maeve66 | Reading

What Does Extreme Wealth Do to the Brain? NYMag

The Women Leaving the New Right NYMag

I Watched 6 Hours of DOGE Bro Testimony - 404Media - paid post (wish there was a way to pay like for a single article or something but they've posted some clips on their socials)

Jewish Currents has recently had some great podcasts discussing: MAGA Catholics, why Jews don't want to identify as Zionists, and on Epstein and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

toastykitten

Garlic & Sapphires by Ruth Reichl - Just finished this reread because I needed something light. I forgot, though, that Reichl's husband was a journalist at CBS, and so bits of harsh reality will break through every so often. At the end, he misses out on going to interview someone named Osama bin Laden. This is the book where she gets the job as New York Times food critic, and in the hopes of fooling the restaurants who have her picture hung up on their walls like a wanted poster, she takes on different disguises and personalities. I have always really liked Reichl's writing, and this was no exception. It's warm and engaging, and honestly, I wish I could feel and taste what she tastes whenever she has food, because she writes about it so sumptuously. Really fun read. I remember also really enjoying her tenure as editor-in-chief at Gourmet, and oh yeah, she wrote a memoir about that, too.
It reminded me to go to her Substack La Briffe, and on the latest post she put up a rant she did about food writing.
Also she did an interview with the new Gourmet online magazine. By the way, it's called Gourmet because Conde Nast let the rights to the name lapse, and so five food writers/journalists decided to snatch it up and make their own online magazine. It looks like it should be good.
In other online reading news, The Key is a new online magazine focused on Palestine, from the Palestine Festival of Literature. Opening essay is on why legacy media may be beyond saving, called "It's Not Complicated". Sara Yasin spoke to LitHub about it: “What are the things you cover if the baseline is someone thinks that not only is a genocide happening, but that genocide is wrong?” Yasin said, “What does it mean to tell stories if the goal isn’t, ‘You have to humanize Palestinians?’”

sabotabby

Let's take a little break from reality and talk about romantasy! Escapist tales of fucking fairies and immortal elves and nothing to do with politics whatsoever, right?

Okay you know whose blog you're reading here. Two new-to-me podcasts with great names, Ordinary Unhappiness and In Bed With the Right, did a crossover episode, "Romantasy, Fantasy, and Trauma." For someone who has never read a romantasy (but read a lot of the precursors) I'm kind of obsessed with it as a genre and even more obsessed with the discourse around it.

Disregarding the people whose opinions I don't care about, there are kind of two opposing takes on its appeal.

This is a fundamentally conservative genre that encourages women to become tradwives and relish in our own oppression.
This is actually a liberatory genre that allows women to explore their fantasies and traumas.

I don't think either side is fully right or wrong here, and that tension is worth exploring. This episode starts from two positions that many critics and admirers of the genre neglect: That women have agency, and that not everything women like is inherently feminist. From there it looks at where the romantasy boom came from, what its appeal is, and what it says about the psychology of its readers. I came away without a spicy take beyond that it turns out that a lot of the stories I wrote and never showed anyone when I was in my teens and twenties actually fit pretty neatly into the genre, which means that either BookTok girlies and I read a lot of the same books growing up, or there's something very deep in our culture that it speaks to, such that we reproduce the tropes unthinkingly.

I also find it interesting (not really discussed on this episode) that for all that the romance formula is reified into tropes and beats and commercial genre fiction is expected to at least somewhat engage with word counts and structure, romantasy really does appear to be an exception, and you can still write and sell stupidly long books in which nothing much happens, and no one complains about it. Dear Publishing Industry: Another world is possible.

sabotabby

Just finished: Lullabies For Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill. Naturally, this was great, and surprisingly uplifting at the end. I don't have a lot to add after last week—if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

Currently reading: Indigenous Ingenuity: A Celebration of Traditional North American Knowledge by Deidre Havrelock and Edward Kay. This is a kids' book about technologies and traditional knowledge systems used by pre-contact Indigenous peoples. I'm reading it for work but it's been on my radar for awhile. It's quite good and informative, if you can get past three things that I find cringe: 1) the kind of writing for children that includes lines like "Do you think you would enjoy being creative?", 2) a certain exuberant reiteration of "gosh, weren't Indigenous people SMART and RESOURCEFUL" as if they're not that now, and if we need to be constantly reassured, and 3) it's pretty American-centric, though it does mention Nations on the land currently known as Canada as well. But very useful overall, and the problems I find with it are largely centred around my own dislike of how books for children are written and fairly significant but subtle framing between the US and Canada as to how we talk about Indigenous civilizations and sovereignty.

microbie

The good:

Scott Joplin wanted to write an opera and did (two, actually, but the first has not survived).
The audience was hyped. This was the first performance for the WNO since leaving the Kennedy Center, and the artistic director, Francesca Zambello, and general manager, Timothy O'Leary, received a standing ovation when they came out before the performance to give their standard welcome. The WNO had to arrange for new venues, a new ticketing system, and a new website all in the middle of the season. I still think Zambello has terrible taste in sets (or likes to hire directors or designers who do), but even I got out of my seat for them.
It's amazing what color and pattern can do: The set was not lavish, but the detailed patterns and clever lighting did a lot to enliven the stage on a budget.
The director (Denyce Graves), conductor (Kedrick Armstrong), composer (Scott Joplin), and principal singers and dancers were all Black. This was clearly a labor of love for everyone involved, and they looked like they were having a good time.
I liked the choreography, and there was a lot of variation in styles throughout. The dancers were also very good.
In general there was a sense of joy that I'm not sure I've felt at a WNO performance, not even the gala.

The perfectly fine:

As the Wikipedia page for the opera notes, most of the music is not ragtime, so I didn't know what to expect. There are some lovely moments, but I think the most impressive achievement is invoking African American music in an otherwise standard opera. I leave it to others to debate whether it works or was a good idea.
There wasn't a bad singer in the bunch, though the Lisner Auditorium is smaller than the KC Opera House, so the orchestra was smaller and it was easier for voices to reach the cheap seats.
At one point, Vivian Goodwin (Treemonisha) sang and danced at the same time. This happens in other operas, but this dance was more physically demanding than, say, Carmen's or Salome's. It was closer to Zerbinetta.

The bad:

The auditorium was too warm, and we had made the mistake of eating a lot of salty fried food before hand. I should've bought a bottle of water before the performance, but the lobby was so small and crowded that I didn't want bother.
The overture was way too long.
I didn't like the mix of plain dialogue (added by Kyle Bass because some parts of the original opera have been lost), recitative, and through-composed singing.
Joplin's libretto rhymed, which was super, super annoying. It was like a 90-minute nursery rhyme.
WNO chose to highlight that the heroine of the story is an educated, peaceful Black woman, but there was also a didactic, preachy tone and an undercurrent of expectation that people should be able to pull themselves out of bad circumstances. Apparently in the Black community at the beginning of the 20th century, this was largely the influence of Booker T. Washington. I'm not a fan of blaming individuals for systemic failures.
At one point near the end, Goodwin let out this high-pitched shriek that sounded like a cat fight. I'm pretty sure it was a mistake, just not sure whether it was Goodwin's or Joplin's.

microbie

I had the week off from work (though I did some work most days) and was able to catch up a bit on chores and sleep. I saw my optometrist, who confirmed that my prescription has changed, which is probably why I can't read for more than an hour without getting a headache. I scheduled an appointment with a new dentist. I took three bags of clothing and shoes to our local recycling center and donated a trunk full of household items to a thrift store. I think one sign of a tougher economy is the selection at thrift stores--there really wasn't much that tempted me, and it was easy to leave empty handed. I left my garden shears at the small engine repair place to be sharpened (gotta pick 'em up tomorrow).

I napped every day but yesterday. We have a mouse problem, so I finally scheduled to have someone give an estimate for work to seal the house against entry. [The previous vendor put down snap traps but never seemed to completely seal the entry points.] Then in the afternoon I had a work call and spent some time cleaning items to donate.

It's been a while since my last visit to a thrift store. I still like seeing what people are giving away; e.g., "smores makers" are still taking up shelf space, and most of the kitchen utensils were black plastic, probably from that study claiming that black plastic kitchen utensils cause cancer. I did a lot of shopping this week, and one thing I still believe is that there's entirely too much stuff in the world. If we stopped manufacturing mugs (beer, coffee, soup), I bet we wouldn't notice for a couple of years. Same thing for flimsy but ostensibly reusable tote/shopping bags and costume jewelry.

The other work call I attended this week was for our next alt-text pilot. This time we have a blind scientist who uses screen readers helping us evaluate the vendor's work, and the call was to meet her. She was very nice and kept thanking us for doing the pilot, which was a little embarrassing. It's only a step up from the least we could do. Still, it was nice to see a real reminder of why we should be making our content more accessible.

We also booked an actual vacation: we're going to Memphis in May for three days. We want to see Sun Studios and Stax Studios and possibly one of the music museums. We're staying at a hotel that has a vinyl lounge; we're hoping it's like the Tokyo record bar we visited, where talking is discouraged and the jacket of the album that's playing is displayed on the bar.

sabotabby

Events, dear friends, have been piling up faster than I can write about them—personal tragedies, global horrors, and work conspiring to keep me at a pace where I have not yet emerged from under the weight of one massive project before I'm saddled with the next. Needless to say things are happening but I get approximately 15 minutes of laptop time a day if the subway cooperates and it's largely spent answering emails.

Anyway, on with the podcasts. This week's episode is from a new-to-me podcast, A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein. I heard him on Bad Hasbara and he was very funny and insightful, and his actual podcast doesn't disappoint. My favourite episode so far has been "She Had Elon's Baby. Then, Leopards Ate Her Face," featuring Ashley St. Clair and Juniper.

I didn't know the name off the top of my head but Ashley was one of those far-right grifters/pick-me girls who is very traditionally pretty and thus assumed that there was no need for feminism. She wrote an extremely transphobic children's book that I had actually heard of because it was on one of Queen Coke Francis's video essays*. The title of the episode is not precisely accurate, in that the leopards in question started gnawing Ashley's face before she gave birth, as she had started to turn away from her transphobic stance when she was pregnant with her second child.

You have questions. I also had questions. One of the reasons this particular episode is so good is that Matt handles everything as responsibly as anyone can. He has Juniper (the trans podcaster/editor who, among other accomplishments, popularized "goblin mode"), who was the one who engaged with Ashley as she made her turn away from the dark side. Neither one of them softball the conversation, laying the harms that Ashley did out very clearly, and questioning whether she has actually changed or whether this is another grift (for the record, neither of them conclude that it's a grift).

It's a hard listen because obviously it is. Trans people are being targeted for genocide around the world and especially in the US, and Ashley was one of its instigators. It asks hard questions: Can people change? Is the community that they harmed obligated to believe and accept those changes? What does it mean to make amends and reparations, or to build trust? What can we do to deradicalize people (note: Ashley's redemption arc seems to have started with queer and trans folks engaging her online, which I'm legitimately surprised at)?

Anyway it brought me a little bit of desperately needed hope so maybe it will help you too.

* Check her out if you do YouTube video essays. She's a drag queen who mainly covers culture war stuff and she's hilarious.

sabotabby

It feels very strange and unpleasant to be making my regular book post under the circumstances. Nevertheless.

Just finished: A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was so much fun, and I'm hooked on the series. It's mostly a lighthearted absolutely nightmare fuel cosmic horror murder mystery, but as the afterword says, it's also kind of a commentary on fantasy's obsession with kings and nobles and what this means for our present political circumstances. Which is to say. Kings. Not a great idea. I disagree with Bennett re: what ASOIaF was trying to do but the book is a great example of how you can smuggle interesting politics in a rip-roaring narrative.

Currently reading: Lullabies For Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill. I love everything she writes and meant to read her most well-known work ages ago but it ended up near the bottom of my physical TBR stack and I'm only now getting to it. This is the story of Baby, a little girl in Montreal whose father is a possibly-schizophrenic heroin addict. Does that sound depressing? Because it is. It's also very much a dark comedy, like it's genuinely fucking hilarious the more searingly awful Baby's life gets. Sometimes I just want fiction to fuck me up, and this does.

toastykitten

To be discussed later - realizing that my current favorite writers are all Asian American men - Ed Yong, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, with very different sensibilities, but all with a deep thoughtfulness to them.

I just finished reading Ken Liu's translation of the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), which takes a less traditional approach, and sprinkles throughout the chapters anecdotes and a little history and context. I really liked it.

Came across his Substack, and this entry in which he talks about his frustrating experience of trying to get his AI assistant to do what he wants it to do and failing. Made me reflect on how even the smartest people I come across, especially if they are pro-AI, lapse into attributing qualities to AI that are human and not machine. Like...the AI is not lazy. The AI is incapable of processing the request you keep trying to make it do, and is also incapable of telling you when it cannot do something. Like, it just sounds exactly like this Meta exec who went viral when her "agentic AI" went ahead and tried to delete her entire inbox, ignoring instructions to stop.

In other AI news, apparently there was a mistranslation of a Korean analysis of the war, where the original text said that the US "could" be moving military assets out of South Korea, when the AI English translation said the US was actually "considering" moving it, and the mistranslation went viral.

I can't tell if this is the administration trying to get out of taking the blame or they're just stupid (why not both?), but I guess Rubio et al are going with "we bombed Iran because Israel was going to do it anyway and we needed to defend Israel first", which is now prompting outrage from...Gavin Newsom and Sen Ruben Gallego...of all people.

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