It covers a lot: the training of the eye and mind to an art form; climate change; the peculiarity of loving the australian landscape as a colonial presence in it; lazarus taxons; motherhood and daughterhood.

    2. Related to item 1, I have booked myself two nights away in a small town out from Sion. Ideally, I will go there and do Not Work, and Not Internet either. I'm feeling at the moment like I haven't shed the exhaustion burden, like I'm hovering on the edge of burnout but a little bit back from it, close enough that it's always in my line of vision. Maybe this will help. Or maybe the amount of rearranging I will have to do in my life to get everything planned and sorted to take that time off will be worse.

    3. I went to the gym today, second time in a week, and it was not terrible. Baby steps.
    highlyeccentric: Angel Coulby's feet in red boots (angel's feet)
    you guys, [personal profile] redsnake05 has started posting scans from fashion magazines, amply improved by her telling 100% true and reliable stories about the people pictured therein. Thus far, she has explained the fashion choices of A distractingly sexy railway engineer and two angsty lesbian sirens.
    highlyeccentric: Julia Gillard making a Lleyton Hewitt salute (Gillard)
    Draco grabbed Pansy's arm and pulled her behind the nearest tapestry. 'We've reached peak flag,' he said. 'It's on!'

    It was the matter of moments to explain the situation to Crabbe. Most of them belonged to Malfoy: 'I feel our styles are divergent: you're all classic Death Eater, I'm more complex anti-hero with a possibility of later redemption. It's just not working for me. Also, I've been planning your public downfall since you rolled me four years ago and I can't think of a better time than four days before you meet the criteria for your Prime Ministerial pension supplement.'

    Pansy's message was simpler: 'You're dumped, Crabbe. And you're taking Goyle with you.'

    Even Rita Skeeter couldn't argue, epsecially when Malfoy fronted the media with his hair glinting perfectly in the afternoon sun and with no phalanx of flags to make his argument for him, but rather words, more than three, constructing an actual argument. Draco looked earnestly into the camera. 'We need advocacy,' he said. 'Not slogans. We need a different style of leadership, one that respects the people's intelligence."

    Two hours later, Crabbe replied. 'We're not the Labor Party!' he declared. 'We are not the Labor Party! WE ARE NOT THE LABOR PARTY!

    'Alas,' muttered the Australian Voting Public, remembering well that – mad as they may have been, and in all honesty they put cut snakes to shame – the Labor Party under both Harry and Hermione had provided stable government, passing legislation, negotiating intelligently with the opposition and cross benches and rarely embarrassing us on the international stage.

    For hours they pretended there was still a decision to be made. Goyle announced: 'We cannot and we must not become a carbon copy of the Australian Labor Party.'

    But it was all to no avail. Of the 99 votes, Draco received 54, Vince 44, and Kevin Andrews drew a picture of a penis.

    Crabbe was out, having served less time than any Australian Prime Minister since the one who was eaten by a shark*.

    *Probably


    The full saga of Vincent Crabbe and the Goblet of Bile can be found at blamebrampton's LJ.

    Fooods

    Aug. 15th, 2015 06:50 pm
    highlyeccentric: Manly cooking: Bradley James wielding a stick-mixer (Manly cooking)
    Things I have cooked today:

    - toasted granola for 1x week's breakfast
    - Epicurious Banana Coconut Muffins, homg, so good, do recommend
    - basil-almond pesto (I've never made pesto before! And pine nuts are too expensive here! But eventually I had so damn much basil it became necessary to branch out)
    - tuscan bean stew from the big red book

    And I didn't even spend ALL day in the kitchen! Also got haircut, did grocery shopping, cleaned the bath, and washed the kitchen floor. Unprecedented productivity, wot.
    highlyeccentric: Sign on Little Queen St - One Way both directions (Default)
    A boy told me
    if he roller-skated fast enough
    his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

    the best reason I ever heard
    for trying to be a champion.

    What I wonder tonight
    pedaling hard down King William Street
    is if it translates to bicycles.

    A victory! To leave your loneliness
    panting behind you on some street corner
    while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
    pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
    no matter how slowly they fell.




    Meanwhile, I strongly recommend you read [personal profile] liseuse's post about PIGEONS IN THE SECRET SERVICE.
    highlyeccentric: Sign on Little Queen St - One Way both directions (Default)


    This photo, by Rina Castelnuovo of the New York Times, won third place in the World Press Photo competition's 'General News' category. It shows an Israeli settler in Hebron taking time out from his Purim celebrations to throw wine at a passing Palestinian woman.

    More striking images here. Many disturbing, some heartening, all artistically gorgeous.
    highlyeccentric: Firefley - Kaylee - text: "shiny" (Shiny)
    Happy Chanukah to those who celebrate it. And, celebrating Chanukah or not, if you fancy some amusement, may I recommend [livejournal.com profile] gillpolack's Very Special Retelling Of the Chanukah Story, reposted at the collective demand of six unsuspecting members of her flist. :D:D:D
    highlyeccentric: Angel Coulby's feet in red boots (angel's feet)
    Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing.

    Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.

    [...]


    I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.

    And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.

    You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real.

    Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me.

    Hanne Blank


    Warning for some (rather strange) transphobia in the comments, and a stray post of incomprehensible bile, and a few people Not Getting It.
    highlyeccentric: Demon's Covenant - Kitchen!fail - I saw you put rice in the toaster (Demon's Covenant - kitchen!fail)
    I have just discovered
    a) the existence of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
    and
    b) that they have a transcription and electronic facsimile of the 1914 edition of the 'Sure to Rise' Coookbook, issued by the Edmond's baking powder company.

    It's not the earliest edition, but it's early enough to be deeply entertaining. What is the usual way to bake chelsea buns? I don't know, and they're not telling me. Does the custard love the cup? How much is a teacup of sugar? (I don't know, but a teacup of milk = 1 gill) And Was this stuff as unappealing as it sounds?
    highlyeccentric: XKCD - citation needed (citation needed)
    ABC Online's chief political writer offers apology to Kevin Rudd, apparently unprompted.

    Of course, that's all part of the Annabel Crabb persona, the performance of an irreverent attitude to politics and political reporting both. It's not as if such an apology *costs* her, or the ABC, anything: rather, it shores up the 'real person' image she's got going, somewhere between a column and a blog.

    And this article isn't precisely *nice* about the Ruddbot. Indeed, early on Crabb reiterates that evidence exists to support the contention that the Foreign Minister is a deeply, ornately strange human being - funny, and possibly true, and also evidence that this performance of contrition is about Crabb's readership, not Krudd at all.
    highlyeccentric: Garden gnome reading - text: can't talk. dorking. (Garden dork)
    Currently, Anthony Green, the leading Australian election commentator, is conducting a long internet conversation which can best be summed up as Preferential Voting for Dummies Britons. Scrolling back through the last couple of pages you can find detailed but plain-language explanations of all kinds of factors involved in Australian elections. Eg: how is a ballot paper counted?; No we don't use electronic voting machines; Are Australians tyrannised by the alternative vote?; and why it takes more than a week for election results to be finalised (hint: it's not the alternative vote).

    If you read from the start of the kerfuffle forwards (instead of backwards, which is the order in which I linked you), Green's increasing tone of annoyance at having to explain the same basic things over and over again is deeply entertaining.

    Yes, THIS

    Dec. 17th, 2010 09:49 pm
    highlyeccentric: I've been searching for a sexual identity, and now you've named it for me: I'm a what. (Sexual what)
    When we look at what the factors are that make life so miserable for young gays and lesbians, it’s tempting for progressives to point the finger at religious traditions that are hostile to sexual pluralism. But the young men in American high schools who are beating up other boys whom they suspect of being gay are rarely doing so in order to comply with a misunderstood dictate from the Torah or the Pauline epistles. It’s not faith that drives the hate as much as it is an overwhelming desire to establish masculine bona fides. “I torment faggots, therefore I can’t be one; I beat up queers, therefore I’m a man.” That toxic equation may be aided and abetted by conservative religion, but it isn’t rooted in it. Rather, the hateful behavior is rooted in the rigid rules of American masculinity, a masculinity predicated on a contempt for and a paranoia about even the slightest whiff of femininity among the be-penised.


    Hugo Schwyzer, Homosociality and Homophobia

    OOOH LOOKEE

    Oct. 6th, 2010 06:18 pm
    highlyeccentric: Sign on Little Queen St - One Way both directions (Default)
    Dreamwidth is now on the Map of Online Communities!

    Which is to say, there's a new XKCD map, and DW is now a small island off the coast of Livejournal.

    I like this map. It's *extremely* detailed.

    Heee

    Aug. 21st, 2010 03:19 pm
    highlyeccentric: Sir Not apearing-in-this-film (sir not appearing)
    The First Text Messages: on how telegraph operators made friends, learnt to recognise one another by Morse style, made jokes, and abbreviated words.

    Profile

    highlyeccentric: Sign on Little Queen St - One Way both directions (Default)
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