progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

Epitaph came in a dream: I WAS A DIN AND I DIED

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”

“‘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.

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