Status Updates From Songs of No Provenance

im gonna go ahead and say thats too many mentions of piss for the first 20 pages of a book

skeptical so far

I kind of don’t buy that Joan would be so insistent upon not going on this conservative podcast, perhaps in part because her only redeeming quality currently has been her teaching. I kind of wish I got more of a sense of her values? Like she’s fine with pretending to be gay but draws the line at pretending to be conservative?

I actually think Joan deserves to be an amoral, pleasure-seeking hound, just sayin'.

Weh, I am in love with Sparrow.

Idk Joan, you play the lumbering cis fool pretty well as-is. This backstory from Sparrow, it's kind of on-the-nose, but it is nice, I think. Not everybody utterly fuckin sheds their whole life when Gender.

I cannot believe Joan is starting a piss psyop.

I don't think I understand Joan all the way.

Thinking for a sec, I kind of don't like how Sparrow is positioned in this. We haven't got a lot from them, so they kinda feel like solely an instrument for Joan's being weird about womanhood. Not that her being weird is bad, just that they have 0 agency about anything, in narrative terms.

This whole scene is just... like, on the one hand Joan makes fucking WILD assumptions about Sparrow that probably get in the way of her thinking, but on the other hand this is clearly a massive moment for her. Maybe something good will happen?

Joan has very comical ideas about what various queers do and do not like in their women, as if this feral street rat of a folk guitatist has zero appeal to a passing Sparrow...

"Sparrow liked women. That was good. But certainly the woman in question was young and queer and cute, not rangy and rough-edged, frightening colleagues with her abject, phone-free life."

This stuff with the shitass guitar has me in mind of that one KT Tunstall quote, about the cockishness of guitars generally. Like, for all the fear she had of revealing some Gender to the superfan, here she is slashing away for the kids...

I BELIEVE IN THE JOAN THAT CAN BE A GOOD ENOUGH PERSON FOR SPARROW!!!

When she's not being (somewhat understandably) completely unhinged, she's actually fairly interpersonally adept, for not knowing what "fire AF" means.

Joan recounting a sexual encounter ("and she never saw anyone she pissed on again") to Paige, Paige barely reacting and then Joan squirming internally about it is actually great. My greatest desire for Joan is to find someone she can piss on and be happy with.

Sparrow and Joan have a relationship where one of them makes a wild assumption about the other, and then acts really weird about it.

Don't call them a "little boy creature"! Wtf! Is that even okay???

Oh, I feel bad for Sparrow already. Doubt it's gonna be a fun A Novel for them...

"Who was this grouchy creature with no knowledge of proper watersports?" I guess Joan's more of an oromashi woman, alas.

Okay you obviously shouldn't piss on people's cats, but that aside I hope the narration is going to let me in a bit more on the piss stuff. "Confusion as to why everyone wasn't pissing their pants all the time" which is fine and all, but do tell me more!