sunsalute / paperbagghost

 Events, dear friends, have been piling up faster than I can write about them—personal tragedies, global horrors, and work conspiring to keep me at a pace where I have not yet emerged from under the weight of one massive project before I'm saddled with the next. Needless to say things are happening but I get approximately 15 minutes of laptop time a day if the subway cooperates and it's largely spent answering emails.

Anyway, on with the podcasts. This week's episode is from a new-to-me podcast, A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein. I heard him on Bad Hasbara and he was very funny and insightful, and his actual podcast doesn't disappoint. My favourite episode so far has been "She Had Elon's Baby. Then, Leopards Ate Her Face," featuring Ashley St. Clair and Juniper.

I didn't know the name off the top of my head but Ashley was one of those far-right grifters/pick-me girls who is very traditionally pretty and thus assumed that there was no need for feminism. She wrote an extremely transphobic children's book that I had actually heard of because it was on one of Queen Coke Francis's video essays*. The title of the episode is not precisely accurate, in that the leopards in question started gnawing Ashley's face before she gave birth, as she had started to turn away from her transphobic stance when she was pregnant with her second child.

You have questions. I also had questions. One of the reasons this particular episode is so good is that Matt handles everything as responsibly as anyone can. He has Juniper (the trans podcaster/editor who, among other accomplishments, popularized "goblin mode"), who was the one who engaged with Ashley as she made her turn away from the dark side. Neither one of them softball the conversation, laying the harms that Ashley did out very clearly, and questioning whether she has actually changed or whether this is another grift (for the record, neither of them conclude that it's a grift).

It's a hard listen because obviously it is. Trans people are being targeted for genocide around the world and especially in the US, and Ashley was one of its instigators. It asks hard questions: Can people change? Is the community that they harmed obligated to believe and accept those changes? What does it mean to make amends and reparations, or to build trust? What can we do to deradicalize people (note: Ashley's redemption arc seems to have started with queer and trans folks engaging her online, which I'm legitimately surprised at)? 

Anyway it brought me a little bit of desperately needed hope so maybe it will help you too.


* Check her out if you do YouTube video essays. She's a drag queen who mainly covers culture war stuff and she's hilarious.

 It feels very strange and unpleasant to be making my regular book post under the circumstances. Nevertheless.

Just finished: A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was so much fun, and I'm hooked on the series. It's mostly a lighthearted absolutely nightmare fuel cosmic horror murder mystery, but as the afterword says, it's also kind of a commentary on fantasy's obsession with kings and nobles and what this means for our present political circumstances. Which is to say. Kings. Not a great idea. I disagree with Bennett re: what ASOIaF was trying to do but the book is a great example of how you can smuggle interesting politics in a rip-roaring narrative.

Currently reading: Lullabies For Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill. I love everything she writes and meant to read her most well-known work ages ago but it ended up near the bottom of my physical TBR stack and I'm only now getting to it. This is the story of Baby, a little girl in Montreal whose father is a possibly-schizophrenic heroin addict. Does that sound depressing? Because it is. It's also very much a dark comedy, like it's genuinely fucking hilarious the more searingly awful Baby's life gets. Sometimes I just want fiction to fuck me up, and this does.