Bed-Witch > Recent Status Updates

I am actually enjoying this - but I had to get it on my phone to read and I loathe reading on devices. So I'm going to finish it when i get my hands on a physical copy. 😒 In abayance it goes! The pile of come back to or dip in and out of books.

Enchanting enough that a small moment reading the first few pages hijacked my attention from the two other titles I have been reading (on my phone so im reluctant to finish them until I have physical copies.) Vesaas has suspense and anticipation so well mastered and I have so many questions about this story already.

Quite a bit better than I expected. I'm surprised that I like it as much as I do and yet - here we are - this might have been the book Kingsolver was working up to. I don't feel so bad about it's involvement in a certain Christmas book wrapping mistake now.

I expected not to enjoy this - I rarely enjoy Kingsolver and haven't been able to feel her work grip me in the past for reasons I am not clear on.

So far I'm invested in this one. Ramshakle trailer park dynasty and childhood shenanigans? Struggling, sober single mum under 30? It's quippy but not overbaking cleverness. I care, and this time I'm curious enough to go along for the ride.

I am actually trying to write and finish something. However I made a fatal mistake by reading into the symbolism, references and language choices of a favourite poet; Dylan Thomas references this specific book over and over in his work. And unfortunately he isn't alone in my favoured writers list to do so. Jeanette Winterson and T. S. Eliot also turn to gush on it. So naturally I have not written much today...

So far this is an insightful portrait of nostalgia narrated through a man looking back to his childhood summers from the aftermath of his wife's diagnosis. It is made of his surly and sexual gaze toward the women and girls of the Grace family, and his disdain for older men. I'm fascinated by Banville's writing style but I abhor the predatory male gaze - so not sure how my milage will go. It's beautifully written.

Swallow the magic words and keep them lodged against your cheek. Sew them in place of a tooth, or an appendix. Replace your un-needed organs with the insistent and luxurious treasure Cixous implores you to seek. Have them installed when grief knocks against your shaking heart or as you read - let the reading wound you - and stitch it loosely. Suture it to reopen and spill secrets and mysteries.

I'm deeply impressed and affected by Zupančič on the basis of this work. It's pertinent, questioning, easy to engage with and respond to, and it reveals ideas about contemporary socio-political concerns with clear examples and contextual theory. It leans right into knowledge, authority, capitalism, and 'denial' vs disavowal in ways I think are incredibly important to take in and allow to percolate. Especially now.

Yes this is a book worth reading and yes, I didn't know that for sure until Chapter 3 and yes, yes I have cried now reading it and yes, yes there is Gay Sex in this book in detail, and there is sadness and pain, and yes, there are beans and sauerkraut and a deep questions posed about of the state of community.

Thundering along now! Redemption of the novel arc. I'm here and I am comitted to the project. Chapter 3 onwards and now chapter 2 makes sense. Now pleased I didn't stop reading earlier and decided to give the novel just a little longer. I was close to putting on the DNF pile with a sad dissapointed look- and here it is, whapp! No need.

Fragments of the Firth of Fourth and Fife and Climate and the wind and the storms of her youth but also the steady sight of the lighthouse and the comfort of predictable gannets and the wonder of humpback whales and grief - for nature starving on plastic bags but also loss of family and time. I love Kathleen Jamie.

hmmmmm. I'm not actually enjoying this yet. Feels a bit like an instagram rant in stream of conciousness. Except no urgency, not yet full of the Jerry and the John, just sort of tepid and clearly trying to make the reader question things that I literally do not need to question as a dirt poor queer disabled human. Beautiful lines here and there are perhaps not enough here to carry this reader through...

Honestly Mr Henchard. I've hated murduring psychopathic characters less than you. I know this is a tragedy and that Henchard is almost comedic (depicted as having black eyes with red glints in them - I just cant tell if Hardy was serious here) but he is actually horrible! Also I am aware Susan is a product of the times but isn't she a wet blanket.

'Close to The Waters Edge' is so far my favourite in this collection. Though the first story did make me laugh. Keegan is really good at not saying things directly. She whispers things in my ear over an evening drink - unfortunately that ear is connected to a megaphone in my rib cage pointed right at my heart... So naturally I can hear what she isnt saying quite well.

For bookclub: pick your poison Hardy style. It was hard to choose between 'Man (drunk on porridge) - sells his wife and child to a random sailor for less than the cost of an old nag and later becomes mayor' or 'boy with head in the oxford clouds, realises women exist after being assaulted with a dead pig appendage' Really i wanted to read his poems and short fiction - but I'm having fun shouting obscenities at this

I read 'Sons and Lovers' as a teenager, which put me off trying any of D H Lawrence's other work - and yet I currently find myself in a state of rapturous gluttony, my eyes half rolled back into my mind in mental pleasure as I read his poems about barbed and crowned green globes and their jewelled fissures, or voluptuous velvet peaches, and waiting, waiting for the snake. Aside from the saints - I am wave-thrilled.

I have been averaging about 2 days in a month where the fog lifts it's heavy skirts from over my cells so I can sit listening to the squabbling clicks of wattlebirds above a high tide on the breeze; and for the most part, become lost in Oliver. So much of her poetry reminds me of the moments I turn into my own. Only her faith breaks my experience of her magic.

Excuse me!? Melville, if you can snipe me with a rolicking tale of mutinous activity, - and enthrall me with piratesque turns of phrase and concepts like being stung in the ventricles of the heart - why could I not get past the first chapter of Moby Dick ... 3 SEPERATE TIMES!? How dare this short tale I just read be lifted from the very same book. You arse. I'm going to have to retry the white whale and I'm mad!

Crip-time metaphor explored. A reverse Addie Leroux, a quiet and less eye-in-the-sky Memory Police. I like how the questioning is a creeping soft discordance - it reminds me of how it feels to be unwell for a long time. What you notice and remember changes, and it doesn't always sharpen your attention. What is time anyway... Is it time changing or unchanging? Or Tara? or Thomas? The read changes each way.

The argument re the social authority of science versus the traditional authority of science and its connection to Disavowal is an enjoyable read. So too is the connection between the social authority of wealth and Disavowal. I mean I didn't need this to have understood that 'ugh capitalism' has a large role to play (not the only point, a point Zupančič covers) - but I am finding it all pretty interesting.

I'm still reading, but in just two arguments Zupančič has made sense of things I've puzzled over for years by interrogating what I'd always assumed was obvious. Apparently, the obvious was the blind spot. (Revolutionary, I know.) It's like being slapped by your own stupidity while it's wearing your own gloves.

Žižec makes me laugh and think. I like it.

I think maybe 'Witty' just feels intuitive to me...
Dynamic language-games and constantly renegotiated contracts are elements of everyday life and survival from a queer, disabled lens. The idea that meaning isn't fixed, but emerges through the use of language and lived context as a dynamic praxis, just makes sense to me so far.