compersion & limerence

I know we all know about Wild Nights with Emily, right? Here is the trailer in case you missed it.

I saw it a bit ago but JEEZ YOU GUYS, I LOVED IT SO MUCH I RECOMMEND IT SO STRONGLY, and now I am going to gush about it!

It feels like the movie version of a fanfiction that caters to aaallll of my buttons: the business of artmaking, girls (ok, yes, women, but also girls!) in love, excellent jokes about the Brontë sisters, effective meta-narrative on history's pliability and who-tells-your-story, caretaking of the body. It also has a super tight running time (1h24m!), and some serious belly laughs. The only important characters are women. And they are killer.

In addition to catering to the "jokes about English lit" crowd, it features a truly astounding ending—devastatingly dignified. I went from giggling to silent crying in the span of about 30 seconds, and it didn't...feel weird? It felt marvelously paced and sincere and powerful.

Not only is it girls! in love!, but Molly Shannon's Emiy worked unexpectedly wonderfully for me—her Emily feels fun and quirky and, you know, a touch melodramatic. All thatr eturned a measure of joy to her poems that I'm not sure I ever had before. (I have not, historically, been a major E.D. fan but I am doing a real 180° on that). That's also why it feels a bit like fanfiction; fic has rescued or illuminated a number of canons for me, and Wild Nights, in it's bawdiness, counterweights the traditional E.D. narrative.

It was SO GOOD and so worthwhile; absolutely adding to my ad-hoc lesbian film collection. Again, the ending was just....stunning.

( Iwhisperspace?: I'm also losing my mind; have ANY of you seen Wild Nights **and** Black Sails? [spoilers ish] )

This was also illuminated by a tweet from Joseph Fink about the ending of GoT, which I think highlights why Nights and Black Sails are SO satisfying, in the end:

"So the anger [at the ending] comes not because the story ended badly but because we were reminded at the end that it was only a story, nothing more, and that feels like a loss.

— Joseph Fink 🐞 (planetoffinks) May 20, 2019

The text of Thomas Merton's "Letter to an Innocent Bystander"; stored here for posterity's sake, since the only other versions are sketchy internet bits.

( Letter to an Innocent Bystander )

good news: i came home early and watched 5 episodes of The Magicians, and I am SO EXCITED to read all the e x p l i c i t fanfiction. It's also perfect "in pain and miserable and embroidering badly" TV. Whoop!

bad news: a professional contact that I don't super like is the only person who recommended it to me; he has been anxiously awaiting my response and I don't want to give it to him. He also, bless, said "Yeah, the internet really cares about Quentin and Eliot...fanshipping, I think it's called?"

( whispery space where I pull out all of my hair )

1. I went to the fancy bookstore yesterday to buy myself a copy of if not, winter, reasoning that I should read it myself instead of just consuming sapphobot. The person behind the counter:

   • owns 3 copies of if not, winter
   • lusted briefly with me after this ludicrously expensive letter press edition, illustrations by jenny holzer
   • keeps a secret copy of Autobiography of Red tucked behind the David Foster Wallace for "when people like you and me come and we're out of stock"
   • asked "do you come here often?" and gave me ~four extra stamps on one of those frequent buyer cards, so, yes, I do now!

2. I just finished red doc< Monday, and was emoting to my housemates about it because I have zero (0) filters; one of them came home the next day and was like "I spent two hours today reading about Anne Carson at work, thanks." I do think I preferred Autobiography of Red, on balance; the specificity and reworking of the translations was so fucking perfect, and so much the meta-textual story re-making I LIVE for. Then again, approaching red doc with the expectation of a straight-forward sequel was foolish on my part. Autobiography continues to rub like a stone in a shoe at inarticulate feelings of queerness. It's the overlap between [embodiment, it sucks] and [gender, it sucks] that I also feel in that my favorite authors continue to be Sapphic women writing about being Sapphic women and embodiment thereof, while not feeling myself to be a Sapphic woman. I both do not know what to do with that feeling and am very glad that I'm having it, and thinking it, and reading literature that rubs at it without naming it. Books: they're pretty good, guys.

3. did you read reticent sonnet yet?

What I Cried About On Wednesday, Week of 3/20 whatever, by felinejumper

SO. Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive. It's a road trip novel, a novel about a dissolving marriage, a novel about echoes and sound and memory, about the stories children and adults tell to each other, and a novel about, god, missing migrant children, children getting lost, the human atrocity of the U.S.-Mexico border. (fwiw it is also, almost incidentally, queer, but her queerness is layered amongst backstory and not at all a narrative priority.) It was a very incredibly good and intense read and I strongly recommend it while also feeling exceedingly odd about recommending a book that is...joyful but not about a joyful subject, mayhap.

( more thoughts )

scuffing a shoe guiltily against the floor so my partner and I...got Breath of the Wild....two Fridays ago...and it's eaten all my spare time...like....ALL OF IT, like 5 hours a night of it every night since, and more on weekends. (It's so good, I am Deeply In Love with our boy Link and my girl Urbosa). Also, I learned to embroider this week, which has been so fucking satisfying and waaayy more addictive/relaxing than expected.

AND, oh, yes, also, in what is technically much bigger news, I went from working 0 hours a week to 40 hours a week, under very surprising circumstances— like, an emergency call on Thursday morning asking if I could, basically, pinch hit for a project I used to work on, because the RA quit with no notice. And it's going ok! It's super weird to be back after a year away, and I am mentally already preparing a fucking dissertation on the unintentional abuse of RAs practised by everyone higher up—like, ten simple steps to avoid crushing your passionate but very young, actually, underlings, beneath the massive weight of your expectations so they don't have a mental break down like all of the RAs I've know who've worked here, me included; if they work, that is. The simple steps to not having a breakdown. crosses fingers

I am also reading books, although...not too many, given all the new hobbies.

( She Rises, Kate Worsley )

( Middlemarch )

generally on the book front, I had dinner with my cleverest reading friend yesterday, and as usual the two of them sent me home with 9 loaners + the results of picking through their "getting rid of pile" so...I'm a monster, and have my assigned reading for the next two months, also. I'm excited, though, because it includes:

• Carson, red doc, which I've been dying for since August when I read Autobiography
• two Valeria Luiselli books
• Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
• two Fanny Howe books? novellas?
• Robinson, Housekeeping

In addition to Nimona, which I've never read in full, and then some assorted short stories, and also some very cool non fiction about memorials to death in America.

Not a full report, but I've been reading Sarah Waters' Affinity and wow, is it a claustrophobic queer horror experience. I think I really like it,but it's almost too intense an experience to enthusiastically recommend. It's visceral and creepy and deeply disturbing.

My brother & his partner did me the immense favor of showing me The Handmaiden--which, incidentally, watching that bath scene? That buttons scene? With a family member? Do NOT recommend, I've never been so turned on in the presence of a family member before, I can't tell if they know how hot those scenes are-- and I was like yes, I sure do need more of this in my life. And thus, Affinity.

( soul and body horror (mild cws, I guess?) )

Somewhat unfortunate that I'm about to meet a new person in checks watch now o'clock while completely mired in the horrors of Millbank and Victorian era prisons, but hey, whatcha gonna do.

I both got Libby set up two weeks ago (i.e. immediate access to many books on my TBR) and actually made myself do research, so: books!

fiction

Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman

(h/t to breathedout 's + others Tumblr discussions about movie/book Carol vs CMBYN from a year ago, neither of which I had read at the time but have now!)

I usually care about books long before the halfway mark; that said, I cared deeply by the end of the book, although I'm not sure about who. Elio and Oliver are both so defined by Elio's obsession with Oliver that it feels both very far from my experience and too close to focus on. Or, differently, the disparity between intense introspection and complete non-focus/unawareness/unconcern with outside perception made it feel inaccessible (as I am not Elio) while also providing no other options in terms of handholds; anyway, I think the fact that it's difficult for me to articulate things means it was a net positive reading experience.

Autonomous, Annalee Newitz (h/t to glorious_spoon for the amazing rec on the topic of trans robots)

"We're just making donuts!" the admin screamed, holding up a ball of gore. "Why don't you let us make donuts? Timmo's bots make…the…best…donuts!"

Autonomous as a whole was very clever and an excellent romp and so up my alley; along with the actual topics, it's a standout example of, uh, late-capitalism Nightvalian comedy. It's also about:

• synthetic biology
• IP law/free culture
• robots
• gender

Which if you did not know, is ENTIRELY my jam. I don't know that I've read this many little bits of a book out loud to my partner ever; I am v. excited for him to read it as well. Extremely good fodder for my general side-gig of theorizing about what works for me in science fiction.

The entirety of the Sins of the Cities, & The Magpie Lord, K.J. Charles

Look, sometimes you need an aperitif at the end of the day. Yay, historical queer romance! Yay, nobody went to jail for sodomy! Yay, somewhat-dubiously-defined magic systems involving sex!

non fiction (i.e. in progress books that I should be reading right now)

A History of Genetics, Alfred A. Sturtevant (available in full text for free @ that link, courtesy of the ESP)

Sturtevant wrote this in 1965 in his retirement; he'd been a member of T.H. Morgan's lab in 1910 & was very involved in Drosophila genetic research and is the 'father of biochemical genetics'; was the first to make gene maps. So, as they say in the book, a history by one who was there (and with the attendant biases thereof). A nontrivial bonus is that so far the chapters are very short and very easy to crunch through, as opposed to either scientific texts by scientists or historical texts by historians.

The Invention of Science, David Wootton

Please see this post for my non-academic commentary on this book so far; anyway, a decidedly not crunchable book. It's...pretty dense and I don't have a good grasp of his thesis yet, but I think it's basically a rebuttal to the field of history of science. So. We'll see.

I...did not use the signal bookmarklet correctly, but h/t to conuly's post for this fabulous article about cross cultural science writing:

Decolonizing Science Writing in South Africa

Sibusiso Biyela

( brief cut for image space )

Last October, I received one of the toughest assignments of my freelance career. Scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had discovered the fossils of a new species of dinosaur, Ledumahadi mafube, unearthed in the mountainous Free State province. Weighing in at 12 metric tons and dating back nearly 200 million years, Ledumahadi mafube, Sesotho for “Giant Thunderclap at Dawn,” was one of the earliest Jurassic giants. Its fossils held clues about how even larger dinosaurs, the sauropods, evolved. My job was to write about the discovery for the South African website SciBraai—and to do so in my native language of Zulu.

But there’s no word for “dinosaur” in Zulu. Nor are there words for “Jurassic,” “fossilization,” or “evolution.” Despite the fact that Zulu—or isiZulu, as the language is called in South Africa—is spoken by some 10 million people, it simply doesn’t have the words for communicating science.

This article ties in many many interesting threads that I am adding to my mental toolbox: language and apartheid; 'retrofitting' a language for science communication; language-based scientific alienation; some successful Zulu + Xhosa sci-comm projects; and science storytelling as a particularly Zulu cultural imperative. It also serves to illustrate a metrics divide based on semi-specific background knowledge, because (for those unfamiliar) S. Africa is by far the scientific powerhouse on the African continent. Their research outputs are something like an order of magnitude greater than the rest of the continent combined (afaik from research a few years ago, and measured by fairly traditional metrics), so it's especially interesting how relatively little progress there has been in enabling indigenous languages to talk about scientific work. I mean, though, apartheid is a pretty good explanation for it, in the end.