Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Music: Continuing my adventures in queer country, I'm still very much loving Clyde Petersen with Your Heart Breaks, 'Drone Butch Blues'. I also bought Bethel Steele, 'Of Love and Whiskey', which is good background noise but no particular song has grabbed me yet.

Podcasts / Youtube:

Fiction:

Further progress on Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve have received their eviction notice.

Ken Liu, An Advanced Reader's Picture Book of Cognition, Escape Pod recording. Listened to this with Shiny and Metamour. Described it as 'some of the rare hard sci-fi I like'. Mr Trains, conversely, described it as 'designed to appeal to female sci-fi fans'. Shiny cried at it. My efforts to recommend not distressing fiction are going well, as you can see.

Discussion, Lit, etc:

Julia Ftatek (Romancing the Gothics Youtube class), Byron, Manfred and the Transgender Self. I love how Ftatek navigates historicity and trans readings.

Ian Burrows (A Bit Lit - both podcast and youtube), Shakespeare for Snowflakes, in conversation with Emma Whipday.

Academic Events / Round Tables / Etc:

A talk from UCD that I can't remember the title of, on researching distressing topics. Mostly about doing oral history, but very interesting.

Part two of the Shakespeare, Race and Queer Sexuality series from Lafeyette College, a conversation between Simone Chess and actor Skyler Cooper. I really loved the way Cooper talked about gender in general, and especially about Shakespeare as a site for gender exploration for him - although he put that down to 'he writes *human* stories', very bardolatory, which I find unsatisfactory. (I need to catch up on part one)

Sex, Rage and Change: Feminist Adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, from the Classical Reception Studies Network and the University of the South in Sewanee - Stephanie McCarter (academic translator), Paisley Rekdal (poet) and Nina Maclaughlin (short stories) in conversation. Sadly no public video after the event.

The latter two really threw my sleep cycle out this week, but were totally worth it. Although it was annoying that I only discovered AFTER opening the link to the Skyler Cooper one that it wasn't a YouTube livestream, it was an unlisted recording, despite the program having a time on it. Could've watched it the next morning...

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Some links, of many links I have backed up:

Sophie Lewis (Nplusone Magazine), My Octopus Girlfriend: On Erotophobia. Remember the twitter Discourse about the sexy octopus? I never even saw the original tweet. This is by the woman who had got high, watched a documentary, and described the relationship between a guy and an octopus as erotic. It's a very good analysis of, amongst other things, the documentary My Octopus Teacher; the backlash to her tweets; and porous boundaries of concepts like sex and eroticism. Also it includes the line 'who among us can be sure that we have not had sex with an octopus?'

Kristin Hussey (Kopenhagen museum of medicine), Saving the sunshine: health, chronobiology and daylight saving time. On the origins of daylight saving time (nothing to do with cows).

Esther Anatolis (Meanjin, Winter 2020), The long tail of the Bauhaus. Meanjin sometimes runs interesting articles on urban planning and design, and this is one of them.

Karen O'Connel (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Inheriting Hunger. On food, love, and intergenerational trauma.

Muhunnad Al-wehwah (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Mixtape, Side A: on cassette tapes used to record and send messages between Australia and Palestine.

Claire G. Coleman (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Hidden in plain sight: on discovering her grandfather was Indigenous, and the 'Hidden Generation' of those who, like her father, grew up unaware that one parent was Indigenous (a tactic that saved them from removal by the government of the day).

Daniel Nour (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Mamas boy. On growing up as an Arab-Australian man.

Sarah Sasson (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Attachment. Every so often Meanjin publishes pieces on traumatic birth, miscarriage, and other fertility related issues. This is a traumatic birth one. Very striking, in a lot of ways. Not least because Sasson brushes so quickly over the part where she was traumatised and her husband complained he was 'ruining the happiest day of [his] life'. Inexplicably, she does not seem to have yeeted him into the sun right then or at any time since.

Matilda Dixon-Smith (Meanjin, Winter 2020), Taking female queerness from subtext to text: review of Laura McPhee-Brown, Cherry Beach. Weird stance to take that there isn't non-subtextual f-queer lit out there? But convinced me to add Cherry Beach to my list.

Ben Eltham, The Class of Culture: a rather sceptical review of Brook, O'Brien and Taylor, Culture is Bad For You that both summarises said book's apparently quite interesting proposition and then pokes some holes in it in interesting ways.

Matthew Wills (JStor Daily), The Bluestockings

Xanthe Mallet (The Conversation AU), Cultural Misogyny, and why men's aggression to women is so often expressed through sex.

Paulina Bren (LitHub), How the Barbizon gave Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion freedom and autonomy. This essay, extracted from Bren's book on the Barbizon, doesn't quite... work as an extract (assumes too much background knowledge) and doesn't actually do what the title says it does but it IS interesting and I am interested in the book from which it comes.

Tom Woodhouse (The MERL blog), The Tractor Whisperers: my favourite April Fool this year.

Christina Forgarasi (Public Books), Empathy beyond therapy: a review of Sigrid Nunez's latest, that linked me to a few other interesting reads.

Tom Geoghegan (BBC, 2013), Why do so many Americans live in mobile homes?. Something on Twitter made me realise that when Americans talk about mobile homes / trailer parks, they don't just mean Caravans and RVs (which I would also call caravans). So I read this article about them.

Merve Emre (LARB), Critical Love Studies. A response and homage to Sam See.

Done yesterday:
- assembled a plant stand and installed the trailing petunias (which, like everything else except the rosemary, was not coping with the direct sun on the balcony rail - although it doesn't really get more than 6hrs, it's clearly Too Direct and Too Strong for a lot of my plants, even ones that should love that) and one pot of basil and one of mint.
- 2 hr coworking session via zoom, which i administered. Notetaking, reading.
- Called Shiny for what I expected to be an hour or so catch up in which I showed them my FURNITURE and caught upon their work drama. Ended up being about 4 hours, including me telling them all about current research reading both medieval (romance of the rose) and contemporary (theories of censorship), and assorted D&M social-personal navel gazing on both our parts.
- spent the evening drafting and posting the long thread about Garth Greenwell's Chaucer references

Done today:
- Dithered, then went to the shop. Aimed to acquire a plant pot, coathangers, and extension leads. Acquired those, and also bread, hair mousse, wine, lip balm, a lid for the frying pan, polenta in a tube, panacotta, milk, chicken, dried tarragon, frozen potato balls with cheese, ice cream, and a whole nother plant. No pot for said plant, all the correct size ones sold out.
- Came home to mail: a book i'd ordered (the one in the accidental Karen-ing earlier this week), a book for review, and mail from Ms10.
- Read two pomodoro's worth of the book I had ordered, and one of a secondary source I've been working on for a while
- Reorganised the balcony and vaccuumed both it and the dining room. Washed the balcony ledges.
- Made tarragon chicken tray bake
- Meditation
- email triage. Didn't struggle TOO long with ... it's some kind of dysregulated emotional response to emails esp since I can't see people in person to run ideas past them. Emails kick the "I HAVE DONE SOMETHING WRONG" button and then swiss brusqueness makes it worse.
- Actually managed to listen to some podcats without getting TOO distracted.

I am about to go and do more of that, in fact. Ideally I will also do my day's Duolingo BEFORE bed, and leave the phone on the dresser instead of in bed with me.

I am feeling pretty good about everything. This may be because now I have FURNITURE.

Done Saturday:
* Some chores
* Called Shiny, as per yesterday's filtered post
* Good Omens readthrough with wildeabandon et al. Very fun! Very good people! Also I enjoyed being the stage directions. I'm considering asking to give up my MC slot next time in favour of God or more stage directions, actually...
* Ordered a hard copy of The Mercies, b/c no kobo aus. Also a plastic file folder, to meet the free shipping level, and to store my swiss papers in.
* I think I ate leftovers for dinner and more listening to 'What Belongs To You'? Not sure, tbh.
The DW reading post happened in there somewhere, at least.

Done Sunday:
* Called brother, had a nice catch up. He's doing... better. There was, like, 50% less bitching about his phd-holding colleagues, which was nice vis a vis less bitching and also vis a vis amount of times it seems I'm expected to explain what a PhD is for anyway. He had anticipated what I was calling to inform him of, vis, that I might not make it to his wedding.
* Called mum to inform her of same fact. Predictably she took it worse than brother, but not BADLY per se. She was the one who was like "will you be upset if they don't postpone for you?" Me:.. no. I am the last person you should postpone a wedding for.
* Meditation
* Washed the bathroom floor
* Probably some other stuff but blowed if I know what.
* 1 (one) scary email
* More Greenwell, some Penumbra. Some colouring-in.
* Made roast eggplant with spinach and pine nut pilaf.
* ACTUALLY attended german class, despite the reminder not going off on my phone.

Done Monday:
* Groceries. 150 chf worth, + 20chf in boquet and pot flowers. The latter are an indulgence; the former... THREE TIMES AS MUCH as I spent in Geneva, idek. Almost too much to carry. The flowers were a mixed bunch though and I'm pretty pleased. The pot were... small and purple.
* Made toasted sandwiches with egg, Jack M's banana ketchup, capsicum and cheese. Could have used some pineapple (*ducks*).
* Ordered online some egg rings (a set, one round and three fun shapes) and egg poaching dodads, fed up with my egg-frying experience.
* Read more of Solga
* Laundry - hung in the hangy room because someone was using the tumble dryer. Found some teatowels of mine, i guess I had dropped them and someone put them in the hangyroom?
* Did TWO pomodoros on phd>book, although the second turned out to be more COMMode related.
* Placed another Betterworld order
* Happy Hour with KHC and the drummer. Got deets of KHC's hairdresser in Fribourg; have booked for June 19.
* Cut up some more cardboard and fed it into the cardboard recylcing bin's tiny mouth.
* Got notif from régie that I can expect delivery of my free planters tomorrow (plants to follow soon). Pleased to report I could understand the gist of the letter in German without google translate.
* Previewed some docs for MF
* Et dinner, same as yesterday except cold and now with feta cheese.
* Am making this post.

I am having an ongoing problem with my google calendar. I put all my everything in it. After forgetting German a lot I went into iphone settings and told it to notify me 10 min beforehand. It does this for most other things, but not German classes, so far. Why, I cannot tell. I reinstalled iCal, synced to Gcal, and told it to give me notifications; it did not notify me about happy hour with KHC (although gcal desktop did), but that might be because not enough time to sync. I have gone through my phone and manually disabled 'sound' on almost everything except calendars, since that seems to be the only way to get a BEEP YOU HAVE A THING but not constant beeps. Remains to be seen if this... works.

Project: do not bombard Shiny with chat is going okay.

This has been Pandemic Updates.