Books
Kristina Forest’s The Love Lyric (The Greene Sisters #3)
Bethany Jacobs’ These Burning Stars (The Kindom Trilogy #1)
Jessica James’ For One Night Only (Glitter Bats #1)
Katja Klengel’s Girlsplaining
K. O’Neill’s A Song for You and I
Katie Shepard’s No One Does It Like You
Kay Sohini’s This Beautiful Ridiculous City
Music
Jon Batiste’s Beethoven Blues
Hadestown: Live from London
Lady Gaga’s Abracadabra, Killah (ft. Gesaffelstein), LoveDrug, Shadow of a Man, The Beast
Kendrick Lamar’s squabble up, reincarnated, tv off (ft. Lefty Gunplay), peekaboo (Pdubcookin remix)
Lissie’s Don’t You Give Up On Me
Monchy and Alexandra’s Hoja En Blanco
Shakira with Ozuna’s Monotonía
Vulfpeck’s Big Dipper
Misc.
TV: Dimension 20’s Mentopolis
Rewatch: Dimension 20’s The Seven
Rewatch: Dimension 20’s A Court of Fey and Flowers
Live: Cirque du Soleil’s O
Magical.
Live: Grupo Corpo’s Gira
Religious? Ceremonial? Divine? All I know is I would go again.
Articles
Anne Helen Petersen’s interview with Garret Bucks, “The antidote is always turning deeper towards each other.”
“There is a mourning process when a myth dies, and when we skip that step (either in a workplace or school equity training, or in our online activism or in our debates with our friends and families), of course it will inspire an emotional response. I wish it didn’t. I wish that folks with power and privilege weren’t defensive when asked to give up our power and privilege — but that’s not how the human mind works, it’s not how we respond neurologically to change and mourning. So when you ask folks to sit in cognitive dissonance but you don’t give them the space for the emotions that brings up, it creates an emotional vacuum that grifters and bad faith actors have always, throughout history, been more than happy to fill.”
Adrian Hon’s The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-changing Sci-fi Larp
Not a LARPer, but this is fascinating.
Judith Ivory/Judy Cuevas’ Rif on Politically Correct Writing
“No one told Nabokov not to write about pedophilia and, voila, Lolita. No one tells Norman Mailer not to write with some sympathy of killers, yet he did so and well. These and other writers have produced truly fine works while answering to their own vision; hang any moral responsibility. Romance writers – if they are to be real writers – must be free to do the same. … More importantly, dreck is dreck because of poor execution, not because of the subject matter. Any subject matter in the hands of a great writer can be fascinating.
…But to discuss the subject matter as if it had something to do with the quality of the writing only ties an albatrose around romance writer’s necks – an albatrose no other genre is expected to wear. To accept that we carry a moral responsibility to society is to admit we have nothing to give society in terms of art itself. Art is about honesty. It’s about an individual’s expression of her own, unique vision. You don’t tell another adult what she sees. She stands at a different vantage point from you. If she wants to write about rape or forced seduction, I say, let her. And judge her on how well she does it. If what she writes transports you or any reader into her world, she has succeeded at least to some extent. If she takes you vividly where you don’t want to go, well, for heaven’s sakes put the book down–but if it’s vivid, even unsettling, then graciously admit another might find it interesting. If, on the other hand, it falls flat, seems trite, ho-hum, cardboard, then she’s failed to find the right words for her vision. If a writer express perfectly the ideas society deems “appropriate,” what have she really done? Perhaps only turned out very very nice propaganda pieces, the party line, what we’re “supposed” to think. Because no one has all wholesome, “right” thoughts.”
Anne Helen Petersen’s This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World
“I remember the first time I realized that this was the end game. Legislators in my home state of Idaho were cutting the education budget to the bone. Soon thereafter, they started devouring the marrow — while simultaneously creating funding structures for homeschoolers and private (Christian) academies. The far right’s goal is the end of public education, full stop. It’s not that they hate teachers — teachers are welcome to teach at their private religious schools! They just won’t have pensions. Or unions. Or job protections. Or anything else that made the difficult but essential work of becoming a public teacher stable.”
“So why has teaching and so many other federal jobs remained tenable when journalism and the vast majority of the arts have not? Public funding and unions. Get rid of the public funding, defang the unions, and these jobs become the new journalism and career non-profit work: available only to a select few who can shoulder the costs, which means they’re usually privileged, usually partnered, and equipped with private personal safety nets.
When that sort of change occurs across an industry, you don’t just change who can do the work, but the character of the work itself. And when a civilization is limited to work that produces profit, we don’t just lose the artistry and texture of everyday life. We distance ourselves from the values of care and generosity — and the simple but profound belief that what happens to one of us affects all of us.”
Sanjana’s yes, no, maybe so: thinking differently about consent, sex, and violence in romance
(Re: relegating romance to the realm of the real, there’s some connection here to what tiana is discussing in fandom too.)
“As a reader, limit consent offers me a means of understanding the work of a sex scene differently and more richly. When characters are not “glad to be there,” or “in agreement,” or “enthusiastic,” limit consent expresses something of the enigmatic possibility of sex beyond the development of a contract. Sex, read this way, is not about enthusiasm and joy so much as it is about transformation.”
“Toscano is smart (smarter than me, certainly) to forgo sociological and psychological explanations in favor of a textual one. The reality is that such scenes do work for a narrative and for characters. It does work in A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, in Shadowheart by Laura Kinsale, and in Kiss an Angel or Nobody’s Baby but Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, all books that are extremely beloved by romance readers. Violence can be extremely textually generative.”
“To be clear, I don’t have any interest in telling people how they should navigate consent in their life and relationships. Those negotiations are deeply intimate and beyond the scope of this Substack. I do, however, think we do ourselves a disservice by insisting romance novels model good, wholesome, ethical, affirmative consent, whatever that might look like. By insisting on “yes!” consent in romance, we continue to relegate romance to the realm of the real (as in literal), didactic, and optimistic. There’s an anesthetizing quality to that optimism, something that robs romance of its complexity and intensity.”
“The thing that feels real is this: sometimes pleasure doesn’t feel good, it feels like an annihilation.”
“Increasingly I am understanding fascism to be, at least psychologically, about the collapsing of possibility— in narrative, in art, in life. That fewer and fewer ambivalences, discomforts, and ambiguities are permissible or even written within romance genre fiction speaks volumes to me about where the American collective consciousness lives.”
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya’s advice column on ‘I Met a Lesbian Married to a Man and I’m Confused’
“Queerness to me does not represent a perfect inverse of straightness but rather a rejection of binaries altogether. We are not the opposite of straight people but rather a complete reimagining of how relationships of all kinds can look and work. So this purpose of lesbianism you mention? It’s a vast and varied purpose, and one person’s relationship/marriage does not defeat it.”
Kai Cheng Thom’s Control, Compassion & Social Change
“What is essential is acknowledging the fact that the dominant culture Leftists reject is built around control, discipline and punishment – but very often, our movements and our social problem-solving strategies reflect those same tendencies. We must ask ourselves: How do we wish to build our revolutionary world? What is our theory of change? Command and control? Or compassion and healing transformation?”
Esther O. Lee 