culture consumed (October, 2024)

books

• [Oct 9 climate change book club] Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
• read Abby ~12 picturebooks
• [Oct 17 local library LGTBQ+ book club] Pageboy: a memoir by Elliot Page
  
• [Oct 20 feminist sff book club] The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach (Maori trans woman author) -- I liked this a lot.
  
• [Oct 23 DEI book club -- October is Filipino American History Month] Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista -- This was really engaging (the author is a journalist).  I think my favorite part was the backstory history of the Philippines (Chapter 2) -- "In the aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, Thai protestors filled the streets of Bangkok. Another man stood before another tank at Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall fell, with Germany thanking the Philippines for showing them the way. Once upon a time, we were heroes." (pp. 31-32)
• The Sunforge by Sascha Stronach -- sequel to The Dawnhounds, but which I think I didn't like as much as The Dawnhounds?
  
• It Gets Better... Except When It Gets Worse: And Other Unsolicited Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me by Nicole Maines

other

[Smith College Poetry Center poetry reading] Jai Hamid Bashir and Jennifer Funk, followed by conversation with Adrie Rose

Abby and I watched the livestream during a date night.

Jai Hamid Bashir's debut chapbook, Desire/Halves (Nine Syllables Press, 2024), is a lush, visceral journey navigating between English, Urdu, and Spanish. Called "a read of infinite tenderness" by poet Leila Chatti, Desire/Halves unravels the nuances of being Pakistani-American through Bashir's dexterous multilingual lens. A graduate of the University of Utah and Columbia University, Bashir lives and writes in the American West with her partner. Her work has been featured in publications such as POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Rumpus.

Jennifer Funk's Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy (Bull City Press, 2023) unveils the multi-faceted nature of domesticity and desire with poems that revel in the juxtaposition of mundane suburban life and deeper sensual undercurrents. Funk’s poems are described by poet Sally Keith as both “bawdy and wise, bossy and meek, mischievous and lovely.” A graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers, Funk has been a scholarship recipient at prestigious institutions such as the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place. Her work has been featured by such publications as The Kenyon Review, ROAR Feminist, and SWWIM.

Jennifer read first, followed by Jai.  I was kinda meh on both of them. (I had originally written "we," but ran it by Abby, who said: I think I was more positive than “meh”, though yeah, I wasn’t super into either of them.)

But Jai's is the debut chapbook from Smith's new press -- the first poetry press at a historically women's college.  Which is cool.

Nine Syllables Press is a chapbook press created in partnership with the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. We seek to address ongoing inequity in the publishing world by providing a new platform for systematically excluded voices, including but not limited to women, BIPOC poets, and trans/LGBTQIA++ poets. 9SP honors and continues the long tradition of poets and poetry at Smith, including Sylvia Plath ‘55 while extending that community to the other Seven Sisters colleges and beyond.

Adrie talked about how a Fall cohort of students read all the chapbook submissions to cut them down to a final 10 or something, and a Spring design class designed possible covers for the winning chapbook.  And Abby looked on the 9SP website, and torrin greathouse (whom we had liked last reading) is the final judge for this year.  From the Contest page:

Students at Smith College who are enrolled in the courses The Chapbook in Practice: Design and/or The Chapbook in Practice: Submissions & Publishing are involved in Nine Syllables Press, participate in reading submissions anonymously, learning how to design the interior and exterior of chapbooks, and creating marketing for our books. The final selections from the students are passed on to the final judge, who chooses the winner.

podcasts

• [Gender Reveal] Episode 179: Colby Gordon

  Tuck chats with Colby Gordon (he/him), a founder of Early Modern Trans Studies. Topics include:

  How much of Colby’s work is writing slashfic about the Bible??
  

  The limits of secularism in protecting trans people, and why Colby wants more trans people to have access to religion
  

  How the IRS randomly assigned Colby a trans name as a teen
  

  Running a twitter poll to decide between rabbinical school and a neck tattoo
  

  Plus: Phalloplasty, Wheat Jesus, trans mayhem(!), and the return of Spinoza

Abby had texted our pastor: "I don't know if you're a podcast person, and I don't think this episode is a _must_ listen to. But I did appreciate Colby making the trans pro-religion historical argument and how secularism isn't The Answer™ for trans rights."  Which is what prompted me to listen to the episode (though the episode isn't as much about religion as I had hoped).

some good lines:

"the apocalyptic genders of the resurrection"

"non-secular self-asserted sex-based identity narratives" (from some anti-trans bill)

[re: lyric poetry] "I think the most trans kind of writing is the kind where you get out of your own body and into another one."

 movies

• I Saw the TV Glow with Abby and Hartley
  
  
• [Boston Palestine Film Fest] Lyd with Abby -- which sold out! (The showing was Sunday night, and on Thursday night I thought to invite a friend, but in pulling up the ticketing page learned it was sold out.)

  Lyd by Rami Younis & Sarah Ema Friedland, is a speculative documentary that follows the rise and fall of Lyd – a 5,000-year-old metropolis that was once a bustling Palestinian town until it was conquered when the State of Israel was established in 1948 and was renamed Lod. Lyd dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?

  I felt like the speculative nature of this was over-sold -- though maybe that was just my misreading of the blurb? It's largely about the history and present of Lyd -- focused on the Nakba, and also on the present. I learned a lot and appreciated a lot about the film -- I had just been expecting more "what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?" from the blurb. (They do redo some scenes from present-day Lyd in the "what if" Lyd, which is neat.)
  
  I appreciated that during the Q&A, Sarah reminded us that they did an alternate history starting earlier than 1948 for a reason -- going back to the British and Ottoman rule.
  
  During the Q&A, Rami said he would love to do this kind of project with artists in other places -- to, I forget how he phrased it exactly, but basically "imagine a future without ongoing atrocity."
  
  
• I streamed Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story (which I had not been able to make time for during streaming Wicked Queer earlier this year) as part of the GlobeDocs Film Festival 2024.

  A queer young man in a very straight world of turn-of-the-century England, Noël Coward grew up in poverty and left school when he was only nine years old. Nonetheless, by the age of 30, he was the highest paid writer in the world and a star on the Broadway stage, well on his way to becoming a world-renowned songwriter and performer. And if that wasn't enough, he was also a spy during World War II. Coward defined an era and led an extraordinary life, and this is his fascinating story told in his own words (read by Rupert Everett), along with captivating archival interviews, and a treasure trove of home movies.

  I didn't know much about Coward going into this and certainly learned stuff and was engaged throughout -- but I also I feel fine about having chosen the Marlon Riggs film (Tongues Untied) over this when I was pressed for time the end of the streaming window back in the spring.
  
  
• Abby and I watched a couple of the queer doc shorts [VIRTUAL SHORTS 1: BREAKING THROUGH]:

  SEAT 31: ZOOEY ZEPHYR [15 minutes]
  When Zooey Zephyr was expelled from the Montana House of Representatives for speaking on a bill banning transgender medical care, she made a nearby bench her “office.”
  
  GOOD ENOUGH ANCESTOR [21 minutes]
  Oscar winner Cynthia Wade’s absorbing documentary tells the story of Taiwan’s first digital minister and the country’s first transgender, non-binary gender official in a ministry position.

  This latter one was a lot more about democracy than we were expecting.  There's stuff about the end of martial law in Taiwan in 1987 and the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan and the fragility of democracy; the film begins and ends with a voiceover that half the world's population (4 billion people) in 70 countries will go to the polls in 2024.
  
  re Seat 31, Abby said, "I was surprised how charmed I was by it." It was done by The New Yorker, and you can watch it on YouTube.
  
  
• We also watched one of the shorts in the 2024 Boston Asian American Film Festival queer shorts program, Oh, Queer:

  Fish Boy
  Directed by Christopher Yip
  Narrative | 10 mins | English, Cantonese with English subtitles | New England Premiere
  
  FISH BOY is a lyrical meditation on faith and queerness through the eyes of an Asian American teenager. When 16-year-old Patrick (played by Ian Chen, Fresh Off The Boat) questions his love for God and his sexuality, his self-discovery manifests in his skin.

  We didn't like this as much as we had hoped we would.

***

Currently Reading:

[Nov 13 climate change book club] This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein (2014)

This book is good, and also there is A Lot in it -- the text itself is 566 pages.  It's also not something I can necessarily read a lot of at a time.

As the next four chapters will show, the real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity), the stories on which Western cultures are founded (that we stand apart from nature and can outsmart its limits), as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities (shopping, living virtually, shopping some more). They also spell extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known---the oil and gas industry, which cannot survive in anything like its current form if we humans are to avoid our own extinction. In short, we have not responded to this challenge because we are locked in---politically, physically, and culturally. Only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking free.
-p.63

I think I'm probably not gonna try super-hard to finish it in time for book club (especially given how much other stuff I'm juggling -- see many book club books below, plus assorted theatr etc. in November). Looking at the table of contents just now, the book is divided into 3 parts: Bad Timing, Magical Thinking, and Starting Anyway -- so I will maybe prioritize Part 3 for book club discussion?

Reading Next:

[Nov 14 local library LGBTQ+ book club] You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (2020) -- novel about a queer Palestinian-American woman

[Nov 20 DEI book club -- November is Native American Heritage Month] The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (2023) -- this book is like 600 pages long, so at my suggestion we're only discussing the first half in November (and will do the second half in December).  There are so many notes in this book that the text only takes up 445 pages, but that's still a lot.  The book is conveniently literally divided into "Part I: Indians and Empire" (chs. 1-6) and "Part II: Struggles for Sovereignty" (chs. 7-12).

[Dec 1 feminist sff bookclub] The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (2023)

Abby started listening to it on audiobook and has so far messaged me:

The Terraformers audiobook starts with like sound effects things. And then the quote that opens the book is from Stephanie Burt. I'm here for this bullshit.

The insults in this book are low-key hilarious some of them.

There are allosexuals in this book!

She keeps wanting to make references to the book to me, so she'll be glad once I've read it :)