culture consumed (June, 2023)

[hermionesviolin]

Okay, I was out of town June 29-July 5, so this is delayed.

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books

• [feminist sff book club] The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (and the sequel short story "If You Take My Meaning")
• read Abby ~11 picturebooks -- incl
  • Every Body: A First Conversation About Bodies written by Megan Madison and Jessica Ralli & illustrated by Tequitia Andrews -- explicitly fat-positive, anti-BMI, etc.! (which does still have a bunch of "every body can be healthy," which I don't love -- like, not all bodies are, or even can be, healthy; the book in other places is very intentionally trying to be disability-aware, but I think it doesn't realize it's being problematic in this way)
• [work book club] Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (which had been on my TBR list for years, but which I had no memory of being a short story collection)
  
• DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right by Lily Zheng
  
• quickly read the 4 "Little Senses" picturebooks

theatre

[ASP/TTO] a very queer As You Like It with Abby, Cate, and Allie

tv

• Ted Lasso 3.12 (the season+series finale)

short stories

• as mentioned above:
  • Charlie Jane Anders' "If You Take My Meaning" (which won't make much sense if you haven't read the novel The City in the Middle of the Night it's a sequel to)
  • Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
• the freely available Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalists (which is almost all of them -- thanks, yhlee)
  • "Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal" by Derrick Boden (in Apex Magazine, Sept. 2022) will fucking haunt me
  • "Toronto Isn't Real and Other Metropolitan Anomalies” by A.D. Sui (in Augur Magazine, Dec. 2022) it turns out only the first part of the story is available for free and then you have to buy the issue (Augur Magazine Issue 5.2); I was sufficiently hooked that I did (8 CAD -- which was $6.31 USD at the time I made my purchase), though ultimately I didn't love it as much as I had hoped to.

trailers

• Nimona -- coming June 30 on Netflix

music albums

• Janelle Monáe's The Age of Pleasure -- which I wasn't super into, but this NPR review is good. Also, lol. And Janelle's both non-binary and non-monogamous (the latter via this them piece my partner saw, which cites a British Vogue interview).
  
  Because my last Janelle Monáe was Dirty Computer, an emotion picture, it was weird to listen to this album without accompanying videos. Which also made it harder for me to pay attention/catch the words because of how I often struggle to focus on auditory input if I don't also have visuals/often struggle to make out lyrics.

movies

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse w/ Abby (whose daughter had warned us it ends with a big To Be Continued cliffhanger; this movie was initially gonna be "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One)," but since they changed the name I hadn't been able to find any info about whether it was still a two-parter, so I was glad for the heads up, and also feel like it's kind of cheating.  
  
  Vulture informed me that "The next movie, which will be titled Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, is slated to come out less than a year from now, on March 29, 2024"  Though the author of a later Vulture article said, "Across the Spider-Verse animators say Phil Lord drove them crazy with relentless revision, seeming unfamiliarity with 3D anim, 6 months of indecision and demands to redo finished work 5X. They say no way is Beyond the Spider-Verse coming out in 2024.")

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Currently reading:

I recently started reading Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies, after livestreaming the virtual book launch on Tuesday, June 27.

Reading next:

The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope for feminist sff book club (which is July 23, so I'll probably start that as soon as I get my library copy)

Comments

[lunabee34]

Hi hi!

How are you? I like seeing your media updates, but how is life going? :)