In which a simulacrum of a mutual admiration society holds court

 Just finished: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson. I never had the privilege of seeing Gibson perform, other than on YouTube, so this is as close as I'm ever going to get. They really were a brilliant poet. Some of the poems lose a bit in print—they tend towards the storytelling and autobiographical, and that reads much less powerfully on the page than in speech—but this is a fairly minor critique. Gibson writes powerfully about queerness, gender, disability, and the climate crisis, and their furious energy is made all the more poignant by their premature death earlier this year.

Currently reading: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This is an exhibit based on a course that Palmer taught and it just makes me wish I could take the course. I'm screenshotting bits to text to people. Her central argument is that the total state censorship we see depicted in 1984 is the exception rather than the norm; more often censorship is incomplete, self-enforced, or carried out by non-state entities like the church or marketplace. This is obviously important when we talk about issues like free speech, which tends to be very narrowly defined when most of the threats to it have traditionally not come directly from the government (I mean, present-day US excepted, but it took a lot of informal censorship to get to that point).

The bit about fig leafs, complete with illustrations, is particularly good, as is the bit on Pierre Bayle, who hid his radical ideas in the footnotes to his Historical and Critical Dictionary in lengthy footnotes that he knew no one would read.

You can get this for free if you want to read it btw.