culture consumed (August & September, 2024)

I got behind trying to write up some August stuff, so here, have 2 months' worth:

August, 2024

podcasts

• [The War on Cars] "vehicular cycling" Part 1 & Part 2 (episodes 131 and 132)
  
  I have now looked up what a "stroad" is (a term used a couple times in Part 1), though I can't say I actually "know" what it is now.
  
  
• and then 125. When Driving Is Not an Option with Anna Zivarts -- I streamed the second half of the Train Lovers for Harris Walz Zoom on YouTube, which included this author, and in Googling her (book), one of the first hits was this podcast episode, and I interspersed listening to it and was reading the book.

books

• How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church by Lamar Hardwick -- as I said while I was reading it: The author (Black, autistic, male, pastor) was a plenary speaker at the 2024 Institute on Theology and Disability, and I wanted this book to be better.
  
  
• read many books with/to the niblings (who are now ages 8 and 5, and the older one voraciously reads herself but also enjoys being read to)
  
  
• Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman
  I had told Abby about it a while ago since it seemed like her jam -- queer Pakistani-American girl coming of age in 1980s NYC -- though the queerness takes a while (like 2/3) to be really evident. So when she started listening to it on audiobook, I got a hardcopy from the library. It was fine.
  
  
• [Aug 25 feminist sff book club] The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington -- Abby DNFed this one, which is very understandable. I was surprised that the rest of book club liked it so much.
  
  
• [July Indian Food, Indian Fiction Meetup -- which I didn't make it to, but which book I started reading on my flight home in August] A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao -- a historical (1914) fiction ~mystery
  
  
• skim-read a bunch of picturebooks and early reader chapter books for the niblings; ~read Abby 3 queer picturebooks & 1 other picturebook
  
  
• [Aug 27 DEI book club, topic: colorism] Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex by Marita Golden
  
  
• When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency by Anna Letitia Zivarts -- I streamed the second half of the Train Lovers for Harris Walz Zoom on YouTube. ("Hey, friends! This is tonight and it's not just for train lovers. If you care about safe streets, better buses, cycling, walkability, accessibility and all forms of sustainable transportation, please RSVP!" [said the skeet I heard about it from]) and the author (who was on the call) has a vision impairment, so I was hopeful that the book won't erase disabled people in the way that pro-cycling folks sometimes can (which was correct -- the book keeps disabled folks at the center, while also talking about racial disparities, children, etc.).

sporps

• I watched sporadic bits of the Perpendiculympics* while visiting family, and watched all of the Women's Breaking (aka, breakdancing) after some friends posted enthusiastically about it.
  
  I was bummed that Raygun (the Australian woman who got zero points) got all the Internet buzz. I wanted to talk about so many of the other competitors/matches -- like how Logistx was robbed in the round robin.
  
  * A friend was making daily posts for Disability Pride Month in July and one day posted:

  For today's Disability Pride Month, I'm going to start getting excited for the Paralympics, which begin three weeks after the end of the Perpendiculympics. (Most people just call them the Olympics, but it's not like they're the only game in town, y'all). It surprises me every time I have to explain this to people, but no, the Paralympics are not the Special Olympics, and the Para stands for "parallel" and not "paralyzed", just like with paratransit. The Paralympics are an elite sports competition using much of the equipment and facilities used by Olympians. They include many analogous sports to some of the Olympic events (wheelchair basketball, 14 classifications of swimmers participating in a huge variety of swimming events, sled(ge) hockey in the Winter Paralympics, etc.), and some unique to Paralympians (goalball, wheelchair rugby - aka murderball, which is not just rugby in chairs). Some sports are specific to particular disabilities; for example, Paralympic judo is an event for blind athletes only. These days, there's usually at least one graduate of my guide dog school competing in any Paralympic games; this year swimmer Anastasia Pagonis will return after winning gold last time. (I don't know if her dog Radar will be there, though). In 2028 the Paralympics will be in LA, and I have every intention of being there and screaming my lungs out at the murderball matches! The Paralympics are somewhat controversial, partly because the entire Olympic franchise tends to screw over poor people wherever it's being held, and partly because a lot of people believe that athletes with disabilities don't need to be segregated into their own games. I don't have a problem with either of those viewpoints. But since they're happening, I take them as a celebration of disability culture and athleticism rather than a model of segregation or advancing the expectation of supercripdom.

theatr

• [Queer Artists & Players] "The Rude Mechanicals Showcase: selected scenes from the bard made gayer"
  
  I had heard about their shows previous summers but hadn't been able to make it work in my schedule (or had only heard about it after the fact), so I very much wanted to make it this year and signed up for their mailing list to make sure. So I had the dates (Aug 24 & 25) on my calendar for a while, but as the dates approached was increasingly like, "So, what times?"
  
  I did not love that it took my partner on Tuesday (Aug 20) seeing a Share of a FB post of a photo of a physical flyer for me to find out the times of a show this weekend whose email list I literally signed up for. (Abby speculated that they'd lost access to their website/email. I did finally get an email from them on Friday. Apparently times went up on Instagram on July 27. I do not do well with IG as a platform, and it seems terribly ineffective for trying to actually be sure to reach people -- since it's so easy to miss posts or for them to get buried -- so I did not love this.)
  
  The production was fine? It was mostly just a bunch of famous scenes but mixing up the gender of the actors relative to the characters. Some of them read very queer and some of them I was kinda shrug about.
  
  Also, a bunch of it was very camp -- which is not a thing I often love a lot of.
  
  thedeadparrot said "extremely uneven" (how she described the show after she'd seen it) is about par for the company, so I had maybe had my expectations set too high.

video essays

My day recovering from getting triple vaxxed (covid, flu, TDAP), I watched I'm What the Culture Feeling (The full story of Kendrick Lamar Vs Drake) by F.D Signifier (and his 7 hot takes I had to leave out of my Drake video), which I had heard about from musesfool

I still did not care enough about Drake to have watched that much otherwise, but I did learn some interesting stuff.

***

Currently reading:

:shrug_emoji:

Reading next:

I think I only have one September book club book I'm gonna read?

September DEI book club book (for Hispanic Heritage Month) is: Revenge Body by Caleb Luna

The Latinx Affinity Group at work referred us to one of the Harvard librarians when we reached out for book suggestions -- which is valid.

The gay librarian gave us a nice set of books, including this one (which won the group vote), of which he said the author "self-describes as a light-skinned, superfat Latinx non-binary person"

---

September, 2024

books

• read Abby 9 picturebooks
  
  
• finally finished The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, which I had started back in February and then put down for a while and finally finished.
  
  The blurb says, "Written, edited, and translated by a female and non-binary team, these stories have never before been published in English and represent both the richly complicated past and the vivid future of Chinese science fiction and fantasy," but it's much more fantasy//myth/folklore than science-fiction (and only 2 contributors are she/they -- everyone else is she/her).
  
  
• [Sept 23 DEI book club] Revenge Body by Caleb Luna (for Hispanic Heritage Month; poetry -- the Harvard librarian who recommended it for the book club said the author "self-describes as a light-skinned, superfat Latinx non-binary person")
  
  This book is so short! The poetry ends on page 58. (There's a Reading Guide afterward.) At least one of the blurbs said they read it all in one sitting, but I definitely read it in pieces intentionally. There's a lot of heavy content (er, no pun intended) and I often wanted to sit with stuff.

theatr

• [Central Square Theater] The Hound of the Baskervilles w/ Abby & Allie

  Master sleuth Sherlock Holmes and trusty Dr. Watson unlock the mystery of The Hound of the Baskervilles! Enter the world of deductive reasoning and elementary logic, absurd accents and ridiculous puns as the inclusive, gender bending cast of three actors inhabit more than a dozen roles in this Central Square Theater favorite. Helmed by Artistic Director Lee Mikeska Gardner, leave your cares at home and join us this fall for a laugh out loud farce!

  I somehow thought this was a Bedlam production? But I seem to have been making that up. It was a lot goofier than I had expected, and it was great.
  
  Three actors, all female (one East Asian).
  
  My dad read me lots of Sherlock Holmes stories as a kid, so I expect I had heard this story at some point, but I had no memory of it.
  
  Online program here.
  
  
• [White Snake Projects] Is This America? -- a fully staged 90-minute opera about Fannie Lou Hamer, with Abby's FB friend Shane (where she found out about it from) and Shane's partner Cam [online program here]
  
  I appreciate White Snake doing contemporary (they only do world premieres, apparently) activist opera, but I think the opera format is not particularly for me? Someone, I think during the talkback, talked about wanting to tell Hamer's story in the grandest of formats, and I guess there's an argument to be made for that, but personally the opera style doesn't inherently feel "the most grand" to me -- I feel like I have been more immersed/moved/impressed by other media I've experienced than this one. (Oh, it occurs to me that it's very me that I'm like, "You are repeating these lines and taking a lot of time to sing them; do you know how much more content you could include if you weren't doing this style?" Which is not a complaint I have when I'm enjoying a musical.)
  
  It's very much about her work on voting rights -- which is valid and important. I did wish the beginning of the opera had done more work to explain why voting rights were so important. Her non-consensual hysterectomy is named as one major motivating factor, but it's not like you can directly vote your way out of that. Like, I can figure it out, but it would have been nice if the opera had done some of that work -- especially since these days there's so much discourse about electoralism. (Speaking of that discourse, Abby and I cringed when, during the talkback, the librettist said if you don't vote you don't have a right to complain.)
  
  I had read the picturebook biography Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement back in (checks notes) 2016 and really liked it. I reread it to Abby that afternoon before we went to the opera. I didn't love it as much as I apparently did in 2016 when I gave it 5 stars.
  
  In the poem about the 1964 DNC, it says, "We had not come nine hundred miles for two seats. / I threatened to slit our chairman's throat / if he took the deal." (Which, btw, that goes hard for a children's book.) I was delighted that the opera retained that threat.
  
  It's only in the backmatter of the Voice of Freedom picturebook that we read, "Beyond the civil rights movement, Hamer helped start a Head Start preschool program and ran a farm project to reduce hunger in her community." But the 2023 picturebook The Light She Feels Inside focuses on that work. When our protagonist is connecting with her ancestors, "She plants carrots with Fannie Lou Hamer to feed a whole neighborhood." And the backmatter says:

  Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)
  
  Fannie Lou Hamer carried her glow from the voting booths to the farms. She was a farmer, teacher, and community organizer who fought for the expansion of voting rights for Black people all over the South. In 1964, Hamer organized Freedom Summer, a project to register Black voters in Mississippi. Then in 1969, she raised enough money to buy forty acres of land and began the Freedom Farm Cooperative, so that Black people could grow food for themselves, have land, and start new businesses.

  The opera does retain the story from Hamer's childhood (also in the Voice of Freedom picturebook) of white people poisoning the animals her family bought (gotta keep those freed Black folks from getting ahead) when she was a child, so there would have been a way to segue into that, but I understand why the opera kept its focus where it did.
  
  The music director teaches at Mt. Holyoke, and a bunch of his students were in the audience the night we went, which was nice.

tv

A friend said the Agatha All Along trailer looked gay, which motivated me to get back to finishing WandaVision (because I'd like to finish it before watching Agatha All Along).
I have not quite finished it, but have watched WandaVision 1.03-107.

other

• [Smith College Poetry Center poetry reading] torrin a. greathouse, followed by conversation with Jina Kim
  
  Abby and I watched the livestream during a date night.

  torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet, essayist, and educator whose work blends myth and biography to uncover profound truths. Described by poet Danez Smith as a reluctant formalist, her collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), showcases her inventive use of language to explore trauma, memory, and selfhood. As a trans, disabled, neurodivergent woman and survivor, greathouse offers nuanced insights into the body, which she describes variously as kindling, an unfinished moth, and a repeatedly revised rough draft of a coast. Her work affirms the intrinsic value of every body, demonstrating that irregularity is a doorway, not a defect. In addition to her debut collection, greathouse is the author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity.
  
  Co-sponsored by the Department of English Language & Literature, the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, and the Smith College Accessibility Resource Center.

• 26th annual Harvard Powwow

***

After having almost no September book club books, I have a lot of October book club books.

Currently reading:

[Oct 9 climate change book club] Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

The writing style on page 1 was A Lot, and I would have quit there if I wasn't reading it for book club.

The first while of the book has a lot of ~unlikable characters and stressful situations. Many of the characters reveal more complexity later on, but it was rough going for me for a while.

And it took until 10 or 20% of the way in for the narrative to really get going. (Which is a lot of pages, since the book is 436 pages long.)

[Oct 17 local library LGTBQ+ book club] Pageboy: a memoir by Elliot Page

Abby DNFed this, which is valid. There's a bunch of trauma in Elliot's life. And we agreed that it's a solid trans memoir, but (at least as far as we'd gotten so far) not a lot felt particularly new to us.

Reading next:

[Oct 20 feminist sff book club] The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach (Maori trans woman author) -- book is very not copaganda despite the main character being a cop; my partner did not recall being warned and was not fully prepared for the queerphobia in this book.

[Oct 23 DEI book club] Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista -- October is Filipino American History Month