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

@nicole Such a good photo.

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

@nicole “…bad at textiles…” -Sassy magazine, 1995

@terrafiedkestrel To boldly go where no one has gone before / I use gender neutral pronouns cause I know the score

@nicole Also, to stop hammering on a particular phrase, the way sex in MJH is always such a lonely missed connection is just one of the most poignant things all round.

@nicole Oh, or if “transsexual brothel” is not “standard old brothel with trans workers” but “brothel that (temporarily?) transes you”? There would be takers for that!

If I remember right the Culture novels posit this sort of generational cycle with body modification: there are decades where everyone does everything they can, and then decades where they mostly get tired of it and go au naturel again, which also seems right.

I’m not any kind of posthumanist but it’s always disappointing to meet one who can’t go big or go home!

@nicole You probably noticed, as I just did, the mention of "transsexual brothels" as Saudade local color.

You have to wonder, in this world of cultivars where body modification is a matter of course, what would transsexuality as such even look like? And would it still carry anything like the erotic charge it does in our world? I have suspicions!

@vance_maverick You should read! It’s a good novel and I would believe my reaction is more a fact about me than a fact about the book.

@AngryTransLady Good luck with the appointment and getting back your money!

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

@glossydinosaur The Icelandic-Korean axis is a good one! What are those pickups, do you think?