B. Pladek

Anatomy of a Fall: The Case of Indiana University (Guest Post) Indiana University on November 3, 2025    by Johannes Türk Chair of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington Indiana Universit...

Frighteningly similar to what's been happening at Marquette, albeit (so far) on a smaller scale.
utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/anat...

oh for sure; on our campus the event is more a weathervane for how the institution's going to treat us than anything else. I hope it's just students migrating elsewhere! still, for the students who do show, I like to be there, since they're often first-years w/o local community yet.

I can only hope so <3

thanks! if if doesn't I just might throw it up on my blog so at least people can read it and go visit this gd archive, there's enough for at least 2 serious monographs & years of delectably petty fracases

I think about Bryher's life a lot these days, since we are parallel in re: approaching fascism in early middle age (Bryher was 45 in 1939)

currently shopping a public-facing essay about Bryher, will let you know if anyone picks it up! the Beinecke‘s archive is *astonishing*

black and white photo of Bryher, a butch English person with an Eton crop situation going on

Bryher and H.D. sit on a bench bouncing Perdita, H.D.'s daughter who they raised together, on their laps. Bryher is wearing knee-length breeches and long socks; H.D's wearing a dress and squishy hat

Midwest queer scholars: if you’re at this year’s MMLA at Marquette, I’m giving a paper on my mild obsession Bryher, the 20thc transmasc bajillionaire semi-known for being H.D.’s wife-guy, funding every Modernist ever, & saving people from nazis… www.midwest-mla.org/digital-prog...

They do such a fantastic job!! Especially on Finnes 😈

Opening of "The Spindle of Necessity" on Strange Horizons: "Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it."

cover of Mary Renault's The Charioteer, a young white man with reddish hair in a green coat

my beloved "sad man tries to crack dream-Mary Renault's egg and she says no" story from 2024's @strangehorizons.bsky.social just got a lovely podcast treatment, produced by the excellent @darthj.uno and read absolutely beautifully by @ardenfitzroy.bsky.social!

strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

Bryher signs a letter as "Fido", addressed to H.D, who is "horse" (alternately Lynx, Kat, Cat, Mog). The picture is of a griffon terrier; "griffon" was one of Bryher's 10+ code words for cock.

Letter from Bryher to H.D, signed Fido, with an addition by Kenneth Macpherson, then H.D.'s husband, writing as "Rover" and written in truly excruciating doggy baby-talk: "Darlingest, wuffs from the bogger i mean bugger i mean bigger if not better dawg. Lovely letters from the Lynix. Tell Gayog to come orf it and be 'human. Sounds too bloody awfyl, I know him like that too, one feels like crushing a damp ice cream on the nape of his nuque. Prague in Tibbalds Road sounds positively underworld." "Gayog" is Bryher, "Rover's" fellow dog.

...& who should be better known for writing hundreds of bitchy, brilliant letters* chronicling trans life between the wars via the proleptic trifecta of lay psychoanalysis (excessive), cock puns (bad), & fursonas (elaborate).

*now housed in Yale's Beinecke library -- 200+ boxes, neatly typed.

black and white photo of Bryher, a butch English person with an Eton crop situation going on

Bryher and H.D. sit on a bench bouncing Perdita, H.D.'s daughter who they raised together, on their laps. Bryher is wearing knee-length breeches and long socks; H.D's wearing a dress and squishy hat

Midwest queer scholars: if you’re at this year’s MMLA at Marquette, I’m giving a paper on my mild obsession Bryher, the 20thc transmasc bajillionaire semi-known for being H.D.’s wife-guy, funding every Modernist ever, & saving people from nazis… www.midwest-mla.org/digital-prog...

Tonight!!

Cover of WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE by Syr Hayati Beker: a mermaid and a fish with legs about to make out on a background of black floatiness and stars

WI/Madison folks: come out to @roomofonesownbooks.bsky.social next Wed, Nov 5 at 6 pm to celebrate the magnificent new short story collection from @syr.bsky.social, WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE, out now with @stelliform.press!

It includes an OPEN MIC, so come read! <3
roomofonesown.com/event/2025-1...

gritty green hiking bag busted in most places

[whispers quietly] you weren’t a good boy. you were the best

Cover of WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE by Syr Hayati Beker: a mermaid and a fish with legs about to make out on a background of black floatiness and stars

WI/Madison folks: come out to @roomofonesownbooks.bsky.social next Wed, Nov 5 at 6 pm to celebrate the magnificent new short story collection from @syr.bsky.social, WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE, out now with @stelliform.press!

It includes an OPEN MIC, so come read! <3
roomofonesown.com/event/2025-1...

UKL award shortlist was absurdly good this year, and @vajra.me’s RAKESFALL is a masterpiece that richly deserves this honor. Please go read it if you haven’t yet! also the rest of that shortlist!

Les Misérables Set against the backdrop of 19th century France, Les Misérables tells an enthralling story of broken dreams and unrequited love, passion, sacrifice and redemption – a timeless testament to the surviva...

MKE, if you're seeing the Marcus Center's Les Misérables this fall, I'm doing a Q&A on the novel before the Tues, Oct 28 show.

Come on out to learn about Hugo's 1300-page treatise on prison abolition, police brutality, & the necessity of perpetual revolution!
www.marcuscenter.org/event/les-mi...

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!

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

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

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