blogcutter

I kind of struggled deciding on an episode this week, but I'm going to go back to one from a couple weeks ago that I'm still thinking about a lot, A Bit Fruity's "Clavicular Is a Symptom, Not The Cause (with F.D. Signifier and Kat Tenbarge)." I love it when F.D. Signifier guests on podcasts; I would watch his YouTube but I don't really watch a lot of YouTube so it's nice when he does a thing I can listen to on the subway.

Anyway if you've been under a rock or don't have this shit forced on you, Clavicular is a 20-year-old influencer who promotes young incels hitting their face with a hammer (here is a quick explanation from mainstream media describing how most of us olds learned about him). It's kind of amazing just how completely far-right internet memes have made it into pop culture; like, I will say things like "[blank]maxxing" ironically despite being a normie old. This kid was one of the high school students who graduated under covid lockdown, if you want to know how recent all of this is. 

Oh, he also has an eating disorder and is autistic. Things I didn't know. Apparently at least some of the appeal for viewers is watching this kid navigate social situations and failing miserably. Which is fucking gross and awful. 

Looksmaxxing and Clavicular are things I learned about against my will, which is the case for everyone in this episode. The whole trend is weird and gross and misogynistic and racist and awful. Which is why the compassion and analysis that Matt, F.D., and Kat bring to the discussion is so important. They have compassion for Clavicular, who may be a terrible person but is also barely out of his teens and needed help and didn't get it. They have more compassion for the boys who follow this kind of content. This is a look into the nihilism of young men, and the degree to which it's an understandable reaction to a world that basically gaslights them. 

Anyway, if you have kids in your life, it's definitely worth a listen.

Just finished: Five Points On an Invisible Line by Su J Sokol. I don't have a lot to add since I'd almost finished it last week, but the final setpiece, a massive, multi-tactic demonstration, is really well done. 

Currently reading: Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. Time to start Aurora Awards reading. TBH I started one of the best novels—won't say which one—and found it very much unparsable in the way that some secondary world fantasy is just too much for me, so I moved on to this one. I'm around halfway through and the jury's still out.

This one is set in Fantasy Medieval France and follows a tavern poet who's recruited by the local provost to help him solve the murder of a duke who is running the country, since his brother, the king, suffers from an undisclosed madness. Great concept, cool characters, the setting is a breath of fresh air, and I cannot argue that Kay is a superb prose stylist.

And yet I almost always bounce off his work. There's a certain Tolkienesque narrative distance that I think works for Tolkien but feels peculiarly pre-modern. Objectively, I respect this as a deliberately alienating technique, but it means that I don't bond with it in quite the same way, and takes a tremendous feat of writing elsewhere to make me love it. It's entirely possible that this will hit that and I'm giving it a chance but so far I'm feeling that I like what he's doing but don't feel emotionally invested.

Okay, I don't know how to feel about this one. On the one hand, I can't help but feel that this shouldn't be made. This isn't entertainment and it certainly shouldn't be for copaganda. On the other hand, I thought they did a shockingly good job of it.

It's about Bruce McArthur, a serial killer who preyed for years on middle-aged, poor, brown gay men in the Village, while the cops turned a blind eye. If you don't want to read about that, who could blame you?

( Lost & Found )

Just finished: Nothing

Currently reading: Five Points On an Invisible Line by Su J Sokol. This is the sequel to Invisible Line, and follows the main characters: Laek, Janie, and their kids Siri and Simon, three years after they fled the US and settled in Montreal. They're now joined by Philip, Laek's best friend and former colleague, who had been devastated when he left because he'd been in love with Laek the entire time. Much of the book feels very slice-of-life, with the adults navigating poly relationships and the immigration system, while the kids figure out their identities, except that lurking beneath the surface, everyone except for Simon is involved in some kind of clandestine revolutionary activity and can't tell anyone else about it.

It's a really cool story. There's a tension in genre writing where deep down, everyone kind of wants the trauma to matter, but the tight pacing required to actually create a readable story often doesn't allow enough space for it, and so you get stories where characters just shrug off the physical and emotional costs of fighting the good fight. Otherwise, you have characters spending the whole time talking about their feelings and processing. This to me strikes a good balance; it is absolutely about dealing with trauma, and specifically dealing with the trauma of state violence, but it's also compulsively readable and full of cliffhangers.