progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

I think this one is a good pairing with Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex on the constructedness of desire (for any of us who get perplexed around how desire gets constructed).

This novel, a sweet one, made me feel warmer about the possibility of recuperating old confusions and errors—though I didn’t get into it with the guy on BART who wanted to know about my reading habits and told me I looked like a librarian.

#books #bookstodon

For @nicole

Core curriculum. It’s urgent about what it is and really uninterested in pretending to be anything else. The main character is on-brand in dismissing Joyce as patriarchy, and yet the book’s got exactly the same arc as Ulysses: building up expectations for a surrogate filial relationship that finally converges, sadly, in a deflationary missed connection.

(Also, why is it so funny that the book’s Joyce booster is a manic trans guy named Kieran? It’s just funny.)

The afterword, on what Binnie learned/received permission to do from Joanna Russ, Gloria Anzaldúa and others, is an actual inspiration.

#trans #books #bookstodon

I enjoyed reading Am Fluß, but why, a few chapters in, did I start responding to it with the kind of aspirational envy one associates with social media?

The book is about a woman who spends her life walking around the margins of cities and having complex thoughts. Family is alluded to; in one chapter she looks for a job, though it ends up being more an allegory than anything else. She has some happenstance meetings. Otherwise it's pretty much all elective solitude.

The depth of the prose, and the implicit relation it bears to all this idle time, is what makes it seem like walking around and having thoughts is now a luxury good.

#books #bookstodon

Eight weeks post #ffs , no longer much swelling to speak of and nerve sensation making its slow return, but the most surprising thing about this mug has been the immediate and total cognitive overwrite of how I used to look. Unless my phone pops up with an alarming surprise from the photo library, it’s already very hard to recall that things were ever any other way.
#trans #transgender

Can’t believe he passed up the easy win of “queers over QAnon”

Esther Kinsky is my informant that London has mini tornados? Frequently? Had no idea God was this angry with Albion.

You know the planets are lined up when #transappreciationfriday falls on #TwelfthNight.

I'm Pauline (she/her). I spent my youth getting kiln-fired in #Tucson, #Arizona, now in the #BayArea; used to be an academic in the humanities, now write code during the day and fiction in the off hours, also some songwriting and home recording with guitars, but there's this whole ongoing struggle to get my singing voice repitched.

My most remarkable life stories all involve other people, and one of the most amazing is that my oldest and dearest friend is also a trans woman. It's been something to figure this all out alongside her as an other half to her Gemini.

Fig.1: restaurant washroom selfie, Fig 2: some hot gender-bent flirtation from Twelfth Night (Viola dressed as Cesario is supposed to be a proxy for the Duke; Olivia has other ideas).

Appreciation to all!

Anne Enright. I was slow to read her, I guess because whatever summary I’d seen didn’t stand out, but the execution is so, so good (and much bleaker than I’d expected).

Whereas this bit of Ashbery could be rolled out unaltered as a dril tweet.

Why someone chose to put a checkmark next to this line, out of an entire book of Ashbery poems, rätselhaft.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Innocence. This "party" scene starring a count, a monsignor, and three novelists is the funniest thing I've read in a bit.

food chain

Cercocarpus betuloides (mountain mahogany)

I was expecting many fine things from Reyner Banham’s Four Ecologies, but among them was not the 'basic Los Angeles dingbat.'

#tdor #transdayofremembrance

Finished The Story of the Stone, and I must say there's a real age-of-Musk vibe to the highly foreseeable dynastic collapse in the last volume:

What happens when a collision of crisis cascades, what happens when a casket of cholera goes critical, brekekekex koax koax

36 hours out and God just punted on one of His last best chances to avert this