I haven't finished a book in a few weeks. One thing that has been on my mind is a Bsky post (though the sentiment is not unique to that platform, obviously) encouraging readers to leave reviews, because "they're good for authors". I feel caught between contradictory positions: on one hand, there is the social-media relationship with an author, where you enjoy pictures of their dog, make enthusiastic noises about their latest excerpt, maybe reblog a link to their newest story, while on the other hand, there's the reading space, where I'm not really thinking about the author so much as my relationship with the text. I don't want to link my "reviews" that are posted here to my social media presence, partly because feelings could get hurt.

Anyway, I've been trying to read a book that, thanks to social media, I'd been looking forward to for months, only for it to be a huge, wearying slog. And the other book I've been trying to read, Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances, is just not very good at the things I care about. The characterization is programmatic, pretty self-consciously so — here is the idealistic student activist, here is the streetsmart thug — and I can't make much forward progress. Plus, there's a bad guy from the utopian socialists literally named Hegelsy.

Here are some pieces that I have read recently, first fiction, then non.

online reads
• Early Signs of Life. Despite a few wobbles toward sentimentality, this flash story is quite strong and moving.
• I Sexually Identify As the “I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter” Controversy, June Martin. Wow. This could have been trite, just superficially clever, but it's not; it's powerful and unsettling, just like its inspiration.
• We Don’t Want Kids, Catherine Roberts. Very weird, pretty intense.

• The Story is (Not) Yours, the November installment of indie author Magen Cubed's newsletter, is an essay I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. She considers ephemerality as well as trauma, and how both conditions inform her art and her ways of thinking about art. The fact that she welcomes her first book no longer existing resonated strongly; on and off for months now, I've daydreamed about deleting all my fanfic. Just embracing its transience; I already lost many works, mostly (>100) but not all BtVS, that never made it to AO3.

But the passage that struck me hardest in the essay is this one, about personal vision (or w/e):

For me, art should be selfish. Self-obsessed. You should follow your every impulse and desire to create something that feels like sitting around inside your head when I open it up to flip between its pages. Every quirk and kink and eccentricity laid bare. It sounds so wanton to put it like that, but it's just because, in the moment, when reading something that feels so much like its maker, the experience is electric.

At first, I kind of hated this point. It reminds me too much of, first, the whole thing about self-branding as a content creator artist, and, second, of a take that's been going around, that as a counter to AI-generated dreck, creators should be as weird and idiosyncratic and kinky as possible. From there, it's about a hop and a half to ffa-style "iddiness" as the highest aesthetic value.
Where's the craft? the stuckup pedant assface in me keeps whining. Surely there's somewhere else, not even a middle ground but an entirely different territory, where there is neither generic soylent mush nor iddy smears.

I think that other territory is what MC is talking about, a place where autobiography is over, but individual attachments and interests prevail.

And, just so I have it at hand, here's the passage on trauma that got me:

I’m tired of talking about [trauma], honestly. Everyone has it, and rarely does anyone have anything interesting to say about it. They’ll wear it like a badge or a shield, polishing and brandishing it. Hiding behind it when necessary, but offering nothing beyond just…its existence.

I'm tired of giving trauma all this credit for my personality, intelligence, or talent.

I'm tired of giving it air.

I'm tired of giving it books.

Someone not me should do a comparative reading of this with Seghal's "Case Against the Trauma Plot".

• The H-Word: Bartleby and the Weird, by Zachary Gillan, makes a very convincing case for Melville's 1853 story as part of the big-W Weird genre:

Bartleby is, in other words, in his own realist(ish) way, a locus of irruption, of weirdness crowding into the world and unsettling things. His insistent refrain “I would prefer not to” becomes infectious, an early example of the weird horror commonplace of memetic, awful knowledge or language.

I really enjoy intellectual exercises like this, reading backwards, the way Mieke Bal does in Quoting Caravaggio. I was also pretty psyched to read Gillan on epistemic uncertainty as key to the Weird—"[t]his root impossibility of knowing or understanding makes weird fiction the fiction of epistemological collapse. It’s what best captures the anxiety of living in an unknowable and alienating world"—because it nicely confirmed my reading of Mohamed's These Lifeless Things.
• (Cyber)Punk is Dead. This uses layout and text effects to admirable effect, and makes some powerful points.
• Article defending private-equity involvement in autism services retracted: Nearly two-thirds of the article’s references appear to not exist. AI's only function is as a machine of lies and damage.