I’ve been writing these posts since 2015, and, especially in recent years, I keep asking the same question: what is time anyway? This year is no different. Or, it is different because there are new griefs and fears and time is moving in ways both slow and fast and it slips through my fingers before I know what to do. Part of this feeling comes from the year’s circumstances. I went to New Zealand in late January, spending three weeks of summer in the middle of winter, and seeing a bit of a place I knew nothing about and that looks so little like most landscapes I know. My oldest spent the summer in California on an internship, the first time in which he’s not lived with me for at least a few months in a year and the startling realization that he might never live with me again. My…
reading for the future
Isn’t a bit weird that we do end-of-year reading highlights? By “we” I of course mean me, but also I’m not the only one who does this. Is this the turn from 2022 to 2023? Is this the middle of 5753? Is this also the 1036th day of March 2020? All these things are true, time is a construct, I think I’ve said all this in other years, too, so I guess time is also a circle or something. It’s been a pretty good reading year for me. I read slowly (so slowly) and just barely hit my goal of 50 books for the year. I don’t usually set a goal for myself, but BookWyrm prompts you to, and I thought an actual goal would help me remember that I do love reading books more than I…
Feminist Bibliographical Praxis
What follows is a talk I gave (over zoom) on June 29, 2022, for the London Rare Book School. I’m deeply grateful to Elizabeth Savage for the invitation to speak—both for her original invitation to deliver this in person back in the summer of 2020 and for her invitation to revisit this as a zoom talk now. Back when we had first planned this, I was in the early public stages of talking about feminist bibliography; now, I think, I’m maybe a bit closer to a sense of what I’m up to in thinking about FemBib. Or, at least, I have a clearer sense that part of what I’m up to doesn’t involve answers, but focuses on questions and on the intersections between materiality/ideology, personal/political, academia/public scholarship, bibliography/not-bibliography, text/not-text. I’m sharing this talk because it most accurately reflects the place that I’m in right now, and I have not yet…
still reading
I can’t believe I called last year’s reading post “reading in a hellscape” when 2021 was lurking around the corner. Is 2021 worse than 2020? By sheer dint of not being dramatically better, yes, yes it is worse. This has been a shit year of rollercoastering. I know Biden says this isn’t March 2020 and it’s not, but it is December 2021 facing another winter of isolating and feeling like you can’t avoid covid even though you already waited hours and hours for your first vaccine and then the second and then the booster and waiting for a vaccine to approved for maybe some of your children, and then maybe your younger children, and then will they ever find something that works for the youngest kids and who is getting boosters and how are you feeling, anyway, can you come into work tomorrow we’re very short staffed and customers/readers/students are…
reading in a hellscape
Well, this year didn’t go the way we thought it was going to at the start, did it? And I can’t even really remember this year accurately it turns out. I thought I hardly read anything, but I read slightly more than I did last year—65 books over last year’s 58, although last year’s numbers were down over 2018’s, and those were lower than 2017’s. I did read a lot of fluff, which is true to my recollection, but there were also more serious books in there that I had already relegated to a more distant past. I’ve written before about the value of reading whatever it is that strikes your fancy in the moment that you need to read: I don’t need to have everything I read be important or moving or revealing. Sometimes I just read to pass the time. I’m a big believer in reading whatever and…