Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

21st Century American Pastoralism

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:43:08 GMT

I learned that there's a hashtag #MonthofDick on bluesky and sadly it is for people reading Moby Dick and not gay hockey.

I'm currently halfway through watching Heated Rivalry and picked up a different gay hockey romance just for curiosity's sake. A colleague has been on a mission to read ALL the hockey romances -- they've read 72 so far -- and wants to make 2026 the Year of Sapphic Hockey which I find great.

So I ended up joining a book club through my record store -- it's four of us altogether, I'm the only girl and relieved by how frankly pure the other guys are, and we had a sincere conversation mulling the popularity of hockey romances right now. All three guys are straight so they are earnestly puzzled, but in a "never would have thought, that's So Interesting" way as opposed to (derogatory), and so we were discussing the attractions of enemies-to-lovers and so on.

But then today I suddenly had the thought, imagining the academic world in 100 or 200 years, and the students who would be earnestly reading and studying 21st Century American Pastoralism, the flux of novels that took place in coffee shops, bookstores, and other cozy-but-in-real-life-more-stressful-than-charming locations, and how they would be interpreting that, and also of course the gay hockey. And I found imagining this world so INTERESTING because imagine this future student who had grown up with these charming novels and then doing research about sports injuries and everything and being so upset about it, like how Victorianists really end up deep-diving into all of the medical studies about STDs and stuff.

Anyway, these are the thoughts I have when the world is on fire.

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Rabbitholes

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 04:25:32 GMT

Because reasons I've ended up in a rabbithole for Sappho and am reading chunks of a book on the history of sex in America and there is a WILD chapter about the Oneida Perfectionists that were this free love community in the 1840s and their thing was "complex marriage" where monogamy was discouraged

and like ejaculating was considered not good unless explicitly for procreation so basically it was a thing to just practice edging all the time??? And it was discouraged for women to have kids with only one guy and the community would react if people got too exclusive. And APPARENTLY they had rules that men with men was okay but they didn't mention women with women.

BUT GET THIS

THE KICKER

IS ONEIDA IS THE SAME FAMILY THAT GOES ON TO FOUND THE SILVERWARE COMPANY

But what absolutely fries my brain is like meanwhile Emily Dickinson is in Amherst and arguably wildly in love with her best friend/ future SIL or just SUCH GREAT PALS and blahblah New England Evangelism and literally if she had just gone up the eastern seaboard a bit more there would have been wild fucking orgies to say nothing of the Mormons

Anyhow where's the AU where Emily Dickinson goes to join a free love cult pls??

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Bookmark: The Digital Death of Collecting

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 20:18:13 GMT

"Essay: The digital death of collecting: How platforms mess with our tastes" by Kyle Chayka

Snip:

The shifting sands of digital technology have robbed these collections of their meaning; the context in which they originally existed can no longer be experienced and they only appear as nostalgic ruins, the remains of once-inhabited metropolises gone silent. ...

Algorithmic feeds are by their nature impersonal, though they promise personalized recommendations. The more automated a feed is, the less we users feel the need to gather a collection, to preserve what’s important to us. If we can always rely on Instagram’s Discover page or the TikTok For You feed to show us something that we’re interested in, then we have less impetus to decide for ourselves what to look for, follow, and save. The responsibility of collecting has been removed, but that means we offload it to the black box of the automatic recommendation system. Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture — like maintaining a personal library — has moved from being a necessity to a seemingly indulgent luxury.

It goes back to the significance of the bookshelf: When we didn’t have access to automated feeds and streaming platforms, we had to decide for ourselves which culture to keep close by.

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Two Links

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 18:17:23 GMT

Roxane Gay Says "Cancel Culture" Does Not Exist

snip:

[on the term "culture wars"] It doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. I think it’s the kind of thing that people say when they’re too lazy to engage with the world as it is, and they want to dismiss the very material realities of most people’s lives. I get really frustrated when people are like, “Oh, it’s the culture wars.” What precisely does that mean?

This bit was super interesting to me since "culture wars" was the term of choice from the 90s and 00s that was used to encapsulate grappling with all the isms. I'm not sure that a better term ever came along, but the old one is certainly passe. (Will still keep the tag tho since I've got, yikes, nearly two decades worth of stuff there.)

Cancel culture is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior and when their faves experience consequences. I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake—and we all do, by the way—there should be consequences. The problem is that we haven’t figured out what consequences should be. So it’s all or nothing. Either there are no consequences, or people lose their jobs, or other sort of sweeping grand gestures that don’t actually solve the problem at hand.

All this. At some point I need to write up something on the shenanigans and intellectual laziness inherent in that reaction, especially in terms of scholarship.

How Crying on TikTok Sells Books

snip:

Many Barnes & Noble locations around the United States have set up BookTok tables displaying titles like “They Both Die at the End,” “The Cruel Prince,” “A Little Life” and others that have gone viral. There is no corresponding Instagram or Twitter table, however, because no other social-media platform seems to move copies the way TikTok does.

“These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about the books that make them cry and sob or scream or become so angry they throw it across the room, and it becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people immediately connect with,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble. “We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales — I mean tens of thousands of copies a month — with other social media formats.”

I'm baffled at the notion of purposefully reading something that will make you cry, but at the same time I feel like there's something heckin' Enlightenment about it. Something something culture of sentiment and performance of reading. Also, it would be super interesting if the reporter had connected the video for The Song of Achilles with how that book has been adopted in transformative fandom. Shades of Crush.

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Bookmark: 125 Years of Book Reviews - and women

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 19:36:44 GMT

Reviewing the Book Review

As the publication celebrates its 125th anniversary, Parul Sehgal, a staff critic and former editor at the Book Review, delves into the archives to critically examine its legacy in full.

Journalist goes through 125 years of book reviews looking for women, people of color, queerness.

Revisiting the midcentury: "I’d innocently turn a corner and find you back at it, comparing a woman writer to a trout — as praise."

The relevant line from the original review, of an autobiography called "That Pellet Woman!" by Betty Pellet: "Nevertheless, a valiant woman comes through, an indomitable spirit leaping at life with the drive of a Dolores River trout."

Snip:

It was a clubby world put into a panic by the success of “the lit’ry lady,” as a 1907 article termed her. Early issues of the Book Review were lively with alarm. Why Are Women Using Male Pseudonyms? How Dare Women Write From the Point of View of Male Characters? Why Are Women’s Books Selling So Well? “Is Woman Crowding Out Man From the Field of Fiction?”

(NB All these reviews are hyperlinked in the article.)

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Bookmark: On Book-Buying in the Pandemic

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 03:47:16 GMT

BLACK, LATINX, AND MILLENNIAL READERS ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE BOOK WORLD by Kelly Jensen

Snip:

The research, undertaken amid the COVID-19 pandemic, involved surveying over 4,300 qualified individuals across an array of age groups, races, and locales in the United States. To qualify, individuals have to have indicated engaging with one book over the course of the previous year. The data explored three age groups: Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. Researchers also looked at five US regions and numerous racial demographics. It is believed to be the first such study and offers conclusions to questions and assumptions many in the industry, from booksellers to publishers to librarians and book influencers, have been eager to learn.
...

Of the three age groups studied, it was Millennials who engaged with books more than any other. But more specifically, it was avid Black, Latinx, and male-identifying Millennials who engaged with books the most, though across all age groups, it was individuals who did not identify as white who engaged the most. The singular exception was when it came to the context of buying books as gifts. This was the one space where white, female-identifying Baby Boomers outpaced any other group.

Books sales over the last year during COVID-19 saw an increase of over 8 percent, and study participants reported not changing their habits during that time. It was instead avid book engagers — those who engaged with four or more books per month — who helped drive that spike in sales."

Hilariously, they link to the study results which is apparently a Google doc in someone's trash. OOPS.

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Notes from Reading

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 18:31:43 GMT

Y'all I loved the Bridgerton series SO MUCH and so I picked up the first book and it is SO BAD. I knew going in that the book was going to be whitey mcstraightspace but dear lord. Turns out all of the characters are in different books so if I want to check in on my favorite, Penelope, Imma have to skip to like the third or fourth book. I don't even know where the fuck Marina is. And on top of that, book 2/season 2 will be all about Anthony "Diet Vanilla Sprite" Bridgerton and dear lord.

Anyway, I usually read queer romances, both fic and published, and reading straight people always seems to involve "you're hot, I'm hot, let's insert that dick into the vag." On top of which a lot of reviews talked about the banter and it's like. What banter? It's all "Pip pip cheerio, no I shan't take the biscuits with tea today."

Straight people, who hurt you? I mean obviously it was The Patriarchy but good lord.

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Class, Reading, and Regions in America

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 20:45:10 GMT

"The New National American Elite" by Michael Lind

A fairly long piece on class in America, which says a lot of interesting things, some of which I doubt. For one thing, towards the end there's a section on "woke speech" as "a ruling-class dialect" which I think is almost but by no means entirely true. (Look, I've spent the better part of a year overhearing technocrat meetings.) But the overarching argument about America's past of regional elites (northeastern, mid-Atlantic, southern, western, etc.) seemed on point. And then THIS fascinating nugget:

"Local patriciates tried to boost their own authors at the expense of those in other American regions. My maternal grandmother, a schoolteacher for part of her career, belonged to the minor Southern gentry. She saw to it that my brother and I were introduced to the literary canon as educated white Southerners of the early 20th century conceived of it: A British substrate, consisting of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, overlain by Southern writers like Sidney Lanier, whose “The Marshes of Glynn” introduced me to the wonders of verse. The equivalent New England literary canon ran directly from Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Scott and Tennyson to Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier and the other “Fireside Poets” (Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville only acquired their present status later, thanks to mid-20th-century academics)."

Now the regionalization of reading, especially in terms of school canon, is something I think is accurate. Today I imagine it would be somewhat mitigated by increasingly standardized class curricula as well as the replacement of bookshops by mega-chains/Amazon. (Although that I can speak less well to since the local bookshop where we had to go buy the handful of books we were expected to purchase was largely dominated by Dickens Village and Precious Moments tchotchkes rather than, you know, BOOKS.) But I do know the books that I had to read, in rural Georgia, were very different from those Scott had to read in Boulder Colorado: I got To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby while he got Bless Me, Ultima and Death Comes for the Archbishop. There's definitely more to untangle on this.

Probably the money-quote from the piece:

"When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?

The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family."

This was also interesting to read following a piece I'm reading for work, “Pushing Back From the Table: Fighting to Maintain My Voice as a Pre-tenure Minority Female in the White Academy” by Dr. Nicole Cooke, which keeps coming back to the questions of "Who belongs at the table (in white academia)?" and "Do I even want to be at this table (in white academia)?" (Some of y'all know that I've struggled in cycles with that last question.)

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Reading, Thinking, Reacting

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 23:00:40 GMT

Warning for unedited and unpolished word vomit.

Last week I started reading Janine Barchas's The Lost Books of Jane Austen, a study on popular editions of Austen that are largely "lost" because they were read to bits with few survivors. Eg. there was an edition in the late 1800s that was printed as a promotional by a soap company, and if you sent in x number of soap wrappers they would send you a book as a reward. Fascinating stuff, but early on Barchas describes her study as "bibliographical slumming" because she's studying popular works (never mind that Jane Austen is part of the canon; if this was a study of popular Shakespeare editions this same method of analysis would no longer be slumming and we all no way). A colleague scolded me for repeating the phrase, however, because "slumming" is such an ethnically and class-coded term, which is fair.

But I also contemplate the problematic ways that I as a human am read because of who I am now, which is as a tenured professor at a top university. It's assumed (and not just by this one person; it's happened with other people in other incidents too) that I don't know anything about working class life and so on, despite the fact that, you know, I grew up backwoods and blue-collar and so on. Frankly I know WAY the fuck more than a number of colleagues about problems of class and abuse in the US because I have fucking lived through it. And I have gotten to a point where I need to figure out how to much more openly address these issues in a useful way.

This weekend I picked up several books from the library. I got two volumes of Milosz's prose after talking to Todd last week; apparently the reaction of both of us in the wake of political goings-on was a desire to read/reread the work of a poet about how to intellectually survive in a totalitarian regime. I had also requested the new biography Becoming Beauvoir a while back and it finally came. It is very good and imminently readable, and it was very surprising to me to hear that most of the WW2 experiences of Beauvoir and Sartre are recounted as explicating varied love affairs (which honestly needs a chart to track) than anything else. So I suppose that survival is also about reading and fucking and loving, which I guess is helpful in its own peculiar way too.

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To add to my collection of gendered/sexualized printing metaphors:

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 03:52:37 GMT

Leah Price's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading" (2019), p. 23:

"Perhaps print is to digital as Madonna is to whore: we worship one but use the other."

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This amused me

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 20:14:33 GMT

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Bookmark: Anxieties about reading (and sex)

Sat, 20 May 2017 03:47:39 GMT

The Dangers of Reading in Bed by Nika Mavrody

In his history of masturbation, Solitary Sex, the historian Thomas Laqueur draws a direct link between 18th-century distress over solitary, silent novel reading and masturbation’s new status as a public menace: “Novels, like masturbation, created for women alternative ‘companions of their pillow.’” These “solitary vices,” as Laqueur calls them, were condemned for fear that individual autonomy would lead to a breakdown in the collective moral order.

...

People feared that solitary reading and sleeping fostered a private, fantasy life that would threaten the collective—especially among women. The solitary sleeper falls asleep at night absorbed in fantasies of another world, a place she only knows from books. During the day, the lure of imaginative fiction might draw a woman under the covers to read, compromising her social obligations.

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