progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

Today risks being a bothersome day but a) all the magnolias are flowering; b) new shoes!

(the website called them “tan” but obviously it should have said “rust” and I love them)

The London Review of Books writeup for this went and spoiled the ending, and even if it’s not much of a surprise I’m annoyed with myself for not having known better than to read it, and to find that it actually does change the reading experience.

I guess the rationale was “why does it matter, it’s a long modernist novel where nothing happens,” but it’s not, it’s a long modernist novel where like two things happen, and dude, you can’t just yank the curtain.

Brazenly characterize a shopping trip on the e-bike as “put some paneer in my panniers”

@kelidanovus @Impossible_PhD @terrafiedkestrel @dani_tseng @Jamie Did you find the answer???

“‘Wet leg’ is a term that inhabitants of the Isle of Wight, where Teasdale and Chambers grew up, apply to day-trippers and holiday-makers who ferry across the five miles from Southampton, on England’s southern coast. (‘D.F.L.,’ short for ‘down from London,’ and ‘overners,’ from ‘over the water,’ are others.)”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/23/the-women-of-wet-leg

"from time import sleep" has not become any less mystical in all the years I've been typing it.

@piratescarlett I'm interested in this Tokyo reading list she did for the NYT - some known quantities, some very much not, at least to me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/books/books-tokyo-japan.html

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!