Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

 Just finished: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson. I never had the privilege of seeing Gibson perform, other than on YouTube, so this is as close as I'm ever going to get. They really were a brilliant poet. Some of the poems lose a bit in print—they tend towards the storytelling and autobiographical, and that reads much less powerfully on the page than in speech—but this is a fairly minor critique. Gibson writes powerfully about queerness, gender, disability, and the climate crisis, and their furious energy is made all the more poignant by their premature death earlier this year.

Currently reading: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This is an exhibit based on a course that Palmer taught and it just makes me wish I could take the course. I'm screenshotting bits to text to people. Her central argument is that the total state censorship we see depicted in 1984 is the exception rather than the norm; more often censorship is incomplete, self-enforced, or carried out by non-state entities like the church or marketplace. This is obviously important when we talk about issues like free speech, which tends to be very narrowly defined when most of the threats to it have traditionally not come directly from the government (I mean, present-day US excepted, but it took a lot of informal censorship to get to that point).

The bit about fig leafs, complete with illustrations, is particularly good, as is the bit on Pierre Bayle, who hid his radical ideas in the footnotes to his Historical and Critical Dictionary in lengthy footnotes that he knew no one would read.

You can get this for free if you want to read it btw.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

i had the pleasure of experiencing Gibson's performance live on two occasions, once in Albuquerque at a dank little hole-in-the-wall bar that seemed like such a wildly inappropriate venue until I learned that the owners had made Gibson abundantly welcome long before they were famous enough to pack a theatre, and thereby earned their lifelong loyalty. and the show was splendid anyway. and then two years later terra & i and two friends piled into the car and drove to Flagstaff (a 6 hour drive) for four days, where we were met by three other friends, so that we could all see Gibson perform at the Orpheum Theatre. which was stunning. this was in 2018, so before their cancer diagnosis. (we spent the other two days of the trip at the Grand Canyon, which none of the aforementioned friends had seen before, so since it's RIGHT THERE, we made that part of it, to our collective lasting delight.)

a film came out recently, Come See Me In the Good Light, about Gibson's last few years & their work & legacy. Tig Notaro was involved. it's heartbreaking and beautiful and i wholeheartedly reccomend it.

[sabotabby]

Oh, I should watch that.

They have a poem about the Grand Canyon in this collection. I wonder if it was inspired by the same show.

[yarrowkat]

i think they performed at the Orpheum several times over the years, but who knows! i have the book, I'll have to remember to look up that piece specifically. i've been very slowly making my way through that collection.

Profs like Palmer

[jesse_the_k]

could make me want to go to college.

I loved her "History of the Book" presentation at the NZ WorldCon about how the raw materials for books were so important before the invention of paper! The Invention of the Renaissance is waiting for me bedside.

Is this exhibit the one you're enjoying?

https://voices.uchicago.edu/censorship/exhibit/

Re: Profs like Palmer

[sabotabby]

That's the one!

I seriously want to go back to school just to do her 1492 papal conclave LARP.