(no subject)

Gray's and Cook's work foregrounds the discursive mechanisms by which the dominant social order at once censors and polices the identities of those whom it designates as transgressive and designates as transgressive and in need of censoring and policing anyone outside the dominant social order.

That's from the introduction of "Headline Hollywood: A Century Of Film Scandal". I strongly suspect I am not going to finish this book. It's not that I don't understand what they're saying, or that what they're saying has no value. It's just that I have no desire to put in that much effort when all I really wanted was a lot of juicy gossip about famous people who are now dead.

I don't know where I even found this book in the first place. Sometimes I think I browse the library catalogue in my sleep.

In other news of absurdity, the Chicago Transit Authority announced yesterday that it's going to close nine Red Line stops on the south side of the city (essentially, all Red Line trains south of Chinatown) for five months, while they do renovation and repairs.

I do not think it is coincidence that these nine stops serve some of the most economically disadvantaged portions of the city. 'Cause poor folk don't need public transit, right? That's just crazy talk.

(no subject)

I haven't written a poem in a while, but I was going through old emails and re-found one in which nakki sent me a poem I had a) lost in the hack and b) forgotten I'd written.

I realised we were coming up on the date of her graduation from MIT, and we'd talked about me writing a poem about precession (I do like a challenge) so I sketched out this poem as a graduation gift. And she said I could post it here, so here we are. :)

Congratulations, nakki!

Precession

Her hands are making circles in the air
Describing arcs, parabolas --
And moons, for all I know. No, I do care
But I can't hope to fully understand
The weight of stars, the spin of Earth,
We wonder at these things together, and
Entirely in separate, equal ways. The birth
Of universes, circuits and machines,
Robots, buildings, roads, all of these things
She knows in ways which I don't have the means
to see as she does. Mystic, intimate, she brings
Her hands to know mathematics, formulae
And I could never follow. I have ways,
I can describe the arcs and moons in lies --
Well, call them stories. All our days
She'll understand why spinning tops
Spin round in circles. What precession means,
I cannot ever know, nor why it's so
But circles intersecting, I can see:
The poetry in spinning toys and coins.
The differences between us long since died;
her hands make truths and mine make honest lies.

(no subject)

Aaaaaaaah I am done with comments on The Dead Isle. Imma go collapse now.

If I didn't reply, rest assured I still read them all; some that had crit that maybe didn't get a reply, I just went through and changed stuff and was like "Welp, okay, moving on" without thinking about it. Some changes haven't been made yet but they're in notes, because they're Big Sweeping Things that I can't focus on with both the document window open and a comments-reply window open, beckoning me to respond.

Thanks to all of you who left comments, and if you still have comments you want to leave, I'm still reading and integrating them at this point. Once these Big Edits get done, I'll start typesetting, and it isn't until then that I won't be able to integrate any more criticism. Extribulum rocks. :)

That's as much intelligence as I have left tonight. I'm spending the rest of the evening on the couch watching Secrets Of War: Spy Games Of WWII.

And posting an RFM item I deemed urgent enough not to wait on: A now-defunct tumblr called "Studying-lgbtq-people" has been asking for personal information from people and then outing them to their communities. Apparently the woman's name is Sophie Herold. As always, use your good judgment when deciding how much personal information to share with others. (Thanks Lorena!)