Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Today's musical development is that courtesy of the world's least impressive dictactor parade, I have remembered that I actually like Credence Clearwater Revival. Figured out that the cassette tape we used to have in the car must have been Cosmo's Factory with a couple of tracks off Willy and the Poor Boys taped onto the end.

Instagram has been feeding me a trickle of interesting indie protest-song creators lately.

Consider Jesse Welles, who seems to be able to come up with a new political song within a day of every new twist the Trump administration disaster show. I do somewhat prefer his less "breaking news" work, for instance:



There's Malört & Savior, who have this rather catchy little track. Although what really strikes me is that they seem to be a fairly new band, and cerainly this was put out in the past month - but they SOUND like they walked straight out of 2009.



And there's Rain McMey, who has a few bangers going back a few years now, but this one delights me:



Podcasts, assorted recommendations:

The recent Bad Gays episode about Gavin Arthur was pretty fascinating.

I enjoy "Lions Led By Donkeys" frequently, and they had a thematically linked pair of interesting episodes recently: The Pastry War (also known as the first French Intervention in Mexico) and The War of the Oaken Bucket.

The most recent episode of Gender Reveal, with Alison Bechdel is great, generally, and has particularly interesting comments on the difference between memoir and fiction.

The Odd Lots podcast episode of last week, A Major American Egg Producer Just Lost 90% of its flock was fascinating. It's sort of a follow-up to Why are Eggs So Expensive of last year, which I also really appreciated (dangerous though: the cashier at my local service station convenience store wasn't expecting a mini-lecture on how long it takes to recover from a bird flu outbreak, or the impact which the fade-out of battery farms has). This time I was also particularly struck by the way Hickman talked about not being able to access vaccines - apparently the US exports vaccines to other countries who choose to vaccinate their laying flock, but US producers who WANT the vaccine can't get hands on it. He did not once mention the post-covid stakes in anti-vaccination policy, but you can kind of hear the outlines of it as he's talking. The other thing that was really clear is what an impact bird flu must have on the local economy - when Hickman's talking about the cost to the company of losing "institutional knowledge" and/or having to "hire back" the staff once the flock is re-established, that must mean that an outbreak means massive job losses.

The Behind the Bastards two-parter about Versailles was fascinating in its own right. I also, courtesy of a reminder somewhere in there that this is NOT a medieval system of administration, and courtesy of my own having figured out that the HSC modern history syllabus, which started "modernity" with the French revolution and absolutely did refer to the preceding regime as medieval, wasn't just lying-to-children, it was specifically drawing on the long duree, Marxist-leaning school of historical analysis - well put those two together and... oh, RIGHT. The reason the "palace complex" of Tamora Pierce's Tortall (or Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar) is so _bizarre_, economically speaking, is that their shared invisible template is _Versailles_. Combined with the 16th c English Chancery, certainly, and some influence from the Prussian War College.

Fiction:

I powered through Dimension 20's "Fantasy High: The Seven" and I loved it. Adorable! Now on to Fantasty High: Junior Year, which I am actually finding a little difficult as the early episodes have so much emphasis on how busy / under pressure everyone is. And the "your god is at risk of dying, you are her only believer, why aren't you evangelising for her?" storyline re Kristen is... uncomfortable. Maybe it's cathartic to Ally Beardsley, but it makes me feel squeamy.

Because I require MORE of Brennan Lee Mulligan in my ears, I found Worlds Beyond Number and am so far enjoying The Wizard, The Witch and the Wild One.

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.

There is no way that I am going to catch up the Things I Have Listened To since July 2023 (and that was after a long absence).

But let us note some things:

1. Pursuant to some readings for my current undergrad credits, I had the question, generally, "wtf happened to the English legal system between the 13th century and 1788", and also some minor qualms about my understanding of wtf happened between the 10th and 13th centuries (because what I am seeing in Australian law textbooks does not match up with what I thought was the important throughlines of medieval law) and wtf happened between 1788 and, oh, at least 2012 (when I first worked in a legal adjacent job).

2. I have not answered all of these questions, yet. Some of them have been SOMEWHAT answered by further adventures in law textbooks. Some have been only further aggravated.

With that in mind, consider:

Law, Order and Murder from a podcast by an American entitled History of English. It was published in 2016, but even so, the terminology choices seem a bit out of date (not just the use of "anglo-saxon" but "tribal"???). Upon investigation the host is an attorney, which explains why the history of law bits seem pretty solid, to an undergraduate level, while the social history is... not the best I would hope for undergrads, let's say. BUT, bear in mind that my undergrad English training was hyperfocused on pre-1066 (with a couple of begrudging - but lifechanging - later Middle English units), while my history components were very continental. I have a lot of legal histoy knowledge but all the post 1066 stuff is about sex law, and hence focused on the canon vs secular law divide. This is NOT the binary that one is asked about in Law100. This particular podcast doesn't even address the common : equity law divide but DOES fill in a lot of gaps that the textbook does not (but which I have enough knowledge to see and be itched by) about Angevin adminstrative reform and the development of canon law.

I cannot find any good podcast on the early courts of equity, because if I search of "chanxery court" or "history of law equity" I get all AMERICAN results. Boo hiss. So let's just skip over the 15th to early 17th c, I guess, like the worst of textbooks. And onward to my next point of interest:

Preuludes to the English Civil War, but with emphasis on, a) the Inns of Court and b) high church Anglicans. My two favourite kinds of pedants: lawyers and anglo-catholics. Behold, A whole podcast about that. I'm still not sure who Arminius is, but I can definitely use "Arminian" in a sentence. I'm also using this podcast for its Facts with my greatest Paranoid Reading haton, because podcasts that begin with a homage to QEII are to be commended for their accessible Facts and presumed conservative in their analysis.

Now, I had another question: why did I think that I knew a different name for "the basis of law in continental europe" compared to what the law textbooks keep giving me. They say civil law, I say, yes, but there's a more History word... the word is Salic Law. I have bookmarked some podcasts on the 14th century developments of the Salic Law, which may make me a, a better historian (too late) and b, better placed to nitpick my intro law readings.

Keane J's lecture for the Selden Society (2015) on >Sir Edward Coke. I am 1/4 of the way through it. My only comment so far is : per Keane J, Coke (pron cook), had a deeply Protestant resentment of all things continental, and especially the Courts of Equity.

Two questions arising, which I suspect the podcast will not answer because those contextual notes were tossed off as into as if everyone would understand:

1. What is the continental influence in the Courts of Equity? If significant enough for Coke to care, why do the Law100 textbooks not care?
2. Protestants. There were lots of them in Europe. SURELY one cannot do ultra-protestantism without getting big into some kinds of continental influence?

I suspect Keane J of using "continental" and "European" as a shorthand for "Catholic", but if so, that makes q 1 much more fascinating..

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Meanwhile: please accept a musical recommendation



Let's not try to psychoanalyse the details of my parasocial vibing with Beth McCarthy, okay.

Let us also not try to pschoanalyse my strong enthusiasm for the song "Women and Sandwiches", from Freaky Friday The Musical (for schools). TBH the version on YouTube is not as compelling - I think I liked the y 10 kid from my sister's school's voice better, and the director & costume designers had gone for (apparently) a big "Taylor Swift Eras" vibe. My impression of this character, when he's wearing a spiky-but-sparkly vest, is quite different to the Miscellaneous Guy In Flannel in this smoothly-produced-and-uploaded version:



Also, in Freaky Friday the Musical, when the mom character asks her catering offsider to un-resign, the offsider says, fervently, "I wish I could quit you". I asked Ms15 if that wasin the original script. Ms15 says yes. I says: "well I know what age group THAT script writer was in and they're probably gay".

I then had to try to explain to both Mum and Ms15 (the worst combo audience) why that was funny.

I was the only person in the audience cackling at that line. And the gen z actors didn't even know to expect it.

Such are my burdens.

What song do you live for at the moment? Oh no. I have just entered another DEEP FLEETWOOD MAC SPIRAL, but how am I to choose? My song by song affiliations waver by day, by hour. What I can offer is that I have considered my childhood memories, and I submit that I have always been a Dreams (1977) girlie, over a Landslide (1975) gal. I recognise that Landslide is a masterpice, of course, but there are covers which I like as much if not better. Not only is there no such for Dreams, people seem less compelled to produce covers of it.

Also: on the scale of natural phenomena, I vibe more with thunder and rain than with snow and landslides.

Sidebar: I can't think of a rock, blues, pop or country song about bushfires. WTF is with that?

Is there a band or artist that you attach to a particular memory? What memory is it?
Obviously I WANT to answer with Fleetwood Mac. And in reality the most entrenched memory-album in my life (aside, perhaps, from Pink Flloyd's Dark Side Of the Moon, soundtrack to many late night last end of car journeys) is either the Wiggles "Yummy Yummy" or The Whitlams "Eternal Nightcap" (was I really a person between those two albums? ... evidence points to no).
But in terms of a single track? I'm quite sure I remember, under the age of three, bopping in the sunlight beside my parents' bed, either singing to myself or to the soundtrack of (technologically: this was pre CD. I must be remembering singing to myself, or perhaps bedside radio? Alarm clock radio?) Ian Moss' "Tucker's Daughter". It's a pretty good song, although, as I get older, I'm more fascinated by and unable to make An Politic judgement on the structure of the song, the implications of the cotton worker:boss' daughter narrative *when explictly Australian* and bearing in mind musicians, esp blues musicians, were less insular than most Australians in 1989.
This song is linked in my head with Fleetwood Mac, and the Black Sorrows, and, hilariously, with "Dem Bones", because whenver it was (under the age of 5) I first encountered "Dem Bones", I kept thinking about "slap my knee bones to the ground". And I'm quite sure that the use of "knee bones" is meant to invoke that <1928 spiritual despite being a composition of Australian white guys in the 80s. I am... discomfited. But the longer I, as an adult, am discomfited, the longer I remember bopping - I think I even remember being in nappies - in the sunlight, by my parents' bed, slap my kneebones to the ground.

What's the most beautiful song lyric you've ever heard?
What an odd question. The most beautiful arrangements of words in sequence I have read are poetry; the most beautiful phrases of music I have heard are instrumental. And i say this as a noted enjoyer of songs with vocals. I did not expect to be so stumped.

I have considered this, and, aside from the obvious answer that song lyrics are just mediocre poetry without their matched tunes, I think... I cannot think of a 1-2 line grab *without its context*, lyrical and musical, which would be worth caling particularly beautiful. Unless they were a pre-existing poem set to music, perhaps.

I have triple checked: I checked The Whitlams (look, "truth, beauty, and a picture of you" is a a pretty good line, and if you'd rather be horny for the concept of Sydney, there's "love this city for its body and not its brain"); I checked several of my favourite hymns. In news which deeply betrays my inner teen, no favoutite of mine I tapped seemed lyrically more *beautiful* than straight up - and preferably formal, metrical - poetry. I'm sorry, Teen Me, for what has become of me.

If you could choose any band/artist to cover any song, which combination would you pick?

Oh, that's easy. I want Harry Styles and Stevie Nicks to perform Leather and Lace. I don't know that that counts as a cover, since it's a Stevie song, and I want it done live. But I SPECIFICALLY, and unachievably, want Stevie to sing Leather to Harry's Lace. We know Harry can meet Stevie's range, because of their Landslide duet; and Stevie could cover Don Henley in her fucking sleep.

What's the best concert you've ever attended?
I attend very few concerts, which means the ones I do attend, I usually have a deep prior investment in. But NOT SO "Back In Black", at least the first time I saw them. I did not even know they were an AC:DC cover band! I turned up because there was a misc event on the geneva "we were a lesbian anglophone group but we had to stop being lesbian-specific so we made up a silly name" social forum, where a vague acquaintance had described the event as an "all woman rock group" who deserved support.

I turned up to the address. It was British-style pub. I located the venue (downstairs). I located the dykes. The dykes seemed confused, and deflated. The one dyke I recognised was hot, and I desired her approval, but: I looked upon the stage, and realised the bad was an ACDC cover band. The dykes (European, through no fault of their own) had not heard of ACDC.

By end of the night, I was second row from the front, bopping amongst the badly-dressed British men. One remarked upon the fact that I, a Young Lady, knew all the words to "Shook Me All Night Long". I, baffled: uh. It's a national obligation.

I ALSO encountered some Accadacca that Australian radio had never introduced me to: specifically, "Whole lottta Rosie". And I listened to the swears-allowed non-conglomerate rock station, too!

At the end of the night, after the encore, I turned to my fate-assigned British Man companion, and said: but they didn't do Long Way To the Top???

And that's how I found out that no one outside Australia got Long Way To the Top on their AC/DC albums.

I attended another Back In Black concert at the same venue a year or so later, and I don't remember much about it except that the cover-band-driving-persona, a tiny blonde woman with an alarming devotion to Malcolm Young, spat fake blood on me, and my then-partner did not appreciate why this was great news. Not to worry: we broke up and I continued attending Back In Black gigs.

---

The main thing we learn from this is that I would be able to answer question sets more concisely if I:

- prioritised current music

and/or

- cared less about valuations like "best" and what kind of valuation scale they imply

Herewith, some things I have listened to.

Music:



Something I said about how "You say you didn't wish you were a boy growing up, but you're transmasc??" is a weird question for me (look, none of the boys with my personality traits seemed to be having any fun in rural Australian either) caused Shiny to play this for me.

I also purchased and am enjoying Cub Sport's Like Nirvana, on the recommendation of Jules from AusGothic podcast. I like their work a lot, but not enough to buy their more recent albumn "Jesus at the Gay Bar". If I never see that poem again it will be too soon.

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Audio Fiction:

At some point in April I listened to, and enjoyed vr much, the audiobook of The Eyre Affair. A+ comfort re-read, delightful narration.

Beck's Pest Control and the Case of the Drag Show Downer, by Abra Staffin-Weiner, at Podcastle. Lovely little urban-haunting detective type piece.

Rusty Quill Gaming: Finally finished the whole five seasons. I've still got some specials to go back and fill in - the last special arc I listened to was the "Thanes of Beowulf" one, which was not as cringey as I thought it might be and had some amusing "oh, you have read the original" jokes (but haven't studied it, there were some really obvious missed opportunities that anyone who'd spent more than a week on Beowulf at any point since 2000, maybe earlier, would have siezed on).

Non-fiction audio: I'm going to chunk these up by podcast rather than episode. Some things I've enjoyed lately.

ABC Radio National, The History Listen with Kirsty Melville. I don't listen to every single episode, but I was recommended the one on aquariums with John Simmons. Who I have never met, but had HEARD of: the elusive Fourth Medieval John of Sydney (but not USyd). I loved the piece on the Green Mountain Plane Crash; and this one on the history of vegetarianism in Australia. Most recently they've re-run a fantastic two-parter, Through Samurai Eyes, about a ship of convict mutineers from Tasmania who washed ashore on a Japanese island in 1830. The story itself is great, and across the two episodes the details are FASCINATING: a mix of local Takushima prefecture researchers, one British expat who got curious, and the biographer of the convict William Swallow managed to piece together the links between the Japanese records of the encounter, and the trial records of Swallow and his companions, eventually vindicating Swallow's claim (largely disbelieved by modern historians) to have visited Japan.

The Dollop, live episode 208, The Australian Sex Philosopher. I haven't loved the other episodes I've tried, but I found this one fascinating enough that I'll keep trying. William James Chidley was a weird, weird man. Kind of low-budget sexologist crossed with Danny Lim. Wandered around town in a short toga, handing out his unhinged tracts on how to have "natural" sex. Big believer in vaginal suction, apparently.

Well, There's Your Problem: A Podcast About Engineering Disasters. The episodes are very long and chatty. Some of them I don't really remember the actual engineering content, just the banter. I started with the one on Berlin Brandenburg Airport, and I also enjoyed the Great Yarmouth Suspension Bridge. HH Holmes and his murder castle was pretty good, too.

Jo's Boys: A Little Women Podcast. I obsessively listen to this, although I also frequently seethe because Peyton Thomas does not know enough about 19th c Protestantism (no, the reason the Christmas play scene got the book banned by the Sunday School society wasn't crossdressing - it was objection to theatre in all its forms), and occasionally misremembers the book itself. Also, I am not here for Mr Bhaer slander!

Still listening to, and vr much enjoying the latest season of, The Loremen. The minisode with one story from Japan and several from Alisdair's tour locations is great - the spooky cat story from Chris' holiday in Japan especially.

There's more! But I fight completionism, and go forth to view light shows instead.

I got a significant chunk through this post and then pressed rong button. Eurgh. At any rate. I'm back at work as of today, and yet, I barely got the urgent emails dealt with. Not because they took 8hrs, but for lack of Cope. I did, however, revisit the conference paper I nearly finished in December, and delete a chunk of not-strictly-necessary waffle. I think I need to completely restart it, AGAIN, to fit everything in, though.

My minor win was fighting off the combo jetlag/despair that wanted to go to bed at 6pm, and eating dinner and sitting down to make A Post. Therefore, I shall repeat what I had drafted and keep going.

---

Music:

Most notably, I bought, with an itunes voucher I swapped my sister (she'd been given it but doesn't use itunes - crap, I just remembered I was given an AUD gift-visa card, for a modest amount, that I forgot to use, too. I can probably use it online), an album by Kate Nyx. You may recall Nyx from last Listening Post, her song 'Bean's gotta scream' feat. Winslow the Cat. These days Nyx does sort of caberet-type stuff I think? But the Sage and Silver Bullet's album is sorta Americanah. I particularly liked, for its 'huh, that's a neat literary device' value, this song using the 'curse of Eve' to refract a meditation on disordered eating:



Other musical observations:

1. Having finally read Niko Stratis on the queerness of Green Day, I bought and re-listened to American Idiot. I can report that I had never noticed the line about "faggot America". I had always heard /fag end/ America. I understood this to be a classed reference vis a vis the smoking habits of the "rednecks" in the next line - like, the speaker, a fag end, was cast off even by the "redneck agenda" of the next line. But no. Huh.

2. Partner introduced me to the defunct Melbourne outfit 'The Jane Austen Argument', who are basically the Whitlams crossed with Amanda Palmer, but not, AFAIK, arseholes. Reminiscent of The Indelicates (to whom I finally forcibly exposed Partner). NB esp kayloulee: when seeking replacements for AP in our respective shuffles, we did not find this group but we ought to have.

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Audio Fiction:

Ben Aaronovitch, False Value: powered through in the last few days before flying out. Frankly disappointed with the opening dramatic-irony ploy. Remains worth it for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's narration.

Rusty Quill Gaming: I'm up to episode 52, past the Inception plot ploy. I particularly enjoyed Bertie's side quest. Listened to some episodes with Shiny in Sydney - particularly Mr Ceiling, one of Shiny's favourites. I enjoyed Mr Ceiling as a character, but no single episode really stands out. I enjoy RQG because, by and large, I don't NEED to pay close attention to entire episodes ("Everything's Fine" being a startling exception).

---

Other Audio:

I cannot possibly be comprehensive here, so, some highlights:

Contemporary Misc:

How airlines quietly became banks, a YouTube piece recommended by Siderea.

Still plodding through the RTS / SRF news from Switzerland, supplemented with SBS German, and the occasional Radio France and Deutsch Welle learner news podcasts

ABC 'Conversations' with Sue Ellen Kusher, whose father was a (domestic) spy. Parents recommended it, and it is actually pretty damn fascinating.

Queer Misc:

Queersplaining - conversation episode Choose To Live with someone named Eli, whose surname either wasn't mentioned or I didn't gather it. Eli is an apostate from Islam, and the episode is about grief and trauma - due to Eli's background it was SUPER relevant to my specific brand of Queer Angst, but there's a lot of time devoted to "processing this whole pandemic thing: ugh", Unprecedented Times, and other varietes of no-specific-big-bang-moments-but-everything-sucks trauma. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I continued to binge Gender Reveal right up until a few days before Xmas Eve, whereupon I abruptly switched to Ben Aaronovitch because there's only so much Gender a gal can take in December. Still excellent stuff. A sticker arrived in the mail for me, purchased by Partner (aka Shiny) and long in the mail, saying "Gender is a shitty group project", which I 100% wholeheartedly believe to be a more accurate description than either "gender is performative" or "gender is a social construct". If I had my way we'd redo gender theory from about 1995 onwards via Bourdeiu, but I do not have my way, etc.

QueerLit by Lena Matthias - I particularly appreciated the episode on Queer pets. TL,DR, very academic literary scholar type stuff. But good.

History and such:

The Loremen podcast as a whole. All of it. Some bits I love more than others but the standard deviation of my love for it is small. I know I listen to certain episodes and think YES, CLASSIC; but a few days later I can't separate them from the general background of excellence. Mostly 16th-19th c local history and folklore. Both hosts are comedians, many puns.

Forgotten Australia, The Plague Returns Part One and Part Two. Part Three pending. Michael Murray follows the bubonic plague through Sydney, 1902, with particular attention to a. the pollution of the river bays (with offal from the Glebe Island slaughterhouse, eww) and b. the staging of Ben Hur at Her Majesty's Theatre. Murray is often frustratingly apolitical, to the point of lacking *analysis*, but in this case I think his restrained quips about contemporary resonances (I thought I was so clever for thinking of a rats/RATs joke... but Murray had a three part episode devoted to it) and political buck-passing works well. And as ever his archival work is both meticulous and vivid. I'm shaky on my historiographical trends, but I'm pretty sure Murray's methods owe something to both the Annales school and the sub-Ginsberg tradition of microhistory. (Psst monksandbones if you're ever bored, I'd love to know your take on this podcast. Either start with the plague episodes, or if you want to steer well clear of pandemic vibes, there were some good ones on minor seafaring Drama that I noted back in 2020)

I... think that's it. Quite a few other things I got halfway through and vagued out, but these are the things that stuck.

Please accept this offering of Weekend Listening Post.

Music: Hmm. Nothing revelatory. I picked up, with my habit-reward-budget, a couple of CN Lester (better known as the author of 'Trans Like Me')'s albums. I haven't glommed onto any track yet, but the albums are nice background noise.



Podcasts:

Audio Fiction: Since last post, I...

Finished the first four Anne books via Radio Canada's Oh!Dio app. They were good! I feel like my French improved quite a bit!

Listened to a bunch of Megan Arkenberg short stories: Lessons from a Clockwork Queen at Glittership; All the King's Monsters at Clarkesworld; A City of Kites and Crows at Glittership.

Plus listened to a couple of other short stories: In September by Aimee Ogden, at Podcastle; and Tiger lawyer gets it right by Sarah Gailey, at Escape Pod.

Various news and current affairs: After finishing the Anne books I made a solid stab at more FR and DE listening. So far I'm enjoying:

A couple of RTS (swiss public radio) streams - Le Journal Horaire, most mornings (often it's the last update from the previous night, but never mind that); random short news or discussions from 'Le 12h30' and 'Forum: Le 1iere'. One of the latter does a periodic 'revue de presse Allemanique', which is useful for...

SRF (swiss public radio, German) 'Heute-Morgen'. I actually find i can understand most of this! My class level is just at the beginning of B1, but I find this _much_ easier to understand than I did even 'français facile' from RadioFrance when I first arrived in Geneva. Unsure if it's because my aural skills are much stronger due to immersion, or something about Francophones having way too high standards.

Possibly the latter, because I'm ALSO listening to a couple of German easy-German news podcasts, and one of them, the one from Deustsche Welle, is actually *too slow* for me; for comparison, I'm also occasionally listening to RadioFrance's 'journal en Français Facile' and, like, yeah, it's not pushing my comprehension skills but it's still work.

SBS Australia's 'wir sprechen Deutsch' podcast, which does a mix of news and discursive episodes. Doesn't explicitly say it's for learners, but I'd guess that high school and university students make up a chunk of the audience. In terms of the details covered in the discursive episodes it's got to be B2 level, but I'm finding it pretty easy to follow. And useful! I could now talk about the premier of NSW and the Prime Minister, separately, if I needed to! (The premier is Minister Präesidentin, while the PM is Premier Minister; the Chief Minister of the ACT is just 'Chief Minister' in a German accent because fuck it. I look forward to the day they need to talk about Governors and Governors-General).

Discursive Podcasts:

Productivity Alchemy by Kevin Sonney with Ursula Vernon. Okay so I put this on for showering background noise (I've figured out that I'm less likely to lose time if I have noises on for the morning food / meds / shower / cat / dress / minor chores routines), having done so a couple of times before, but instead of just puttering around I got FUCKING OBSESSED i'm binge-listening to it now. The episode I happened to land on had a whole preface talking about Ursula's one-year-post-diagnosis ADHD coping mechanisms and it was really cool and affirming (I actually noped out of the rest of that episode, because military interviewee). And then I went back to 137 where she got diagnosed, and have been alternating March 2020> with recent stuff. The March 2020 experience is wild, because useful (if also enviable- damn you Ursula with your simple meds process!) ADHD content, but like, the interviewees, even the one who was a doctor, were just... way too optimistic about the pandemic prospects, huh? And I've now gone back to episode 1>, where they didn't KNOW Ursula was diagnosed but were trying to figure out an organisational strategy that might work for her (none of them do, but the ways they fail are interesting).
This is so great! Affirming neurodivergent content! Nerd background noise! Mostly fascinating interviewees, too. I think listening to Kevin nerd out played a part in finally galvanising me into starting a Data Oriented subproject. And listening to many many interviewees bang on about reviewing your progress prompted me to, er, review my week and write a list of hanging threads on Friday. Hooray!

I have listened to some others (Two Bi guys, and... some other stuff, gendery, I think?) but I gotta go do a thing now. No more content for today, no links today, but hey, you get Listening Post, at least.

Post-vaccine blergh seems to have peaked last night: I felt a bit feverish and couldn't sleep until past midnight, and then this morning after feeding both His Whiskers and myself I went back to bed and had some truly wild dreams - ones in which I knew I was sick and needed water, but couldn't call for help, and kept trying to crawl through increasingly weird landscapes to a fridge, and so on. Eventually I did wake up and called Shiny to have them witness me walking to an actual fridge and drinking actual water and taking actual painkillers. Took a while after that for me to get myself together enough to shower and go out and restock painkillers, and I thought I was better by the time I did. But after eating lunch I turned my ankle stepping into the road, went splat, staggered into a tram, managed not to collapse, and came home and went to sleep again.

Woke up with an inexplicable desire to watch football, which might be a side effect or might be a sign that I'm finally - 18 months into the pandemic - getting lonely.

Listening Post will be short, on account of said desire to watch football.

Short and Serial fiction podcasts:

Enjoyed the short bonus episode from Starship Iris, Cultural Enrichment, in which a Dwornian soap opera is watched.

I'm seven episodes into S3 of Unwell, and loving it; can no longer decide WHAT I think about the old man in the woods, am very concerned about Dotty, it's great.

From Podcastle: Once and Future by Dan Mickelthwaite

From EscapePod:Report of Dr Hollowmas on the Incident at Jackrabbit Five, by T. Kingfisher. This one is just *perfect* in oral delivery.

Classic / longer fiction:

I finally finished Paradise Lost via Anthony Oliveira's podcast. I'm keeping up my patreon sub for now, but I doubt I will continue on with Paradise Regained, and certainly not into the gospel of Mark.

I'm over halfway through Anne... la maison aux pignons verts, in the RadioCanada audiobook. Delighted to see that Anne of Avonlea is up there, too. That's my sick leave time sorted...

Discursive podcasts and other links will have to wait, I am going to watch An Sport.

Music:

Bethel Steele has failed to grab me, although continues to be pleasant background noise. Meanwhile, I bought Rhiannon Giddens' (formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops) new album sight unseen, and... I don't know what I expected but it's not that! It's GOOD, but it's not country - a fascinating mix of celtic, classical/operatic, blues, all sorts of things. The common thread is laments - loss of place and loss of people.

The album closes with one of the loveliest versions of Amazing Grace I've ever heard:

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Podcasts:

Not much, of late - more Paradise Lost, another episode of Unwell.

Plus, via the Lightspeed Magazine podcast, Persephone of the Crows. A good story.

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Links, Miscellaneous:

Peter Kurth (Salon, 1999), "The Trouble with Normal" by Michael Warner. Review / synthesis of some queer theory I've not read but which had me punching the air going 'yes, this'.

Beth Nguyen (The New Yorker), America ruined my name for me: so I chose a new one

Mellissa Febos (NYT), Prologue to "Girlhood". (CN: needles, drug use)

Charmaine Chua (own blog), Slow Boat to China, The quiet port is logistics' nightmare and Landlessness and the life of seamen. Three episodes in an old blog series about the authors' anthropological research as an observer on a mega container ship.

Frida Damani (Jeune Afrique), Tunisie : « Michel Foucault n’était pas pédophile, mais il était séduit par les jeunes éphèbes ». To find this investigative piece, which debunks Sorman's claim by checking with the residents of Sidi Bou Saïd (TL;DR Foucault certainly slept with young people, but older teenage boys who were absolutely considered adults by their society. Yes, orientalist sex tourism; no, not pedophilia) I had to read this piece in Lundi Matin (in English), which is justifiably critical of Sorman but also, like, thinks that people taking the Foucault accusations seriously is because of #metoo and a culture of excessive victim-believing? When the whole point of the Jeune Afrique piece is that no victims, or any North Africans at all have made this claim.

Patrick McKenzie (own site), Falsehoods Programmers believe about names. I've read this before, and perhaps so have you, but it's always good for a re-visit.

Ed Cumming (The Guardian), Catterpillar wars. I don't usually repost links to current affairs, but this whole Colin the Catterpillar thing was SO BIZARRE, and the article is amusing.

Gareth Millward (AHA Perspectives), Vaccine hesitancy is a 21-century phenomenon. Not because no one had reservations, but because until eradication became the goal, a small number of avoidant people didn't need persuading - time was better spent on increasing *access* for those who struggled to prioritise vaccination.

Robbins Libraries / Margaret Sheble, Reclaiming the death of a beautiful woman: a digital exhibit on women's art of the Lady of Shallot.

breathedout Many endings can be happy, you know?. Big mood.

Mark Mazower (TLS), Revolutionary reckonings: Greek independence, 1821 and the historians. I do not know enough about Greek independence, clearly!

Jeffrey Wasserstrom (TLS), The Good China Story? Literature as a nation’s lifeblood. Review of multiple books, and a sort of stock-taking of a the current moment in Chinese (domestic and diaspora) literature. Fascinating. I also don't know enough about early 20th c Chinese revolutionary movements.

I stayed up far too late the other night bookmarking artists mentioned in the CountryQueer article Your Guide to The Butches of Queer Country (and the earlier piece Trans Country Artists You Need To Know, which I started some time ago and got hung up on Namoli Brennet).

First one I abitrarily pulled up on Spotify was Catherine the Great, not least because her hair looks like mine did when it was short-but-below-ears, and I am fascinated by the idea that that hairstyle could work with a soft butch aesthetic. Anyway, I love her already! She has a song called 'Eat the rich for Christmas' that assures you it's 'better for the planet than veganism'!

I bought her album 'Jigsaw Puzzles and Pink Wine', and am loving it. She doesn't seem to have any pro music videos, so I recommend this one, NOT on the album



Side note: I spend enough time overlapping with trans twitter that it's slightly jarring to see the phrase "girls like us" NOT used to describe being trans femme, but I'm pretty sure that's not the intent here. Strongly suspect the song itself is transferrable, but not Catherine the Great's self-articulation, AFAIK.

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Podcasts and spoken media

Fiction:

As per last week's reading post, Lightspeed Magazine Podcast's recording of The mathematics of fairyland by Phoebe Barton. I'm a little so-so on the story but the recording is great.

Unwell s3 launched. I'm weirdly leery of starting - the emotional commitment of a New Series! But I bit the bullet and loved S3E01. I now know how my favourite ghost died!

I was caught up on Starship Iris, although I think another episode came out. I was unsure about how it would fare in the second season, and I'm not yet sure if the plot will be as tight, but the characters remain compelling.

Non-fiction:

The Spouter Inn: I enjoyed the special episode with Irina Dumitrescu on food writing; and the episode on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was interesting.

I listened to Natasha Simonova's lecture Seven Habits of Highly Effective Bluestockings, which was a keynote for a conference on 'habit' that's now on YouTube. I don't know much about the 18th c Bluestockings per se - my sense of identification with bluestocking-ness is anchored in the 19thc, in the term's use as a catch-all dismissal for women's intellectual pursuits. But clearly I SHOULD know more!

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Some links:

Rafia Zakaria (The Baffler), Death in the Mango Orchard: a book review, of sorts, of Sonia Faliero's The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, a true crime investigatory about a double murder in rural Uttar Pradesh. Also serves as a thoughtful overview of the stakes in this particular crime. I would, however, have liked a little more interrogation of what Faliero's racial background (not Indian, afaik, and neither Hindu nor Muslim) did to shape her reception in the village / the end result of her book.

Alice Robinson (Meanjin blog), What I'm reading. Interesting reflections on children's lit here.

Jamie Hood (The New Inquiry), Fucking Like A Housewife. I talked about this one in the preamble to the reading post last week.

Gernsbacher, M. A., & Yergeau, M. (2019). Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 7(1), 102-118.

Carol Lefevre (Meanjin Winter 2020), Silence and Light. one of the things my Meanjin subscription has brought into my life that I would never have sought out is art criticsm, and this is one of the pieces I am grateful for.

Toby Fitch (Meanjin Winter 2020), Endlings: a sort of essay-poem on extinctions.

Alexis Wright (Meanjin Winter 2020), A Self-Governing Literature. Gosh everything Alexis Wright writes is so good. This piece is a lightly edited version of an address given at a conference on literature of 'the Global South', which explains why mid-essay she turns to interrogating that concept.

Randa Jarrar (Bitch Media 2018), Neither Slave Nor Pharoah: finding the divine in BDSM. This one is as much about race, religion and heritage as it is about BDSM and gender. Do recommend.

Jillian L. Martinez (US Figure Skating News), Eliot Halverson challenges gender norms. Halverson, now a coach, used to compete (in men's competions, I think?), retired due to homophobic pressure, and is now a coach and choreographer.

Ruth Madievsky (Guernica), Girls on the Playground. This is a pretty intense retrospective on the author's experience of child sexual assault.

Chelsea Voulgares (Electric Lit), Can a revenge movie succeed without violence? I'm reading a fair bit about rape revenge movies right now, but this piece-a review of 'Promising Young Woman' is what actually articulated for me why people watch the genre (which I do not wish to watch myself).