i seem to have been reading a lot about the childbearing recently (why?)

[felinejumper]

Part -1. Wooooof, I feel like I have not been on the internet for weeks, hi, internet! Predominantly this is because I have been cranking on experiments at work the last bit, which means the past two weeks have been of approximately infinite length, and because of the very particular data set has required me to be at work at 8 am every day. This is...earlier than usual.
The exceedingly fun -- truly -- project I'm pushing on is about that horrifying thing of fetal microchimerism. This is the stuff where in post-mortems of people who have given birth, you consistently find live cells from their long ago progeny -- in the lung and liver and heart and ~brain, oooh, spooky (see this NYTimes article from 2015 for the long version of this). I haven't done the deep deep literature dive yet, but there seems to be some really recent research suggesting that while yes there are negative immunological impacts (mother raising an immune response to fetal cells from baby A, which when Baby B comes around is. . .not super great for baby B), there's also some absolutely WACK research about fetal cells serving as stem cells, and in cases of maternal injury (cardiac arrest, in this case) actually being recruited to the site, and leading to better outcomes. Completely nuts biology, I feel, and absolutely fascinating.

It does have some possible clinical relevance to miscarriage and abortion, in a long-range kind of way, which I. . . need to think through. Working in genetics is complicated. In any case, yes, am excited about results and data, and sounexpectedly intrigued by this field, and I am also totally 100% exhausted mush; you could just pour me into a jello mold and "wait until congealed." (The real way they wrote recipe books! god, why??.)

Part 0. I am SO excited about my femslash after dark assignment, my word, my WORD, and all the rest of what will be gifted to the collective femslash-consuming community come August. I am worried I didn't write a detailed enough letter; er, rather, I didn't list all my kinks comprehensively, what if my writer thinks those are my only kinks and therefore limits themself?!
But still, really really really looking forward to writing (oh god when??) and reading. Yum.

Part 1, books recently completed (now a woefully out of date list):

• Fanny Howe, The Needle's Eye: Passing Through Youth
  This was quite beautiful and moving and I have no idea what I read, basically. Howe is America's "most readable experimental poet", and that sure is a category. Needle's Eye starts by talking about and around the Boston Marathon bombing and builds a broader...something, not quite commentary, on youth and childhood as a global and eternal experience? (I really am not sure). It's built also on her clearly extensive literature background and very much a patchwork of references to saints and writers and history. I really loved it; this is the only bit I have handy on my phone for an illustration of the...choppy-yet-sensemaking she pulls off.

Like Yeats, Francis believed that magic was existence itself.

What is a sister or brother but a person whose blood-stream has the same source as your own, whose near-invisible bio-determinants are yours too, who came out of the same waters and voice, and who has breathed on the same breast? I met a person who could taste the grass and herbs a beast had eaten in the meat on her plate. I only taste my tongue in a leaf of lettuce, a strawberry.

Meister Eckhart wrote in The Aristocrats:

Back in the womb from which I came, I had no god and merely was myself. I did not will or desire anything, for I was pure being, a knower of myself by divine truth. Then I wanted myself and nothing else. And what I wanted, I was and what I was, I wanted and thus, I existed untramelled by god or anything else.”

I...this quote sure is something, given my research discussion up high, huh. Anyway, it's wonderful and well worth spending some time on, I think.

• I got sad two weeks ago, so I read like seven romance novels over the course of two days (thanks, Courtney Milan!). They were fun! Particularly the ludicrous one featuring Violet, the Countess of Chromosome, for obvious reasons.


• I watched Good Omens and have been reveling in an entire new fandom to play in. Anathema is critically underused and I'm upset there's only two War/Pollution fics -- the one I've read was delicious, tho.


• oh! I finished Mary Oliver's Upstream; after realizing paper books also exist from the library and are way more available than the Libby waiting list, which I've been on since January for Upstream. So that was very good, as you might expect. "Winter Hours" was a standout, and I also really really enjoyed the essays on Poe and Whitman.

Part 2, CurrentlyPreviously Reading

Sarah Waters, The Night Watch, per comments from when I read Affinity -- ty to breathedout for the recommendation; it was ridiculously on brand for you, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Like Affinity, it was gripping as a read, but with distance I've started to feel slightly more iffy (although not as iffy as Affinity, in the least). I'm not sure why, except that I didn't cry, and I feel like I was meant to. And, you know, I am a human waterfall.

Some things I loved: The moving backwards through time!! felt like a boon to the story, and managed a neat trick of reminding me, constantly, of the way we get to know the people around us. You always hear the most recent stories first, when you meet someone -- Kay living alone, Mickey, the gin fizzes; Viv in a hopeless loveless affair; the ring, why the ring?; the clear devolving nastiness of Helen/Julia. Then they dig into their past, and then further, to the crux of it, the one formative moment that set things going; that's how you meet real people, and I so so very much enjoyed meeting these people that way.

The Kay/Helen/Julia triangle. Ooooof. I loved that we saw Helen deciding to cheat. I loved the instant when she discovered that Julia had been in love with Kay, and consequently felt her own adoration of Julia troubled, fuck, wow, that is a good character moment; I would kill to have constructed a triangle sufficiently nuanced for that to land. (goals!!) I love the way Julia and Helen operate in and around Kay; I love the way Waters constantly pulled things back together -- Helen calling Julia, Kay calling Helen, patterns of behaviour morphing through time.

I loved the way the time skips forced you to remember the future, as it were -- the skip from 1944 to 1947, imagining how Kay's relief over Helen's being alive! transformed to grief over her leaving, but still joy that she lived at all -- maybe, who knows, not us and not Kay. It's a delicious amount of readerly work to be done.

...I'm getting a strong vibe that I liked Kay, and you're right, I did like Kay, and her "shirt she could wear open, like a woman might." Nng. I fell madly in lust with her on literally page 5.

I find it harder to say I adored Viv and Duncan; I think I find them more disturbing stories, although not worse. Viv's abortion was stunning, though, and viscerally disturbing, and a really incredible piece of writing. More or less the same for Duncan's arc; they both felt like they were hardly in control of their own lives, absorbed by their partners and unable to escape their orbit (but that's true for Helen and Kay, as well, so...).

About 3/4 through 1944, I started saying "oh no oh no oh no there's another time jump oh no"; that again worked. So well. For me. Perhaps better than any other time stuff; it didn't feel at all deceptive in the way that time obfuscation does, which is especially surprising given my understanding of her style so far.

So I guess I liked it, all in all, though!

Part next, whatever part I'm on, currently reading (actual):
Finished Le Carre's Single & Single, a day or two ago, which featured too many names and a plot that was...fine; not as fun as the Smiley novel I read a few years ago. It was a found-on-vacation deal, so that's alright.

Picked up H is for Hawk, which caters quite precisely to my niche of gay + grief + nature, thank you very much. It's lovely, just as expected.