highlyeccentric | Entries tagged with podcasts

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:

Watch on YouTube

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.

Watch on YouTube

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

Watch on YouTube

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.

Musically: currently catching up what I missed from Hozier. Big fan of this one:

Watch on YouTube

Assorted, non-exhaustive podcasts and such:

A Rebel on the Bench: ABC Conversations interview with David Heilpern, former magistrate and law reform advocate in a range of areas. Prior to appointment as a magistrate, he wrote a book - THE book, the only systemic survey - on sexual assault of young prisoners. He's very well known for his openness about his workplace PTSD, and for work in drug law reform and alternative sentencing.

The Callover's NAIDOC week episode with Justice Lincoln Crawley, the first Indigenous person appointed to a superior court in Australia. I particularly enjoyed Crawley's description of why he left his post-undergrad public service job within a year: he was bored out of his mind (same, pal), and he wanted to be "a specialist, putting specialist knowledge to work". That really resonated with me.

Jolene's podcast "When a guy has a really f*cked gender", particularly this episode with Alexis, "Femboys in the Factory". The incitating topic is Alexis' article "Femboys in the factory: trans labour beyond abjection", which I have yet to read, but there's a lot of back and forth discussion of Alexis' overall marxist approach to concepts like transmisogyny and who is subject to it. Engages interestingly with Jules Gill-Petersen's history of transmisogyny - including diverging in a few interesting ways.

ABC Listen's "What the Duck", especially this episode on tomato virus history. Featuring government jobs being decided by a boxing match, and pioneering biological research before anyone had seen a virus with a microscope.

Emily Anderson's podcast "Unfinishing", interview with Lorraine Topper about the history of bras, and why Lori abandoned writing a book on bra history.

Kate Lister's Betwixt the Sheets, but particularly one on The origins of the patriarchy and The History of Monogamy. Notably, although the two guests clearly don't share the exact same set of key dates / assumptions, Helen Fisher puts the origins of monogamy *long* before the development of agrarianism; and Saini doesn't fix the origins of the patriarchy with agrarianism at all but with the rise of *cities*. I need to update my feminist anthropology, clearly.

Will Tosh on Bad Gays re Christopher Marlowe. Tosh makes a compelling argument back toward using an author's queer narratives as as good a reason as any to suppose them queer: not because art MUST follow from life, but because the ways Marlowe's texts show a deep investment in thinking around and through problems of gender role and homoeroticism as problems, neither absent from nor unquestioningly accepted in his cultural context. I immediately ordered Tosh' book on Shakespeare on the basis of how he talks about Marlowe.

Gone Medieval, How the Plantaganets Built England

ABC If You're Listening's entire series Who Broke Britain, the first episode of which dropped as the UK election campaign began, and which ended the week after the election itself.

Lena Matteis' Queer Lit, especially This episode "Gendered Bodies and Narrative Form" with Chiara Pellegrini. Having recently finished "Confessions of the Fox", I'm once again particularly annoyed by what seems to be a collective agreement in trans literature that "describing bodies and sex without specifying anything about genitals" is not only tasteful but radical and affirming - knowing that it's not just me having weird luck in books, it's an actual Trend Worth Studying, is useful.

Forgotten Australia, The Birth of the Bodgies: in which Bodgies and Widgies are much more complex (gender-wise, social panic-wise) than a few sentences and a picture in the y 9/10 history book had led me to believe.

And, last and most unexpectedly fascinating, After Dark, The Hidden History of Garden Gnomes

This has been a non-comprehensive list of things I have listened to.

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..

Meanwhile: please accept a musical recommendation

Watch on YouTube

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:

Watch on YouTube

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Recently:

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Solid Dad Book right here.

Backdated Reviews (2021-22)

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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

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

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

Home by Stephanie Alexander

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

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

I recently discovered a podcast called "The Philosophy of Sex", hosted by someone who gives few googleable details about herself, named Caroline. I listened to her interview with Bri Lee and also with Damon Young. I have not read either Lee or Young's books, but I have read their shorter writing and media work, etc. I did not cringe at Caroline's handling of EITHER the criminal-(carceral)-justice focus of Bri Lee OR the queer-kink focus Damon Young has. And, more importantly - given I have cringed at both Lee and Young at different times for wildly different reasons - Caroline's interviewing showed off the best of both of them, or at least the features I consider the most interesting.

Hence, I began with interest her podcast interview with Avgi Saketopoulou, entitled "Sexuality Beyond Consent", concerning the book of that name, full title "Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia"

By traumatophilia, Saketopoulou means the process by which small and large traumas shape our erotic interests. About ten minutes in, I added her book to my tbr. About 40 minutes in, i removed it with strong "I might if it was necessary for academic research but I'm not paid for this anymore" prejudice".

I must stress: until that point, an awful lot of what Saketopoulou had to say resonated with me. She's a therapist: she talks eloquently about how trauma is rarely ever "cured" but can be treated (a phrase she quoted from one of her colleagues: "ghosts become ancestors"). She's interested in taboo, and in the complexity of boundaries. The podcaster, Caroline, was starting to ask her about her idea of "limit consent", shortly before I noped out; certainly Saketopoulou made an eloquent summary of what I find to be Katherine Angel's most compelling point, re the limits of affirmative consent discussed some time ago on here, best chapter reproduced online at Granta.

"Sometimes," says Saketopoulou in this podcast, "We can't know what we want until it is already happening." Note: she does use the positive of want, not the negative; I had to re-listen to check.

For example, says Saketopoulou, this happens in the therapeutic relationship. I am now paraphrasing, but so far quite closely. You can't treat a patient without medical consent to treatment. But consider [paraphrase grows less literal, I am too repelled to reproduce this faithfully] a patient who came to Saketoupoulou, and who by the end of their first meeting was extremely convinced she could benefit from the therapy Saketoupoulou offers. But she was not willing to pay the stipulated fee. She could AFFORD it, Seketoupoulou specifies; but did not wish to pay it. Yet she did not walk out, demanding more time and attention.

So far, so ... actually completely within predictable professional norms, I'd have thought? Not so, Saketoupoulou. Saketoupoulou specifies that the client had not asked her fee, in initial contact. And then moves on to talking about how the client wanted Saketoupoulou to acknowledge that Saketoupoulou had "screwed" her.

... I'm sorry. I can afford no patience for someone who blames the client not asking, rather than saying "my bad, I should've posted my fees online" or "wow, I really didn't train my receptionist properly". You DID screw this client, lady. Granted, you might still encounter that sort of client neediness (eg: person who hoped for fortnightly therapy and has just been told they need biweekly; person who who hoped for concessions you're not willing to give), and if you hadn't already thought about that and developed an Emotional Labour Face for enforcing those boundaries... uh... please talk to your nearest pro sex worker?

In all seriousness, I am deleting this book from my tbr, with prejudice. The described professional scenario is not completely unrelated to sex, but its closest neighbour is abosolutely pro sex work, and I have not known many pro sex workers personally but none of those I do know nor those whose writing I have read would make this careless a conflation between their professional boundaries and the very real risk that someone might commission them to engage in acts that the client can't handle OR with respect to which the client has un-meetable emotional needs.

Also, despite my Australian-ingrained instinct to read her name as racialised, Saketopoulou seems to be Greek, educated at the American College in Greece, and now based in the US, so... no, I don't think I will even gamble on her chances of having a good take on slaveplay (something which the podcast teased early on). I'm not saying I'd EXPECT a Greek Australian to have great takes on that (I acknowledge my prior over-generosity re CS Pacat, Lebanese-Australian) but I might be interested to read, because the way that "off-white" racialised people navigate the racial landscape is interesting... but no, I don't think Saketopoulou is the Greek I'd be looking for. If some American has a review that tackles her work from a race perspective I would read it, but I do not think I will read her book itself unless I am very bored in a library.

This has been: a broad Listening Recommendation for the Philosophy of Sex podcast, and a "don't even bother" anti-rec for Avgi Saketoupoulou.

Been a while since I did one of these, hmm?

Music:

Jolie Holland, Escondida albumA. Jolie appeared on a podcast I was listening to (see below), and some lines from "Old Fashioned Morphine" were quoted and I suddenly remembered knowing her music (or at least this album) very well. Either I had a pirated copy once or K listened to it a lot.

Watch on YouTube

Aysendiz Gokcin, Pink Flloyd Classical Concept. I love me some "things played on genre-inappropriate instruments" covers and this is fantastic. It's not a parody, it's a re-arrangement which really brings out some of the elements of the original - especially the tracks taken from Dark Side of the Moon.

Watch on YouTube

Audio fiction:

The October Man and What Abigail Did That Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch. I really enjoyed the October Man - loved the deep dive into A New Niche Thing (in this case, Rhineland wine production). On the flip side, I might have enjoyed it less but think What Abigail Did That Summer is perhaps a better book. It was a nice change to be in the perspective of someone who rightly mistrusts the metropolitan police, and I'm intrigued by the set-up for Abigail-led content with a different (though lbr not less Problematique) set of authority. I particularly admired the way that, instead of having a single foil to Abigail's brother, we got two characters, and one of them was also a foil to Abigail herself. I like refractions of characterisation through clusters, I suppose.

I've resumed The Magnus Archives, with a couple of episodes from s3 the other night

New podcast discovery: Monstrous Agonies. Conceit: a late night radio segment for the supernatural, with the host taking listener letters for advice (actually listener submitted, so it's a sort of collaborative fiction). I link to episode 77, of which I particularly enjoyed the second letter. The mid-episode ads are great, too.

Kehkashan Khalid, The petticoat government, in Fantasy Magazine

L Chan, Re/union in Clarkesworld. A dutiful daughter attends New Year celebrations with the AI figures of her ancestors

Non-fiction audio:

Loremen Pod, as ever. I particularly enjoyed this week's episode on The Great Bed of Ware

Hakai Magazine, which delivers "Coastal news". It's based in Victoria, BC, so a lot of content from the Puget Sound/Salish Sea kind of area, but by no means exclusively. For instance, I enjoyed this episode, in which we learn that a fake beach was accidentally good for sharks.

The History Listen, by Australian ABC radio. I was fascinated by an episode on the 1930s craze for Hawaiian steel-string guitar in Australia, not least because it made sense of some of the things my grandfather had said about liking "Hawaiian" music in his youth. I wish the episode had explored the racial dynamics a little more - most of the people they spoke about were white, but at one point a white interviewee learned (in Australia, if I recall correctly) from a Maori family - I'd love to know more about that. And about other factors in the makeup of the 4,000 students of Hawaiian guitar in Sydney: apparently a small majority were women, but the episode didn't touch on class, or interaction with employment categories, or much on the Great Depression at all.

Sports Greatest Crimes, a BBC podcast, specifically the sub-series on Shergar the racehorse which is inexplicably hosted by Vanilla Ice.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, hosted by Margaret Killjoy. I particularly loved the two-parter on Isabelle Eberhardt, but I really admired Margaret's historical research work on The Battle of Cable Street, where she starts a decade and change beforehand, looking at labour solidarity between Jewish tailors and Irish dockworkers. One of her key arguments - and she doesn't push it to a "great originary point" line, but it's the stronger for not being over-sensationalised - is that the Irish dockworkers around Cable Street were *particularly* disinclined toward Oswald Moseley's anti-semitic recruiting tactics, not because they were particularly noble, but because a great many of them had in fact grown up in Jewish homes for a few years - because part of the turnabout of solidarity between the two unions had involved two teenage Jewish girls in the 20s organising to take the children of dockworkers into Jewish homes during a prolonged strike. Radical childcare in action!

Betwixt the Sheets, On dick picks: the history. I enjoyed this a lot - it's actually mostly a modern sociological look at dick picks, and the relationship between solicited nudes as part of modern erotic life and the unsolicited dick pic phenomenon. Still, I had some baffled moments listening to two straight cis women talk about dicks, which I should post about in a separate and probably locked post.

Herewith, some things I have listened to.

Music:

Watch on YouTube

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.

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:

Watch on YouTube

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.

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: Since I last made a listening update, quite a bit, actually.

Grace Petrie's Connectivity album, from which I particular enjoy this track:

Watch on YouTube

The (hopefully conscious?!) irony of following this up with 'The Last Man On Earth' is just... *chef's kiss*.

Plus: Ryan Cassata's "Shine" and Muriel Buckley's "Driving in the Dark", both queer sort-of-country music (Cassata leaning pop, Buckley leaning into "Americana"). Both good, neither arresting.

Also I bought and am enjoying The Who's "Who's Next" remastered edition.

On a completely different tack, last night I discovered Winslow, a cat belonging to a singer-burlesquist named Kate Nyx. Winslow is a very good cat, and has released a track with his mama:

Watch on YouTube

Finally, this, which I am saving for when I need to teach the importance of remembering that editorial punctuation can be restricting interpretation:

Watch on YouTube

Podcasts: So many podcasts.

Vaugely Historical:

My current deep binge is The Loremen, with Alasdair Becket-King (comedian who does some good one-man bits on Twitter/YouTube, really long flaming red hair; I recommend his recent sponsored skit playing Dugeons and Dragons with An Actual Dragon) and some other guy, plus guests. Each Loreman takes turns telling the other folkloric and/or just weird tales from "Days of Yore". I cannot possibly recount the fabulous things I have learned, but this morning, I ran late to meet

shadowspar because I was distracted by the tale of Gef the Talking Mongoose, a guest episode of Manx lore in honour of Pierre Novellie, also a commedian, from the island of Man. I enjoyed the obviously-false tale of Brother Jucundus with Amy Gledhill, although I was disappointed that no one noticed his name was a complete giveaway to the falsity. And I actually count the episode on The London Monster as 18th-c cultural research.

Forgotten Australia on Australia's First UFO wave

The Slightly Foxed episode on the Weiner Holocaust Library

Literary/Arty/Cultural

The Slightly Foxed podcast: I enjoyed the episodes on Sybille Bedfod, Angela Carter, Graphic Novels, as well as the Weiner Holocaust Library episode I linked above.

'Footnoting History''s episode on Ivanhoe and medievalist nostalgia

Gender Reveal episodes with several authors and media-makers: particularly notable were Jackie Ess (author of 'Daryl' - she talks about writing from the perspective of a cis man, the ways in which her POV character doesn't, actually, have an uncomplicated gender, writing things that trans readers might be uncomfortable with or cis readers weaponise... good stuff); Zachary Drucker, who I had only heard of before as the producer of Trans Parent and who I think I had assumed was a trans GUY (she is not), and who recently made a mini-series called "The Lady and the Dale" about a (real-life) trans woman con artist in the 70s, again, making some artistic choices other trans people might really not like; and Yeonsoo Julian Kim, who is kickstarting a game (~~with Choiceofgames~~ not with choiceofgames, that was another project) called "Women Are Werewolves", in which you roleplay a nonbinary person in a family of strictly-gender-bound werewolf lineage. I loved the way Kim talks about making painful art - about using storytelling games to offer players a chance to walk through difficult, challenging, issues - either ones directly affecting them, or ones adjacent; or indeed challenges unfamiliar, as a way to develop understanding.

Discursive, Personal Narrative/interviews, Specific Topics:

A lot of other Gender Reveal Episodes. I enjoed the episode with Chase Strangio (trans lawyer for the ACLU); the guy who does Hola Papi whose name I forget right now; some general Q&A episodes (this one was particularly good and Relevant To My Interests); Carta Monir; and Callie Wright, who used to do a queer atheism podcast and now does a queer narrative-based type podcast.

The said Callie Wright's Queersplaining episode with Dallas Hawthorne, on the queer community attitude to masculinity (which Dallas, and apparently Callie (?) understand to be positioned as the WORST thing - something that is not rewarded but seen as outside the queer community, specifically. That's... I have been bugged by some takes on masculinity - gave up on Food4Thot, for instance, because the mix of cis men and trans people who aren't transmasc all sat around talking about how masculinity is bad and even the cis men want to disinvest from it. But I've also liked, say Dejan Jotanovic's take, which boils down to "What is non-toxic masculinty? No clue, because we don't have such a thing under the current cultural wossname". Dallas Hawthorne would NOT like that take, but might be... right, actually, that it's very reductive (and white-centred, now that I think about it). Still. Listening to a transfemme sit down and talk with a trans guy and apparently both kinda... take it as read that masculinity is shunned in the queer community sure was whiplash-inducing off the back of recent Twitter Discourses.

K Andersen's podcast Lost Spaces, an oral history of now-closed queer nightlife. I randomly picked an episode with the artist known variously as Regina Gently/Gentleman Reg about his career shift from bartender and indie folk artist to drag persona and dance music-maker, via the Toronto bar The Beaver. Delightful.

The ABC Australia podcast series "innies and outies", from which I picked and enjoyed one on Coming out in regional Australia

Several more episodes of Two Bi Guys, of which the recent season finale with ABilly S Jones-Hennin and Chris Hennin-Jones was a stand-out.

A few episodes of the BBC podcast NB: My non-binary life, which is honestly a bit shallow but also, like a message from the deep past when the BBC wasn't EXCLUSIVELY a terf-propaganda machine.

A couple more Productivity Alchemy - I particularly enjoyed Scalzi's most recent appearance.

Verbal Shitposting: I listened to a bunch of episods of "Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap" and then abruptly hit maximum intake for that particular group/style of geeks verbally shitposting.

Podcast Fiction:

I've started on Rusty Quill Gaming, having finally realised that it's not high fantasy or alt-medieval, it's alt-19th c. Enjoying it so far.

I listened to precisely two more episodes of the Magnus Archives, slowly edging back into series 3.

Fully up-to-date on Unwell, enjoying Wes' character arc very much

Megan Arkenberg, The Crowgirl, in Nightmare Magazine. I do not normally read horror but I REALLY like Megan Arkenberg, and it was worth it.

Also Megan Arkenberg, The Oracle and the Sea, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Loved it.

I'm still keeping up with daily swiss news in FR/DE, supplemented by Aus news in DE and occasional German-german "langsam" news podcasts.

This has been: a summary of much podcast consumed.

It has been a LONG time since my last audio content post. I no longer remeber every single thing I've listened to. But here's some recommendations:

Non-fiction and Topical Discussion:

Continuing my interest in Two Bi Guys. I particularly enjoyed Bad Bisexuals with Jacob Engelberg; Jane Ward on sex between straight men and the follow-up; and the most recent episode with A Billy S Jones-Hennin and Chris Hennin-Jones.

Various of Productivity Alchemy by Kevin Sonney with Ursula Vernon, although I've definitely over-binged on that one.

The Gender Reveal podcast, from which I particularly enjoyed (links go to transcripts due to website layout): the revised 101 episode; the Cis Day of Visibility episode with Carmen Maria Machado, in which Tuck Woodstock talks with Machado about the existential horror of "having a gendered body"; episode 96B with John Paul Brammer aka Hola!Papi; Episode 82 with Kai Cheng Thom; Episode 62 with Cyrus Dunham; episode 67 with Niko Stratis.

The BBC podcast My Nonbinary Life, from the distant past (2019) when the BBC didn't unilaterally loathe an undermine all trans people. Bit surface-level, but also quite fun.

I returned to the Slightly Foxed podcast, and was pleased in particular with the episode on picnic at hanging rock for making multiple queer boarding school recommendations, and some non-white recommendations, even if the attempt to talk about Australian gothic and colonial anxiety was a bit ham-handed. It's an improvement for Slightly Foxed to even ATTEMPT that.

The Ezra Klein Show interview with Amia Srinivasan, which has a silly title but a really deft take on the "must we politicise our sexuality" question.

The High Theory Podcast episde with Eric Wade (medievalist) on Lust

The Menkind Podcast, starting with the episode with some bloke named Fred Langridge, most notable for having been in a *marbles cooperative* as a child; and followed up by the episode with Jay Hulme, which I enjoyed a surprising amount given my general leeriness of devout religious queer content AND my specific (no seriously, it's faintly ridiculous but it is A Thing) backstory with sexualising gothic architecture.

The LGBTQ&A podcast (I think run by one of the US media franchises?), two interviews with Kate Bornstein, who I continue to adore.

That is not all the things I have been listening to, but you'll have to wait for another night to hear about "shitposting in podcast form" and "podcast fiction". And more non-fiction, even, I've got several less queer podcasts on the go!

Two Bi Guys.

I've been dipping in and out of this podcast in non-linear order and I'm really enjoying it.

I think the first one I listened to was Three trans bi guys, which was just... really sweet and nice. That's all I've got on that one.

Since then I've enjoyed the first episode, and both enjoyed and been ... productively annoyed by the season 3 launch episode. Loved the two parter with Shiri Eisner, bisexual masculinity and bisexual judaism and resistance. Jacob Engelberg was guest host on those, and I followed back and LOVED the episode on Bad bisexuals where he was guest - Yes! These opinions on media, I agree with them!

The interview with Jen Winston, which I listened to tonight: HEARTEYES. Winston is a nonbinary woman, and the way they talk about bisexuality and nonbinary gender being tied up for them? I actually hadn't seen anyone approach it like that before. Eisner talks about their genderqueer status as a given. A lot of other people talk about the connection between nonbinary-ness and bi/pan sexuality in a way that sort of... fronts the gender, making the sexuality a given.

I've been trying to grapple my way to the flip side: that somehow my whole Gender Situation is emergent from my queerness, and specifically from bisexuality, and not really managing to articulate that. I've gravitated back towards pre-butler lesbian theory, like Monique Wittig, as outlined here by Theresa de Lauretis. The whole "lesbians are not women" thing, which I think de Lauretis is right, was misrepresented by Butler (but I haven't read Wittig in depth in the original French so I can't swear to that). And yet, I'm grappling with the fact that ... I still will not rule out dating men. I came so very very close to drawing that line in the sand, and then I met Shiny (trans man/genderqueer/etc), but also Metamour - who is frequently annoying in ways that I associate with straight men, but also in ways that I am annoying, and... yeah. Nah. Queer men can stay, even the annoying ones.

-- for that, for remaining "available to men", Wittig would not be at all interested in me.

But Jen Winston? It's not high theory. But they jokingly said they were "bi for bi" and like - oh. Yeah. That could be my operating framework (I'd been stick on how to articulate this! No one complains if a queer person doesn't want to date straight men, but my lack of interest in lesbians? Sounds prejudiced. I maintain I'm allowed to preference people closer to my experience, it's not like a vast swathe of lesbians don't do likewise when eliminating bi women from their dating pool; but look, a positively framed label!). And then they talked about how their experience with bisexuality and rethinking gender vis a vis attraction meant the paths were already forged for their gender reconsiderations - not CAUSAL, but assistive.

Honestly I'd be willing to try out a causal logic. But I'd not even see anyone try out the 'well this thing made that thing easier' logic *in that direction*, before. I'M FEELING PRETTY VALIDATED.

Also my life goal is now to do something cool enough to be on Two Bi Guys.

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.

Watch on YouTube

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.

Skipped a weekend there, whups. Behind on photoblog updates, too, sorry. Back at work, 40%, but along with rental admin, and improved capacity for Doing Self Care (gym, language classes), I'm functioning at the edge of my capacity again.

Music: Like every other queer on the internet, I have purchased 'Industry Baby'. I actually only just got around to watching the video now - the song is pretty catchy, but neither it nor the video are My Jam the way Montero (Call Me By Your Name) was. I just noticed I missed one single, 'Sun Goes Down', tho, and have added that to my collection.

Another purchase from the habit tracker reward budget is Serpentwithfeet's album 'Deacon', which was sitting in my iTunes wishlist. No idea where I heard of it, now: maybe Anthony Oliviera's podcast? Still. It's GOOD:

Watch on YouTube

Audio fiction:

I've been ploughing through the RadioCanada Audiolivres of the Anne books at a great rate, starting with Anne... la maison au pignons verts; I've got through that, Anne d'Avonlea, and Anne Quitte Son Isle. Next up, Anne au Domaine des Poupliers, and then I think that's all they have!!! How shall I cope. My french is, at least, rapidly ameliorating through the process (if probably aquiring a distinct old-fashioned cast).

Stephanie Burgiss, 'The Wrong Foot', at Podcastle. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the story but it was very well read.

Starship Iris: I enjoyed the interlude where several characters watched a Dwornian soap opera. Like slice-of-life fanfic for the show, vr good. And 2.06, an epistolatory epside, did a good job at getting a bunch of fragmented plot (the cast is no longer in the one place) across.

Discursive Podcasts / YouTube:

I listened to, and had VERY mixed feelings about, the 'Gender: I hardly know her' episode of Food4Thot (a podcast that has been on my to-listen-list for a while). On the one hand, I really liked the way that several of them talked about gender as situational, relational and contextually evolving - in terms that were straightforward and yet theoretically informed. On the other hand: no one on the team is a trans man: there's one cis guy who describes himself as fairly ambivalent about that, a man but not invested in masculinity. Which is FINE, but the lot of them - including him, nay, especially him (and I no longer remember which team member this was! both Tommy Pico and Joeseph Osmondson use he/him pronouns) - kept describing masculinity as inherently violent and repellant. One of them team soft-balled the 'I think some of my trans man friends would disagree with you', and the response was 'Oh I'm not talking about being butch'. So, apparently it's possible to run a queer podcast without being aware there are flaming femme trans men? I don't think I'll be picking this up again...

The Spouter Inn's episode on Memory Serves by Lee Maracale (a First Nations Canadian author) was really fascinating, and their episode on CL Jame's 'The Black Jacobins' FANTASTIC. And the bonus episode with Lesley S. Curtis on the first Haitian novel, 'Stella', super cool.

The Queerstories episode with Samuel Leighton Dore, Moments of Culture that Raised Me. Light, nostalgia humour for the late 90s and early 2000s.

At some point I listened through the A Bit Lit episode with Eric Wade. It says 'on the global origins of race and sexuality in the Middle Ages', but he doesn't actually talk that much about race IIRC.

I was hoping to get another miscellaneous-links post in here, but it's 9.45 and I need to exorcise the kitten before bed. If he will come out, given the fireworks going on around me at the moment. An hour or so ago, someone lit one of those staked-in-the-ground fountain ones in the yard of my appartment complex, and they're lucky I didn't have my mop bucket outside catching rain today, and that my bedroom isn't in the same room as the back door, because I caught it out of the corner of my eye/heard it, and was on my feet, looking for water (would a bucket be enough?) and about to dash to the bedroom to haul my woollen blanket off the bed to fight the spot fire, all before I realised that a. it was a firework and then, slowly, b. it's been raining here, the yard is full of ivy, there isn't a fire danger from the firework itself either.

A very Australian kind of panic attack.

Mercury was sitting in the window keeping watch, but when I got up to go to the loo just now, he wasn't willing to stay in the windowsill alone, and has gone into hiding. Poor lad. He was very brave in face of the sizzly fountain one - when I opened the door to go out and be sure it was All Safe, he even considered following me.

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:

Did anyone order queer swing-band vibes? Because I found queer swing-band vibes:

Watch on YouTube

I found Hen in the Foxhouse with Jem Violet (no album or ep, but four singles out) via the Queer Country blog, but their oevre is more indie miscellaneous than country, and this piece is leaning toward jazz and swing. It is Good, Actually.

Otherwise, I've been listening to Flume's album Skin on repeat. I bought it back in 2016, for the track with Kai, and liked it but never got _fixated_ until now. Strange are the ways of the neurodivergent brain, I knew it was hyperfixation material, I just didn't know when its moment would come:

Watch on YouTube

Podcasts / youtube discussions:

I've been puttering ahead with Paradise Lost (now past the tower of Babel! Getting there!). The two stand-outs of my week though were from the A Bit Lit podcast (links go to the website with youtube, look them up on your podcast app if you prefer):

Bodie Ashton on German nationhood, unexpected snails, and the pet shop boys. I have a very transparent brain and sartorial crush on Bodie, and perhaps this is a good case study in why.

Becky Yearling on early modern satire.

A Bit Lit is really a saving grace of 2021 for me: when I've failed to get much done in a work day, I scan through the podcast for items vaguely related to my research interests and listen while cooking. It's filling a ton of knowledge gaps, at a far lower executive function cost than sourcing, sitting down to read, and then annotating, books.

Some links of possible interest:

David Clark (own blog), Losing and Finding My Voice. I really admire Clark's academic work, and this is a lovely little personal piece about work, embodiment and creativity.

Arundhati Roy (Guardian UK), We are witnessing a crime against humanity. On COVID in India.

Monica Hesse (WaPo), Philip Roth and the sympathetic biographer: This is how misogyny gets cemented in our culture. Went back to re-read this after reading Elaine Showalter's review in the TLS. I have great respect for Showalter (Teaching Literature made quite an impact on me) but wow, that showed a startling lack of feminist interrogation of the Roth-Bailey relationship, even granted that it came out before the accusations against Bailey surfaced. Hesse is better.

Paul Collier (TLS), The days of rampant individualism are over. I mostly hate-read this. Collier describes himself as a '68er, but puts today's social frictions down to his generation destroying the cohesion that comes with conservatism (I think? It's a little hard to tell), apparently entirely unaware of, like... leftist collectivisms? Baffling. I suppose it's what one gets when one reads the TLS.

Peter K. Andersson (TLS), Monarcho: A Megalomaniac Jester at the court of Queen Elizabeth. Some cool historical information here, although I would have appreciated a little more interrogation of the 'megalomaniac' framing via critical disability studies.

Andrew Motion (TLS), Dreams that take my breath: the reserved defiance of Charlotte Mew. TIL: when people talk about 'georgian' and poets, they don't mean the Georgian period!

James Romm (TLS), In the footsteps of Alexander: review of Wheatley and Dunn's 'Demetrius the Beseiger'

Ophelia Field (TLS), Marriage à la mode? A notorious case of high-society bigamy. Review of Catherline Ostler's book on Elizabeth Chudleigh.

Laura O'Brien (TLS), Lives less ordinary: How a family prospered from the French Revolution. Review of Emma Rothschild's 'An Infinite History', which seems to be an example of that excellent genre of tightly-focused archival history studies, following one provincial family through the post-revolution years. Paging

monksandbones, suspect this is your jam; if it's paywalled hit me up via email.

Lindsay Hilsom (TLS), Red ink and machetes: Ethnic strife on a Rwandan hilltop in Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga. Added THIS to my endless TBR, yes yes.

Emma Smith (TLS), Getting the Measure: The character and development of the Arden Shakespeare. This is ostensibly a review of the latest edition of Measure for Measure, but it's also a really cool historiography of the Arden series.

Jaime Herndon (Bookriot), Dead women poets are not your punchline. Herndon is overcoming a sense of cringe at their love for Plath and Sexton. As someone who was told I *should* like Plath (because I was a teenage girl writing angsty free verse) and bounced off her hard, I actually really appreciated this take.

Brandon Hogan and Jacobi Adeshi Carter (NYT), Opinion: there is no Classics catastrophe at Howard. Both work at Howard (although not in the Classics department); the piece is a reply to Cornell West, but also a really interesting take on what we consider essential 'cultural' education and why.

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:

Watch on YouTube

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.

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.

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...

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.

Which is why I didn't make any post at all last fortnight. So it's been a month since I last updated re music or podcasts. Let's see. Last time, I had just gone through the Country Queer posts on trans artists and butch artists and bookmarked a lot for later.

Most recent discovery/crush: Clyde Petersen, who has a much higher voice range than you might expect given pronouns and general vibe.

Watch on YouTube

Petersen's 2019 album with 'Your Heart Breaks', Drone Butch Blues, is a whole queer concept album, with Petersen's personal history twinned around songs on queer history and drawn from queer writers of the last century or so. Sometimes I can't tell which is which. Without pronouncing on Petersen's personal gender status right now, I can say the album takes an expansive approach and positions him as singer-songwriter in empathy with both gay men and lesbian cultures. I like that, yes I do.

I also succumbed to The Memes and bought Kate Bush's retrospective album 'The Whole Story'. It is certainly... an experience.

Podcasts and youtube lectures and so on:

Paradise Lost: I have got as far as Adam and Eve's big post-fall marital spat. Anthony Oliveira has a very generous reading of it, whereas I'm rather more inclined toward the traditional 'Milton is an arsehole' reading, but there's something in his argument that, per Paradise Lost, misogyny is a consequence of the Fall.

Starship Iris: I caught up, finished The Museum Heist, which I had for some reason left half finished. It was a bit clunky - I wish more time had been spent on the actual heist, less deus ex machina.

The Spouter Inn: I enjoyed their episode on Toni Morrison's Beloved, and was particularly interested in the ways Suzanne and Chris had to figure out to talk about violence. A word that struck me was - delicate, they called it *delicate*, in order to articulate that sense you get with a master craftsperson like Morrison, where absolutely brutal violence is conveyed incredibly deftly.

Here's a good, short youtube video on late medieval and early modern 'Battle of the Sexes' comic tropes:

Watch on YouTube

Some links:

Cassie Workman (Junkee), The joy and chaos of my second puberty

Bob Leak (Unicorn Zine), With everyone appreciating online community during lockdown, for me it's always been a lifeline.

Jamie Fisher (New Yorker), The Age of Peak Advice

Emily Mortimer (NYT), How Lolita escaped obscenity laws and cancel culture. I don't agree with Mortimer or Dan Fisher that the difference between now and the 1950s is that Lolita wouldn't find a publisher: for a start, it didn't find a mainstream publisher in the 50s! It was published by an erotica press, the only people who would take it on, which Mortimer includes in her essay! Baffling. But an interesting essay.

Melissa Breyer (LitHub), A brief history of women street photographers

UCL Culture Blog (2013),Bentham present but not voting. The mummified body of Jeremy Bentham does not NORMALLY attend meetings, but it has done so at least once.

Alicia Andrezjewski (LitHub), The semi-hidden history of queer pregnancy in literature. Mostly a review of Detransition, Baby. I was... unsatisifed with this on many levels. In particular, I think it's particularly... gauche? And not very good critical engagement, to complain, as a bi woman who has had a child with a cis man, that Edelman's No Future and similar queer ethics alienate you. Big eyeroll. At least do some reading and find same-sex parents writing and engaging with Edelman and nihilistic queer ehtics, because they are out there. [NB: I am saying that as a bi woman, for those not aware.]

Jeremy Atherton Lin (LitHub), A brief literary history of gay and lesbian bars. Some disappointing gaps; the longer book may be better.

Kimon de Greef (Guernica), Bad Birds in Quarantine. After I so enjoyed Audabon Magazine's piece on parrot piracy, Guernica brings me: FINCH SMUGGLING.

Leigh Patching (guest post at Franki Cookney's The Overthinker's Guide To Sex), I survived purity culture and now I'm Queer AF

Sophie Vivian (Overland blog), On women, dissociation and the experience of trauma. Warning: the current auspol clusterfuck.

Danielle Scrimshaw (Archer Magazine), Heteronormativity and popular history. This piece DOES note that the 'and they were roommates' meme stereotypes historians as homophobic (ironically, homophobically erasing queer historians), but is mostly a complaint about The Straights doing history. It's... good enough... but I want more depth.

Jessica Hines (Ploughshares), The discomfort and difficulty of attention. Posits, not entirely ironically, that love is paying attention.

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

Watch on YouTube

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.

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!

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).

Music: More of the same, with the addition of The Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks, good on them for changing it) 2020 album 'Gaslighter'. I quite like this one:

Watch on YouTube

Podcasts, Live Lectures, and Audio Fiction:

Fiction:

I finally caught up with the Penumbra Podcast! I was stalled over the holiday special episode, because it involved people EMBARRASSING THEMSELVES aaargh. Including Damian embarrassing himself by just being Damian. I could probably write a character as irritatingly devout as Damian and not be irritated by him, but he's very difficult to be audience to.

Paradise Lost: Sin and Death have descended into the mortal plane. God continues to be an absolute arse. The earth has been tilted on its axis, unless of course the heavens have been tilted around it. So it goes in book 10.

Starship Iris: With the Penumbra under control, I have turned my attentions to Starship Iris s2: The Mini Episode was a good plot refresher.

Non-fiction:

The Spouter Inn: I listened through both the episode on Hemingway's A Moveable Fest, and the special guest episode on Hemmingway generally. I enjoyed the latter in particular, with its gossipy tone, special notes on Hemmingway's thing for Fitzgerald's dick. And I enjoyed guest Simone de Rochefort's enormous enthusiasm for Hemmingway and the way she held that *as well as* knowing he's an arse. I dunno, often people seem to be... soberly appreciative of his Literature and the 'well I know he's an arse but' part comes off as either weak, or sort of implying *other* people should Move Past It. Whereas de Rochefort's bubbly fannish enthusiasm exists with an 'oh god Ernest you trash man' sense, her conflict isn't *in the fact she likes it* but only in terms of her concern that her enthusiasm will lead her not inconsiderable following to think *they* should like Hemmingway too. ANYWAY. I liked it. I also really liked the episode on MK Fisher's How To Cook A Wolf, which I still haven't read but which has definitely been having a comeback of sorts in the last few years - every few months some outlet or other will run a piece on it. None I'd read so far mentioned what a cool and alternative life MK Fisher lead, though, so that was new and cool.

A Bit Lit (youtube series): Andy Kesson with Rose Biggin and Keir Cooper re their Midsummer Nights Dream novel 'Wild Time', very good, do recommend. And Andy Kesson with Julia Ftatek on trans readings of 18th century (English) literature. Have you ever considered that Gulliver's Travels might encode some form of dysphoria? Julia has. Also good, also recommend.

Some miscellaneous links:

Eric Levitz (NY Mag), The Game Stop Rally exposed the perils of 'meme populism'. This was a nice antidote to the person on my twitter feed who was convinced Stonks were the awakening of class consciousness.

Michel Summer, twitter comic, Interview with Beowulf. I want copies of this to send to Many People.

Franki Cookney (The Overthinkers Guide To Sex), How NOT to start a conversation about sex. On the weird but apparently common phenomenon of (straight) men approaching (straight) women on dating apps with unsolicited explicit kink propositions.

Dr Rachel Clarke (Guardian UK, Books), I've been called Satan: On abuse of Drs during the COVID crisis.

Michael Beckerman and Katherine Lebouw (New Fascism Syllabus, Dec 2020), In support of difficult history: Open letter in support of Anna Hájková, regarding the ethics investigation she was facing at Warwick. I read this as background after hearing that the investigation found against her. Hájkoá, whose piece at Notches I read some time ago, is a Holocaust researcher, whose book on Thereisenstadt details a coercive relationship between a Jewish inmate and a female guard (as well as with a male guard at Auschwitz). The inmate's daughter first sued her under a German law that protects the reputation of the dead (usually, the dead in question are former Nazis); the court found her research was within reason, but ordered her to use a pseudonym for the woman. Subsequently, she was fined because she was unable to scrub all uses of the woman's name from the internet. Although her research had ethics approval from Warwick all along, the daughter brought complaints to the university, and the university found against Hájková. The press coverage was pretty sensationalist (amongst other things, the press reports say Hájkova asserted a 'lesbian relationship' - Hájková avoids the word lesbian for very good reason), and I'm still unsure what the consequences of the Warwick decision are.

Rachel Handler (GrubStreet), De Cecco Finally Reveals What the Heck Is Going On With Its Bucatini. Follow-up to the all important pasta exposé of late December.

Jennifer Down (Meanjin Blog), What I'm Reading. This piece, one of many in the identically-titled series Meanjin run, is about struggling to read in the pandemic. Big Mood. I really appreciate Jennifer's bloody-minded determination to re-teach herself how to read, though, using pomodoros and reading in French because the effort keeps her engaged. I often feel like my tracking and monitoring and goals-based reading, for both fun and work, is... sad, somehow. It's nice to know it works for others, too.

Jinghua Qian (Feminist Writers Festival), Walking away, backwards; or, woman-lite in women's lit. On being a nonbinary writer.

The entire Howl Round Theatre Commons series Staging Gendered Violence.

Alison Phipps (European Journal of Culture Studies, 2021, issue/vol unclear), White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism. Contentious online; pretty valid if you read the whole thing instead of just the abstract. I do think the first part, on the #metoo movement, needed a little extra framing - both author and journal should have predicted it would be received as 'author says #metoo accusations are White Tears'. I think what's underlying this is the author is fundamentally sceptical of the movement, as one that insofar as it provides a movement for women does so through 'politics of injury' - that's the whole Wendy Brown section - but that definitely needed more space.

Jules Gill-Peterson (Sad Brown Girl blog), Fight or Flight in six acts (cn: trans medical trauma).

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