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@you-just-wait-sunshine
Author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen has been live posting reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time on bluesky and just hit the first proposal. The replies are basically the sickos meme
Thread here
Incredible stuff happening. I want push notifications for every update. I hate push notifications.
One of my goals for 2026 was to read no more than one or two books at a time, in order to improve my focus. I'm currently reading five at once. As you can see, I'm doing a bang-up job of meeting my goals. Go me!
Portrait of a small boy reading by Gluyas Williams
If you ever wondered why writing a dissertation/thesis takes so damn long, this has been my day so far.
Me: Okay, I should probably add a paragraph about the contextual late-18th-century understanding of republicanism. Let me read over a key text to make sure I'm being accurate. [downloads a 42-page book chapter] Me: Hmm, okay, on page one of this chapter they're expecting me to know some nuanced things about civic humanism. Better just brush up real quick. [downloads 9-page primer from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] Me: Okay, cool, but there's some stuff in here about Machiavelli that I really should read in its annotated source context, because that's what my history guys were working from. [downloads 283-page book on Machiavellian political philosophy with source texts] Me: Oh, for fuck's sake-- [downloads Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics]
how it feels like doing research:
truly the idea of "this scene is (un-)necessary to the story" is such a fundamentally uncurious and anti-art way of engaging with fiction. the story itself is unnecessary, in the sense that all art is unnecessary, because art is not a fucking optimization problem. that's the beauty of it
also there is no theory of “necessary” and “unnecessary” scenes that is not culturally conditioned and a reflection of specific societal biases. modern Anglophone readers of the Iliad tend to find the Catalogue of Ships and the Doloneia and Achilles fighting the Scamander and most of the violence and killing in the poem unnecessary but an Iliad that removes them and telescopes the journey from Book 1 to Book 24 is not the Iliad in any meaningful way.
nobody tells you that you live somewhere that looks like this with people you like and are the kind of people to hold a funeral for a settee that was in our house for 25 years, and suddenly you barely have time to read
Some little illustrations of dogs reading to use up the last paint on my palette.
has anyone considered that it was probably her house too. where else was she supposed to put her chintz?
I like this question because I think it really gets at the power dynamics at the center of the poem!
The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.
This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.
The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.
There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.
Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.
I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?
Great poem, great discussion question, love everyone in this bar <3
the thing about nonfiction is you come out of it with several more books to put on your to be read list and it's only gonna branch out from there so really the only solution is to read every book in human history starting at the beginning
having institutional access never stops feeling sort of crazy to me because you can literally type in any country and time period and find at least a handful of peer reviewed articles somewhere that discuss a specific aspect of people's lives in depth and at length like "what was considered pop culture in late imperial russia" or "how did the textile trade work in northern mali in the 1600s" or "children's toys in pre-colonial philippines" and it's just sitting there but the majority of people on planet earth aren't allowed to read any of it
the Cc in emails stands for Cuck chair
my reading spot of the day had a touch of accidental irony.
can we get 36 hours a day? not for any productive purposes i just want to finish my to watch & to read list in this lifetime . also probably get enough sleep
booklr at the moment is like watching all the merlin fans come crawling out of the woodworks like some starved little bugs
beautiful time today going for a hike and wild swimming after snagging the audiobook from the library of The Ballad of Ronan McCoy by Colin Morgan. i don't know what i was expecting, knew very little about it, but i'm so enjoying the exploration of teen devotion and disability. i can't wait to carry on with it
Where are you on the kinsey scale of fiction/fic reading?
0 Exclusively read original fiction
1 Predominantly read original fiction, rarely read fanfic
2 Predominantly read original fiction, often read fanfic
3 Equally read original fiction and fanfiction
4 Predominantly read fanfic, often read original fiction
5 Predominantly read fanfic, rarely read original fiction
6 Exclusively read fanfic
x I don't read lol
I wanna talk about it / results
I'm curious too, about the drive towards one or the other. If youre a 1-2, what makes you seek out fanfic? If youre a 4-5, what makes you seek out original fiction?
nobody ever teaches you what to say when you're at a house party and someone is completely pissed and talking about their great something grandma who was from yorkshire and the first british lesbian writer and they were called Ayn Rand
