The Male Hysteric

I've been spending some time on the digital audio player subreddit (and now have a Snowsky Echo Mini and matching Linsoul 7HZx Zero:2s* and probably shouldn't be looking there anymore, but the old Sony stick-style mp3 players are strangely appealing), and there are a decent amount of young new users out there who have... never owned a music library, like at all, they just have had Spotify or whatever their entire lives and have never bought music. I guess I shouldn't be surprised but it just seems insane to me. I'm not exactly a full scale digital hoarder but like, if you like something, get a copy, and save it locally. You never know when it's going to disappear.

*I've had the Echo Mini for a while but I just got the IEMs a couple days ago and I am hearing sounds I have never heard before in old songs and they're way more comfortable than my porta pros. I do recommend, if you're into that sort of thing.

I don't really have a coherent plan of action right now, but given the encroaching ID certification to view anything "adult" in certain countries and payment processors pressuring vendors to censor "mature" content and KOSA getting revived, I kind of feel like more than ever people need to get themselves a web space that isn't social media. Having a static site just seems to be increasingly a good idea, even if it's just a single, unformatted page of links to your friends' static sites, and keep a backup of your site locally in case you're forced to move.

I'd recommend getting started on neocities.org or nekoweb.org. Both have slightly different features. If we know each other and you want to be linked to my website, comment or DM me. Good luck out there.

I just saw this and thought you all needed to see it immediately:

Ernest Hemingway Visits Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club by Amy Estes, at McSweeny's

Two books today, because I'm no good at getting these comments posted in time.

I think I was probably more disappointed by The House by the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune than I should have been because it was listed, for some reason, on a thread about fans of The Locked Tomb series looking for something m/m and this book has essentially no similarities and should not be mentioned in the same sentence as any Locked Tomb book, which isn't this book's fault.

It's a very cozy book with little sense of stakes, which is fine if you're into that kind of thing, but also I feel like it is kind of a prime example of books for adults feeling "fanfiction"-y. A lot of fanfiction is low-stakes because the source material is often high-stakes so the fanfiction fills in holes of the source material, I think, so what many people think of as fanfiction-y overlaps heavily with "cozy."

But I think probably my disappointment was more not necessarily this book’s fault, but more that like Asako Yuzuki's Butter, it refused to “go there” — I honestly for some reason though that Arthur would be revealed to be an incubus or something, which would explain his affinity for working with Lucy, why he thought the best idea to keep the house open was to charm Linus, and Linus could be concerned that he was being seduced, should a sex demon even be in charge of caring for children in the first place or would it be a problem considering their inherent nature — but instead, we got a ‘phoenix’, a creature which doesn’t really seem to have a lot of meaning besides a symbol and flame based power, boring. I think if I want a book to “go there” unlike The House on the Cerulean Sea and Butter, I might just have to do it myself.

Anyway, given all these frustrations, I went ahead and borrowed Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu from the library, you know, one of the first vampire books that predates Dracula by about 25 years. I guess it’s more of a novella, not a novel, considering it’s very short, but I’m going ahead and counting it here. Anyway, this book delivered exactly what I expected. Gothic, spooky castle, old-fashioned sapphic-sploitation for tittillating purposes, etc. No real notes. If this is the sort of thing you’re interested in reading it, you can get a free copy at Project Gutenberg.

My therapist wanted me to read Andrea Long Chu's Females for a while and on my way to buy it online something totally wacky happened. I stumbled upon a reddit post about this critical review of the book by a trans woman. The review seems pretty typical, praising Chu for being interesting while at the same time critical of her perspectives and cast them as misogynist, absurd, projecting, nonsense, a "harmful" narrative to trans people, and generally un-transfeminist... essentially a pretty shallow reading of it and closely toeing the "party line" of public-facing transgender narrative at the time it was written, back in 2019.

This would all be quite unremarkable, except in the interim, the book critic has since detransitioned, claims he was "immersed in transgender ideology" which encouraged him to transition because of his "autogynephilia" and has even converted to Catholicism. Andrea Long Chu, meanwhile, is still Andrea Long Chu-ing.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki was a book that I had requested from a long libby queue a long time ago, forgot about, and then suddenly I had to read it right away before it disappeared, so it became my book for May. Anyway, I'm going to be square about it -- I was disappointed.

And I think what disappointed me so much is that about the first two thirds of the book were so, so promising, with a slow build about danger and desire for it to just... poof into smoke. I really feel like to get into my problems with this book will require spoiler tags, so here we go.

For a book with so many meditations on desire, particularly female desire, and clear themes of intimacy between two female characters who are very dissatisfied with their male lovers, the gender non-conformity of the main character, and the taboo of it all, it never... went there. And it's not even that it never went there, it read like there was some kind of invisible barrier preventing it from going there, like some kind of Hayes-like code that prevented it from happening. Once it got too close to happening the novel retracted itself into a nice, neat little story with a neat little lesson about wants without transgressing that awful line of... gasp, lesbian desire!

I admittedly didn't read too much about this book before I started and as a digital copy I did not have the blurb easily accessible so I couldn't immediately tell if it was being billed as a 'queer' or 'lesbian' book. I know that after a certain point in the US, books portraying major characters as gay and normal rather than something inherently... transgressive, I guess? became mainstreamed and I was not sure if this shift over ever happened in Japan so I was wondering if maybe I was seeing something like a book that was pre-this-shift. However, that was not what happened. The story saw what could have been and then went, absolutely not, nothing to see here.

It felt like a perfect distillation of what I was talking about to yvannairie a while ago, how straight, canonical couples have no chemistry at all, while implied gay couples have so much because they're not built completely on societal expectations of what a couple should be. Hell, there was even more chemistry between the main character and her older male tip source than her boyfriend, who thank God she at least broke up with, but that none of the chemistry that the main character actually had was ever explored is so bonkers considering the themes in the book. And it's so weird because it's not like there's no sex happening. It's like sex is allowed, as long as it's not actually sexy at all. Ugh.

Anyway. I don't know how much of this was stuff lost in translation, considering the book was originally published in Japanese. But I don't think I could recommend this book, especially to the type of people I know.

I guess I'm feeling kind of gross because I feel like I'm between projects, but not really.

I am Looking At The Novel, being the science fiction novel I've been working on for two years, and think the first few chapters need a heavy revision. So I have been trying to do that, but being on the computer, it's hard, and I'm just... not feeling it? And I'm not sure if I need to pause or need to muscle through it. My insane thought was to make a draft where I just took the passages I really liked, in some kind of opposite kill-your-darlings, and try to weave a narrative through that way, because this piece is really supposed to be running on vibes, so selecting the bestest vibes first from the old draft may be the way to go. Or maybe I should just do normal editing. I don't know. I feel kind of nuts looking at this thing, which is making me wonder if I should just chicken scratch at dirt for a new project that I want to do but isn't formed enough to really start writing.

I also had this insane idea of making a zine of excerpts of notes I've sent to my therapist, which in my case are extremely prolific. I mean it's my writing so I can do what I want with it, right? But as I was starting to compile some stuff it just felt really hard, even if the excerpts I was working with weren't super significant. I was at a local group to write and in the middle of it I was just like, "wow, what the fuck am I doing, this is insane," and had to get up and leave. But maybe it would be worth it to do? I don't know.

There is a zinefest at the end of June so I did want to bring something more substantial than my minizine for trades, but this might... not be it.

Yes I have been reading, no I have not been very good at recording them. So I’m only going to post some short things about each of these.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir was a reread for me, and a part of why it took me so damn long was because I was taking notes. I was also going to go through all the backmatter, but I got distracted, and now I figure that all of this has been delayed enough that I will talk about it anyway. What can I say? It was way better the second time around because I actually knew what was going on. I feel like The Locked Tomb books are the types of books that get better on reread and you might just have to go on vibes through the first read, which may be a flaw or strength, depending on how you read. I’m still going through the GTN read on Frontline Fifth and am going to try to reread Harrow before getting through their HTN read, though I’m unsure if I will do notes on that one, even though it probably needs it more.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was interesting, but also a book that felt like it went on for too long for what it was, though a part of the problem was probably that I borrowed it from the library as an ebook so the return time was very strict. But if you actually pick it up at a library, it’s a very fat volume! I did enjoy it, though. One thing it did was that it was very direct about the casual terror of being a Jew in the old country which is just… when you have the fantasy fairy stories based in Europe is always absent? Reading it was very familiar, like, yes, yes, the horrors, we know the horrors, and then it dawned on me that no, the vast majority of the writers and readers of these kinds of books (maybe not this one, but fairy stories in general) do not. And that realization was kind of upsetting. But this isn’t Novik’s fault.

Dr. No by Percival Everett was… a very silly book. I picked it up at a bookstore because it was on the counter along with the promotional materials for James, which is having a moment right now but I didn’t think was my kind of thing but Dr. No from the summary absolutely did seem like my kind of thing, or at least I was kind of obligated to read it because I’m also writing about people studying math getting into trouble. I guess I had kind of assumed that James was a serious book, and therefore this would be a different book, it was very goofy, and not exactly in a way I was into (I don't read enough spy thrillers to be into a parody of them I think), but it was still a quick read which isn’t something I can say of a lot of the other books I’ve read lately. I’m left wondering if James is also a goofy book. I mean I guess Twain was considered a humorist but I never found him that funny.

So I was starting to make a minizine and it's about making websites and I'm realizing that I should probably have like, my own website, blog, email address on here and it's just making me think... if I put that shit in print... that will mean that I am making a commitment to these usernames, identities, etc? And that just feels... real scary! It's honestly making me wonder if I should change some stuff around. I don't know. I am no good at names, and I don't know what to call myself for this one.

Then again for a little minizine I probably shouldn't be having an existential crisis about it, and because I will have the master copies I should just be able to change the addresses if I really need to update it, right? Ugh.

I may know who I am, but what to call myself is an entirely different question. That one, I don't know. Ugh.

I should probably get into what books I've been reading (I have been reading, just not posting about it), and getting more into The Locked Tomb fandom. And I've found a podcast that did a read on Gideon the Ninth, Frontline Fifth, and they're going to start reading Harrow soon. I have a feeling this is slightly less brainrotting than my usual podcast fare so that's something.

I'm still alive, and stuff has been rough. Hopefully I'll get back to posting here more.