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I finished the Tove Jansson novel Fair Play which is about two Finnish lesbians in their 70s who hang out on an island and in their apartments. They're very chill and unsentimental about everything and is basically just a series of disconnected vignettes. Just a really nice, languid study of queer companionship. I liked it a lot. I'm also reading We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poets which just came out from Nightboat. Tons of good people in it and it's so chunky, over 400 pages, so far as I've just been dipping in here and there. I'm also rereading the Helen Adam Reader because she was such a weird and mesmerizing figure. I dug it out to check something but now I'm just reading it cover to cover again. I guess I'm also very slowly picking my way through a bunch of more depressing and dense non-fiction. I have the new Gerald Horne book which is about the roots of white supremacy in the "long 16th century," and Jen Manion's Female Husbands which I've only skimmed so far but looks like a pretty interesting look at an area of queer history I'd barely ever heard of. I'm doing this all while eating some Twizzlers I found outside.
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Nov 6, 2020 22:08
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I'm rereading a lot of Ann Taves for my dissertation right now and also rereading a book called Teaching Queer that helped me figure out a lot about teaching a few years ago and I think could have some useful tips for me about teaching highly stressed out students in the spring if next semester is anything at all like this one. I'm also a bunch of H.D. poems again. I'm also reading some crummy ol Carl Schmitt for next week when I'm teaching Hamlet. Nobody likes Schmitt but you just gotta.
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Nov 9, 2020 21:00
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beer pal posted:wide sargasso sea - really good! having a good time reading books lately Great book, I hope you check out Voyage in the Dark too, it's my favorite Jean Rhys novel.
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Nov 13, 2020 00:50
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I haven't read it since probably 2007 but it's stuck with me so strongly. One of the greatest of all modernist novels' endings imo.
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Nov 13, 2020 01:07
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Casey Plett put her first book of short stories up for free on her website. I've been reading it and a lot more of them are about people making love than I expected. Kind of feel like I fell into some kind of erotic snare.
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Nov 24, 2020 04:35
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I am now reading a not very interesting biography of Robert Duncan and revisiting a bunch of good Nathaniel Mackey books. I think his essays rule so much, very stoked to read Discrepant Engagement again.
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Dec 1, 2020 04:56
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It pairs really well with the 1926 Blaise Cendrars novel Moravagine if you've never read that. I like both of those books a lot.
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Dec 1, 2020 20:43
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I got the big new Bruce Boone reader, Dismembered, because I wanted to cite something in it that I'd previously only had as a really raggedy looking scan of a scan of a xerox. It's so good. His writing about Duncan is just the best and funniest ever, his Spicer essay is the tops, he's just the perfect guy. I read his little translation of La Fontaine a bunch of years ago but rereading his intro tonight it just took my breath away.
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Dec 16, 2020 06:38
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I read a few pretty unsatisfactory biographies of Magnus Hirschfeld so I gave up and just started reading Gay Berlin, a study that a few people I trust have recommended. Although I don't know why I don't just read Isherwood's stuff about Berlin and cut out the middlemensch.
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Dec 22, 2020 08:35
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I finished reading a book about how homosexuality and homophobic violence were represented and criminalized in journalism and fiction between the beginning of the 20th century and Stonewall. It was ok but as it went on I felt like too much of the book was just cryptic newspaper clippings about guys being murdered in hotel rooms, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that the book was a bummer but yeah it was a pretty big bummer. I am now reading a book about queer culture in Weimar Berlin, because I don't know how to learn from my mistakes.
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Jan 4, 2021 09:39
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xcheopis posted:I'm giving up on trying to read any new fiction. I just can't get into anything, so I'm going back to my favourite non-fiction subjects for now. the only good novels I've read lately are reissues or older things that just got translated into english. I think novelists need to get their acts together and stop loving around writing crummy ones
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Jan 8, 2021 07:20
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Bright Bart posted:So too was another film where a sex scene was prominent, even earlier. Yeah these days Fritz the Cat is barely even taught at all in K-12.
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Jan 15, 2021 23:53
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I have been reading a lot of stuff for lesson planning and it's been a lot of fun. This week I read Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature by David Greven, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire by Amy S. Greenberg, and Walt Whitman's strange pseudonymous fitness book Manly Health and Training to Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body. I learned a lot about the boys and their awful ways. My committee chair also gave me a book, The Laws is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons by Dayan, which I'm excited to read. And then last week I was able to just lounge around in the tub for a pretty long while so I read a Mary Ruefle poetry collection I hadn't read before, DUNCE.
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Feb 5, 2021 16:32
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I'm on an Otessa Moshfegh kick and I really like her so far. I guess I'm accidentally reading all her stuff in order and next up is My Year of Rest and Relaxation which I hear is the big one. I also am back on translating some Paul Scheerbart. I might translate his long essay on Cervantes next.
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Jun 26, 2021 15:06
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Eileen was really funny mostly because it is so grim and the heroine is such a ghoulish creep, it's like if Edward Gorey had to direct a giallo movie about E/N. I really liked it, it's wild how satisfying her stories are for how much they steadfastly deny the reader what they want.
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Jun 26, 2021 23:26
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I'm finally finishing Darryl and it's such a weird bummer. I think if it wasn't the novel everybody was talking about right now I would just say ah well not for me but I have a pathological need to be able to follow The Conversation. It's about this guy with a cuckolding fetish whose wife gets involved with this alt-right weirdo and the main guy becomes friends online with a trans woman and ruminates on this and that. It's pretty funny and the narrator has a likeable little inner monologue but I am not having fun reading about an alt-right guy cumming and running wild. It just feels a little too mean to me which maybe means that the mindset of a cuckolding fetishist is just completely alien to me? So I also feel like mm, am I kinkshaming this novel? I will say one thing I admire about it a lot: most of the big discoursy novels by trans authors so far have been About Being Trans so I like that this one is about some guy with his own problems. I like that Jackie Ess, the author, could be like, yeah of course the novel is going to be about gender and how we all reckon with this huge strange construct, but nobody is putting a gun to my head and making me write a roman a clef. So I appreciate that and I hope people pick that up and run with it but otherwise I dunno, I feel square saying this but it's just not really my cup of tea this book. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Jun 28, 2021
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Jun 28, 2021 18:33
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When I was a teenager I went to a lecture he gave at the Philly Library. I was really excited, and I don't remember much of what he said, but I remember it was very very weird. I was just a little baby idiot at the time, I wasn't aware of his blogs or his politics outside of what you could get from his novels and a very strange essay he wrote about colonialism that I read somewhere, but I did know a little bit about political philosophy and I knew he was saying stuff that just did not fit into any of the ideological clusters I had grown used to thinking about. When I left I felt like I didn't really like him very much anymore but that I felt like I understood something vague, vaguely better than I had previously. I wonder how much of this is that so much of what he believes stems out of an extraordinarily idiosyncratic practice of Mormonism, a system I'm honestly relatively ignorant about in terms of what it meant to live and believe in a Mormon universe in the 20th and 21st centuries (and the impression I get is that he practices it and parses it in a very personal and unusual way). Because there's that awful ugly strain of homophobia, that fear of change that I think is endemic to certain kinds of fundamentalism, but also an awful lot of stuff about peace and embracing the terror and vulnerability of empathy that I still kind of think back fondly on. It's just such a weird mish-mash and so internally jumbled up and wayward that I wish I could just take a pair of tweezers and extricate the good and compelling and beautiful parts and let the hate and ugliness fall back into the quagmire but I guess that's... impossible!
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Jun 28, 2021 19:45
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I feel like I gotta read something that will help me learn something brand new, I had all these history and theory books started and like 25% finished because the dissertation chomped up all my time, but I also want to just rush out and buy new stuff or bring home a huge pile from the library. I also kept telling myself this would be the summer I'd really finish In Search of Lost Time but honestly that ain't looking likely.
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Jun 28, 2021 20:46
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xcheopis posted:https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520085800/inscribed-landscapes I'm reorganizing and cataloguing all the pdfs I've grabbed "for later" over the course of the past bunch of years. I remember in the little twilight era between undergrad and grad school I remember having so much fun just getting a curiosity about something and being able to casually read one or two books about it and then move on. I loved getting pop science books for laypeople and not having to feel like an expert on every little thing beneath the sun.
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Jun 28, 2021 22:16
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That sounds really cool. I read Lorraine Daston's little monograph Against Nature a few years back which it sounds like was covering similar arguments although from more of an early modern/history of science vantage.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:53
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Today I'm reading Jan Morris' 1974 Conundrum which so far is the most delicately and ornately written trans memoir of the bajillion often not that good trans memoirs I've read. It's really beautifully language. I have never read any other books by her but I guess I should? At the same time-- she's sooooo British I'm losing my mind. You know the tone I mean. Here's this part about her having sex as a high-schooler with some dummy.  I also found a very old cache of John Keel PDFs and kicked off the day by drinking my little coffee and reading about bigfoots and so on. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jun 29, 2021
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Jun 29, 2021 16:55
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nut posted:read it read it! then let me know what you think added it to my list!
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Jun 29, 2021 18:06
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Jul 1, 2021 02:43
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Nut I started that Lewontin book and so far it really appeals to me. I briefly considered doing my PhD work on early modern medical rhetoric (there are very very weird and poetic 17th century textbooks and tracts about the plague that imo have an influence on medicalized political metaphors later in the century) but I was too lazy to learn Greek and I realized that if I had to spend years reading only about the plague I'd get too depressed, and so far I'm reading along going like yeah that's a good way of thinking about it, that's really interesting. I'm pretty tired so I'm not making a ton of speedy headway but I keep thinking about this contrast Lewontin draws between how much cancer research is geared single-mindedly towards a theoretical grasp of what cancer is and how it operates, versus the very very nitty gritty and empirical methods used to actually do something about patients with cancer. That rings super true but I was still kind of shocked to consider how much it cohered in 1991 as much as in the 1660s. quote:It is not at all clear that a correct understanding of how the world works is basic to a successful manipulation of the world
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Jul 3, 2021 05:19
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I would like to read this but I'm sadly no longer at a point in life where I can just email an academic publisher and say "may I please have this" It looks good because it seems to go against a lot of what I've read elsewhere a bit... eg most of the scholarship I've read about the Mattachine Society in the early days is about them being quite stodgy and cautious in many ways, and more politically active members getting fed up and quitting (eg Jack Spicer or a bunch of people in the mid-century Philly milieau). I'm really interested in seeing the other side of the story and thinking it over.
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Jul 4, 2021 19:09
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I read Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoong Frazier since I'm trying to read some Lamba nominated stuff from this year. It was ok, huge bummer though. I'm reading a big huge book about Barry Goldwater now and still working on that humungous Sarah Schulman book about ACT UP. I also did unpack the three Proust books I own and started rereading Swann's Way. I started reading those newer Penguin translations back before grad school and when I got done with #3 they hadn't released anymore so I put a pin in it. And now I don't remember who anybody is.
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Jul 12, 2021 16:52
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This summer I did not finish In Search of Lost Time but I got pretty far. It has taken me a ton of years because I don't like the old Montcrieff translations and really liked the job Lydia Davis did on Swann's Way. Well, I still wish she'd just been allowed to do all of them because the different Penguin translators feel pretty uneven to me, but they're all definitely a lot better than what was available when I was younger. I think Proust is the pinnacle of weird creep pervo novelists, I think his obsessiveness and luridness is a billion times more persuasive and narcotic than more explicitly over-the-top people like Dennis Cooper or whoever. You sort of get roped into the narrator's mania and soon enough you too are afraid of telephones and just wandering around going Albertine Albertine... Anne Carson was right about this all along. You kind of just get stoned off his methods of looking and unpeeling things. It's too bad he has such an unfounded reputation as this very delicate, brittle novelist, because he's not, at all. I also read my friend Alice Hall's new book Universal Casket this week, wonderful.
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Aug 19, 2021 03:35
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the David Harvey guides are so good, did you watch the lectures too?
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Aug 20, 2021 03:37
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No that happens in every translation I imagine and in the original, I can't really put my finger on why I disliked the Montcrieff translation, it just felt stilted and... I guess cautious to me. As far as I know it's not an inaccurate translation so I guess it comes down to preference. Incidentally the poet Anne Carson has a long weird essay about Albertine that ran in the London Review of Books in 2014 that I like a lot, you can see it here.
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Aug 26, 2021 12:45
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bad guy posted:i fkin love anne carson, and i love her "essays" more than i love her "poems." her essays are imo her most genuinely original contribution to poetry Me too. I always kind of lump her in with Susan Howe in that her essays mean a lot more to me than her poems. A little while ago one of my friends bought that little box set of chapbooks and pamphlets she put out because he said he didn't like it and was probably never going to take it off the shelf again, but I never got around to reading it, maybe I'll do that this weekend. I also really liked that weird Catullus themed box set she did about a decade ago, I remember I was living in an apartment with a long corridor leading to a set of stairs and one night my little poetry group came over and we just unfurled the entire thing down the hallway. I wonder if I have that kicking around somewhere too or if it got lost in the half dozen moves between now and then.
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Aug 26, 2021 16:22
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bad guy posted:another one who's sort of verging on that territory is alice oswald. do you know her? she's a classicist like carson. some of her poems are indescribably beautiful. Only Memorial and Nobody both of which I love a lot. What's another good one to read? Also on that note do you know Caroline Bergvall's stuff?
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Aug 27, 2021 01:37
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magic cactus posted:I re-read Fernando Pessoa's The Book Of Disquiet on a long car ride last week. hell yeah
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Aug 27, 2021 01:37
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That book is really great, I gave it to some people when they had questions about trans stuff just because I think it's such a warm and capacious book.
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Sep 18, 2021 16:20
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I have this and I want to read it but I'm looking at the upcoming week and I'm probably not going to read anything that's not an undergrad paper or a comic book.
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Sep 19, 2021 03:24
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Like 70% of my time reading Proust was from just having a book by him in my bag and taking it out to read on the subway or waiting for my car to be inspected or in the dentist waiting room or wherever. Yeah I think if I just shut the door of my office and said begone I'm pondering the tomes of Proust I would lose patience but the prose is so dense and thick its perfect to just digest chunks of it in 10 minute increments. Also bad guy's critique about him not being funny reminds me of this conversation I had with a guy maybe a decade ago who was one of the best writers I knew, and he said he hated reading Proust because there was no hardness to him at all, everything about his writing was so soft and yielding that there was no way to like, get INTO IT, to read it antagonistically or ram up against it or whatever. And I think both critiques are pretty true. Buying a Proust book is like buying a truly enormous pillow. I like truly enormous pillows though.
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Sep 22, 2021 04:19
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I'll admit I have a pretty high bar for actually laughing out loud at a book. I think I read in a pretty staid way. The last time I really laughed laughed laughed at a book was We Both Laughed in Pleasure, Lou Sullivan's diaries, but even those were mostly laughs of recognition.
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Sep 22, 2021 16:26
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I am finishing a book I started awhile ago about sex and love between men in the 19th c. US before the invention of the "homosexual" or the "gay man" as socially understood categories. It's really interesting especially as people on both sides of the Atlantic begin to go "hm perhaps I am a certain specific kind of guy and can organize myself and my coterie along the lines of constituting a new sort of subject position." Right now I'm just in the middle of a long section on Walt Whitman so I took a break and reread the first version of Leaves of Grass.
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Oct 9, 2021 19:53
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One of my favorite poets, Jack Spicer, went pretty much forgotten after his death in the 60s with just a few die-hard fans and advocates keeping his stuff circulating, but lately he's had a big boom (maybe the last 10-15 years). I wrote part of my dissertation about him and was in pretty close contact with his major biographer, Kevin Killian, a great poet and novelist himself who was extremely generous in sharing materials and keeping me in the loop about a new collection of Spicer's plays and unpublished poems that was in the works. Unfortunately Kevin died a few years ago, and was unable to see that book through to the end. But a different Spicer scholar took up the reins and now the book is out. I'm only reading it a little bit at a time because it's really bittersweet. On one hand it's just like-- after this that's all there is. On the other hand it makes me think of all the ways my diss would have been different if I'd had access to everything in here. But mostly I'm just remembering Kevin and how much passion and labor he put into this and wishing he'd been able to hold the actual thing itself in his hands.
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Nov 3, 2021 17:23
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I don't know who's in your specific anthology but I'm flipping through one I have in my office and here are some people from it I like. I am not a beat expert because for the normal petty poet reasons a lot of the people I like from that period really hated the beats and wanted them to gently caress off (ie. Spicer, Duncan, Blaser) so I didn't have to read them very much. But there are a bunch that I like reading: Kenneth Rexroth Philip Lamantia Joseph Ceravolo (I don't think of him as a beat AT ALL though) Bob Kaufman, who was known as the "black Rimbaud" Diane DiPrima DEFINITELY you already mentioned Joanne Kyger-- I like her a lot Here are some people in my anthology I DEFINITELY do not consider beats, I have NO idea why they're in it but I think very much worth reading Anne Waldman Frank O'Hara John Wieners
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Nov 19, 2021 16:01
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bad guy posted:i guess i don't need to know the ginsberg thing to make recs because the poets i would rec aren't like ginsberg anyway. people usually sleep on the west coast beats which is a real shame. i like them better. imo the east coast writers were useful for getting you to the new york school which owns but they were mostly loving around not fully formed while the west coasters were solid, having had robinson jeffers as a precursor so oh yeah I really do like Gary Snyder. I haven't read him in years because I gifted all of my Snyder books to a younger relative but he was mega important to me in college. bad guy, do you have any thoughts on the Berkeley Renaissance crew? I feel like I've become slightly less well-disposed towards the beats because I spent so much time over the past few years really immersing myself in people who considered themselves like... diametrically opposed to the beats, although I guess I really don't see that much air between them once you get outside of the immediate orbit of Spicer and Duncan.
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Nov 20, 2021 18:13
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