“Females” by Andrea Long Chu

This is a short book that I again, have no idea how it ended up on my reading list. But I am glad that I picked it up. It’s based on a play by Valerie Solanas, the author of SCUM Manifesto who later on shot Andy Warhol. This was actually good timing, my partner had just read SCUM Manifesto and could explain some of those references to me.

The idea behind this work is that being female is a state of mind, with nothing to do with gender or sex. Being female means repressing your wants in order to make room for someone else’s wants. And damn if that doesn’t resonate with me watching myself and other femmes make ourselves smaller so that someone else can take up space. Anyways, everyone is female and also everyone hates it. We all can’t stand that we do this to ourselves, but we do it anyways. And sometimes, we even seek it out.

Long Chu’s perspective as a trans women I think is really key here, she talks a lot about her process of transitioning and what she was thinking about and the art she was creating. I thought it was fascinating to hear about her experiences, and how she loops that into Solanas’ work. I’m not super familiar with the play or anything, but it is explained pretty sufficiently in the text. She also pulls in other works like the movie “Don Jon” featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and such. Everything just revolves around this idea of demonstrating that we are all, in fact, female even if we may identify as male.

I thought this was really thought-provoking and interesting to read. I’m not sure if I agree with all of it, sometimes it seems as though people like being female, but it is a really interesting look at gender dynamics. I love anything that separates gendered terms from gender/sex so it was up my alley. Anyways, it’s short and sweet so pick it up if you haven’t yet!

This Is Beautiful: Snow!

 We had our first snow here! It was so pretty, I unfortunately didn't have time to make a snowman but there's a few that have popped up around town. I'm not fully ready for it to be freezing, but I do love the snow! (Plus seems like it's going to get warm again later so...)

“Quichotte” by Salman Rushdie

This is another book that has been on my list for a while but I cannot remember how it got on there. I almost enjoy that more though, as a result I start off not super excited to read it and partway through realize “oh, this is why I was interested!” and get very invested in the story.

Quichotte is essentially an Indian-American Don Quixote, he has watched too much TV and wants to win the hand of Miss Salma, a celebrity TV actress and host. He invents himself a son named Sancho, who then talks to an Italian cricket and comes to life. They travel across America to win Miss Salma’s heart while Sancho realizes that the world isn’t a welcoming place for immigrants/non-White folks. They also start to have hallucinations, for example a town in New Jersey where people are turning into mastodons turns out to be a vision.

Meanwhile, chapters on Quichotte are interspersed with Sancho’s narration and the Author’s. The Author is similarly estranged from his sibling and son, and as time progresses the worlds of the characters and the author intertwine. First, Sancho senses the Author digging around in Quichotte’s brain, and then events of the book start to play out in the author’s world.

A theme of the book, beyond needing the absurd to make sense of anything, is that the world is going to end. And it starts to, Quichotte then convinces Miss Salma to head to a lab with him to go through a portal together. They burst into the Author’s world only to choke on the air that is too big for them to breathe.

I started off intrigued but a little meh on the book. For context, it was published in 2019 during the first Trump presidency. There are allusions to an orange, deranged president, nothing concrete, but it clearly is inspired by that time and those policies. It does make sense that to try and make sense of a tv president you need a tv addicted man. And that you would go a little crazy.

Once the author emerged as a character I was much more intrigued. There are passages that address what he hopes to do with this work, and notes that he makes for himself about the characters. The interplay of the characters coming into this world as his world intercedes on theirs I think culminates in a really accurate portrayal of what it’s like to live in the Trump era. You feel as though you’re the only sane one, and media consumption is driving you nuts. The only way to cope is to pretend as though it is all normal, like the folks being turned into mastodons. There’s something fundamental that this work captures really well, and I think I might have to reread it to fully put my finger on it, but it spoke to me so strongly.

Now of course I would like this book, at its heart it is a postmodern masterpiece where there are so many movie, tv, song, and pop culture references that it might overwhelm you. But I think that the culmination of it all creates something that is inherently very relatable. I am not an immigrant, but I think it also captures what it’s like to be an immigrant without getting too far into policy or the violence (even though there is some). But just the insane unreality of what we are living in is expertly captured and pinned under a microscope.

This Is Beautiful: Job Interview

 I have a job interview later today! Wish me luck, it's the first that I've gotten and I've been looking since August. (To be fair I've gotten replies outside of interviews, but this is still the first and that's exciting.) I hope it goes well, I do like the job posting quite a bit so I hope there's some good news after this.

“Every Heart a Doorway” by Seanan McGuire

This is another book that has been on my list to read for ages. I saw it getting kicked around in lists of books with asexual main characters, and I knew a few friends that read it and really liked it. Honestly I surpassed all of my expectations, I loved the world of this book and I’m really excited to dive into the rest of the series. 

The book follows Nancy, a girl who has just returned from the Halls of the Dead to parents who thought she was kidnapped and don’t understand why their daughter is behaving so differently now. They send her to Eleanor, a woman who runs a home for troubled children like Nancy. Hidden from the parents though, is that this is a home/school for many similar children who went to other fantasy worlds, returned, and have a hard time adjusting. Nancy’s roommate is Sumi who went to a Nonsense world, and her friends include Jack and Jill, two twins that went to the Moors, a land ruled by a vampire. Jack becomes an apprentice to a mad scientist and Jill becomes the vampire lord’s pet. There’s also Kade who went to a fantasy realm and was kicked out when he realized he is actually a boy.

Things heat up when Sumi is discovered head, with her hands cut off. Then another girl is discovered dead with her eyes removed. Nancy, Kade, Jack, and Christopher (from a skeleton realm) stick together to try and survive, especially since the other kids suspect that the creepy kids from death realms and the mad scientist might be behind this. Eventually it’s revealed that Jill has been behind this, she’s trying to create a perfect girl from pieces of girls to make someone who is wanted by every realm so that she can return to the Moors. Jack stabs her sister and is then able to bring them both back to reanimate her. The book ends with Nancy discovering an old note from Sumi that tells her to write her own story, leading to her rediscovery of a door to the Halls of the Dead and returning.

Now the best part of the book is the way it turns some fantasy tropes on their heads. After the kids return home, what happens next? Of course they have a difficult time with their parents and peers. There is some order to the worlds, some are Nonsense and some are Logic, but I honestly never really understood that. But it is really amusing to hear about the different worlds. One character went to a spider realm, Sumi went to a candy realm or something, and just about every version thereof. And each child is molded to that realm meaning that the personalities are just as vibrant as the realms.

Also fun is the representation. Nancy is pretty openly asexual and talks about it a lot, including dropping that she isn’t aromantic. As Kade flirts with her it makes her anxious until she explains that she just finds people pretty, leading to his understanding (even though she never used the word with him). Kade similarly is openly trans from the time we meet him, and it leads to him being rejected by both his parents and the world he went to. I would love more information on his experiences, but it was heartbreaking to hear about how badly he wants to remember his experiences despite the pain from not being about to go back ever. And I love that the main love interest is trans, that’s so great for people to see.

The book is really short, I think it’s technically a novella. But for all of that it establishes a universe from the beginning and doesn’t waste time getting to the main mystery. I’m so excited to check out the rest of the books and hopefully expand this whimsical world.

This Is Beautiful: Halloween!

 I think I enjoy Halloween more as an adult than I did as a kid! This year my partner and I dressed in 90s fashion and put Beanie Baby tags on the animals to be Beanie Baby collectors. Then my lab had a party which was cute and I put a tag on my lab mate! It was really nice doing a low-key celebration and just being around the lab members again for a social event. It's great to have an adult fun holiday!

“The Ladies Guide to Petticoats and Piracy” by Mackenzi Lee

This book has been on my list for a while, it’s one that gets circulated a lot if you are interested in reading asexual characters. I had not gotten around to it as it isn’t quite the genre I like the best (aka historical fiction) but it was a fun, easy read to get through.

The book follows Felicity, a young girl in the 1700s who desperately wants to become a physician despite only being rejected by medical schools for being a woman. At the start of the book she is living with Callum, a baker, in Scotland and she has to reject his offer of marriage. She heads to London where her brother Monty and his boyfriend Percy live where she tries again at a London medical school and is similarly rejected. However, she learns that this legendary doctor, Dr. Platt, is about to set off on an expedition and that he is getting married soon, so she wants to intercept him at the wedding to an old friend of hers. However, Monty disagrees with this plan so she ends up joining with a mysterious pirate of color named Sim to head there. Felicity isn’t sure about Sim’s motives, it sounds like Sim wants to steal something, but it’s too convenient for her to pass up.

They get there and Felicity has to try and make up with Johanna, a childhood friend that she had a falling out with. Felicity remembers it as Johanna demeaning her for not being interested in boys and parties, and Johanna remembers it as Felicity looking down on her for being interested in those things. They start to make up, and then Felicity catches Sim robbing Johanna. Then Felicity realizes that Johanna has run away and she teams up with Dr. Platt to find her in Zurich. Once there, Felicity overhears that Dr. Platt wants to kidnap Felicity so she also sneaks away and runs into Johanna. Turns out that she wants to get her mother’s things from a museum storage but they won’t let her since she’s a woman. So Felicity goes to steal it and runs into Sim trying to steal the same stuff.

They scuffle but then end up leaving together when Sim is injured on a broken vial. Felicity treats her, and they learn that Johanna’s mother was studying sea dragons, animals whose scales hold stimulating properties. They make the trip to Africa, where Sim is from. There Felicity and Johanna are separated and captured, but Monty shows up to save them from Dr. Platt. They then all head to where the eggs are and fight the English, but a sea dragon shows up to finish the deed for them and save her eggs. The book ends with Sim and Felicity heading back to Africa so that Felicity can study medicine there, and Johanna returns to England to claim Dr. Platt’s things.

Alright well first the ace representation. I thought Felicity was well written in that she never uses the words “asexual” or “aromantic” but it is very clear that this is what the author is going for. Felicity doesn’t get the “spark” with other people or have any interest in marriage or relationships. Potentially people would criticize this for going too far in the other direction, where Felicity is a tomboy that looks down on feminine women, but I think the subplot of her making up with Johanna and realizing that it is ok to be more feminine is a really nice way to round out her character.

There are times where the book is a little too obvious with what it is doing. Of course Felicity and Johanna make up. Of course Sim ends up not so different from Felicity after all. There was clearly a moment where Felicity basically said “I’m not like other girls” and Sim said she probably never looked for other girls like herself. But it is a young adult historical fiction, so that’s ok. I don’t think criticisms calling female characters “too modern” have much of a basis usually, there have always been women that care about their rights and how other characters are treated and such. Felicity does mention that she had to do some warming up to her brother being gay as well, so it’s not like she had completely modern viewpoints either.

The sea dragons did feel pretty out of place to me. I don’t think those are real creatures or anything, and to plop them into a pretty straight historical setting felt inconsistent to me. The scales in particular, I know that they need to like discover new things or something, but that felt very much as though it was a Deus Ex Machina of medicine for Felicity and Johanna to then study or whatever. And it isn’t totally needed, there’s plenty of natural world in Africa that was ruined by colonialism to talk about.

Anyways, this was a quick and pretty fun read if not completely my cup of tea. The characters are delightful and it’s easy to get through. Just sometimes I think it could use a little more complicating.

This Is Beautiful: Being in a City

 I went on my first trip in a while to a conference last week and WOW I didn't even like where I was but I was so happy to be in a city again! Just being able to walk around, have good food, public transportation, and all that was absolutely mind blowing. I went to multiple museums in a single day! Food was diverse and amazing! It just felt like being back in civilization.

As I start thinking about next steps for my career, this is unfortunately something I should really keep in mind. I so want to be back in a city again. I will have to keep that in mind as I go forward.

“Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud” by Martin Gayford

This book has been on my list for a while, I thought it was a really interesting premise and a very different perspective on art and the creation of art. It was indeed a very interesting read, although it didn’t totally hit for me for a few reasons that may or may not be fair.

The book essentially is the author’s notes on sitting for a portrait with Lucien Freud (LF). He clearly based it on his journal notes and elaborated as he went, all of the entries are dated from the early 2000s. The vast majority of the book is about sitting for this portrait, and there is a short section at the end about sitting for an engraving.

Gayford talks about how he feels sitting for the portrait, whether that’s bored or self-conscious or so on. And he talks quite a bit about LF’s philosophy and technique behind painting. LF doesn’t want to create art that is pretty or just like the sitter, he focuses more on creating a decent piece of art and subtly alters things in service of that. He also though has been known to exaggerate features that sitters are self-conscious about to make them look less pretty. Apparently one of his previous sitters said that he violated some contract between artist and model, which he then explicitly says that he always wants to do.

I thought this was a really interesting meditation on the process of creating art as well. Gayford talks about how long this all takes and complains about being there for weeks without making much progress. He sometimes asks LF about how things are going and what different colors are for. Evidently Gayford owns two different blue scarves and didn’t realize this until partway through (whoops).

I did really enjoy reading this book, but I just don’t think that LF’s art is for me. There are plenty of examples in the book, and I realized a few pages in that LF seemed to really enjoy making his models look ugly. Even before he said that in the book. And that all of the nudes emphasize the genitals which is just something I don’t particularly care for. I really like his use of color and texture, the portrait that makes the name of the book has these really nice streaks in the model/author’s face, but overall I just feel like he’s painting to an audience that isn’t me. And partially it may be that I don’t particularly care for portraiture, it has never been my favorite type of painting. But I can’t help but feel that I would in fact be more interested in some of these conversations about LF’s methods if I liked his art more.

All that to say, I am still glad that I read this book and was exposed to this art. If anything, I wish that there were more books like this so we can get a sense of how more artists work directly from their models! Could you imagine how our sense of Degas’ dancers (as a recent example of another book I read on models) would change if we knew their perspective?

This Is Beautiful: Second Half of Semester

 So close to the finish line! Just have a few more things to get through and then hopefully my time constraints will be more streamlined. My department has annual student talks so mine is coming up soon, and means that the class I teach is over halfway done. We got this folks!

“The Apology” by Eve Ensler

This book has been on my list for a while, but I was intrigued by the premise and thought it was an interesting exercise to explore and read someone else’s interpretation of. The book is essentially an apology from Ensler’s father to her, detailing the abuse she received throughout her life as well as his thoughts on why or what he was feeling at the time. It also has snippets about apologies, for example that he needs to fully grasp the harm done and try to make amends without making excuses.

Please don’t misunderstand, this is a hard book to get through. The abuse starts when Ensler is five and it really only gets worse from there. That she survived it physically and emotionally is huge. Don’t go into this thinking it is a light read.

I did find myself wondering at times more about the process of writing this book than the book itself. How did she know these things about her father, for example that he was bullied by his older brother? Did she invent that for the sake of the narrative? How much did she worry about injecting her perspective without capturing his? Did this actually help her find closure? I hope it did.

All too often we aren’t given apologies we need, most of the time I would wager to guess. It was nice to read about one woman taking that into her own hands and giving herself what she needed. I hope that it is something others read and take into consideration with their own apologies, but somehow I doubt that the audience of the book is made up of men that need to apologize. Maybe, but unlikely. Still, I think this represents a step towards more goodness and self-awareness in the world.

This is Beautiful: Fake Vacation

 Alright well this week I'm at a conference and while it's definitely supposed to be work, I'm treating it as a vacation. Heehee. I have a few things that I have to do, few that I want to do, and then I really want to just get some sleep, catch up on things, and do some tourist-y things while I'm out of town. Hopefully it'll be a rejuvenating week!

“The King of Attolia” by Megan Whalen Turner

This is the third book about the Thief of Eddis that my partner and I have read together. The first was The Thief and then The Queen of Attolia. This book is quite different from the previous two in a lot of ways, but it was nice to read something a little different.

The book is from the point of view of Costas, a guard in Attolia assigned to the King. Only problem is that he hates the King, the popular belief is that the King is an idiot who doesn’t actually care about the Queen. He is seen as little more than an invasion of a neighboring country. So Costas punches the King before the book opens, and is worrying about his future. Thankfully, the King spares his life and instead makes him one of his personal guards. Costas now has to follow the King around everywhere. In doing so, he learns that the King is funny, smart, and appears to be purposefully hiding these because he doesn’t actually want to be King. He truly just wanted to marry the Queen and now he has so many more responsibilities and is dealing with homesickness.

Much of this comes to light when there’s an assassination attempt on the King. Thankfully, Gen (the King) is able to defend himself, but Costas realizes how adept he is through that. And nearly everyone realizes how much the King and Queen care about each other from their responses to the attack. Afterwards the guards don’t believe that he defended himself, so Costas baits Gen into fighting half the guards to prove himself. By the end, not only have the Attolians accepted Gen as their King, but he has fully embraced his role as head of the state.

Overall, I don’t think I would say that this was the best book in the series. Costas is a completely new narrator, and he takes some getting used to as a lot of it is him talking about his honor or whatever. And nothing much happens for a lot of it, it’s just the routine of being at court and the King’s lessons and whatever. I thought the assassination attempt would be more exciting, but Costas largely misses the action and just stands guard while Gen recovers.

There are some very funny moments though. And Gen manages to prove himself in various ways, including his god telling him to get off of a rooftop when he’s drunk. I also really love the relationship between the King and Queen, I wish it was highlighted earlier on. The Queen had Gen’s hand cut off, an incident that still gives him nightmares, but they deeply love each other now. We got snippets of this interaction, such as the Queen comforting the King after his injury and the King convincing her to pardon someone as she should have pardoned him, but I would have liked more.

All in all, I’m excited to continue with the series. I really like the world and the characters, so I’m happy to hear about what is coming next. There are hints that the series is building to something, and I want to see what that entails for Gen and his kingdom.

This Is Beautiful: Prioritization

 Alright so I'm drowning a little in work with graduating and finding a job and teaching and wrapping things up. But I had a good talk with my therapist earlier this week, and I think just having that conversation made me feel better with letting some things just not have all of my effort anymore. I knew that I had to let some things go, but it still feels weird when those things are, say, your PhD work. But hearing someone else give me permission has helped a lot, for the past few days anyways, so that feels really good.

“On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck” by Nick Riggle

Ok that’s it I’m calling it: this is by far my favorite philosophical text that I’ve read. Probably ever. Riggle manages to toe the line of writing so familiarly and colloquially, but also making really nice academic points on how to treat each other. It makes ideas about ethics and community very accessible, and very inclusive.

The main argument that Riggle presents is that being awesome is opening up space for interactions outside of the norm, creating social openings to interact in ways that we usually don’t. Sucking is the opposite of that, you don’t take up an opening when presented with one or actively shut them down. This theory starts with a really concrete example of an awesome guy at a sports game acting out a Bon Jovi music video and a guy who sucks trying to kick him. Riggle then goes through examples of different ways to be awesome or suck, and talks about how we can all create a little more awesome in our lives.

I got such a kick out of this book. Based on the title and the way it is all presented, it seems like a very bro-y topic that might only connect with a small part of the population. Or it might stay very surface level, only talking about what does and does not suck in a non-generalizable way. I was super wrong. Riggle clearly put the work into this, he talks about how biases such as racism or sexism can lead to sucking as being awesome is all about inclusivity. And then there was a whole section on awesome art that leads to new interactions with other people, which I loved as a philosophy of art nerd. Riggle has also published academic philosophy papers, he cites them in the footnotes throughout. I just love that this is a project that an academic philosopher took on!

I really wish there were more books like this, that make philosophical theories accessible to so many people without talking down on them. And if anything, I think this work has only gotten more relevant as so many people do not know how to behave coming out of the pandemic. We should all strive to be more awesome and interact with more awesome art!

This Is Beautiful: Teaching

 I feel like I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel a little bit, but honestly teaching has been keeping me going lately. I have been so super busy, don't feel like I've been getting enough done or have that much time to myself, but I do still really like teaching. I love being with the students and getting them excited about science. And that's beautiful!

“The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear” by Walter Moers

I have had this book on my reading list for so long and I sure am glad that I eventually got around to it! This was such a fun romp of a read to get through. Moers is a writer and a cartoonist and the story is surrounded by his delightful drawings of the zany characters.

The book is the autobiography of Captain Bluebear as he looks back on his 13 ½ lives so far. The lives don’t end in death or anything, it more so means that he has had 13 ½ different chapters to his life. Bluebear lives in Zamonia which is where all of the mystical creatures have gone to leave the rest of the world to the humans. There still are humans in the book as characters, but they are known to be idiots and they aren’t allowed in the capital city of Atlantis. Anyways, Bluebear travels around the world learning many things for his lives.

To try and summarize very briefly, his first life was with the mini-pirates. Second life was on an island with the Hobgoblins. Then he meets the Babbling Billows that teach him to talk. He then ends up on an island surrounded by food that is then revealed to be a sort of carnivorous plant fattening him up, but he is saved at the last second by Deus X. Machina, or “Mac.” He spends his fifth life navigating for Mac as Mac goes around saving people at the last second. Mac drops him off at Nightingale’s Academy where Bluebear learns everything about everything and meets Qwerty, a prince from another dimension and Fredda the Alpine Imp. Nightingale then sets Bluebear free through a labyrinth and his seventh life is spent wandering around the Great Forest he exits out into. In the Forest he is almost caught by a spider whose goo makes you hallucinate, but he outruns the spider and falls through a dimensional hiatus. Life 8 he pops out into Qwerty’s dimension and accidentally pushes his friend into a hiatus, which he falls through as well, and he comes back out in his own dimension. He then treks across a desert with the Muggs, and he then ends up in a city in the middle of a tornado. Finally he makes it to Atlantis and enjoys great success as a congladiator, or a professional liar. His twelfth life ends with him fleeing the city as its about to take off for space and ending up on the ship the Moloch. The penultimate life is defeating the sentient element Zamonium that is in charge of the Moloch (which is actually a slave ship) and freeing the animals on board. He then settles down with the other bears on board in the Great Forest.

Alright well first of all the book is so amazingly clever and funny. I was most amused by the appearance of Mac probably, a flying dinosaur that saves you at the last moment named Deus X. Machina? So ridiculous and clever. Nightingale is also delightfully amusing, he is the most clever being on the planet with several brains and the ability to literally infect you with intelligence. I wish that Qwerty was involved more, I quite enjoyed his appearances. Overall, super fun, but I did sometimes wish that my favorite characters were more present.

The ending with Atlantis taking off did seem to hint at something important, I wonder if Moers has more books that get into it more. The idea is that the mystical creatures can’t be on Earth any longer and have to leave to head to another planet. They don’t all go, clearly, but a lot of them were in the city and left. It seems to be the set up for “this is why magical creatures aren’t here” sort of a story that could be more of the focus later.

The book is thick, but it ends up being a fast read since it is so easy to get through. The illustrations are fun, the characters are memorable, and I had a blast getting through it. I can’t recommend it enough, and hopefully I can find other books with Bluebear later on.

This Is Beautiful: Working From Home

 I kinda gave up on my goal of heading into lab a few days a week this week. I just felt so overwhelmed and knew that I'd be more productive at home. And it was successful, I did get more done and that helped to feel less overwhelmed. I think working from home also encourages me to take more breaks which has been needed. I'm still overwhelmed, but I hope that this will help with recovery a little bit.

“Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal” by Heather Widdows

This book has been on my reading list for a very long time. It is a philosophical work, but it is immensely readable without a ton of references that are hard to understand. The extent of the difficulty is more in that she is writing in a very specific way to craft an argument, which I think also at times makes it easier to see what she is trying to argue than anything else.

There is a lot covered in this work, but to be brief, Widdows starts by examining beauty and arguing that the pressures are increasing and that there is an ethical ideal to be beautiful for many people. The ethical aspect of the beauty ideal is what distinguishes it from previous beauty ideals, as it is globalized and solidified. The needs of the beauty ideal are also slowly rising incrementally, it is easy to move from one form of a routine to another as the beauty ideal is normalized. She also has an interesting section on the benefits of the beauty ideal, in that it allows for socially acceptable forms of touch and intimacy between individuals. There are multiple chapters on the self and objectification, which she complicates as with beauty work we are both subject and object. Then she discusses consent under the beauty model and argues that information is not enough as we are increasingly pressured to conform to the beauty ideal or else. And finally, she examines gender and how men are also subject to a beauty ideal, but in key ways that differ from women that have the potential to harm women more.

First of all, I think it is really fascinating to see an academic work look at beauty and take it seriously. The idea that there is “pretty privilege” and that there are key differences in how we treat people that we think of as pretty vs ugly has always been around, but I haven’t had the resources to really examine it. I hope that she expands on this work as when I was going through it I was constantly thinking about myself as a dancer and a transgender individual. How does this resonate with how I feel about my body and what it can do? Increasingly I am harder on myself and how I look as I age. Additionally it talks about surgery for beautification, and I was thinking about my decision to have top surgery. I don’t think that it made me beautiful, but there was an ideal in my mind that I wanted to use the surgery to reach. Some very key similarities and differences that I hope she’ll explore further.

Now a lot of what she was saying resonated with me, but there was one point that I think I disagreed on within the chapter on consent. Widdows was first arguing that information isn’t enough for consent, and then talks about false consciousness and consciousness raising and how that model fails here because women aren’t being duped. There are real benefits of beauty, even if they are overstated sometimes. And these feel at odds to me, if you are saying that information is not enough, then there is a misconception or incorrect information somewhere. And especially if we are acknowledging that the benefits of beauty aren’t always what they are cracked up to me, that feels to me as though people are in need of information. I do agree that consciousness raising might not be the solution, but I do think that false consciousness, where we think we know everything but don’t, might be part of the problem. Separating the two doesn’t seem that hard and might even lead to part of the solution.

This book was published in 2018, and I suspect that things have only gotten worse since the pandemic. I don’t know stats and studies, but I have heard of and read more about young girls spiraling into eating disorders since lockdown, and even adults being impacted then. Widdows repeatedly mentions that we are in a “visual and virtual culture” and that has only increased since then. I really hope that she continues this work and we can get an update, because I haven’t seen others articulate what she is picking up on in the zeitgeist.

This Is Beautiful: Hobby Felt Good

 I'm sort of slowly realizing that I have to do a lot of work when it comes to my perception of my body. It's always been there, but I feel like something about getting top surgery 2 years ago changing my body type and hitting 30 and having more things change is triggering it all up again. All that to say, I have some complicated feelings about exercise because what I like to do to exercise tends to involve looking in a mirror at myself (dance, circus, etc stuff that people perform).

I think though that I'm starting to feel better about getting into aerial circus. I at first was low-key terrified, and just forcing myself to do it because I knew I would come away alright. And as I felt better I ended up in this weird position where my body doesn't like being upside down, spinning, or using upper body strength and everyone else seemed to be moving faster than me. But the most recent class I felt good, and I think it's an upswing from previous struggles. 

I think it has to do with a few things. I am finally developing some confidence where I don't have a last second "maybe I can't even get up there" knee jerk reaction. And the people moving really fast just moved up so I'm not constantly comparing myself. And I'm trying to film myself practicing more so that I can like the way I look. It's a journey and I'm sure it'll have down swings again, but for now I feel pretty good.

“Radical Empathy”

There’s a theater group in my area that exclusively puts on new plays by emerging (and frequently local) playwrights and they recently performed one called “Radical Empathy.” This happens to be from a local playwright who has now done multiple plays with this group (I think it is his third). And I was so struck by this play that I wanted to write a full post on it, not just a This Is Beautiful quick thought, because it felt so timely and powerful, but there were also some serious flaws that I wanted to bring up.

The play starts with a sociology professor giving a TED Talk on empathy and highlighting how Americans should have empathy for citizens of Iraq. Rather than terrorists, he advocates for putting yourself in their shoes and viewing them as people. He goes viral and one Iraqi man ends up reaching out to him, the two develop a friendship as the professor gets the Iraqi man to speak as part of his class. Then tragedy strikes, the Iraqi man’s house is bombed by the US who thinks that he is part of ISIS, he is the only one to survive as his brother, niece, nephew, daughter, and wife are all killed. While the Iraqi man wrestles with survivor’s guilt and how to feel about the situation, the American tries to get him in touch with someone at the embassy who can say that this is a mistake. Eventually the Iraqi man speaks again at the professor’s class about his acceptance of the situation and the students persuade their professor to bring him to the US. The play ends with them taking a selfie together, and the picture of the real life friends is shown behind them.

First thing I want to critique, and this is major, is that the play has four characters. There are the two men and their wives. The wives, while acted out really well and very funny at times, really only serve as vehicles for the men and their friendship. The professor and the Iraqi man both use their wives to bounce ideas around and talk through things, but the wives don’t have a journey of their own. And that bothers me a lot, that they would be half of the cast but not nearly as present as characters.

Beyond that though, the staging did a really good job with using technology. Most of the communication between the men is either through Skype or a phone call. You get to see their reactions to each other while they direct their speech at a laptop or phone. I was a little nervous about this, but I think it worked really well in that you could see things that the characters couldn’t. It was a neat perspective.

I also wasn’t really sure what the ending signified. There’s a fight between the professor and his wife where the wife wants him to do more with his empathy, and that ends up taking the form of the professor talking about his fear of losing his wife with his friend. And bringing him to the US to speak, which is a more tangible form of friendship for sure, but I thought that also didn’t go nearly far enough. The Iraqi man has a line about how he cannot change the situation, and he isn’t mad at the Americans because he knows that they cannot do anything either. Which is a hell of a thing to tell an audience, that they cannot do anything, because I think we can and should be doing so much. Calling representatives, participating in civil disobedience, calling out Islamophobia, so much. And we were just told that best we can do is hope an Iraqi guy emails us to start a friendship. Just sits wrong with me.

Just wanted to briefly touch on the acting as well, it’s sad to say but the guy playing the professor blew everyone else out of the water. The Iraqi man was really stiff most of the show, he did not come off looking great next to an actor who had himself in tears at a key moment and knew how to command the whole space. The female actors were doing the best with what they had, but it was really his show. Such an excellent performance.

And then finally I want to end with how timely this all felt. We are in the middle of a genocide of Palestinian people that is being financed and carried out by American money and bombs. They are not terrorists, but are simply folks trying to live their lives in the shadow of Israel. It would be so cool if we took the great parts of the play to heart and started having empathy for them, and then did something with it.

This Is Beautiful: Settling Into Semester

 We are now a few weeks into the semester, I finally feel like I'm finding my rhythm. I can figure out what to do in class pretty easily, and I've finally got a regular exercise schedule which is so nice. Hoping to keep up with my work in a way that feels satisfying to me, and also find time to relax, while working on job apps. It'll be a lot but it'll be managable!

“The Tangled Lands” by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell

This book has been on my list for ages, I don’t remember how it initially came up. It’s an interesting format, the authors go back and forth writing these sections that each focus on different characters and different situations. The sections will reference previous events occasionally but they don’t revisit previous protagonists or anything like that.

The book takes place in Khaim, a city essentially on the verge of collapse. The people used magic in the past and that brought the brambles, a plant that feeds on magic and is brought into existence through its use and then chokes the life out of the ground. The people that touch it get poisoned and if you have too much you fall into an endless sleep. Our first story is about an alchemist that invents a machine to kill bramble. He brings it to the mayor and the chief magician and they are delighted. They then figure out how to repurpose the machine to track down magic users. They can make them glow blue now, and the streets are red with blood of the executed people performing small magics they think they can get away with. The alchemist is locked up to continue working on it, but he eventually escapes with his family.

Khaim is referred to as the Blue City afterwards, and interestingly it’s the ability to completely shut down magic use from fear that gets credited with the city still standing. The next section is about a woman whose father used to be an executioner, and she substitutes for him as he lays dying. While she’s out raiders come, they set her house on fire and kill her husband and father. She goes after them but is defeated by the raiders. However, she’s found by these traders and then joins their caravan. They teach her to fight, she inspires them to recruit women to fight the raiders, and they take the raiders city. However, she is too late to save her kids, who have been indoctrinated into the raiders Way (which is basically that magic is bad because it destroys other people and those that use magic have to be killed or converted) and they have already left on a pilgrimage.

Third story was the hardest for me. It tells the story of Mop and Rain, two kids that are refugees from a city that fell to bramble. They get jobs pulling bramble seeds out of the ground but Rain tragically gets pricked and falls into bramble sleep. Mop doesn’t want to have to kill her but no one is letting him keep her safe so he plans to return for her body that night. He is too late though, so he heads to the brothel to see if she was taken there. She isn’t, so he does a spell and enchants her comb to find her. He’s nearly found by the city, then nearly taken by bramble himself, but a fuss is being made at their overseers house. Turns out that he took her body to do what he wanted with her, but the comb stabbed him in the back killing him. The people then rally together to all take care of Rain, having heard the legend of the girl who protected herself.

Final story is about a blacksmith’s daughter, her family is hired to make armor for the Duke’s son but they aren’t paid enough. They do their best but he isn’t happy. They try to run but are caught up with and the Duke brings in the chief magician who then uses magic to dig a pit, send her parents in there, and cover it with bramble and dirt. The Duke tells the daughter to finish the armor and he’ll free her parents. She instead makes a suit to wear to dig them out but is found out, ends up killing the Duke’s son, and then heading there with the suit. She’s too late, her parents committed suicide when their food ran out, and she goes to bury them. After fighting off guards, she leaves to find a new life.

Alright so the most interesting part of this for me is the use of magic and bramble as an allegory for climate change. The whole idea is that people think that their use is justified and small, but brambles appear randomly in their neighbor’s house or something like that. And as it goes on it’s clear that the upper classes get to do it whenever they want and the lower classes pay for it. The first two sections have more to do with this idea than the latter half, the first story with the fact that those in power are more interested in punishing music users than clearing the bramble really speaks to this. It reflects how people today don’t want to clean up the CO2 and would rather put the blame on someone else. The second story with the raiders and their cult is also really interesting as it’s revealed that their violence is a response to brambles. Same violence, different side of the coin where they want to kill the magic users to stop the bramble from impacting them.

The other major theme that comes through from all of the sections is this class warfare, how the upper classes profit and the lower classes suffer. There are small victories, but all of the stories are just so sad. These people are being constantly taken advantage of because the upper classes know that they can do that. Does it ever get better? Is it worth it? I’m not sure, there are endings to the sections that are vaguely hopeful but it’s hard to say. That’s partially why I felt the third section so strongly, the community coming together at the end feels much more hopeful to me than anything else.

My main issue is that the bramble sleep in some ways is essentially a plot device. The protagonist in the second section falls into bramble when the raiders beat her and she wakes up after a few weeks. Yet Rain is doomed pretty quickly in the third section. It isn’t the most consistent, which is maybe realistic, but it feels as though people wake up when we decide we want them to and don’t if we don’t.

So this is not the most light hearted read, but I think sections are very thought provoking. I do wish that there was a little more discussion relating magic to climate change, that essentially disappears after the first half of the book, but it’s the main interesting point to me. But there are ideas that emerge from these stories that are very applicable to life right now.

This Is Beautiful: New Pointe Shoes

 Alright so I rebought pointe shoes about a year and a half ago, and I knew my shoes were dead for a bit. But I have this thing where I hate shopping and spending money and all that, so I kept going for as long as I could. And it got to the point(e) where I couldn't do anything with the shoes and it was a struggle to hold myself up. I knew the shoes were dead, but I kept thinking about how bad of a dancer I am and that I'm getting worse, not better, etc etc.

All that to say, I bought new shoes about a week ago and it's SO much easier! I actually do not totally suck, if anything the dead shoes probably made me stronger and I can tell that I've improved now. It's really delightful, even though the hit to the bank account was a little rough. But I'm so excited to dance in them, it's a joy again.

“Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” by Camille Laurens

I had been meaning to pick this book up for a while, it was recommended reading from the book Don’t Think Dear and I thought it sounded fascinating. This book tries to tell the true story of Degas’ iconic sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” or as I knew it growing up, “Marie in Fourth Position.”

The book covers many aspects of Paris at this time. There’s the treatment of young dancers like Marie, who came from impoverished families trying to sell their daughters to the Paris Opera to make more money. There’s what we know about Marie’s family, she’s the middle daughter of a family where the father is missing. She moved around a lot, likely rent hopping.

Then there’s Degas. His eyesight is going so he is moving from painting to sculpture with specifically wax. He is the odd one out of the Impressionists since he prefers dark scenes and horrifying reality instead of pretty pictures. When this sculpture is unveiled, it shocks and horrifies the public. This was the heyday of phrenology and thinking that personalities, and criminal tendencies especially, were written on a person’s face. The little dancer happens to have exaggerated criminal characteristics, and may not even reflect what the model looked like very well. It isn’t totally clear what Degas intended with this work, he has other sketches of criminals where he exaggerates their features so he may buy into this nonsense, but he also displayed the sculpture like a doll and emphasized her age in its name. He’s calling attention to the fact that she’s a child, barely hit puberty, and she’s in an environment where she’s likely being driven to prostitution to make money.

The book ends with Laurens trying desperately to know what became of Marie. We have her birth date, and the death dates of both her sisters and mother, but we have no idea what became of her. After modeling for Degas and other painters, she misses so many days at the Paris Opera that she’s fired as a dancer. That same month her older sister steals money and they’re caught as the family tries to get away. The older sister spends time in jail after that. And Marie disappears.

Since there is just so little we know about Marie, the book is full of speculation and rumination on the sculpture more so than her life. There’ll be a discussion of some aspect of Paris society or whatever, and then we’ll be back to how that is reflected in the sculpture. Some of it does appear to be grasping at straws, I’m not entirely convinced that Degas wanted this little dancer to reflect all of life and death in her face. But I’m not ungrateful for the thoughts, I think art like this can be molded and remolded to reflect whatever the audience is thinking about.

And I am grateful for Laurens’ tenacity to stick to the facts. There’s a lot of fictionalized accounts of this work. She stubbornly refused to do that, even documenting how hard she was trying to find out information about Marie. The extent of the speculation is pretty clear, she asks questions throughout or talk about what she imagines the interactions between Degas and Marie to be. I wish we knew more about her life as well.

It is so interesting to me how the reception to this work of art has changed. It horrified the people of Paris when it was unveiled, and now every dancer knows it and loves it. This was a fascinating perspective on the work, and a much needed reality check for what it was intended and who it is portraying.

This Is Beautiful: Kind of a Break?

 Last week my mentor was out of town, and this week a lot of activities I do are suspended for a break before the fall. It's nice to get a break from the pressure, and it's nice that it's not all at once, so I get multiple chill weeks. In different ways of course, but still. When my mentor was out I was able to course prep and get stuff done that I wanted to do personally, and then with less activities I have more evenings free during the first week of class. It's nice! I almost prefer it to a complete stop to be honest, still feels like I'm going but it's a little more relaxed.

“Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens

I’m not sure how this book got onto my radar, but it’s another one that has been on my reading list for a while, so I decided to bring it with me on vacation. Pretty light stuff for the beach. Anyways, it consists of seven essays that Hitchens wrote and published in Vanity Fair, then it was collected into a book after he died. I didn’t really know the author’s work all that well, but I thought this was a great collection of thoughts on dying.

Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and writes a lot about his treatment and his feelings as he goes through this, but he also talks about how people treat him. From what I gather he was very outspoken about the failures of religion and he writes about what it’s like for people to pray for him as an atheist and just how weird that is. He also writes about how his voice started to disappear as a result of the treatment and how unfortunate that was for him as a communicator. There was a section where he talks about how he doesn’t “have” a body, he “is” a body and how easy it is to forget that when you’re healthy.

To be honest, I thought this was a very refreshing take on death. I’ve read so much stuff about death from the point of view of a physician and whatnot that I appreciated getting the perspective from a patient. Particularly a patient who clearly knows his craft and is good at writing. It makes for a much more relatable experience for me as a reader who is not a physician, plus I just feel that the market is saturated with doctors trying to share their thoughts about the whole death thing. So it was a quick read, kinda depressing, but I quite enjoyed it.

This Is Beautiful: Independent Course Design

 I got moved to a different course recently and it was a swap from teaching with someone else to teaching on my own again. And even though it's more work, I am excited to be just on my own and having that flexibility again. Last fall I was in a similar situation and I liked the freedom, and now I have the added benefit of building off of a previous instructor's materials. (Thankfully it's not like last fall where I was doing a course from scratch.) I think it'll be a good semester as a result!

“Networking for People Who Hate Networking” by Devora Zack

This book had been on my list for a while, and in theory I need to be looking for a job soon, so seemed like a good time to bring it on vacation with me. It was a quick but kinda entertaining read.

I think I was surprised a little by the fact that the whole premise of the book is that you can tailor your networking strategies to whether you feel more like an introvert or an extrovert (yes there are centroverts as well). There is a lot of emphasis on how these groups of people can learn from each other, and you might not fit into one category seamlessly. But it’s a framework to guide how you think about networking and approach it instead of being scared of it. Zack sprinkles in plenty of anecdotes about people she has worked with or mistakes she’s made. Overall she advocates for being prepared and to devote just a little time to networking instead of burning yourself out on it.

I think this was helpful to read, but I wasn’t particularly surprised by any of it. The main benefit was that it was all wrapped up in snappy ways to remember her strategies. I also feel like as a scientist we definitely network but it’s a little different in that I don’t know anyone with a business card or anything like that. So there are limits to what I can do with this as well, but I think a lot of the big ideas can easily be applied.

Anyways, glad I finally gave it a read, if it wasn’t the most helpful it was short so I didn’t have to invest a ton of time into it.

This Is Beautiful: Circus Performing

 I recently found out that the aerials studio I've been going to for a while lets even folks from the intro classes perform! As I'm staring down my last year of graduate school I'm about to lose my dance group that I've been with, and it'd be nice to have a different venue to perform with. At least I'd still get to perform if it isn't working with others so much. And I really appreciate that intro students can since I've been stuck there due to lack of upper body strength and the fact that I build up muscle so slowly.

Anyways, excited to check that out soon! Hopefully this will work out as a new thing I can do as a creative outlet.

“Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi

This book has been on my reading list long enough that I started it and was surprised at my choice. The plot gets turned on its head though halfway through, and again just before the end. Then I realized why I was so interested in it.

The book starts with a story about teenagers Sarah and David who are both in the theatre program at a performing arts high school. They start off in love but then drift apart. Sarah can’t figure out why and is constantly orbiting David trying to get his attention again. They end up hosting a theatre troupe from England as well, and Sarah starts a thing with their unattractive star Liam.

The narrative abruptly stops at page 131, which is revealed to be as far into a book that “Karen” gets. “Karen” is the pseudonym for a classmate of Sarah’s, who is now an adult and reading Sarah’s fictionalized version of their high school experience. She stops at that point as it becomes clear that she isn’t going to be fully portrayed in the story. Karen keeps the use of the pseudonyms to be consistent, but she talks about how she swapped to dance and left town, but then ended up coming back and befriending David in the process. David is also in their hometown and directing theatre there, he wants to put on a play written by Martin, the director of the English troupe that was in town when they were students. Karen was implied to be in a relationship with Martin, and she manages to get cast in the play. She also goes to meet Sarah on her book tour and convinces Sarah to be her backstage dresser for the show. Having done all this, she was supposed to shoot a blank out of a gun backstage with Martin so that there’d be a gunshot for the play. Opening night though, she shoots him in the crotch. Her narration reveals that he got her pregnant before leaving town and she gave up the baby for adoption.

The final chapter is from the point of view of her daughter. Real names are now used so it’s hard to be sure who anyone is at first. But she goes to the school to try and figure out who her mother was. She talks to their teacher, and the chapter opens with her attending a memorial for his life. In a flashback she talks about how she went to his house to try and get information from him and he sexually assaulted her. She never figures out her mother’s name.

The twist halfway through was by far the most interesting part of the book, because it allows the focus to go from these teenagers to the unreliable narrator that we’ve been hearing from this whole time. There’s such a long amount of time dedicated to Sarah and David in the beginning, you really have to slog through all of that before it gets interesting. Many of the details are woven into there, such as the characters that Karen gets chopped into, but the author really makes you work here. Post changeover, with the change in focus to Karen it really sets things on their head. You start off rooting for Sarah, but Karen has very little patience for Sarah the author. She’s even downright unkind at times. But you start to piece together what’s been changed and what’s been even deliberately left out.

I found the ending also really striking. You never figure out Karen’s real name as she just goes by “Karen” and her daughter never gets that information from her failed trip to the school. It says a lot about sexual assault cases, especially with teens, that the victim is never named but the villain has articles and papers written about him as he gets accused. Not to mention that the two main father figures both turn out to be sexually assaulting students. There aren’t any major female adults, just those two male ones, so definitely a pattern going on there. It speaks to the power that adults have other these teens that are trying to prove themselves as artists and as individuals. And that the power is so long lasting that it transcends generations with it impacting Karen’s daughter as well.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think I even had a better experience going in a little blind. I really had to commit to that first section and then got so excited when it got interesting. My favorite kind of books are the ones that make you think about the medium, so I’m really glad I found this one.

This Is Beautiful: Things Starting

 I'm such a sucker, I love doing nothing and the free time that I have over the summer, but I'm also getting excited about being back from vacation and things starting up for the fall. I just feel like I need something to look forward to, you know? The dance group I'm with is announcing pieces to sign up for and I'll be teaching a low-key lab class. It'll be good to be in a classroom again. I'm just hoping that the academic year has a good balance of time to work on my things (or I'm never graduating) and fun stuff to do.

Madeira

So for two weeks in July I was on vacation and we spent a lot of time in Madeira, a small Portuguese island. It was really lovely! We were close to the city of Funchal without being directly in the middle of it and there was a great mix of nature and city. We tried to see Lisbon as well but between flight delays and things being closed on Mondays, there wasn’t much I saw or did. So I’ll have to head back there to check it out properly, but I feel like I can definitely talk about Madeira!

We got there and immediately I was struck by the beautiful flowers and insects. The area is tropical so I think pretty much everything grows and likes being there. It’s gorgeous! There are also banana trees everywhere, plus grapes for their wine and passionfruit and things like that. We figured out that there were so many monarch butterflies because there’s a population of monarchs that were blown there accidentally and just never left the island. So they have a slightly different wing shape since they don’t have to fly as high to migrate and everything. Also eating the fruit is amazing, there’s passionfruit in most things but everything is good.

We did a few hikes on the island, it’s pretty mountainous and really only half of the island gets rain. So they have a system of levants that are these canals to bring water to agriculture. And that creates these pretty level walking paths. People clearly use them, we ran into folks bringing groceries home while hiking which was pretty funny. And the views were incredible, I felt like we covered so much ground so quickly and got to see mountains from a few different angles and things like that.

We also spent a few days wandering around, there was one afternoon we went to a beach in town. It was essentially a very big pool, and there wasn’t any sand or rocks or anything, but you could also jump into the ocean. There were a couple floating platforms and rocks to jump off of, but no way to walk into the water. It was still really nice, but after a bit we wanted to be able to stand in the water haha. Still, it’s been forever since I’ve been in the ocean and that was lovely.

There was also one day we spent in town, we checked out the cathedral a little and the Museum of Sacred Art. The museum had more history of the island and how it was used for sugar cane production with the help of slavery until it was outcompeted, and that there was a lot of Flemish trade that brought in more art. Some of the objects in there were still used by the cathedral which was really neat as well. There are a few other museums but they were closed unfortunately. We did get to a food market to try some bananas and see the attached fish market as well, which was so cool! And we stopped at a wine place for a quick tasting on the way back.

Speaking of food, I already mentioned the fruit but the seafood was also very good as well! I really enjoyed the espetada I had, or beef skewer. It was super tender, very tasty. The scabbard fish with a fried banana and passionfruit sauce (of course, you need the passionfruit) was also amazing. I could have also had their grilled limpets all day, it reminded me of mussels but loaded with butter haha. The drinks were also so fun, I loved my nikita since it’s like an alcoholic milkshake and could not find it in enough places. And finally the Portugese custard tarts, pastel de natas, were my favorite snack, I could have eaten those all day. We also tried the Madeira honey cakes and queijadas (more like a cheesecake tart) but the custard tarts are still my favorite.

I do feel like we had a very good and just well-rounded experience of the island, but I would be so ready to go back for another vacation. It was beautiful and quiet and I could hang out on a beach with a nikita all day! Well worth the trip!

"The Queen of Attolia" by Megan Whalen Turner

 My partner started reading this book series to me, we started with The Thief and recently finished The Queen of Attolia (with a pretty big gap, we forgot about it a little in the middle there). It was a pretty interesting continuation of the world set up in the first book, as well as the journey that our protagonist is on.

The book starts with Eugenides, who we know as the Thief of Eddis from the first book, getting captured in Attolia. He meets the Queen again, and she keeps him in captivity. To send a message back to the Queen of Eddis, Attolia has his hand cut off. Jen returns to Eddis depressed and having a hard time recovering. After a while, he starts to return to his old self, and he suggests going to kidnap the Queen of Attolia to resolve the war that has sprung up between their countries. 

Meanwhile, the Queen of Attolia is hosting the Mede, an advisor from a larger country. She knows that he is after her hand in marriage, but she's stringing him along for now. She's familiar with backstabbing advisors and court drama. Jen successfully gets the Queen of Attolia to come with him, and he proposes his plan then. He'll let her live, if she'll marry him and end the war. Attolia is skeptical but angrily agrees. Jen tells her that he loves her and has for years. That's really why he did all this. 

They are stopped by the Mede's forces and head back to Attolia. The Queen there sets a trap for the Mede and ousts him for good with the help of Eddis. The book ends with her agreeing to marry Jen and them saying that they both love each other.

The decision to maim your protagonist in the second book is a pretty bold choice, but I kind of like it. Jen can't just have successes as a thief, and now he has to adapt in pretty significant ways. He can still steal things, sure, but he ends up becoming a king instead as well. It forces the story to change with him.

The love story felt a little forced for sure, I'm not totally convinced that Jen has loved the Queen of Attolia his whole life. But he never mentions it in the narration until his confession so there's some plausibility there. It is weird but there is a lot of effort put into the ending to make their decision to get married also seem realistic and not a convenient change of heart. Attolia barely talks to Jen for a while and insists that he's lying until the Queen of Eddis talks to her. And then she finally talks to Jen about it and how she cut off his hand and all that. Then it finally gets resolved.

There appears to be some larger arcs with the Mede going on, and that'll be interesting to see how they develop. But the next book is my partner's favorite, so I'm excited to finally get to that!

This Is Beautiful: Vacation

 I'm heading out on a 2 week vacation on Saturday, and I am very much looking forward to it. It will be a working vacation as I make sure all of my i's are dotted and t's crossed on this paper, but that's ok. Gives me an excuse for a little alone time. And it will be so nice to just take a break from the grind. The summer has been restorative, but there's always less that I could be doing.

"Dragonflight" by Anne McCaffrey

 I honestly don't remember how I found out about this book, but I am not surprised that a book about dragons got caught in my radar. This is an award-winning book from a female author written in 1979, so I expected to both be excited and probably have some disappointments along the way. Unfortunately though, I think the disappointments outweighed the excitements here.

The book swaps between the narration of Lessa, a young girl seeking revenge for her family's murder, and F'lar a dragonrider. Lessa has been hiding out as a dirty servant girl in the castle where her family used to live, until they were murdered by the ambitious Fax. F'lar is a dragonrider on a Search, where they are trying to find new dragonriders. He is brought to the castle with Fax where he senses Lessa's power as she goads him into fighting and killing Fax. From there, F'lar brings Lessa to the Weyr when the dragon hatching starts. Lessa bonds with Ramoth, the queen dragon and starts to be educated in the ways of the dragonriders.

The previous Weyrleaders and dragon queen were both lazy and neglected the traditions. The country that they're in gets passed by a Red Star (implied to be Jupiter, of which they are on a moon) that sends out Threads from the sky that burrow into the ground and feed off of life. There have been no Threads in a few hundred years, so people doubt the importance of dragons and their keeping. A lot of knowledge has been lost as a result, but F'lar and Lessa believe. Anyways, a change in regime comes with Ramoth mating with F'lar's dragon, making F'lar Weyrleader. Also now the humans are a couple as well. F'lar starts trying to uncover the lost secrets of the past. Lessa desperately wants to fly and go between which is this way dragons can pass through space to get somewhere quicker. Lessa in her untrained habits then discovers that they can go through time as well, and dragons can time travel!

The Threads come sooner rather than later, and they are very unprepared. To help, F'lar sends some dragons back in time ten years to mature them faster. This is hard on those people, humans don't like being in two places at once, and Lessa discovers that the reason most of the dragons disappeared 500 years ago is because they came forward in time to their aid. She decides to go back to 500 years ago and manages to bring them forward with their knowledge, technology, and the like. The group is much more prepared to face the Threads now and can fight together!

Alright so I have a whole lot of issues here. First they're doing the whole "not like other girls" thing with Lessa as during the hatching she keeps making fun of the other girls who are terrified of the dragon (the dragonling does kill 2 of them). Not to mention that the gender of it all is handled pretty poorly in my opinion, it's never explained but it's evident that boy dragons mate with boys and girl queen dragons with girls. F'lar and the others keep making a fuss about how the girl has to be "pretty" which isn't explained until the mating. Guess they all want her to be pretty because as soon as the dragons start having sex the humans do too. Not to mention that there's a paragraph in the book about how if the dragons aren't involved F'lar is basically raping Lessa which seems entirely unnecessary. 

Then there's the time travel. Seems a little ridiculous to me that Lessa would be the first person to figure out that dragons can do that at all, but even if I excuse that there's all of these plot holes that time travel introduces. The biggest being that if the dragons all disappearing contributed to the decline in their culture and traditions, wouldn't leaving them in their own time mean that the traditions would have a better chance at carrying forward? And then they wouldn't need to get the dragons from the past. Or at the very least, send them back to their own time once the Thread fighting was done. They can't all have been happy abandoning the rest of their lives and living in the future. It's a very big sacrifice for not entirely necessary gain.

There is a while series here, but I am feeling very done after this book. I respect what it's doing and that it's award winning and all that, but it is pretty clearly not for me. I don't think I could do another installment of this, I just haven't really connected with the characters and don't think I could cheer them on through more of this.

This Is Beautiful: Getting Close

 I am nervous about posting this as I might be proven wrong, but I do feel like I am getting close to the end of the process with this paper. Things I think are coming together pretty nicely, and I feel as though most of what I'm doing is wrapping up things and settling details. Again I might be proven wrong because my advisor consistently can't go through everything that I'm working on so I'm just making a judgement call in places, but I'm really hoping it's getting close. The passage of time is freaking me out a little, it's July already, and I want to just get this out of my hands.

"Late Fascism" by Alberto Toscano

 This is the last book that I grabbed from Verso recently in a book buying binge, and I was quite excited about it. Reading it was still super interesting, but the audience is clearly an academic one and the book gets very bogged down in academic lingo and such. To be clear, I don't think that's the fault of Toscano or anything like that, I just am not the intended audience and was hoping for the book to be something different. But it would be so cool if a version of this was written for a more general audience.

The book uses writings about fascism throughout history to look at our contemporary US society and make comparisons. It's really interesting as it pulls from a broad pool of work encompassing Germany and Italy (of course) as well as Black radical writings talking about how the US has always been fascist to people of color. I found it really interesting how he talks about fascism and time, while many people regard fascism to be an obsession with the past, he characterizes it more as an obsession with the future which is how they can make changes so quickly. A similar twist is done with fascism and freedom where fascists don't shut up about freedom and liberty but it's specifically freedom to exploit other people, which then leads directly into how fascism and capitalism are directly intertwined. Capitalists need the freedom to do a capitalism. The book ends with a chapter that was probably the most new to me but there's this eroticism of fascism where fascists are seen as super sexy and seductive, like a bad boy aesthetic, when they were all known to be, just, gross. I hadn't thought of that aspect too much previously.

Now I'm sure there was plenty in the book that went over my head, I was familiar with most of the writers that are cited but I don't know them in depth. But Even I found that slogging through it I was able to pick up on and think about a number of ideas. Fascism just seems like an ever-more slippery concept to me with people crying that the current regime is fascism or isn't fascist and things like that. For me personally, I side with the fact that this is fascism but I have heard a compelling argument that fascism was a specific movement situated in a specific time in Italy/Germany around WWII and I do find that an interesting idea. Toscano does complicate that by pulling in writings from other cultures on fascism which I think makes this work much more compelling. Because the US and imperial regimes have always had an element of fascism, especially for people of color, and that is highlighted in this work. In most discussions I usually see that overlooked.

The last chapter on eroticism really made me think though about how fascists did win the aesthetics war. There's such a clear set of imagery and look to fascism, it's all black and red and angular, it's not hard to find it a little appealing. And it wasn't even the right being the only people promoting it, the fact that most people just equate Hitler with evil because we make these simplistic comparisons in decades of art comes from all corners! It's just bizarre! Meanwhile leftists are demonized by Democrats and Republicans alike (just look at the NYC mayoral primary, people are being super racist there). There isn't a set of aesthetics to fall back on and promote, which means that it doesn't spread as far without a ton of effort.

I found this to be a provoking read, and I might come back to it later to see if I can gleam more from the content. But if you don't want to go through an academic text, feel free to skip this, just do some reading on the history of fascism. Eventually I hope these ideas will make their way into a more accessible format, but we will have to wait on that.

This Is Beautiful: Progress

 Things have been hard lately, I can tell that I'm making progress but it doesn't feel like it's enough. I'm trying to remember to take a step back, look at everything I've done, and be proud of that. But it is hard, the summer is passing rapidly and I feel so pressured to get things done more quickly with very little assistance. Need to keep focusing on the big picture, and even just the progress that I can make over the course of a few days when things are working. There are plenty of figure edits and writing progress being made without me having to fret about it not being finalized.

"Love Expanded: How Asexuals and Aromantics are Redefining Love, Life, and Family" by Wren Burke

 Here's yet another book on asexuality and aromanticism that I got my hands on! This was a lovely surprise as these tend to come out in October when Ace Week is. I found this on Twitter also, so I was able to get it right as it came out (important for reasons that will come later). Overall, I don't think I necessarily learned new things, but it struck me that this book is an excellent model of how to blend the ace 101 information along with what to do and what changes to make with this information. 

The book has ten chapters covering everything from what love means to a-spec individuals to gender to family structure and ending with legislation. The author covers plenty of material that I'm already familiar with such as Ace by Angela Chen or Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda Brown but also pulls from anecdotes, a survey of 1,900 aces they designed for the book, and interviews with ace researchers. I was really pleased to see that aromanticism was an integral part of the book, with Single at Heart by Bella DePaulo getting its turn in the spotlight. And in general, the book is very inclusive and just feels very queer. It isn't breaking up identities to only focus on one but discusses elements of queerness and what that can look like in other cultures.

Helpfully, the book does not assume that you know much about asexuality and aromanticism, but it does not pander to folks that are new to the community. I find that if authors are writing more 101-type things that there are constant caveats about what they mean. This has its nuances, but I also felt that Burke just had a great handle on the material and was writing about what they were interested in. I also just feel that if you're picking up the book, you know what asexuality is and are likely asexual. But maybe I'm wrong (hoping that I'm a little wrong anyways). 

The ending though talks about what we need to do to make things better. And it starts with changing legislation and writing to MPs. Burke is British, I was honestly surprised how much US law was in the book, so I wasn't shocked by that. I do wonder though how quickly this book will go out of date as a result. Seriously, the most recent reference to the Ace Community Survey that I could find was 2019, it's been going on annually since then. How quickly will those legislative references go out of date? Or even more tragically, how many won't?

All in all, I thought this was a great addition to the canon of works on asexuality and aromanticism. I think it definitely has its niche as an intro text or something for someone who knows about asexuality but wants to start digging in deeper. I hope that it's a model for more works situating asexuality less as its own thing and more as fundamentally queer. And I dearly hope that there's more positive changes in legislation coming for us.

This Is Beautiful: No Meetings

 As my studies start to begin to wrap up (lol) I have finally achieved success with eliminating all meetings that I used to have to go to. A big part of that is that I'm no longer doing a bunch of orgs and those meetings are all gone now, but it's also part of me just not paying attention to anything that I don't want to do before I go. Plus it's the summer, so things are more relaxed regardless. It is really nice and makes me realize that I used to go to wayyyy too many meetings. Why was I doing all that?

“The Sublime Object of Ideology” by Slavoj Zizek

Alright well here’s another philosophy book that I certainly won’t do justice to. I grabbed this from Verso Books as I hadn’t read any Zizek and I was both pleasantly surprised by how much I got out of this while also sure that I didn’t fully understand it. The main issue is that this book is largely about Lacan, who is a philosopher that I haven’t actually read anything by, so I’m forced to take Zizek’s word for what different passages mean. But Zizek is blessed with being a relatively clear writer, he makes plenty of references to movies and pop culture so it’s very easy to follow along and get the gist of what he’s saying.

The first part of the book has to do with “the symptom” which I believe is a specific phrase to describe life under capitalism here. He discusses how it was actually first described by Marx, that there’s this contradiction between being free to sell your labor, and then once you do that, you are no longer free. This dissonance leads to the symptom, of seeing these contradictions and yet being trapped. I think Zizek coined the phrase “enjoy your symptom” and while that isn’t directly in this text I could see that coming up in a lecture or elsewhere. I’m not sure I grasp the full significance of the symptom as that seems to be his answer to everything (there’s a passage along the lines of “what existed before anything the symptom” of course) but there is an intuitive sense to it. I liken it to the idea of the absurd, that nothing really matters, there’s just this inherent sense that there’s a contradiction here we are ignoring the same way we don’t talk about the meaning of life constantly. He expands on the symptom and talks about how it has symbolic meaning as well, that the symptom can expand and turn into a source of joy as it becomes our main sense of meaning in life.

The next section is much more technical and I confess I was skimming a lot of it. Lacan has these diagrams that illustrate what language does when we refer to different objects of desire and how we get meaning from them. Zizek appears to be going through these and elaborating on them/explaining further, but I also just don’t really care too much about what the letter S means on a diagram from a guy I haven’t read. I did appreciate more though the discussion about what language does, since that’s common in philosophy. Are we referring to the universal? A particular? That sort of thing. From there he talks about the two deaths, that we die once physically and again when we realize we are dead. I thought this section was interesting, but I couldn’t follow the connection beyond that it was an extension of the discussion of desire. Once we stop desiring or realize that what we desire is impossible, that constitutes the second death.

The third and final section was the roughest for me because it continues into he weeds on the ideas of the subject introduced with the Lacanian desire diagrams. I did quite enjoy a part on how the object is a lack. He uses this example of a painting called “Lenin in Warsaw” of Lenin’s wife with another man where “Lenin in Warsaw” is the object specifically because he is not there. This idea that the object of desire or whatever is by necessity a lack that’s given meaning by the desire resonates a lot with me.

So there’s what I got out of that. Primarily that I should have read Lacan (and probably brushed up on my Hegel) first. But I honestly was impressed with how much I could follow, and I quite enjoyed Zizek’s jokes and references to pop culture along the way. It is so hard to keep up with philosophy once you’re out of classes, so I’m trying to not get too discouraged, but I honestly like revisiting it every once in a while just to see what I’m able to get out of the experience. And I can always reread something later and learn more!

This Is Beautiful: Progress

 Not like a super fleshed out post, but in the past week I had a thesis committee meeting and submitted an abstract to a conference. And it's nice to just look back and realize that I have gotten a lot done. I'm trying to not focus on how much I have left to do, and this was a nice reminder that I am making progress and I am going to graduate eventually!

"Genetics in the Madhouse" by Theodore M. Porter

 I was really lucky to get a free copy of this book through the Science, Technology, and Society group at my university, and I am so glad that I did! The book group does have a selection of multiple books most years, but it's not every year that I get something that is so directly related to my actual degree and my interests.

This book looks at the history of asylums and in particular how asylums documented patients and their madness. This forms some of the earliest examples of big data, and directly impacts the study of statistics and heredity. Researchers figured out pretty early on that insanity and mental illness were passed on in families, but their understanding of it and how to treat it varied wildly. The book focuses a lot on Great Britain, Europe, and the US but there are mentions of elsewhere in the world as well. The main thesis though is that eugenics was not simply a misunderstanding of Mendel, it started way before that, with these asylum researchers and the work that they were doing, and it has larger roots in big data itself.

I honestly found this whole history fascinating. As a genetics researcher, I have tried to make it a priority to learn about eugenics and the hooks that it has in our modern understanding of genetics and the way we teach it. (We do not typically get taught this in hard science classrooms, hence branching out to STS.) And I have to say that I am deeply swayed by this argument, I think it makes a lot of sense that eugenics came from the failure of asylums as forced sterilizations were so tied to ablism and still is!

My one critique of the book is that in presenting the history, it focuses just on that. There are very few, if any, elaborations on how these historical figures were wrong. Which maybe if that was included it would be a very different book with a different focus, as that's adding a lot of information, but I was curious going through what was more accurate than others. And part of that is beside the point, a big contention was how different hospitals were defining insanity and cure rates and things like that. But I so wanted to know what the modern arguments against these ideas were! I knew probably more than average as a genetics researcher, but I did wonder if the average layperson would be able to pinpoint what the fallacies were.

This is immediately going with my other books on eugenics and genetics history. I hope that others read it and that I can get some of my lab mates interested in it!

This Is Beautiful: Cooking

 A combination of a few factors have led to me cooking much more in my regular life. First, I have started protecting my weekends much more. I do a lot of meal prepping, so having time on Saturday or Sunday to actually do that is crucial. We also started getting a kind of farm share box that is local foods only, some prepared even, and you can opt in or out each week. So it's pretty flexible, but still gives me access to different foods I might not buy on my own.

And I'm really enjoying it. The challenge of how to use the different foods in a way that we will actually eat is pretty exciting in a way that makes my brain happy. Taking the time to really do this and make something good, plus we get so much food from this box that it's always a feast on Saturday or Sunday night. It's so satisfying!

Mentoring and Transitioning

 As I near the end of my PhD, I'm reflecting a lot on mentoring and the transition that I feel like I'm being pushed through to get from mentee to mentor. I am trying to get a paper out before I leave, and my mentor has always been... well a mentor. In that he looks things over and approves and gives suggestions and we go through several iterations of that before anyone else sees the thing. With this paper, he is giving me much more leeway to lead the project and loop him in as needed. And in some ways this feels cool and as though I am taking charge and ready to graduate and lead these on my own. But in some ways it feels like getting shoved in the deep end of a pool.

Getting a doctorate means that you are learning really deeply about a field and contributing to it. It isn't very cut and dry what that exactly means, and in a lot of ways that has kinda changed into just "fulfill the requirements and get what you want out of it" rather than the grandiose contributing to science origins. For me though, I am much closer to that earlier definition where because I want to stay in academia I wanted that experience of having a paper get out. So I am doing what I set out to do and what I wanted. But I have also been asking about this experience for years without much success. And I understand that my project is going to be dead in the water after I leave, but in some ways I do not feel as though the past few years have prepared me for this.

With this paper I have been analyzing data and drafting up figures. It is really a bioinformatics paper primarily, but my degree is in Genetics. The past few years I have been doing some analyses, true, but I have been struggling against cell culture and wet lab experiments as well. This as a culmination, in some ways, feels as though I am breaking out into a new path rather than a continuation. To be clear, I don't hate this, I wanted to learn dry lab techniques. But it still feels like a pivot point rather than anything else.

To get back to the mentoring though, I have only been meeting with my mentor every other week on this. We cannot possibly get through everything in that time, so it feels more like I am pulling him in for select things that I want his input on. But now I have to present it to my thesis committee and there are definitely aspects that he has not seen or signed off on. And that makes me a little nervous. Not to mention that other students I talk to are meeting almost every other day when I am out here meeting every other week. It puts a lot of responsibility on specifically me since I am the only person working on this project to begin with.

I don't know if this is the way I would want to mentor, but I know that I have more of a tendency to hand hold. In some aspects, I do think I needed this as I transition out, but I do wish it was a little smoother and that I had more time for feedback and such. But some of that also isn't by design it is just the amount of time my mentor has right now. Regardless, it is my degree and I am getting the experiences that I want out of it. So in the end, it will probably end up just fine.

This Is Beautiful: Stuff is... Working?

 I'm at this home stretch of my degree where I'm doing a lot of analyses, and also at this point where I'm trying to wrap them up and just about everything I have left is super annoying to figure out. But this past week felt really good, I had multiple things work out! It feels good, and I'm trying to just remember that and focus on that because it's so easy to just focus on what doesn't work instead of what does. But things are in fact progressing! It might not be as fast as I'd like, but that's ok because I will get there eventually and while I still have a timeline I think it'll work.

"Assassin's Quest" by Robin Hobb

 I finally finished the Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb! I covered the first two in this post and this one. This was definitely a mixed bag of an experience, for a lot of the book I was a little bored and wondering where we were going with this, but the conclusion was definitely satisfying in a way that not many series are for me these days. So while I wouldn't jump to recommend it, I did have a good time with this book.

It starts where the previous book left off, Fitz induced his own death to escape a dungeon by bonding his soul with his wolf's. His surrogate father Burrich and mentor Chade then brought him back into his body after he was buried and essentially brought him back to life. However he still has to learn to be a man again, which Burrich bullies into him. Eventually though he does regain his memories, painful as they are, and he chews out the both of them. This triggers both of them into leaving. Fitz and his wolf, Nighteyes, start traveling to find King Regal and kill him as revenge.

This is tragically a lot of the book, them traveling on their own. They get there and he fails to kill the king but word is now out that he's still alive. Verity, the true king, realizes what Fitz is doing and Skill commands Fitz to join him. (The Skill is like telepathy essentially.) So Fitz starts traveling to him. On the way he realizes through his Skill dreams that his partner before he died, Molly, has given birth to his daughter with Burrich there to help. He tries to go to them, they both think he's dead, but is physically unable to due to Verity's Skill command. So he keeps going. He meets a minstrel, Starling, who figures out who he is. He is briefly captured and escapes, then the two of them start heading up to the mountain kingdom. They meet up with Kettle, an old lady heading the same way. Of course they are ambushed on the way but narrowly escape again.

Fitz had to separate from the other two and is nearly dead when he gets there. The Fool, now the White Prophet, finds him and starts to care for Fitz. Chade, Kettricken, Kettle, and Starling all stop by. Eventually Regal finds out though and most of them (all but Chade) start heading up the mountains to try and find Verity. They eventually find him at the top of the mountain in a quarry. He is carving a dragon. Kettle reveals that she was a member of a queen's Skill users and starts to help him. Fitz wants to but is rebuffed, and Kettricken is aghast to find her husband half out of his wits as he focuses so single-mindedly on the dragon. It becomes clear that Verity is putting himself into the dragon to eventually become it, and Kettle will join him. Verity refuses to put Fitz in, and that reveals that it isn't enough to wake the dragon. Fitz makes a deal where he can put some of himself in but only if they do not take his daughter to become the new heir to the throne. They Skill to Burrich and Molly and Fitz sees them sleeping together as they both think him dead. He's devastated, but Verity keeps his end of the bargain and gives Kettricken an heir. Verity is able to wake the dragon, and there's a final battle where Fitz wakes the other dragons, and the Fool leads them all to fight off the Red Ships. Peace is restored.

We leave Fitz as an old man writing up his memories. Starling still comes to visit, but he never reveals that he is still alive to anyone else.

For the vast majority of the book, it felt like a big slog. Fitz is constantly going through boring periods of him just traveling with the wolf, and once you think it cannot get any more monotonous he gets captured. He gets a few new scars, but manages to escape. And then it starts over again. Once he gets to the mountain kingdom it does get more interesting with the reappearance of Kettricken and the Fool. The Fool is one of my favorite characters, very funny and a gender neutral icon.

What stuck with me the most was the way Hobb dealt with Fitz's relationship with Molly. I think it had such a large impact on me since Fitz is constantly thinking about her. He so desperately wants to get back to her and the child but cannot. He does so much to try and ensure their safety, but it is simply not enough in the end. She thought he was dead for too long and he wasn't there to help. Usually storytellers would have a couple like that reunite, but not Hobb. And that really broke my heart, I truly felt for Fitz with that. Plus then the rest of the characters are dealing with it pretty flippantly and that made me indignant on his behalf. I am glad he never started up a strong relationship with anyone else. He had to actually feel that pain and process through it and not seek them out ever again. Just brutal.

I also appreciated the ending with the dragons. They feed off of life, and the blood then wakes them up and reminds them that they're hungry. But in the process the people in them are consumed. Verity does not respond as a human after that, even though his purpose is to save his kingdom. And it is revealed that the shadow of a dragon causes you to lose your thoughts, revealing how the Forged ones that have been terrorizing the kingdom came about. The dragons flew over the kingdom's enemies so many times that they forgot everything and turned into shells of humans, so they did the same back. The book ends implying that this is a cycle, and I enjoyed that. The big bad of the trilogy is really King Regal, the Red Ships are never made clear who or what is behind them. But this detail at the end humanized them and made it more than barbaric fighting.

As a result I am not really sure how to leave this series. Again I do not think I would recommend it without caveats, but the world was fun to inhabit and the ending was so satisfying. It takes a bit to get there, but maybe it is worth it if you are looking for a new fantasy series.