progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

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

I'm never going to _enjoy_ sticking a long-ass needle in my thigh and my native squeamishness always drags the process out too long; still, each Saturday morning right after making the date with my endocrine system is when it most feels like accounts are settled, briefly, with the world and it might be possible to move on.

For most of the pandemic a bright green kite was stuck 100 feet up in the crown of a pine tree next door. Seeing it always bummed me out, it was a wrong state of affairs nobody could fix.

The atmospheric river finally just shook it loose into our yard. Turns out the bright green quality was owing to it being either a dragon or maybe a T. Rex (because arms).

We hung it on a gate where it flapped in the wind and freaked out the neighborhood cats. Next day it was gone. Could be the original owner has it back now; could be they’ve learned something about pine trees.

TUCSON, 1994 - Our protagonist is listening to “Alive” by Pearl Jam, doesn’t understand that the “she” in the first verse (mother) and the “she” in the second verse (lover) are presumptively different people and gets the same sick feeling occasioned by freaky stories on Usenet

The only Jeff Beck moment I actually ever got was also the only Antonioni moment I actually ever got. Rock on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJGEn4FDys

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

Give him credit for “xenial” though, for a moment I thought us Xennials were being pandered to

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.