The Male Hysteric

Well, today I was at therapy and we were figuring out our schedule for the next month or so, and I realized that my next appointment is on US election day, so that's terrifying.

I've finished reading all 10 novels for this year, but I do not have a write up for them yet, I am working on it. Right now my thoughts are, I am not sure if I'm going to read any more novels this year. Probably, because there's still two months left, but also I feel like I have a lot of non-fiction and short readings to catch up on, so maybe not. Next year, I'm thinking of maybe going for twelve novels?

I saw a production of a play version of Frankenstein and it makes me very curious about the version that Mary Shelley saw before she did her rewrites. It also makes me wonder if I should hurry up and make my own interpretation because it does seem new compared to most interpretations.

I am also maybe starting to get into zines? If I find any interesting ones online I may post them here, though a linklist for online zines seems like something I'd put on my static site. I have been thinking of making my own, but it may not end up a zine. It's something about how moderation on the internet is the secret sauce that holds everything together and people don't realize it and it's why we can't have nice things and why we can't seem to "go back" to a simpler internet. But it may be too long or meandering to make a proper zine, I don't know.

I am also, well, still working on the same science fiction novel. Who knows how that will go.

And... it's not my fic!

Somebody from tumblr wrote a drabble based on a post I had made on Frankenstein that has gotten a decent amount of circulation:




Anyway, the fic is to India! Procrastinating by summerstudie on Ao3. It's very short... because if this had happened, there would be no Frankenstein, lol.

I suppose I don’t have to actually ask for permission from anyone here but I’m thinking at the very least reposting the literary analysis essays I’ve posted on tumblr on the novel Frankenstein here, and maybe some notes/excerpts from my large Frankenstein project here once I have any.

I saw a post on twitter wondering about when we were getting “The transmasculine Whipping Girl” and though I don’t really think this is the next Whipping Girl per se, the thesis of the project (which I was thinking of as a book, then a site, but now I’m back to book again) as being how Victor Frankenstein is widely villainized for having the same problems as modern transmasculine people, and the reason why these problems are seen as unsympathetic is because he is silenced both inside and outside the book and assumed to be incapable of having these specific problems as a man. This project was put on hold, in large part because even with JSTOR access research was very hard because I don’t know how to do it. For example, somehow even for a major character of a famous 200 year old novel, trying to search for “Victor Frankenstein Disability” only dredged up analyses of the creature as an abandoned, disabled child and nothing about the main narrator who is constantly bedridden, collapsing, hallucinating, etc. to the point of dying at 27 years old.

I know there’s still research to be done but some other writers have encouraged me to go do it anyway because I might actually be the first person to say these things. I don’t feel that’s especially likely and feel like it would be embarassing not to cite them, but maybe I should go on anyway.