November 2023: Fireworks, Liverpool, and maybe an essay?

[francistimestwo]

Uneventful month as Novembers like to be. Early on I went to a fireworks display in Solihull with Travie - I think we could have saved a lot of money and avoided a lot of mud just standing in the closest comfortable spot to the event without actually going in, because you can’t exactly cordon off the fireworks themselves, but we did go on one of the rides they had set up and win ourselves a pair of stuffed hedgehogs from one of those duck hooking tents so I can’t complain. If you’re a substances kind of guy (in Minecraft), I can’t recommend smoking your Minecraft substance of choice and standing with your friend in a muddy field with the worst pop music you’ve ever heard playing over an ungodly amount of fireworks enough. It was also just nice to go to Solihull - not that Solihull is an especially nice place, but I went to Sixth Form there back in the day so it was sort of nice to be back.

Speaking of revisiting my old school towns, I also went to Liverpool for a night - my old, old, friends all left for uni the same year I graduated from uni so we don’t see much of each other anymore. Jamie and Evie moved to Liverpool together, which is weird both because I used to live there and because two of my dear friends who are slightly younger than me are now a couple with a job and a uni course respectively who live together. Jamie broke his leg getting hit by a car on a work trip in Greece (my dear friend Jamie has work trips! In Greece! Look at me being friends with functional adults!) so the trip itself was pretty uneventful, just dicking around in their flat, but it was nice all the same. They live in a spot of Liverpool adjacent to but not really overlapping what was once my spot of Liverpool so it was sort of weird popping out to parts of the city I absolutely could have explored years ago if I had just walked in a direction I didn’t usually walk in - not that there was anything that interesting there, or that I was exploring and not heading out after dark to grab booze and/or takeaway.

Also, Kissinger died. Tee hee, ha ha, et cetera.

I've been trying with mixed success to keep writing - there’s been talk among my many parents about getting me some kind of microphone for Christmas which means making video essays could start to become feasible which means I’ve started working on an essay again. It’s about the value of children’s art and I’m not sure it’s really anything yet but it will be eventually. I do hope it works out - I have a lot of ideas about how it could work aesthetically if I film it and little bits and pieces I want to talk about, but at the moment it’s not very cohesive. Watch this space, I guess.

Reading

• I finished Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians early in the month, in Liverpool. It was beautifully written and I really wish I had something insightful to say about it but my memory is short and all I really remember is vibes. He's very good at suspense - there's this excrutiatingly long scene near the end, before it all kicks off, where it's like 40 pages of increasingly certain doom and dramatic irony and just dudes hanging the fuck out not knowing what's about to happen to them, and it goes on so long it could very easily get boring but it doesn't. It plays with the slasher format in an interesting way, and I'm looking forward to reading his other stuff.
• I actually wasn’t the first person to read my copy of Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms - I brought it with me to Liverpool and Jamie read it all in one sitting while I was still getting through The Only Good Indians (this was surprising to me - I did not know Computer Science guys could read). It’s about a trans woman with a pregnancy kink having a toxic relationship with a she/they with a parasite kink. I had heard this was an improvement on Tell Me I’m Worthless, her first book, which was exciting because I really liked Tell Me I’m Worthless, but in that specific regard I was a little disappointed. I think this is mostly a matter of preference - I like haunted houses, for one, plus Tell Me I’m Worthless was the first book in the Extreme Political Horror By And About Weird Trans Women Extended Universe I really read, and having read books like Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt and May Leitz’s Fluids between then and now, maybe I’m just a bit more discerning than I was and wouldn’t like Worthless as much now either. That’s not to say I didn’t like Brainwyrms and I can see where people thought it improved on Worthless - it’s less hamfisted about its politics, the characters are delved into a bit further - but it didn’t live up to it for me. The ending was kind of rushed and dumped some pretty interesting concepts into the last two chapters where they didn’t really have room to breathe (which now that I think about it was also present in how Worthless handled Ila's gender stuff, so maybe this is an Alison Rumfitt thing). The book is doing this “actual literal brain worms as metaphor for fascism taking hold in people” bit, which isn’t delved into very well and it’s just kind of obvious? We call it brainworms, and literalising that term is a workable metaphor, but it’s not that substantive beyond the visceral worminess of it all. It feels a little like in trying to make it less hamfisted than Worthless she's made it less nuanced and interesting. That being said - the visceral worminess itself? Delightful. Disgusting. Relentlessly horny. No notes. It’s a deeply gross book and if you’re a deeply gross little freak like I am you’ll have a lot of fun. Vanya put *** **** in their ******! That was great! I found the characters compelling and they did a really good job carrying a fairly minimal story - and I don’t say minimal as an insult here, it works nicely even if I wish more of that time was spent on setting up the worm fascism better.
• Safiyyah's War by Hiba Noor Khan was in stock at the bookshop where I work, so I read it partly because it looked interesting but partly because it felt like a more productive use of the bookshop’s quieter hours than playing on my phone and I should really be familiarising myself with the stock anyway because I get asked for recommendations a lot. It’s about Islamic resistance to the Nazis from the perspective of Safiyyah, a girl living in a mosque in Nazi-occupied France. This isn’t a topic I knew anything about and it did a good job satisfying that curiosity - it was, as one expects from a children’s book about World War II, educational first and foremost, and it was clearly well researched. The writing style didn’t really grab me immediately - I know it’s silly to criticise a children’s book for being simplistic but there’s making a book’s language accessible to a younger reader and then there’s talking down to them, and it’s a tricky line to toe. The characters have lengthy conversations like, “This Nazi stuff is really bad! How can someone be a Nazi?” which, again, children’s book, benefit of the doubt, but I just think children are smarter than the book gives them credit for. That said, the writing style gets better as the book goes on, Safiyyah is a fantastic protagonist, and the community around her that drives the story in a lot of ways is done really well. There’s a balance between keeping the child’s perspective believable and showing sweeping societal issues like war and fascism that she strikes very well
• I also got really into Max Grave’s webcomic what happens next, after Lily Alexandre talked about it in her video "Transition Regret and the Fascism of Endings, which I paused as soon as she gave the synopsis on what happens next, read the entire comic in one go, and then watched the rest of, before going back to the comic the next day to reread it while this time stopping to read all the comments. It's about Milo, a trans man who was an accomplice to murder when he was 15, trying to build his life back up after 5 years in a psych ward and 3 in his grandma’s house doing fuck all. All the characters in what happens next suck so bad, but are also begging to be cared about. Everyone is doing their best and everyone is the worst, even minor characters have something there to dig into. It’s also so deeply online in a way only webcomics can be; a panel of a character's social media account tells you everything about the type of guy they are, only for the comic to deconstruct it piece by piece. It's about prison abolitionism in a big way and the way he digs into it is really interesting.

 

Watching

• In Liverpool we had a bad movie double feature of They/Them followed by Troll 2. Troll 2 is a delight but I talked about it (barely) last month so let me talk about They/Them. It sucks so bad. It's ostensibly a slasher set in a conversion therapy camp but the slasher only shows up near the end and kills one guy and none of the characters we're meant to like are really ever in any danger except from the fact that they're in conversion therapy. I feel like they think they're doing a clever little twist on the slasher movie but they have no idea what makes a slasher appealling so it's the world's cishet-est slightly dark gay coming of age movie with a killer kind of thrown in but she's a nice killer who kills bad guys and also there's some kind of shocking twist where the people running the conversion therapy camp... are evil?!?! It's so dumb. Watch under the influence if at all.
• I watched How To Blow Up A Pipeline with my mum (and my stepmum, who was sort of hovering between rooms). It's sort of propaganda (complimentary) first and a movie second, which makes sense because the book it's based on is literally just political theory (which I desperately need to read). It's about people from different backgrounds all affected by climate change coming together to blow up a pipeline. It's a pretty good movie that makes you want to blow up a pipeline and you know what? It made me want to blow up a pipeline. In Minecraft.
• Immediately after How To Blow Up A Pipeline I put on the first episode of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which my mum and I… rapidly got bored of and switched off halfway through because it seemed like a kind of boring, clunky, word for word, Netflix-anime-pastiche remake of the movie. I heard later on that it was good, actually, gave it another go, and realised I had given up mere minutes before it pulls its little trick on you, because that's where it stops being a remake and starts being something else entirely. I ended up really enjoying what it did with the source material, even though I haven't read the comics. I already wanted to and now I want to more.
• I did a little rewatch of BBC's Ghosts after watching the last season last month (forgot to mention that in last months post OOPS. I liked it is all you need to know.). It's kind of hard to dig into because I've been into Ghosts since the beginning so I wasn't really looking at it with fresh eyes. It's funny! It's cute! It makes me feel things! I love every one of these ghosts! What do you want me to say bitch! Speaking of which:

Listening

• My worsening Ghosts disease led me into the arms of its official podcast Inside Ghosts hosted by Nathan Bryon, who plays Mike's friend Obi. The format is Nathan chatting with 3 people per episode from the cast about each episode in seasons 4 and 5. I don't love Nathan as a host just because his energy is very Official BBC Sounds Friendly Down-With-The-Kids Watch-Along Podcast and it makes me feel like I'm being advertised to, but it's nice to listen to everyone talking about their work and how Ghosts got made. I get now why people get parasocially invested in the Ghosts actors.
• Youtube recommended me Frank Watkinson and I've been playing his covers a lot lately. He's a very sweet old man with a guitar and a soothing voice and he's done a lot of Sufjan Stevens covers. He's ridiculously humble and he likes every comment he gets.