Compost #8
A serendipitous mix of links and recommendations intended to inspire and distract
Resources
“Completing the stress response cycle during a legislative reign of terror”. A heartbreaking and also useful post from Stained Glass Woman. She details the personal toll that anti-trans legislation has taken on her, explains the biology behind minority stress, and offers some ways to deal with it based on the book Burnout. I appreciated her analysis of the current wave of anti-trans legislation:
“ . . . the national Conservative Party has seized upon trans people as the rotating villain of the week, a strategy that they’ve embraced in pursuit of political power for the past fifty or sixty years . . . it’s the exact same strategy, deployed the exact same way, that they’ve used against gay folks, immigrants, Black folks, women—the list goes on, over the decades. They have to change the target of their manufactured rage regularly, because while their lies move fast and hot, they’re also pretty easy to disprove, and objectively indefensible; by the time people have rallied to the truth, these people have moved on to their next target of opportunity, their next manufactured crisis, and the pattern repeats.
Reading and Listening and Watching
Why it’s harder for women to “just say no” to service requests (paywalled; drop me a line if you want a copy). As we’ve discussed, saying ‘no’ to service isn’t as easy a piece of advice as it might seem. This study, based in Denmark, shows once again that women do more academic service than men, and extends their analysis to argue that women are more likely to response to a request with of compliance or a sense of long-term investment, while men are more likely to respond with evasiveness or barter.
An interesting argument against “liberal nihilism” by Jonathan Malesic. I don’t know if I entirely agree, but I’m glad I read it. Another interesting take, this time on the blurring definition of burnout, from the same author.
David Wagoner. Am I . . . learning to appreciate poetry?? No one was more surprised than me when a few weeks ago I ran across Wagoner’s poem “Lost” and it absolutely knocked me out. I asked the poet David Biespiel about Wagoner at a recent Atheneum event, and he told me that Wagoner, who grew up in the Midwest, was totally captivated by the landscape when he moved to the Pacific NW as an adult. A protégée of Seattle luminary Theodore Roethke, Wagoner was the editor of Poetry Northwest—until it was taken over by Biespiel! I love the connection to place and the “it’s a small world” of it all! Though, now that I’m re-reading the poem, I worry that some of its lines qualify as cultural appropriation?
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I will be thinking about and admiring this book for a very long time. Yes the ending, but also the most beautiful descriptions of “the profound beauty” of the wild woods that I’ve ever read. As this (gift link, thanks for the tip, Erica) NYT profile makes clear, Groff is an incredibly talented writer with a unique approach to writing.
“And it seemed to her that she could almost see something now moving below the every day, the daily the grey and oppressive stuff of the self, something more like an intricate geometry that lived beneath the surface of the material world.” —L. Groff, The Vaster Wilds
The Guest by Emma Cline. Haunting and so, so good.
Tracy Chapman’s duet with Luke Combs at the 2024 Grammys. It brought back memories of listening to this album on repeat while doing the small-town, Gen-X teen version of scrolling—driving around town with friends, squeezed into a VW Rabbit, for hours.
Fargo Season 5. So much good stuff in this season! I initially thought the overarching theme was the difference between justice and forgiveness, but now I think this season was about freedom. There’s the freedom to live your own life on your own terms, and there’s the “freedom” that is really just having no constraints on your ability to oppress someone else (see also Freedom’s Dominion).
“When Munch was a boy, freedom was a potato. It was you didn't get killed today . . . But now, everywhere you look you see kings. Everything they want they call their own and if they cannot have it they say that they are not free. They even pretend their freedom should be free - that it has no cost, but the cost is always death. Life for life. Me, or you.”—Fargo S5E4
“You know what a ‘witch hunt’ is, right? Not witches hunting men, but men killing women to keep them in line.”—Fargo S5E9
Wagoner is a good find :). As a creative writer yourself, you might enjoy his one-act play "First Class," which dramatizes the first day in Theodore Roethke's poetry seminar. It's a gripping meditation on the creative process.
Also love your analogy of "dragging the gut," as we called it in Montana, to scrolling. Back in those days I was still shut up in my family's religious bunker, so did not engage in many social functions beyond church. I don't think I regret missing prom or cruising, but I do regret missing that sense of belonging to my generation. For me, Tracy Chapman's "New Beginning" brings back vivid memories of Nebraska -- my first days as a graduate student -- and of the long drive from Troy, Montana, across South Dakota, and down to Lincoln.