Reading with the Bathman

[Flamencology]

So! Over the past year or two, between chemo and COVID, I’ve done a lot of reading. And baths have been great for aches and joint pain. And, as someone who used to be really active, I went a little stir-crazy.

So I started a silly Twitter account.

But fuck it, I’m gonna start posting here too. So here we go!

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Welcome back, Gothamites!

The latest read in the Bathcave is Chantal V. Johnson’s new novel ‘Post-Traumatic’!

‘To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story—a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood—compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.

For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?

A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.’

So, dear readers! What’ve you been reading lately?

 

[Denverdave]

I'm reading this right now.

It's done very much from a scholars point of view, but it is a excellent study and a great read.

 

[DdBob]

I have a short attention span these days so I really haven't read anything in a few years. I rarely even watch movies anymore. I think youtube ruined me

*edit* .....I like the ducks

 

[baimun]

Well this week.... it's mostly been https://www.allen-heath.com/media/SQ_ReferenceGuide_V1_5_0.pdf

 

[Andrew Sak]

I'm reading with the Bachman.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King.

 

[Flamencology]

Welcome back, Gothamites!

This most recent Bathcave read is Jean Hanff Korelitz‘s new novel The Latecomer!

The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings – Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally – feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer” play in this fractured family?

A complex novel that builds slowly and deliberately, The Latecomer touches on the topics of grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.’

 

[Flamencology]

Welcome back, Gothamites!

This most recent Bathcave read is Vaishnavi Patel’s new debut novel Kaikeyi!

‘I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions—much good it did me.’

So begins Kaikeyi’s story. The only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya, she is raised on tales of the gods: how they churned the vast ocean to obtain the nectar of immortality, how they vanquish evil and ensure the land of Bharat prospers, and how they offer powerful boons to the devout and the wise. Yet she watches as her father unceremoniously banishes her mother, listens as her own worth is reduced to how great a marriage alliance she can secure. And when she calls upon the gods for help, they never seem to hear.

Desperate for some measure of independence, she turns to the texts she once read with her mother and discovers a magic that is hers alone. With this power, Kaikeyi transforms herself from an overlooked princess into a warrior, diplomat, and most favored queen, determined to carve a better world for herself and the women around her.

But as the evil from her childhood stories threatens the cosmic order, the path she has forged clashes with the destiny the gods have chosen for her family. And Kaikeyi must decide if resistance is worth the destruction it will wreak—and what legacy she intends to leave behind.’

 

[Flamencology]

Welcome back, Gothamites!

This most recent Bathcave read is Grace Ellis and Hannah Temple’s new graphic novel Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith!

Flung Out of Space is both a love letter to the essential lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, and an examination of its notorious author, Patricia Highsmith. Veteran comics creators Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer have teamed up to tell this story through Highsmith’s eyes—reimagining the events that inspired her to write the story that would become a foundational piece of queer literature. Flung Out of Space opens with Pat begrudgingly writing low-brow comics. A drinker, a smoker, and a hater of life, Pat knows she can do better. Her brain churns with images of the great novel she could and should be writing—what will eventually be Strangers on a Train— which would later be adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

At the same time, Pat, a lesbian consumed with self-loathing, is in and out of conversion therapy, leaving a trail of sexual conquests and broken hearts in her wake. However, one of those very affairs and a chance encounter in a department store give Pat the idea for her soon-to-be beloved tale of homosexual love that was the first of its kind—it gave the lesbian protagonists a happy ending.

This is not just the story behind a classic queer book, but of a queer artist who was deeply flawed. It’s a comic about what it was like to write comics in the 1950s, but also about what it means to be a writer at any time in history, struggling to find your voice.

Author Grace Ellis contextualizes Patricia Highsmith as both an unintentional queer icon AND a figure whose problematic views and noted anti-Semitism have cemented her controversial legacy. Highsmith’s life imitated her art with results as devastating as the plot twists that brought her fame and fortune.

 

[Flamencology]

Today’s Battub read is Sasha Senderovich’s new study How the Soviet Jew Was Made!

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. In particular, the Bolshevik government eliminated the requirement that most Jews reside in the Pale of Settlement in what had been Russia’s western borderlands. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.

This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew―not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zemlenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.

Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

 

[Denverdave]

View attachment 76159

Today’s Battub read is Sasha Senderovich’s new study How the Soviet Jew Was Made!

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. In particular, the Bolshevik government eliminated the requirement that most Jews reside in the Pale of Settlement in what had been Russia’s western borderlands. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.

This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew―not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zemlenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.

Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

That sounds quite interesting.....

 

[Honkridge]

Finished Capt. Cook's Journals recently (an edited version by Phillip Edwards). Mostly tedious day in day out stuff but it gets quite exciting in places. The politics behind the outfitting of the ship was very interesting. Cook's ability and attention to detail made him able to rise far above his station in life.

 

[Flamencology]

‘The twentieth century was the century of modernity. Classical music flourished, and yet when we reflect on the genre’s history its central figures seem to share three characteristics: they were white, male and western.

Sound Within Sound is the impassioned and exhilarating story of the composers who dared to challenge the conventional world of classical music in the twentieth century. Traversing the globe from Ethiopia and the Philippines to Mexico, Russia and beyond, Kate Molleson tells the stories of ten figures who altered the course of musical history, only to be sidelined and denied recognition during an era that systemically favoured certain sounds – and people – over others.

A celebration of radical creativity rooted in ideas of protest, gender, race, ecology and resistance, Sound Within Sound is an energetic reappraisal of twentieth-century classical music that opens up the world far beyond its established centres, challenges stereotypical portrayals of the genre and shatters its traditional canon.’

 

[baimun]

@Flamencology is currently on a Red Black and White cover phase....

Might I recommend....

or if you're looking for some Warhol..

... or the Obligatory Marvel content.

 

[Frank Prince]

I just finished the Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett. If you liked the Locked Tomb series, you'll probably like this as well.

 

[DdBob]

do any of these books have pictures ?

 

[Flamencology]

do any of these books have pictures ?

 

[Flamencology]

Just finished reading Diana Goetsch’s new memoir!

‘Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn’t even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch’s ‘This Body I Wore’ chronicles one woman’s long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades.

“How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city’s crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and ’90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history.

Goetsch has written not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?’

 

[Motorik]

... or the Obligatory Marvel content.

I read that! I really enjoyed it. I was glad when they folded some of it into the Falcon and Winter Soldier tv show (which was a very flawed show in many ways, but the Isaiah Bradley stuff wasn't one of those flaws).

 

[Motorik]

View attachment 76326

Just finished reading Diana Goetsch’s new memoir!

‘Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn’t even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch’s ‘This Body I Wore’ chronicles one woman’s long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades.

“How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city’s crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and ’90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history.

Goetsch has written not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?’

That sounds interesting. Is it good?

 

[Flamencology]

That sounds interesting. Is it good?

I think it’s lovely, well-written, focused, and nicely balanced. All of the stuff that I like it memoirs.