B. Pladek

Wisconsin people, please, please call your reps about this -- this rider will force any medical facility that takes federal $$ to ban trans healthcare for people of any age. That's most facilities; that's a de facto ban on all trans healthcare in the country.

world a bad place & I'm more anxious than I've ever been, but it's a solace to recall that in my life I've been lucky enough to read a great number of brilliant & strange books, & I am even luckier to be friends with some of their authors, & no fascist can take that away.

to say more: there’s a fine line bween taking transness unseriously enough to avoid treacly sentiment & letting fear of sentiment turn transness into a bit, replicating the anxious contempt w which the cis world views us. it’s fun to see the diff ways books navigate that line. writers are good!

so weird to do my little dayjob of trying to preserve shared governance at my university (also DGSing, teaching, & writing supposedly) & having to be normal & measured with colleagues all while knowing that this is happening

also nearly all of the new books that have frustrated me in the the most interesting ways, itself an important artistic service

excellent, thank you!

only a few in scholarship citations, and not in order!! adding to my TBR immediately (though it'll be hard to unseat the Bryher x H.D. letters from their throne in my heart -- not as romantic but incredible in so many ways, and alas mostly available only in archives)

truly!! also have you read A.S. Byatt's Possession? the central love story is "what if RB x EBB hushed it up instead of married"

thanks so much. <3 means a lot, been a rough month of having to trunk stuff-of-my-heart bc it didn't sell.

also hello, iirc you are a fellow EBB's Aurora Leigh fan? love her, love the poem, love how it's secretly a rewriting of Dante's Commedia

thanks for saying so -- it's been a really rough month of failure in the ole writing mines, so hearing this is really lovely. <3

This story, for all its bleakness, opened up the tight fist of fear that is my heart, held my hand, and made me feel a little less alone.

hey Milwaukee, this Friday I’m part of the Book Drop series with @brookesmoody.bsky.social & Richard Vargas at 7 pm at Amorphic Brewery! I’m reading a flash that involves magic fish & bad deontology. Come on out!

the AJCU scene even! I'd also be interested in helping co-edit a volume like this if you want another collaborator within the academy who is very tired of "dark academia" = Oxbridge/Ivies or Oxbridge/Ivies wanna-bes

hello from the ACJU scene, I have a story about unionizing magic NTT faculty that I have never been able to place

hey Milwaukee, this Friday I’m part of the Book Drop series with @brookesmoody.bsky.social & Richard Vargas at 7 pm at Amorphic Brewery! I’m reading a flash that involves magic fish & bad deontology. Come on out!

From Le Guin's Orsinian Tales: "Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir. He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."

Le Guin here rhyming closely with a line from Auden's Yeats elegy that I think about daily: "for poetry makes nothing happen... it survives, / a way of happening, a mouth."

surprised to discover that Le Guin's Orsinian Tales are some of her best work, a melancholy exploration of what the 20th century, esp the Cold War, meant to central Europe. Its closest peer is Jan Morris's masterpiece Hav (you know something's good if I compare it to Hav, which has no real rivals)

such a clear statement of intent that the US is only invested in Palestinian death, nothing else, not even death as cover for a land-grab, just death

this video is how I learned that the well-dressed librarian who rides the same bus as me every morning, but who has not been there for several weeks, has probably transferred their hours to the new location!

(said librarian isn't the dancer, though he's great)

Oh awesome! I hope it helps, and congrats on surgery—sending you good thoughts for a speedy recovery! ❤️

the other flash I read is "The Runners" from @fantasymagazine.bsky.social. I still love both stories dearly, & they both took a long time to find homes. Many thanks to Fantasy & Neon Hemlock for pubbing them & to @storyhour.bsky.social for inviting me to read. <3 psychopomp.com/fantasy/augu...

herein you can 1) hear me read a sneak preview of a flash from a forthcoming @neonhemlock.bsky.social zine (!), 2) see my raggedyass prof hair before I cut it to look respectable for the new term, & 3) cackle at the wonderful @susantaitel.bsky.social's AITA take on Rapunzel!

Now available everywhere!! this is my favorite of @isabelcanas.bsky.social's marvelous novels yet (!!! it's a crowded list!!!), and it has my absolute favorite villain she's written so far! GO BUY IT SO YOU CAN MEET HIM 🖤 💀

this week's (free) post is about the adage "deescalate all conflict that isn't with the enemy" and what it means to be an enemy, and don't worry I manage to reference both Sun Tzu and Tolkien so I've still got it

margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/we-know-wh...

Been on a Byatt kick for the past few years and love Possession and its fake!Brownings; really excited for your newest! trans Possession is everything I want

it’s like: if u, collectively, have the time to practice a six-part acapella filk, u, collectively, have time to practice pronouncing finalists’ names

yeah we do!

It was lovely meeting you, and anger/soli/FFS about the presenters skipping everyone in khōréō's names. What an encapsulation of the event's failings.

nearly all of the best new books I've read so far this year have been by trans writers, please keep making them

I don't believe in the "oppression creates art via pressure like a diamond" myth: you all are just that brilliant regardless of the fascism. keep it up

update: bailing schedule now every 45 minutes for visibly less pooling water, which I'm taking as a win