Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Apparently, I have not made one of these posts since June least year. I don’t know how 10 months have passed, I feel like I only recently finished The Woman In White.

I spent a lot of yesterday reading about 1970s far-left Japanese insurgent groups. ( I had no idea they even existed )

Currently Reading:
Fiction

Gregory McGuire, Wicked. Someone told me that this book was “not as good” as the musical, and I’ve definitely heard people say it’s Worse In The Queer Way. I am baffled. The ableism as applies to Nessa Rose is still there, but honestly, far less simplistic.

Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. The front cover of this second-hand copy fell off shortly after I got it, and then the book (I’d guess 90s paperback?) fell behind the bed and the back cover has taken some weird damp damage as well. I have a new copy on the way, because… well, because.

Non-Fiction

Will Tosh, Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, in fits and starts

Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth. I’ve had the USyd copy out for nearly a year now, revisiting (in fits and starts) legal details I did not particularly care about or didn’t internalise at any point 2008-2022, but the vague memories of which impede and frustrate my encounters with modern legal history. I have tried, on and off, since at least 2011, to buy a second-hand copy, and it has never been worth the $50 AUD + shipping given I had access to university copies. But I found a NEW copy for $40-ish dollars and domestic shipping, from an Aus/NZ online-only bookstore. I think it might be print-on-demand? Everything looks exactly the same (cover, pagination, publication details page) except for the tiny note on the final verso which, instead of “printed in the united states”, has the details of “Ingram Content Group Australia”.

And part-read on the backburner: (selected)

Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu

Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Hannah Fry, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus. Fun Christmas-themed maths/logic exercises.

and, for some reason, Enid Blyton More Adventures on Willow Tree Farm. I ploughed through both Cherry Tree and Willow Tree farms in audiobook then stalled out on this one. Unsure if its not for me or if I just lost whatever “inner seven year old is running the show” mood I was in; unsure whether to abandon it or file it for a future mood.

Recently Read:

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by The Secret Barrister

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was fascinating, and written with remarkable humour and wit for what is actually angry and depressing material.

Also I learned how the Magistrates Court works in the UK and who presides over them, and I am ... wow. What IS really striking is that the Secret Barrister doesn't seem to be aware that it's not just the Americans who don't do the "lay magistrate" thing - down here in Aus we started with those, thanks to colonialism, and decided to get rid of them!

Conversely, the Secret Barrister also doesn't seem to be aware of the aspects of the UK (/Eng-Wales) system which closely related jurisdictions in fact envy! "The UK has much greater availability of legal aid" is something I've heard plenty of commentators upon how NSW works remark upon.


Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I wonder what it says about me that read The Secret River, and came away with a fascination with the history of the Hawkesbuy but no real desire to keep reading Kate Grenville until this came across my path. And I loved it, and admired it much, much more than the literary-lush narrative style she wins awards for.

This is sparse - clearly fiction, in the way it invents incidents and individual conversations and scenes for a woman whom Grenville did not know well while she was alive - but sparse, hewing close to the documented outline of her grandmother's life. At times I could actually identify the context-providing sources that she would have needed to cite, if this was a biography.

And Dolly Maunder is such a well-drawn character, while growing progressively less and less likeable as she gets older. I liked the *book* more and more the less likeable she became. The points where the narrative dwelt sympathetically on her - when, for instance, she thinks over how she and her husband have been compatible and successful business partners despite their loveless marriage, she's still not a person that *I* would like (or who would like me, at all).

It's also striking - given I then went on to read "One Life", which was written earlier than this one - how *unlikeable* Grenville's mother appears in this book, too. One sympathises with her, bounced from school to school and town to town and too aware that her mother does not love her: but it's hard to like her. In "One Life", she is likeable and Dolly is not; in "Restless Dolly Maunder" it's hard to like either of them, but one is invited to sympathise with Dolly's awareness of her own inability to bond with her daughter as much as with the daughter.



One Life: My Mother's Story by Kate Grenville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Should this be shelved with fiction or biography? Restless Dolly Maunder is clearly fiction, but there has been fictionalising here, too - the scripting of scenes and conversations, at minimum.

The life of Isabella/Nance, who trained as a pharmacist in the years of the Great Depression - one of the few jobs, her mother was told, where a woman could keep working after marriage or even children (although, in Nance's several attempts to set up her own business, to support her family while her husband first pursued radical politics then the law, it became clear that being legally able to own and run a business did not overcome the practical barriers) - is in many ways more interesting to me than that of Dolly, but I believe I preferred Dolly's novel to this, perhaps because Restless Dolly Maunder stood just a little further over the fiction line.




I Can't Remember The Title But The Cover Is Blue by Elias Greig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was extremely funny - little dialogue style "Me: ... Customer [Characteristic]: ..." scenes, brought to life by excellent caricatures.




Checkers by John Marsden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Found this in a box at home. I never ended up with a copy of So Much To Tell You but I had this.

Honestly not his greatest work - although good work on realistially and empathetically characterising an assortment of kids in inpatient psych. I'd completely forgotten there was a gay character here.

What brings it up from 3 starts to 4 is the sheer audacity of writing a Teenagers In Psych Ward novel which is also a mystery/thriller about, of all the fucking things, _insider trading_. It works though!



Backdated: The next bunch of books in my record after Detransition Baby and Stephanie Alexander’s Home are a bunch of Chaucer and/or 18th c texts, and then an eight-book re-read of Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series and then Protector of the Small. This was, as you might guess, deep in the “this egg is now scrambled” phase. I… have a few actually load-bearing thoughts on Alana, which I ought to write up one day (in conversation with PTerry, and probably also Silence and also Butler and also fucking Pierre Bourdieu).

But I will also say that something which I struggle with - I remember turning this over and over in my head in my late teens and early twenties - is that… not only am I not like Alana, it’s a total toss-up whether Alana would like me. Kel, on the other hand? It’s pretty clear I have little in common with Kel, and I doubt she’d think I was ideal company - but I remember thinking somewhere in my late teens or early twenties “but I am, or I think I should be, someone Kel would respect”, which is a wholly different question.

Some short fiction, read at some point

Cislyn Smith, Tides that Bind, which is about Scylla and Charibdys.

Abra Staffin-Wiebe, Becks Pest Control and the Case of the Drag Show Downer. This was published in 2022, back when drag + kids was Topical, scary, but still more of a harbinger than the “just one part of all the Doom” situation we have now.

Michelle Lyn King, One-Hundred Percent Humidity, which Electric Lit pubished with the compelling tagline “The only thing more humiliating than virginity is sex”.

Guan Un, Re: Your Stone , in which Sisyphus encountered corporate email.

Recently Added To My To-Read List:
Fiction:

Leanna Renee Hieber, Strangely Beautiful, which looks like a fun lil steampunk adventure

Victor Heringer, trans James Young, The Love of Singular Men. If I’m on a gay lit dive, I definitely don’t read enough in translation, and this looks like my kind of thing.

Steve MinOn, First name, second name. Aus lit, Chinese myth/cosmology and immigrant intergenerational heritage, queer author, porous boundary between fiction and autobiography. Seems like fun to me.

Non-fiction

Moudhy Al-Rashid, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A history of my brief body

Esther Cuenca Liberman, The making of urban customary law in medieval Europe

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.

I have for some years now read, with fascination and frustration, a genre of essays (and occasional short story) which I short-hand under heteropessimism, although much of it is in fact so earnest (Sereisin's description of heteropessimism begins with Maggie Nelson's "heterosexuality always embarrasses me", requires a sort of ironic self-deprecation) that it might better be described as Sad Girl Content. It is the literature of shared (hetero) feminine abjection (in at least one prior post I called it the disappointment memoir mode).

I don't quite know what to do with this fixation, as I am no longer a usefully called a woman. The only kind of woman I find myself reflexively thinking of as akin to me is bi women, and so it continues to frustrate me that bi women are utterly absent from the communal literature of feminine (women-who-date-men) abjection.

There's a lot to commend in this recent essay by Ellie Anderson, on heteropessimism as feminist complaint. Anderson rightly takes a scalpen to Sareisin's slipshod use of "performative" to mean insincere.

Philosopher Kathryn Norlock argues that complaints may have intrinsic value even in cases when they do not aim for a transformation of circumstances in the way Ahmed describes. Norlock suggests that complaining can be recognized as valuable in itself once we take seriously the "interaffective dimension of ethical and social life." Specifically, complaint is a plea for validation that "one's pains are not insignificant," and for the company of others who recognize one's suffering as significant. Complaint has historically been disparaged by virtue of its associations with the feminine — specifically, with the feminine desire to share one's pains rather than remain an upright individual who acts in the public sphere — as in Aristotle and Kant. Norlock argues that rejecting this masculinist value system reveals that complaining is an activity that "regulates the emotional life, articulating and discerning the causes of pains, affirming the feelings of others or oneself, or inviting disclosure and commiseration." Complaining performs key functions in our collective and individual emotional lives.

This is true, and yet. Sara Ahmad, who Anderson cites extensively, would also direct us to attend to whose complaints are given space. Whose complaints are able to become a point of community, are allowed to make meaning. (Interestingly, the genre of heteropessimist complaint has several well-established women of colour in it - Christine Emba, for instance. Class, and access to the opinion essay industrial complex, seems a key factor.)

Bi women are not afforded the same authority to complain. The very structure of the complaint - that dating men flays one's dignity alive, and yet, one must, or withdraw entirely - means bisexuality is impossible. Perhaps some bi women married to men (especially, I expect, those with children) do participate in this discourse, but I can't remember the last time I read an essay grappling with the realities of heterosexual partnership/marriage from a bi perspective (maybe back in the era of feminist blogs? Perhaps these essays exist, and I'm not seeing them because of the glut of "I am an invisible queer" content from bi women; but I'd expect a good essay from a bi woman about having queer experience/identity and yet being stuck in the Crane Wife/Cat Person universe to generate HUGE amounts of biphobic discourse, the kind the "invisible queer" essays regularly attest to). The women writing the heteropessimist essays don't even seem to be aware that bi women are among them! This includes both Anderson and Sareisin (nb: Sareisin has since come out as nonbinary, but was writing as a lesbian at the time).

Sareisin rages that the heteropessimist does not meaningfully disengage from heterosexuality, Anderson argues that complaint is meaningful (but does not, I note, argue that constitues disaffiliation). Neither seem to have any sense what "disengage" or "disaffiliate" might look like. I did not get the sense, when I first read the Sareisin essay, that the author would have any time for me, a bi queer (then)woman who didn't move in lesbian circles.

Meanwhile, for a long time, I have felt that I had more in common with ostensibly straight or bi women who were single by choice or not seeking to date anymore than I did with most lesbians. Is that not also a form of disaffilation from heterosexuality? It certainly puts those women outside of many of the privileges of heterosexuality (economic, social, etc), while not actually marking them as queer unless they also display some other marked trait.

I don't have an answer. I don't even need to answer the question of which group of women I affiliate with, any more. And yet.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction:
- Omnibus of Mercedes Lackey's Mage Storms books, still. Slow going but still pleasing.
- Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man, in audiobook. It is not read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, so I am sad. The voice actor DOES do a good job of "Educated German-speaker speaking English" accent, though, and it's set in wine country, and I'm sort of... whatever the opposite of homesick is. Not even homesick for Switzerland, exactly, but nostalgia-frustrated because I have some cultural context for that area of DE but didn't spend much time there. Anyway. I am soured on Peter Grant (see below), but it has been suggested that I might resent the tie-ins less. We shall see.
- I am in fact partway through the short story The Death Haiku of the Azure Five, in Clarksworld (by L Chan) and enjoying it but I keep forgetting I'm reading it and reading some piece of news or essay or something instead.
Lit Mag: I have, in the past month, been picking up and putting back down the Lapham's Quarterly "Friendship" issue. This is improvement upon not picking it up at all.
Poetry: Nil, nada
Non-fiction for personal interest:
- I am finally making headway in Marion Turner's "Chaucer: A European Life". For a bunch of reasons, it's a perfect sort of book to keep in my go-bag for on site work at my current job, and on some remote work days I have a weird amount of standby time where it is preferred that we read books rather than be on our phones. I have learned a lot about the London wool staple!
- Still pottering through Danny Lavery's "Something that may shock and discredit you" for the second time, reading aloud to my partner.

There are many more things which I am nominally reading but haven't really picked up since last post.

Recently Finished:
Actually Recent:
Archer: the First Nations Issue by Maddee Clark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It took me a damn long time, but I finally finished this.

Two stand-out essays:

Q&A with SJ Norman

Anonymous: Pronoun Trouble

Neither makes me comfortable, and maybe I'll talk somewhere else one day about what in them hit home and what hit a nerve. Not on Goodreads, I think.




Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Things this was:
- a fun historical romp through periods and subjects largely outside my prior interests (except for Lord Byron, bless his weird over-dramatic socks)
- a MASTERCLASS in accessible citation. I listened in audio, and I had no idea there *were* footnotes at all, because Jenner weaves "as the such-and-such scholars say" in so well.
- a MASTERCLASS in breaking down theoretical concepts, see above

I also keep thinking about the section on celebrity photographs and early photographic manipulation. One actress, whose name I forget (and I can't check because I don't have hard copy) sued over manipulated images of her face over risqué nudes, and lost. I keep thinking about this in context of the current SAG strike, and AI, and being confused that no one is pitching hot take essays about the connection.



Semi-recent, IE, this year:
Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved the opening, framing, premise, and most of the execution of this. I enjoy the podcast, and I *particularly* appreciated the way that chapters of this sewed together what had been 2 or sometimes 3 podcast episodes to produce a chapter which had a sort of... preview and a chunky case study (Bosey and Roger Casement were a great combo).

However, I have two complaints:

1. the conclusion was MEH. It did not say anything the introduction didn't say and it said it more boringly. Perhaps this is a product of the public history style? But I have definitely read pop history which doesn't do that (see: Greg Jenner's Dead Famous).

2. The final chapter, which sewed together Andrew Sullivan and Pym Fortuyn, with a contextual segue through the AIDS crisis, was a HOT MESS. It gave no specific contextual attention to AIDS or gay public health in general on the continent, aside from one note that Amsterdam had dealt pretty well because of pre-existing good links between gay community and health services over a hepatitis outbreak. In general, it was written as if the US's approach to AIDS was paradigmatic for the world, which it just wasn't. Australia in general, and Sydney specifically, was a lot closer to Amsterdam (perhaps because of better responses to earlier outbreaks? I don't know and my epidemiology history insiders are only confident to speak on AIDS>COVID trajectories). There's a lot that Pim Fortuyn and centrist-to-right US gays have in common, of course, but you can't just take New York's AIDS history and treat it as standard for the developed world. And the authors should BOTH KNOW BETTER and also have the resources to do better, because one is English and one is an American working for the Gay Museum in Berlin!

I am still, however, very much on board with their project of "bad gay" history: the history, specifically, of how "reclaiming" gay figures from the past has fed into dubious contemporary politics. Something I feel the trans community should think more carefully about before going all in on reclamatory and redemptive premodern narratives, but I appear to be rowing my boat upstream on that count.



View all my reviews

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a difficult and important read. I marked it to-read back when I was madly collecting books about the trauma of being Assigned Girl, hoping that reading enough feminist rage and trauma would anchor me in my assigned gender. By the time I got around to reading it, that was a lost cause.

This was very much a book about early (peri-pubsecent) sexualisation, and the project of reclaiming one's sexuality from a barrage of constant sexual predation. I was about to say that "although I was in an abusive relationship, Febos' experience is wildly different to mine", but it... isn't, not entirely. The age parameters, now that I think about it, are oddly similar, but the frequency and (forgive the legalese) severity, and above all the impact upon me, are widly different. I can't even put that latter down to gender, because I know many trans men whose lives and indeed adult selves walk much closer to Febos than to me.

I spent most of this book ping-ponging between "yoewch, to accurate", and "... wtf i thought this sort of thing was mostly a scare story they told you in school health class". Much like how I offhandedly said to a friend a while back "everyone knows Go Ask Alice was a hoax, that's not how peer pressure ACTUALLY works" and the friend went... "well i read it and it seemed pretty close to my experience. I'd call it plagiarism rather than a hoax." (the author of Go Ask Alice, in case you didn't know, was a conservative therapist working with young women).

Things I particularly resonated with:
- Febos' description of how her parents were not at all prepared to either help or protect her from what was going on. Same, except wildly different. Mine, for instance, were not equipped to help a kid who didn't experience sexuality as just... a natural thing that happens. Who might need to THINK, read, compare, consider, etc. I don't think they'd have coped better with Febos per se, but they were running on a script for a normative daughter halfway between us.
- The chapter about the cuddle party, and feeling obliged to offer affection/consolation to the Sad Man. I particularly appreciated that Febos gave equal weight to discomfort with the attentions of an Enthusiastic Woman And Her Male Partner, because were it about Sad Man alone... I'd be thinking of all the weird physical dynamics which come up with people OTHER than the Sad Straight Man.

Things I didn't but which were elucidatory: I won't go into all of them. But even though I've ditched my project work on Chaucer, I retain my fascination with Kim Zarins' "Sometimes We Tell The Truth". Her WOB's prologue gave me instant "erk". Like... okay, I get where you're going here but this feels wrong, it feels like a story they tell in health class not... a thing that actually happens. (A friend who HAD been subj to advances from older men at age 12 thought I meant I didn't think anyone was. No, I get that... happens... but something about the narration felt like an /extrapolation/ of how that might happen rather than either actually how it happens or how the young girl in q might re-tool the story later) On first read of Febos I didn't make the connection. On second read... the way Febos characterises her younger self feels like the kind of narration Zarins' WOB didn't hit; but Zaris' 17 y old Alison doesn't sound as far removed from Febos' 12 y old self as I thought. If that makes sense? Of course adult Febos isn't trying to paper over her wounds: her whole brand is Trauma Writing. But if she did... maybe it might come out closer to Zarins' Alison than I initially thought.



All About Yves: Notes from a transition by Yves Rees

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Proper review coming but:
1. Rounded up by reason if “I like to read about people like me”.
2. However, I’m pretty sure I’d rather hear from Yves 2025 than Yves “I could never use a men’s bathroom” 2021. There’s a lot that’s gauche here, and ffs. Your trad pub memoir doesn’t count for “publish or perish”. The academic audience might not be here in 2025 but the queers will.

---

23.07.23 Note from later me: I read this as audiobook, I don't have a hard copy, and I'm really not up to re-considering the Saga of Nonbinary Academic right now. Maybe another year. Maybe another decade. This memoir was immensely important to me but didn't review it at the time and I cannot now.



Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


THAT WAS BOTH VALIDATING (yes, i guessed who nona was) and NOT WHAT I EXPECTED AT ALL. A+, ROUND OF APPLAUSE.

...

HOWEVER I would like to register a growing sense of wtf re the charactisation of the genocidal apocalypticist as Maori? It became really explicit in this book and ... no? Love the kiwi localisation, but... Uh. Weirdly I have seen no pushback, and I am not committed enough to this book or genre, nor informed enough about the NZ context specifically.

I note my discomfort, I hope it doesn't snowball, and in the meantime I will do as I have resolved to do instead of pontificating about Books I Read For Fun: bump something else up the tbr. In this case, Alexis Wright's The Swan Book.



Bonus: One(1) Deep Backdated Review. The next in queue is Manion's "Female Husbands", and I do not have the werewithal. But I promised a trans woman pal I'd dig out the applicable-to-her-interests bits, so I might re-read it soonish and then it can go into the recent queue again. Instead:

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am really souring on these books, which I don't think is necessarily a flaw in Aaronovitch's work so much as my increasing distaste for the built in copaganda of much crime fiction. I remain UGH that Peter has not left the Met.



Online Fiction: two recent two backdated
Recent:
- Kehkashan Khalid, The Petticoat Government (Fantasy Magazine). Set in something approximating Mughal India, I think? It actually provided a fleshed-out sense of how female regnancy could work in highly spatially segregated societies, something I *technically know* with my research into gendered space in high and late medieval Europe, but haven't got a really graspable characterised handle on.
- L Chan, Re/union (Clarkesworld). One daughter, of several siblings, is the only remaining family member observing the pious New Year rituals with the ancestors: who are now, for both better and worse, represented by AI simulations at a banquet table. I don't have the cultural context for this and yet it both gripped and gutted me in places.

Backdated
- Rob E Boley, The Assembly of Graves (Diabolical Plots). Sometimes, I read depictions of lesbian relationships, written by (apparently cis and straight, although frequently one only assumes that because Queer Authors have their ID front and foremost) Men, which seem incredibly realistic and Relatable (TM) to me. It is possible this is a sign of my Gender (TM), given I frequently have the opposite relationship with Lesbian Fictions (TM). I dunno. I do know this is a neat horror story and I did not predict the twists to it even though perhaps I should have.
- Cheri Kamei, Blood in the Thread (Tor dot com). This is, I think, a pretty good story in its own right. Nevertheless. I said; I have said over and over and I'm sure more often than that but in keywords I can't recall to fling at site search; that I wanted a queer take on the Cat Person/Crane Wife problem. This is not what I wanted. If I wanted the abjection of the More Queer (butchness optional) partner faced with a Femme and/or Bi partner I could consume anything from The Well of Loneliness to Rent. And yet. I don't think this is a BAD short story, just. One I'm inclined to be bristly at.

Recently Added To The TBR:
Fiction:
- Alis Hawkins, "A Bitter Remedy", from a series called The Oxford Mysteries. KJ Charles gave it a mixed review but I think I like the things she likes and the things she dislikes in this one would be balanced out by my love of weirdly specific academic history.
- Patrick DeWitt, "The Librarianist". Got the rec from the twitter account "Caustic Cover Critic", who is one of my few sources of non-gay capital L Literary recommendations.
- Bruce Pascoe, "Salt: Selected Stories and Essays". I've had Dark Emu on my kobo for ages, but first burnout happened and now my work reading needs to be hard copy. I am intruiged by the idea of mixing fiction and essay, and have earmarked this as a possible library read, esp when I run out of work-appropriate things from my already owned hard copy pile.
- Se-hee Baek, "I want to die but I want to eat Tteokbokki". I saw a really strong rec for this as a depiction of Depression Et Al, and hey, I've never read Korean fiction before.

---

Some links: past and present:

Past: The dates on these are mid 2021, and hoo boy, let me tell you, scrolling back two years in my pinboard is, quite literally, scrolling back two years in terms of gender dysphoria and career anxiety. Still. Some stuff that, now that I look at it again, stuck with me!

- Isabelle O'Carrol (Refinery29), ADHD and gaslighting in women. TLDR neurodivergent women (people? I suspect people) more vulnerable to manipulation.
- Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future. I get a lot of reading recs from SE Smith on Twitter and I think this is one of them.
- Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. By now, in 2023, most of the Long Covid content i see online (perhaps due to Twitter algorithm) is outright misinformation, albeit often driven by understandable trauma and self-protection. I believe I was already noticing this trend by 2021, and this particular article did not trip that alarm. I'm interested in MAST cell activation syndrome, in and of itself, because friends have it and I suspect at least one relative does, and also it's weird and I am interested in weird things.
- Paige Turner (own blog), The healing process can be traumatic. I got bored of Paige's blog within six months of this post, but this one remains both short and true.

Recent: Other than ones linked earlier in this post, I give you the following:
- The Carapan gallery of Mexican art (own blog), What is an Alebrije: TL;DR man has hallucinations in the 1930s, makes art, accidentally sets off a folk art tradition.
- JP Brammer (own blog), Food Fight: on "ethnic" food and percieved authenticity. I love many things Brammer writes and this is a fine example.
- Chelsea Watego (Indigenous X), Voice To Parliament: Why Mob Are Staying Silent.
- Joseph Earp (Guardian), My mentor John Hughes taught me how to write then he plagiarised my work. Supplementary to, and bafflingly uncited in, the next link;
- Anna Verney and Richard Cooke, Being John Hughes (The Monthly). I was fascinated and apalled and at times discomfortingly empathetic to Hughes. I, too, was a kid from the periphery of the Hunter Region, said to be brilliant and promising. But I didn't go to Newcastle for uni, and I was not said to be the Next Big Thing (even at school: partly gender, but lbr the only Next Big Things my school at large was interested in was next big evangelist, and so my male peers as scholarly high achievers were in fact less lauded than I, at least I had the humanities teaching lead on my side). I too went abroad for a PhD and came home less than I had hoped to be. But I came home crippled by all the things I could not speak to, while Johnny Boy seems to have come home and determined to... speak to everything, by plagiarism if he can get away with it. (The worst is his remixing of the Bringing Them Home report's accounts, but he also felt the need to plagiarise a relatively privileged male student? Why?? Baffling.)

I haven't made poetry posts for a long long time, so, in lieu of a reading-related essay highlight, have this poem:

English
Chen Chen

the most beautiful pair of words in the english language is
“eggplant parm.”
followed by “friends forever.”
really, a close second.
a distant thirtieth is “research assistant.”
of course the most beautiful single english word is
“friend.”
now some might say it’s “dragonfly”
& others “devastation”
but they would all be 122% wrong.
meanwhile a few might say these are all just other words for
summer. & they would be 211% right. & if we
were to, every last anglophone, including the staunchest
of anti-anglophiles, if we had to
gather & heatedly
debate the beautifulest trio of words intheenglishlanguage
& the shortlist included such mighty contenders as
“i love you”
&
“flaming hot cheetos”
the winner would still,
by the most mile of a mile, be
“jesus fucking christ.”

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction: Alexis Hall, The Affair of the Mysterious Letter. Sherlock Holmes but in a Lovecraftian sci-fi universe. Also the detective is Ms Sheherazad Haas, Watson is trans, and the entire narrator-voice vs actual-narrative-direction play is AMAZING. Watson, as narrator, is trying to keep up a facade of uptight-ness that might, just about, satisfy his religiously puritan homeland; his actual practice is far from that goal. AMAZING.
Poetry: None, although I did read an entire short book of poems.
Lit Mag: Lapham's Quarterly on friendship, although naturally I let it lapse.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Jen Winston, "Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much". So far, less statisfying than Winston's podcast appearances. Assorted others on haitus.
For work: "The Tinker of ..." (I forget where), a later riff on The Cobbler of Canterbury, and more easily available online. I'm promised dirty jokes. So far I've found a peculiar revision of the Reeve's Tale. Also, Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life, which I alternately admire and deplore.

Recently Finished, or at least, finished at some point:

Justice Calling by Annie Bellet

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Shallow but I thought it seemed promising.

The Jade Temptress by Jeannie Lin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really loved this book. It's a salutory lesson, because I don't particularly identify with any of the characters - but the balance of characters, the historical detail, and the tight control over the mystery plot, all add up to A++.

Capturing the Silken Thief by Jeannie Lin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Clearly a practice run for the Pingkang Li Mysteries; pleasing enough in its own right.

In the Vanishers’ Palace by Aliette de Bodard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Huh. I was not satisfied by this novella *as a novella*. It felt too... thin. As a queer work, I... look I really have a deep curiosity about human/dragon sex, and I GUESS you don't have to satisfy me on that point. But if you're not going to satisfy me on dragon sex AND you're going to give me short-story level worldbuilding, I will... accept what I'm given and read your full-length novels, I guess!
Murder of Crows by Annie Bellet

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Look, I'm a white Australian, my tolerance for "white colonial author tries to wrestle with their context" is HIGH. But this exceeded it. The child murderer plot not only exeeded it but CRASHED AND BURNED IN FLAMES. (I read this in a summer when a batch of residential school atrocities in Canada were revleaned; I know that's not where this book is set, but also, I am Australian. I recognise "haunted by one's own people's atrocities" when I see it.)
I will read no more Annie Bellet, and I have also lost a few notches of respect for Kevin Sonney on the basis of his recommendation of these books.

That can be all for post-dated reviews, and the lesson from THIS batch is: read more non-white people if you must read genre & pulp fiction.

Up Next: As with last time, I give up predicting what I will read next. My most recent TBR addtions and/or kobo purchases:

Melissa Febos, Girlhood. I think I might finally be Gender enough to read this. Maybe.

Rae Spoon, How to (Hide) Be(hind) Your Songs: having read Spoon & Coyote's Gender Failure, I desire more

Lidia Conklin Rainbow, Rainbow: Queer short fiction. I no longer remember where I got the rec

Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon: First Nations (Turtle Island) bi+ fiction. I THINK I got this rec from Coyote and Spoon.

Travis Alabanza, None of the Above, queer memoir

Edgar Gomez, High-Risk Homosexual, also queer memoir. Thing is, I listened to Gomez on Gender Reveal (podcast) and I know the memoir is written as a gay latinx man, and they no longer consider themselves a man. I hover over the buy button, but the blurb copy deters me every time.

---

A Few Links:

Elizabeth Freeman (Critical Inquiry Blog), Without you I am not necessarily nothing. With Berlant's passing, the internet swirled with people who felt slighted, crushed by Berlant; people who wrote panegrics to Berlant; and everything in between. This was an in-between.

Lily Osler (McSweeney's), Guys, I swear I'm only transitioning so I can cheat at girl's sports. I THINK this falls on the right side of comedy, but I could be wrong.

99 Percent Invisible, Always read the plaque: mapping 10,000 global markers and memorials. Neat. See also the plaque for the Wild Oat's Underdone Asparagus Boil.

Sarah Moon (The Rambling), A Love Letter for Anne of Green Gables.

James Parker (The Atlantic): Down with morning people.

I do not have capacity to update my Goodreads rn. Haven't since December. The task gets Worse by week.

What I am currently reading:
- the poems and essays for the next 3 weeks of teaching
- More about John Donne than I'd planned, for same
- the 2021 anthology "Nonbinary Lives" ed Meg-John Barker et al.
- Ivan E Coyote and Rae Spoon "Gender Failure"
- re-read of Monstrous Regiment
- The Play issue of Archer mag
- a bunch of other stuff on hiatus

Why YES there's at theme there why do you ask.

---

Some much belated but interesting links:

Kirby Conrod (own blog), So you're ABD and you're beginning to suspect you have undiagnosed ADHD

Alexis Nowicki (Slate), "Cat Person" by Kristin Roupenian drew specific details from my life. This pales in comparison to the later Bad Art Friend debacle, but what's fascinating is that I HATED Cat Person and I found Nowicki's account of her actual experience much more compelling.

Ange Mlinko (LRB), Waiting for the Poetry, on Adrienne Rich.

Huw Lemmy (own blog), Meanlingless Sex. Has some great stuff on queer storytelling.

Aviva Stahl (New Inquiry), Trust in Instinct. I've still not read Conflict Is Not Abuse, but between observing the kind of people who evangelise that book, and this (and a few twitter threads) response, I am no longer interested in doing so. As well as a response to Schulmann, this has some interesting things to say about harm and shame.

Joe Pinkser (The Atlantic), School Days start and end too early

Lincoln Michael (own blog), Art should be a doorway, not a mirror. Response to the Isabell Fall fall-out, but insightful in its own right.

Christina Tesoro (The Toast), "Not So Bad": On Consent, Non-Consent, and Trauma.

Benjamin Riley (Overland), How To Come Out At The End of Queer Community. Aside from talking queer community dynamics at large, this one might be of interest to those of you who are churchgoers or involved in other religious communities - it's got a chunk talking about how MCC (Sydney's Officially Gay Church) is now attracting more "unchurched" young people than gay Xns.

Da'Shaun Harrison (own blog), Committing harm is not the same as being abusive.

Rafael Tonon (Gastro Obscura), The team resurrecting Ancient Rome's favourite condiment

Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future

Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark.org), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. Might be out of date by now.

Kirsten Leng (Notches blog), Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany 1900-1933.

Cathy Free (WaPo), Three women dumped their cheating boyfriend and went on a road trip together

Maclean's magazine (CA) 1962, How to tell the Grits from the Tories. This is marked fiction but I suspect a metadata error. It reads like moderate political satire.

Matthew Sherril (Outside Online), The ghost trail hunters of Mount Desert Island

Kyl Myers (Archer Magazine), Gender socialisation: rethinking our inherited structures. I know there's a lot of pushback at the moment to the concept of "socialisation" because somehow it's taken that if
[transmasc / cfab / tmab / whatever term we're using to catch both trans men and enbies who were assigned-and-parented-and-may-have-continued-on-assumed-female today] talk about being socialised female/girl it must be the case that trans women and trans femmes were (assumed: successfully) socialised male/man. This... does not seem to me to be at all obvious! I have no idea why everyone assumes there must be polarity at all times! (When trans women assert they in fact internalised harmful female socialisation, eg, that femininity requires subservience, they do not usually imply that trans men 1:1 picked up the corresponding male socialisation and privileges?? I don't think??) Here endeth my necessary disclaimer for this link.

Craig Robertson (Places Journal), The filing cabinet and 20th century information infrastructure. This was, no joke, one of the best things I read last year.

It's been so long since I did a reading post that I it feels really weird to try to preface this with commentary on the best or most arresting thing I've read lately.

Here's something that stood out to me, though: Siderea on The Problem of Morality. I had another one of those weird conversations with my parents the other day where I offhandedly said something, of an acquaintance with a strained parent relationship, "well, if I had a father who [x], I'm not sure I'd WANT to speak to him". Parents: "you can't just stop talking to people over political differences!"

And I'm astounded, repeatedly, because... this seems like an abdication of morality, or ethics, to me. And yet, as my parents occasionally get up the gumption to needle me about, I obviously don't think people should exclude *me* because I offend their morals. I feel like there's a difference between making that since on the basis of *private morality* (how I conduct my sex or relationship life - and even then, as in the case of spousal abuse, there ARE reasons to stop talking to people over their private morality!), and over... political morality? Ethics? Something?

Siderea doesn't get into that particular distinction, but DOES contend that the "left", broadly defined, abdicated the field of morality-as-politics in the 80s, and is now hampered by that loss. And makes this very useful (for talking with older generations, at least) distinction:

And a good bit of that, I seem to recall, was back then it was less universal that the attraction of either party was moral positions. There were lots of people in both parties who were motivated by a purely pragmatic sense of public policy, and voted for the party or even the candidate whose policies they thought would be most effective for bringing about changes they thought were personally advantageous. For instance, one might believe a laissez-faire approach to markets was the best thing for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Republicans who advocated a hands-off policy towards the economy; or one might believe that government intervention was better for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Democrats who argued for that. Back when I was a frosh in college, that was actually a really common way young people aligned themselves politically!

As best I can tell that's completely untenable now. It doesn't matter what you think about monetary policy, your choices are the party which believes that extrajudicial killing of peaceable innocent citizens by the police is murder and the party that does not. And, as I explained above, morality overrules other considerations, like which approach to market regulation is most efficacious for prosperity.

The nature of the conflict we are now in is moral. And we need the conceptual tools of morality to even see it clearly, much less have any leverage on it.

The "pragmatics" approach to voting took longer to become untenable in Aus, and now we also have the problem where BOTH major parties hold some morally abhorrent policies because it's a race to the bottom.* And with the relatively lower profile of, eg, extra-judicial police homicide (it happens, it happens primarily to Indigenous people, followed by Middle Eastern and African Australians, but it's less frequent on a sheer numbers level, shifted toward less visible modes - deaths in custody - and simply getting less traction because, on a percentage level, Australia is whiter and more complacent), and the _not quite as bad_ wealth gap, means that it's possible to still be complacent middle class (perhaps especially if, like my parents, you achieved that status over your working life: things went right and are still going right for you) and think of political choices as matters of pragmatics and priorities.

*For that matter, I'm not convinced by Siderea's presentation of the 'extrajudicial murder of innocent citizens by the police: okay or no' as something that one US party firmly opposes and one supports. Are US democratic politicians actually putting forth platforms to end qualified immunity, or is it "fund the police more to take more anti-bias training, and ho and hum?"

Meanwhile, I got back into work with a six-hour binge in Eighteenth Century Collections Online. I give you: one of the odder things I found, a long poem entitled "Bibliotheca, a Poem Occasioned by the Sight of A Modern Library. With Some Very Useful Episodes and Digressions", by Thomas Newcomb:



The text is online here. It isn't very good.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: Greenwald's 'Cleanness', but very much on hiatus.
Non-fiction for personal interest: 'The Body Keeps the Score', also hiatus.
Lit Mag: Nothing right now
Poetry: Ditto. I did very much enjoy the poem My Queer by Emma Rhodes, in Plenitude Magazine, not least because I, too, named a doll after a very beautiful little girl of my acquaintance.
For work: Not nearly enough, but for mixed work-personal reasons I started Jen Manions "Female Husbands: A Trans History". I'm really enjoying it, although Manion's use of "to trans gender" as a verb grates, and I really don't think it was contexualised early enough, or given a strong enough justification when it was addressed.

Recently Finished: For certain values of 'recent'.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I liked this a lot, but I didn't find it as utterly arresting as I had expected - I think because, ultimately, I've been reading in a post-Carter world since my teens.

I was surprised, and delighted, by the DuMaurier-esque feel of the title story. My favourites were probably the weirder ones toward the end - The Erl-King, and the triple sequence of Red Riding Hood-and-or-werewolf tales that come last, of which, the weird sexy 'The Company of Wolves' would be my favourite.

Anne quitte son île by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read this in the RadioCanada Oh!Dio audiolivre version. Loved it, as usual - although LMM sure does over-sell the ease of convincing two tomcats to cohabitate with one another!


Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature by Nicole Nolan Sidhu

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really interesting, and I'm having a productive and challenging time wrestling with the wide difference between her take on the Reeve's Tale and that of other feminist scholars.

Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak by Helen Davies

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This wasn't actually what I was after, research-wise, but had some cool stuff in it anyway, especially an essay by Kate Fox, in the form of a dialogue, on the topic of autistic stand-up comedy.

Anne au Domaine des peupliers by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another really enjoyable audiolivre from Radio Canada. And as usual when re-reading this one as an adult, I'm really uncomfortable with the number of abusive parents who feature in the "humourous" community plots. It's also notable that the abusive mother is agreed to be not a NICE person, whereas Anne ends up concluding that both the abusive fathers are decent chaps after all. :s

Online Fiction:

Megan Arkenberg, In the City of Kites and Crows reprint/podcast at Glittership

Megan Arkenberg, All the King's Monsters, Clarkesworld, with audio.

Megan Arkenberg, Lessons from a clockwork queen, reprint/podcast at Glittership

Sarah Gailey, Tiger Lawyer gets it right, EscapePod

Aimee Ogden, In September, Podcastle

E.P. Tuazon, Barong, The Rumpus. I did not fully understand this but I liked it!

Bryan Washington, Foster, The New Yorker. A good cat story.

Erin Kate Ryan, The Girl Was Already On Fire, VQR.

Kavita Bedford, The Daintree.

Up Next: You know what this section gives me anxiety, let's cut it out entirely. No more 'up next' bits. Henceforth this section shall be...

Recently added to the endless TBR: Tempted to break my nigh-moratorium on both modern-setting romance novels and m/f romance novels for For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes; delighted to find a nerdy travelogue by someone who isn't a white man, namely, Monisha Rajesh's Around the World in 80 Trains.

---

Some links!

Susan Misicka, SwissInfo, I hear if it's not running: a profile of Martin Horath, who's worked on the Mt Rigi cogwheel railway for 25 years.

Justin Myers, British GQ, The Friend Zone has more meaning than you think.

Sarah Scire, Nieman Lab, Someone wrong on the internet? Correcting them publicly may make them act like a bigger jerk.

Carissa Harris, Aeon Mag, 800 years of rape culture. Smart public writing from feminist medieval studies.

Emillie Colyer, Meanjin blog, What I'm reading. I liked that she talked about the fragmentary nature of writing as an academic: "Because I’m doing a PhD, I am reading a lot of different things all at once, greedy for the thoughts of others".

Jonathan Parks-Rammage, Electric Lit, 7 queer books with heart-stopping twists

Dianna Anderson, Rewire News, Purity Culture as Rape Culture. Been following Diana for a while now, and finding their takes on evangelical culture very insightful.

Hilary Brenhouse, interview with Elissa Washuta, Guernica, Elissa Washuta: living inside this empire is all that I will ever have

That's by no means everything, but I have a kitten to exorcise. Happy Sunday, folks.

It's been a month and a bit since my last reading update, in which you may recall I mentioned a great transphobic school text debacle. That, plus moving house, plus cat acquisition, plus the three schools I did grade for in the end, has chewed up about six weeks of my life on nigh-essentials-only mode.

I have read quite a lot of things in that time. One of the best was Jules Gill-Petersen's essay When did we become cis. I found it very validating in terms of my understanding of how gender works at large, although, paradoxically, in that understanding I would be assuming that I am, functionally, a woman and not any flavour of trans, an assumption is that is seeming increasingly precarious.

Gill-Petersen argues that the term 'cisgender' simply does not do 'what we want it to do'. It completely fails to adequately describe any individual's gender. It does what it was coined to do, namely, to describe a *social apparatus*, but it fails utterly at the individual level.

Some good pull-quotes:

I was born three decades later, one the eve of transvestite and transsexual giving way to a whole new word—transgender—and yet I, like Kathryn, never had that childhood moment of letting trans words get inside me. Actually, even once I did read a lot of them in college and graduate school, they didn’t tell me a single thing about myself. So, what gives? Why don’t powerful words mean what they say, and why doesn’t their meaning tell us who we are? Is this all bad news? I don’t think so.

-

John Money, a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, knew that finding a biological basis for sex could never be the justification for enforcing a match between anatomy and identity. Instead, he changed the terms of engagement. From now on, the issue was not if humans were biologically binary, but rather “the life adjustments of patients in our series”—how normal they felt, or how well they adapted socially.[1] With that twist, a gender identity that did not conform to a binary body could be subject to medical control because it might lead to social stigma, not because there is anything unnatural or unhealthy about it.

[...]

With this tectonic shift, gender became cis. And what’s “cis” about gender from then on is the way that social norms can be coercively enforced to prevent the perceived stigma of being different. In other words, gender becomes cis when it demands a match between anatomy and identity not because that is natural, but because it’s how society functions. It’s a tautology, it’s we live in a society on steroids, but it’s worked quite effectively. To put it a little more precisely: gender, as a system for categorizing and governing our bodies, identities, and social recognition, is cisgender in this specific way. Cis isn’t an identity. It’s a diagnostic, a description of a system organized to subject people to the authority of institutions: the state, medicine, law—and the university, to go back to that meeting I was conjuring earlier.

I don't know what to do with this, because I read it and a. it's RIGHT, it's accurate; b. i feel it gives me rather more breathing room as a gender-non-conforming, genderqueer, etc, person to just... eh, roll with it. Keep ticking f on boxes, recognise that doesn't really describe much about me. And yet, for all sorts of reasons, people want to know if one is cis. And what they want to know when they ask that, unless they're a doctor, is 'do my preconceived expectations of how people assigned f at birth and still calling themselves women experience gender, perhaps adjusted for race and class and sexual orientation'. And by and large, what people who know are engaged enough in trans-affirmative politics to ask that question expect of cis women isn't indicative of me. But of course saying 'woman but don't call me cis' is the domain of transphobes at the moment!

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction:

Anne... la maison aux pignons verts, Radio Canada e-book. Spending more time in Avonlea than in the real world in my head as a child gave me a very peculiar dialect, and massively skewed sense of social norms: let's see what Anne-immersion for French practice gets me as an adult!

Cleanness, Garth Greenwell on hiatus. I read the first two stories, including the one about the hookup-site-enabled bdsm scene gone wrong that I believe was republished in Kink. Whether or not it should have been in an anthology advertised as making bdsm fiction accessible to the general public, I am neutral (it certainly seems realistic, if not A Good Example, and it's too brutal to be erotica), but damn, it was incredibly well-written. The first story, in which Our Protagonist tries to give advice to a young queer kid in love, was also good.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter: also on hiatus

Poetry: NOTHING FOR ONCE
Lit Mag: None, they all pile up, including the TLS
Non-fiction for personal interest:

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel: swinging wildly between feeling Validated, and feeling alienated and frustrated at the relentlessly heterosexual and cisgendered perspective. There's, like, one footnote acknowledging this omission and her awareness that there is likely significant overlap between what she's writing about and the experience of trans women and other queer people, but that's not for her to explore. Okay. Except there's already work out there on desire, inhibition, and expectations by a whole range of queer people! Katherine Angel is writing as a white women, but she has obviously read, and frequently makes nods to, work specifically by and about Black (straight) women - why not queer and trans women?

Several other things on hiatus

For work:

Mostly I'm wading through multiple editions and translations of the Roman de la Rose.

Nicole Sidhu, Indecent Exposure

Recently Finished: This will be an incomplete installment, I'm afraid.

Canterbury Tales by Susanna Davidson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


HUH. Fairly good for its target market; I have a few Questions (TM) about certain choices, which you can find here: https://twitter.com/ChaucerCommode/st...




Trans Like Me: A Journey for All of Us by C.N. Lester

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading this was like being wrapped in a nice blanket and offered a cup of tea and a chat. Most of its content isn't new to me, but the way it's strung together is beautifully clear, and accessible, and Lester's historical research interests mean it speaks to me in a way that many 101-level books don't. I'm filing it under academic reading as well, because I suspect I'll be coming back to Lester's revision of Serano's "subconscious sex" as "prorioceptive sex", that makes a lot of sense to me. Including, perhaps, why my own relationship with my sexed body is a bit skew-whiff from that of many cis people while lacking the sense of dissonance that many trans people have: I literally have a disorder that impairs prorioception.

Snatched: Sex And Censorship In Australia by Helen Vnuk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a fascinating read from the days of early-internet Australia. It's largely engaged with the ratings regime as it applies to movies and to hard copy magazines (did you know that there's content which Cosmo can legally print, but Playboy can't, because the "context" of the magazine as erotica means they can't give detailed descriptions - eg, how-to-guides -of cunnilingus or fellatio, and os on? WEIRD AND WRONG). It's a bit sad how few of Vnuk's optimistic hopes for the internet have held true, while so little has changed or indeed gotten worse in terms of distribution (the Australian pornographic movie industry collapsed, insofar as any dvds are available they're all illegal imports, etc, and now we have the Online Safety Bill, ugh).

I could have wished for a little more engagement with radical queer anti-censorship politics, although of course Vnuk notes the biases in whose sexual media is most strictly monitored. Vnuk's own intense straightness, and that of her interviewees, shows up at times - at one point she's interviewing a woman who curates a 'porn for women' site, and the interviewee complains that all of the 'lesbian' porn she finds involves strap-ons. Vnuk finds this to be evidence of The Male Gaze. I. Uh. I don't know what was out there in video format 2003 (the Crash Pad series hadn't kicked off yet), but On Our Backs definitely existed and is not devoid of strap-ons. Even if the magazine itself didn't reach Australia, I'm willing to bed the erotica collection they put out did (as an illegal import, natch). Not to say the videos Vnuk and her interviewee had in mind weren't necessarily 'lesbian-for-male-gaze' but the strap-on isn't the thing that makes it so.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read this one for high school exams, and enjoyed it more than I expected. The framing device, with the narrative to 'you', the American interlocutor, really makes it - the life story is fairly pedestrian aside from it's function in illustrating the failures of the American Dream and the process by which the protagonist came to empathise with anti-American, even extremist, politics. I was particularly irritated by the shallow and symbolic character of Erica, his white American love-object who never really loves him back.



View all my reviews

Online Fiction

No Man's Land, by Izumi Sizuki, trans. Daniel Joseph. Extract from a story called 'Women and Women', in the collection Terminal Boredom. I was both uncomfortable and sceptical with this at the start, and then as it began to reveal the unreliability of the narration I became curious if uncomfortable. I think I want to follow up the book.

Once and Future, by Dan Mickelthwaite, at Podcastle. Charming and a little heart-wringing.

Report of Dr Hollowmas on the Incident at Jackrabbit Five, by T. Kingfisher, at EscapePod. Being Ursula's work you know you're in for some good wry humour, and this is BRILLIANT. Amusing, down-in-the-grubby-details-of-life sci fi slice of life, made absolutely priceless by the format of the narrator, who is incredibly Done, futilely snarking at an archival AI. I strongly recommend this to everyone but especially kayloulee. Well. Everyone who hasn't had a traumatic labour experience, perhaps. The gory details are of an animal labour, per the content warning, but there are humans in Tense Delivery Situations as well.

Up Next: I'm really looking forward to getting back to work-related reading, but His Whiskers resents me reading books (he's okay with me reading the TLS, for some reason) or even my phone, which is... difficult.

---

Some links, by no means a comprehensive accounting:

Sara Ahmed (TSQ 3.1-2, 2016), An Affinity of Hammers. I actually read this as a PDF from the 'transreads.org' wordpress site that's now disappeard. It's dense. It's good.

Laurie Penny (Longreads), Tea, Biscuits and Empire: the Long Con of Britishness. I don't normally find much in Penny's work but this is Good, Actually.

Justin Parkinson (BBC News Magazine 2015), Almost 300 years without a duvet. This article answered many of my doona questions, like: how come my family call doonas a 'quilt' when they are not quilted (answer: they were marketed as the 'continental quilt' in the UK and Aus in the mid-20th century), and why in the UK and Aus they at *least* go with a top sheet, and in my family - and everyone I knew growing up - they were a bed-topper, not your only blanket.

Robin Craig (Shado Magazine), Looking at porn: why I'm writing about taboo fetishes

Ashley Spencer (Insider.com), An oral history of Tom Holland's sensational 'Lip Sync Battle' performance.

Jill Richards (ModernsismModernity), Claude Cahun's pronouns. This isn't an essay about Cahun's life, but about the author's relationship with Cahun's life as a researcher, the author's changing gut feeling on which pronouns are best used for Cahun, and Cahun as a figure of reception, recognition and re-imagination.

Rachel Boddie (The Conversation Aus/NZ), Long before Billie Elish, women wore corsets for form, function and support. I've long wanted a handy go-to for 'no, corsets don't by default restrict movement' (because no one takes 'I used to wear a corset, quite a rigid one, and while restrictive it wasn't debilitating' as Valid), and here it is.

Carmen Maria Machado (NYT), Banning my book won't protect your child.

Charmaine Chua (The Disorder of Things), In non-places, no one can hear you cry. Another from that anthropological blog series on long-distance shipping. This time, through the concept of the 'non-place': : The idea of the non-place, often invoked in writing about infrastructures of transport, provides a helpful analytical framework. But it also betrays the texture of life on the container ship – a place of transit, to be sure, but unlike other spaces of transit, acts both as workplace and living quarters to sailors who spend up to seven months at a time on board.

Heidi S. Bond, aka Courtney Milan (Michigan Law Review, 119.6, 2021), Pride and Predators. MLR apparently has a running thing where it publishes legal appraisals of classic literature. Bond's take on Pride and Prejudice is... well, frankly, it made me appreciate P&P rather more!

Pride and Prejudice is one of the most beloved romance novels1 of all time and needs very little introduction. For those who need a refresher on the plot, Pride and Prejudice details the community-wide damage that can be laid at the feet of serial sexual predators. It details the characteristics of predators, discusses the systemic social failures that allow predators to abuse others, and grapples with difficult questions of how communities should deal with those predators.

Anjali Enjeti (Electric Lit), 7 books about the partition of India and Pakistan. I've a long slow personal reading project for Partition-related fiction, and there's some interesting non-fiction here too.

Hey, look, only 7 weeks behind in my pinboard saved links. \o/

I haven't got any deep insights into Literature this fortnight. All I've got is that I was deeply amused when reading Snatched, a book by Helen Vnuk on the adult publication and video industry in Australia (up to 2003). In a chapter where Vnuk interviews women running online porn sites (many of which are now defunct - pornforwomen dot com redirects to ratemycock dot com), one Australian woman who ran a bunch of these video and literotica aggregation sites aimed at women complained that, in mainstream porn, lesbian porn is unrealistic, for the male gaze, and with no idea what women like. Her evidence: she watched some, and it had two women, one wearing a strap-on, the other fellating it. No idea what women like, asserts the (presumably straight) interviewee, and this is passed on by Vnuk.

Meanwhile, I've been reading Say Please, the Sinclair Sexsmith edited collection of lesbian bdsm stories, in which strap-ons and the fellating of feature in more than half the stories. My criticisms are a. only one femme strap-on-wearer in the entire collection, b. the wearing of a strap on dick is consistently conflated with being DOMINANT (seriously, does no one order their sub to strap up and deliver? Surely they must. But they don't ... write about it???), and c. a vanishing few of the stories involving strap-ons and dildos feature them as accessories, with quite specific traits - almost all of the stories invest deeply in the fantasy that the dildo *is* a cock. Which is a fine and good fantasy, but I would not have expected it to be so deeply standardised.

In short, straight people have no idea what lesbians like, but if what lesbians like is what Sinclair Sexsmith likes (... they have edited Best Lesbian Erotica for time immemorial so presumably yes?) then I am a little disappointed.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Girl, Woman, Other - some progress. Meanwhile, 'Outside the Lines', Anna Zabo (re-read).
Non-fiction for personal interest: Still slowly puttering through 'Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre'.
Lit Mag: 1.5 issues behind on the TLS. Still interested, though.
Poetry: Finally at the end of Paradise Lost bk 11.
For Work: Started 'Wahala Dey O', a Nigerian theatrical version of the Miller's Tale. It's really cool! I'm reading MF's copy, because it's out of stock pretty much everywhere.

Recently Finished:

Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts by Alison Gulley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


THIS IS A REALLY GOOD AND VERY USEFUL BOOK, and I feel vindicated about Lancelot.


Say Please by Sinclair Sexsmith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Extremely... patchy. Editing quality poor in places (some stories had exceedingly dull prose; a really basic continuity error about whether underwear was on or not, in a story by an award-winning author). A fair range of gender expressions and roles, although very very few femme tops and only ONE fem with a strap on (and zero strap-on-wearers who aren't the dominant partner). Some of the stories had really fascinating engagements with gender, but needed work to work as porn - the one that most interested me, one with a mid-scene gender-role switch, unfortunately tried to pack in SO MANY acts of sadism / masochism in one short story that it was like reading a sports report.

Others, however, were extremely Relevant To My Interests in ways I shan't detail here.

Online Fiction: Karen Joy Fowler (Lightspeed Magazine) Persephone of the Crows. A nifty little story, and good podcast recording.

Up Next: Oh so many things. It's time for me to reread the entire CT's, if nothing else.

---

Some links:

Jonathan Barnes (TLS), Review of: The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer, by Shrabani Basu. Gives a neat little overview of the life of George Edalji, the son of a Zoarastrian convert who went on to become a country vicar in England. Edalji did not have an easy time of it, as you might imagine for a mixed-race kid in rural 19th c England.

Clare Harman (TLS), Notes from Neverland. Did you know JM Barrie wrote weirdly obsessive borderline erotic letters to RL Stevenson? Now you do.

Jane Caplan (TLS), Review of: Nazis and Nobles, by Stephen Malinowski.

Esther Hayes (Guernica), Lineal Gaps. A family history memoir involving two adoption stories.

Jules Gill-Peterson (Jewish Currents), The anti-trans-lobby's real agenda: goes through the Christian supremacist basis of current US anti-trans bills.

Swikriti Kattel (Archer Magazine), The need for reforming sex education: my formative years. Not an easy read but a good one.

Emily Hodgson Anderson (The Rambling), Shadow Work: on academic writing, and the link between writer and work, and the ways that shapes up when you *don't* share an identity axis with your topic.

Nina Sharma, interview with Melissa Febos (Electric Lit), It's time to reckon with everything girlhood did to us.

Gabriel Novo, profile of Robert Cohen (Unicorn Magazine), How building a space for bi men helped my find my own voice.

I hesitate to call it traumatised, because it's not quite that personal; I'm fine, my family are fine, it's the shadow of living with Unprecedented Times.

Sounds like I'm talking about COVID-19, and maybe I will be in a few years, but right now that's a weird sort of normal. It's gone on so long and taken up far more of my life in Bern than was pandemic-free that it's just part of the furniture now. Australia's apocalypse summer, though, I flew out in the middle of it. I didn't realise how much it would haunt me. It's possible that part of the reason I've been less shaken by the pandemic, by being abroad in a pandemic, than many is that it hit just after the fire danger passed (literally: the fire crisis response headquarters in NSW was handed over to the multi-agency COVID response team, one crisis handing over to another). This Australian summer is cooler and humid in the east; Perth is having a mini-apocalypse right now, but it's not been a whole summer of it. I remember tensing myself in spring for a combined apocalypse, an Australian-intensity rerun of the western US's fire season with plague related shelter-in-place orders clashing with fire evacuations, and somehow, somehow, the apocalypse did not double down.

Today, I looked out the window and the sky was, sort of, still grey, but the houses across from me looked to yellow. It unnerved me. 'If I was in Sydney,' I said to my Australian partner, 'I'd be saying it was bushfire weather.' It wasn't. 'A couple of times in Geneva we had Sahara dust storms,' I said. 'I don't think they come this far north.' Turns out, they do. All this afternoon Swiss twitter has been sharing pictures of the yellow-filtered sky. It's eerie, my friends say. Creepy. I remember thinking that in Geneva. In Canberra, when we had dust storms there. I'd photograph it, keen to show people the weird-ass sky.

Despite the swiss news assuring us there is no risk to health in the cloud, the particles are too small, I couldn't convince myself to go outside. I couldn't must the 'hey isn't this weird, document it for posterity' energy. My brain was reaching for 'this is weird THIS IS APOCALYPTIC oh glod document it to try to get some sense of enormity oh glod', but of course... it's not. It's just the weather here. It's not even a climate-change driven extraordinary feature (q: why aren't there literary references to this phenomeon? Am I reading the wrong literature I've never even seen a 'lo in that year there was an orange sky' medieval chronicle type thing quoted in this context!).

My eyes and instincts were telling me something unthinkable, dangerous, literally deadly was happening, and yet... well, it is, but not because of the sand. That's the pandemic, the background noise.

Is this trauma? I suppose it is. The Journal of Traumatic Stress already have a COVID issue. People are talking about a generation-defining traumatic experience akin to the Great Depression. The Apocalypse Summer (what are we calling it? I've seen it called Black Summer, having outstrippped both Black Friday and Black Saturday) must surely be the same, and yet. It's disappeared into the recesses of our minds as the pandemic rolls on, and this present Australian summer has been cool and humid.

I'm reading the Winter (Aus) issue of Meanjin. Slow, I'm behind on issues, having trouble consuming content away from the screen. I'm reading articles written in (australian) autumn, when the fires were barely passed and the pandemic just manifesting itself. I feel disoriented in time. Lucy Treloar writes of 'Writing the Apocalypse':

I’m so angry with politicians that I take beta-blockers to calm my racing heart before going to sleep. Geoff Goldrick writes: ‘2019 may go down in history as Year Zero of the climate apocalypse. The tsunami of extreme events has been so relentless that each is quickly forgotten in favour of its successor.’

He lists the events. I had forgotten the Menindee fish kills and the immolation of Tasmanian forests dating to the last ice age. I had forgotten.

There are two more months of summer to go, but news broadcasts have stopped mentioning the word. Effortlessly, the boundaries of that old season blur and disappear. We have ‘bushfire season’ now. There is no ‘summerness’ this year. As a matter of course the weather report now includes fire alerts, the status of existing fires, the winds that will exacerbate them, fire probability and fire bans. Also the temperature.

I had forgotten the first summer of 2019, too. I wasn't there, of course, but it was a constant background to my winter and spring, via the social media. The fish kills, in particular, shook me. And I had forgotten. That won't be Year Zero: Year Zero will be 2020, with the second half of the 2019-20 fires, and then floods, and then pandemic, and then storms and more pandemic. All those other horrors of 2019 will be relegated, in our story-telling brains, to 'ominous build-up'.

I'm reading work written in Australia as I was settling in here in Bern, work that grapples with the reality of the fires and says: surely, now we must do something. Work that looks at the early stages of COVID-19 and says: our economic system is bankrupt, surely, now, we must do something. I feel cruel, like I have to let these essays down and say: oh, you sweet summer children. You underestimate our clinging to the old. You underestimate our collective ability to cope: faced with two crises at once, we can deny both.

I'm reading essays about the bushfire crisis and I'm homesick. Homesickness smells like smoke, now. I left Australia over 12 months ago. I was only home for four months, but that was the longest time in seven years, and most of it pervaded with the smell of smoke. I miss the smell of smoke. I look outside to the sepia-toned sky, and it doesn't smell of smoke, and my hindbrain is afraid because it looks like apocalyptic danger; and yet, I miss the smell of smoke.

I am not quite shaking, writing this. And I miss the smell of smoke.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Everina Maxwell's 'Winter's Orbit', which I bought even though I have a huge TBR, because I was in a Mood and wanted to binge-read. Did I succeed? No. Reading in fits and starts, still. I'm overall liking the improvements on plot and intrigue in comparison to the 'online draft' version as we are calling it now.
Poetry: Nothing more with Paradise Lost since the Listening Post update.
Lit Mag: As you may have gathered, Winter 2020 Meanjin.
Non Fiction for Personal Interest: A great many things at once. Tillie Walden's 'Spinning', still. bell hooks and foucault, both of which I dipped into for the book proposal but am determined to actually read properly this time.
For work: Also a great many things. Annotating the Jost collection 'Chaucer's Humor', which continues to be stodgy but useful. 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works', in fits and starts. Angie Abdou's A Canterbury Trail, which I am starting to realise will not actually involve a story-telling competition, and thus is less useful than I had hoped.

Recently Finished: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING hard copy since last update. Ooops.

Online Fiction:

Re-read The Archivist by Eris Young (Selkie Magazine). Read it aloud to my partner this morning, which I really enjoyed. One day I should read them a story that doesn't involve violence and emotional manipulation, but today is not that day.

Sunny Moraine (Lightspeed Magazine), Note to Self: in the form of an unpublished essay with marginal notes to self, concerning the 'quantum mirror'.

Up Next: The work related TBR continues to be far bigger than i can feasibly read, despite having taken a 'Reading Week' this week. Ugh.

---

Some links:

Carolyn Holbrook (Australian Policy and History), Managing the Federation During a Pandemic: Spanish Influenza and COVID-19. How the premier of WA got locked out of his own state in 1919.

Amal Awad (Meanjin Winter 2020), Sage Tea, Spices and Spaces: short memoir piece on cookery and heritage.

Lisa Morrow (Meanjin Winter 2020), Unpacking home: thoughts of a displaced traveller. I see my future in this and I'm not sure I like it.

Ginger Gorman (Meanjin Winter 2020), Breaking the Compassion Drought. Two things here: when Gorman started talking about 'radical empathy' and its long history I was Extremely Me and astonished to find her sources only went back as far as the 1950s, and not to 'caritas' via medieval mysticism. Honestly. And more significantly, Gorman's Troll Hunting has been on my radar for a long time; I have thought of it as a good thing based on what I heard of it, but it is VERY hard to have confidence in her perspective about change through radical empathy in this year of 'ffs don't platform Nazis'.

Angela Smith (Meanjin Winter 2020), Shattering the neoliberal fairytale. I liked the structure of this - Smith was in Paris in January for the taxi strike - but her confidence that the initial injection of Aus govt financial support for individuals in the early COVID phase presaged a rethink of the capitalist system... oh sweet summer child.

Sophie Cunningham (Meanjin Winter 2020), If you choose to stay we may not be able to save you. Again, the ... forward-lookingness if not exactly optimism. Cunningham felt, with fire season at her back, that there was finally urgency for action on climate change. That seems to have slid off the agenda, and the people who ought to be holding both parties to account in Aus are all busy trying to hold them to account over welfare issues, Australians stranded abroad, police violence, and and and and.

Lucy Treloar (Meanjin Winter 2020), Writing the apocalypse. This essay poses a fascinating question: when will we start to see climate change in realist fiction? Treloar argues that incorporating environmental destruction and awareness thereof into realist fiction gets you shunted to the genre of 'cli-fi', but at some point that has to give way. I'm going to quote, again. It's SUCH a good essay:

Of course realist fiction, any fiction, has always depicted a curated reality: the cast of characters culled to avoid confusion, conversations condensed, action compressed, and the plot shaped around thematic or genre concerns. They present a constructed ‘seeming’ truth with a satisfying plot arc, which in the confines of the text the reader accepts as reality. In some ways novels are strong. They can hold worlds, universes, multitudes of feeling, thinking, understanding, wondering. But throw a diamond on a beach and fail to answer the question it raises and the novel’s foundations tremble. It’s not so much a loose end as a loose start. An uncanny weather event or a strange sight—a toxic algal bloom, a drowned landscape, or thousands of cuttlefish washed onto a shore—present a similar problem. Mention them and they catch the readers’ attention and threaten to pull the novel out of shape. It is the particularity of an event that presents problems. How then do you depict climate change when its effects are so variously weird?

Joanna Hershon (Guernica), Family Man. 'I never knew my uncle. But it's the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.'

Caitlin Welsh (Mashable), How online advice columns teach us to tell our own stories. Hey, I resemble that remark. Before online advice, I had Margaret Clark's 'Secret Girls Stuff' books.

Olivier Pauchard (SwissInfo), Salt: A Raw Material. This isn't an article so much as a... webbook? Idek, it doesn't work well on mobile though. This thingy, whatever it is, is an introduction to the Swiss salt industry. I have now learned there is part of the old 'Via Salina' which ran from Arc-en-Senans in France to Bern, for the transport of French Jura salt, still paved and hikeable near Yverdon Les Bains. I desire to go at once. There's also a Swiss Salt Museum, which I would go to asap if all museums weren't closed.

Kirsta A Murchison (History Today), Medieval Minims: The hidden meaning of a medieval pen-twister. Yes good.

Possibly the best thing I've read in the past fortnight:

RE: Thesis defense issue (2954 words) by kalirush
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense (McSweeney's Post) - Luke Burns
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Academia, Fecklessness, Snakes, Why Did It Have To Be Snakes, Epistolary
Summary:

It is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and a student needs a snake for her defense.

From: Petroski, Linda <petroski5@barnett.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2020 9:40 AM
To: Kahler, Robin M. <kahler22@barnett.edu>
Cc: Lemieux, Annie <lemieux9@barnett.edu>, Zhang, Wei <zhang3676@barnett.edu>, Ortega, Richard <ortega151@barnett.edu>, Edelstein, Doron <edelstein8@barnett.edu>
Subject: RE: Thesis defense issue

Hello, all-

We just realized that Robin indicated that she was using a committee-provided snake for her defense, rather than one from SMO. Could you confirm that’s the plan, and who will be providing the snake if so? We’ll also need species and measurements for the files.

Thanks-

Linda

--------
Dr. Linda Petroski
Graduate Program Coordinator,
Department of Psychoceramics,
Barnett College

Strongly recommended to anyone who has dealt with grad school in any capacity.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Nothing, looks like.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Tillie Walden's graphic memoir 'Spinning', about figure skating. 'The Queer Child' is still on hiatus.
Poetry: Still working on Paradise Lost. Thought I was on book 10, but it turns out it's only book 9.
Lit Mag: Started the Winter Meanjin.
For work: 'Before Emotion', which I have out for review. 'The Fabliau in English' and 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works', intermittently. 'A New Companion to Chaucer', on hiatus / being dipped into here and there.

Recently Finished:

Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


On the good side, I really liked the protagonist of this, and the love interest: both were interesting, flawed, loveable characters who pulled me through despite... the rest being, uh, still in draft stage, it felt? Complete with some typos. Timing was off. Sudden switch between 'he'd never be interested in me' to 'let's have a fling and i'll initiate it KISS KISS' not really explained. Etc.

The supporting cast were interesting, and I wonder if the whole thing would have done better as a larger book or a duology in family-fiction / "women's fiction" or some such, with the romance thread but without depending SO MUCH on the pacing of that.

Also there's the odd fact that the sex scenes are pretty low detail but the internal monologue is wall to wall 'perving and hornt'. Just. I kind of prefer ways of conveying sexual attraction that aren't 'omigosh his abs' with 'also he's sweet and a family guy' as the decorative note?

Basically, this is a surprisingly weak book in hindsight, given how quickly and with how much enjoyment I read it.


The Good, the Bad and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends by Tom Cox

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book would have been more Of the Zeitgeist had I read it back in 2011 when Cox's work was first recommended to me. It is certainly odd to read 'humourous tales of other people's cats' in book form in this age of #catsofinstagram. But I like it - I like the links Cox draws between the human and the feline, and his anecdotes about people and various animals. I'm not sure if I'll bother with the rest of the cat man books, though, rather than jump straight to his newer stuff.


Gilded Cage by K.J. Charles

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I loved this immensely and I have no idea why it took me this long to get to it. I think it's KJ's first het romance (under this name, perhaps she's had other pen names), and it's great. Much more ... gritty than her f/f work.
Ed: I normally trust KJC but I am suspicious about indentured labour in late 19th c Aus. Hmm.


Meanjin Autumn 2020 by Jonathan Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In an extremely 2020 Mood, I started the Autumn (Aus) issue mid-year and finished it in January. But there was good stuff in here! (As usual, I ignored Shannon Burns. I read pretty much everything else in Meanjin, including things written by certain Vice-Chancellors, but I am done with Burns. Their continued publishing of his bad takes, knowing they can then run counter-takes, is... a reason I seriously reconsider my subscription every so often.)

Timmah Balls' essay Why Write was brilliant.
Jono Revanche, Age, Class, Politics: do recommend.
Liz Duck-Chong, Crosses, Flags, Arches. A history of Ronald MacDonald. Absolutely fascinating.
Anna Spargo Ryan, A Conspiracy of Witches: on abortion reform, and personal experience. Tough reading.
Dzenana Vucic, Digital Intimacy and the Aestheticisation of Sound: on ASMR media
Maxine Beneba-Clarke, On writing and risk: packs several punches, IMHO
Steve Dow, Stream Drama: a really interesting look at the impact of streaming services on Australian TV.
James Panichi, Blasphemy, Italian-Style: there's a profanity divide in Italy, and Panichi writes about it fascinatingly
Lizzie O'Shea, The Secret Misfortune of the Lucky Country: on the pokie machine industry
Megan Petrie, The Rats of the Sky: A memoir piece about travel, and pigeons
Katerina Bryant, Old Wives Tales - on superstition as cultural heritage
Matt Lewin, Please Shut the Door Quietly: a short memoir piece on being a music therapist in a palliative care ward



Short fiction online:

John Kinsella (Meanjin Autumn 2020), Here be lions. I am normally bored by the realist fiction in Meanjin, and I've definitely been bored by Kinsella before, but I like this one quite a lot.

KT Bryski (Lightspeed Magazine), The Bone Stag Walks. Good story: brilliant podcast reading.

Up Next: I haven't got anything going on my kobo at the moment, so one of my recent purchases there. Maybe Jeannie Lin's 'The Lotus Palace', which I bought at xmas.

---

Some links:

Bob Nicholson (HistoryToday): Did you hear the one.... On Victorian distaste for 18thc jokes.

Eli Davies (Guardian): To solve the problem of loneliness, society needs to look belong the nuclear family.

Jonathan Smilges (CFSHRC), Bad listeners. This is... dense. I didn't find it as galvanizing as the twitter recommender did; partly perhaps I don't understand it; partly perhaps as a neurodivergent woman I don't get the same leeway *in which to be* a bad listener as Smilges, who I am assuming from their name is probably read by their bosses and some students as a man, does. I cannot, for instance, POSSIBLY imagine anything but implosion of my teaching career if I told a class to 'talk amongst yourselves' and email me questions, even if I was struggling that day.

Anya Groner, interview with Lee Connel (Electric Lit), The party upstairs and the super who has to clean it up.

Livia Gershon (JStor daily), How women lost status in saloon

Ben Moore and Edward Narayan (Conversation AU), What does a koala's nose know. Saw a picture of a koala and noticed their odd noses for the first time. Now I know about koala noses.