Many people have Monday off, so it’s an extra long weekend to spend time with family. But if you need to go for a walk by yourself, please feel free to take a look at our newest episode–or at some of the back-catalogue. In the mean time, here’s what our team has been paying attention to this week:
Andrew is getting ready for the launch of his upcoming “Andrew’s Bookshelf” feature on the blog and is very excited to feature Ula Klein’s Sapphic Crossings. Just in case you haven’t listened yet, Ula was one of the guests featured on our June 19 episode, “Two Writers are Better than One.”
On screen, it’s still self-care cinema time for Andrew, and so he’ll soon be going out to a theater to see Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Just because he’s going out to a real theater for the first time in a while though, he hasn’t forgotten what’s streaming at home, where he’ll be watching the mystery thriller series Cruel Summer.
For music, just because Pride month officially ended on 6/30 doesn’t mean the celebration has to stop, so Andrew still has a Pride 2021 playlist on Spotify that he’s listening to. Andrew is also using Audible to revisit Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, by turning to Lev Raphael’s Rosedale in Love which is read, wonderfully, by Robin Siegerman. Raphael pays particular attention to Simon Rosedale’s (Jewish) perspective, and Andrew’s working hard to get ready for the upcoming interview with Lev Raphael and can’t wait to share space with a fellow Wharton fan.
Adam, just finished Terry Prachett’s Mort and is now revisiting The Lies of Locke Lamora by Peter Lynch; next, he plans on reading something by Amy Levy, the queer, Jewish novelist from the Victorian period. You may remember she was one of the centerpieces of our June 26 episode, “The Closet in the Library.” Lute music has been on the playlist as he’s listening to lute works by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (ca 1580-1650) played by Paul O’Dette. He’s been (re)viewing Kim’s Convenience, too.
Erika’s lists overlap with both Andrew and Adam this week-that may be a first. She’s watching Kim’s Convenience, and is sad to see the show end at the end of the current season. She’s also been watching Season 2 of Feel Good on Netflix, which is also slated to end at the end of the season. Erika was excited to hear that Good Omens was renewed for a second season and is looking forward to Sandman, and to the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which has wrapped production recently.
The playlist has been very retro this week still, with Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing, some celtic sounds with the Dropkick Murphys and The Pogues and lots of Midnight Oil, shuffling between “Diesel and Dust,” “Blue Sky Mining” and “Earth, Sun and Moon.”
Erika’s reading list has a little overlap with Andrew’s lists; she’s reading Lev Raphael’s work this week as well. She’s still struggling to write a sex scene; for someone who taught as many human sexuality classes as Erika has, the difficulty with this is actually amusing. She’s been reading erotica with a critical eye, and has discovered that reading erotica as a critical reader is a very different experience from just reading it for fun. She’s mostly gone back to the things she fell in love with in her twenties (concurrent with the timing of the short story where the to-be-written sex scene will go) and dug out work by John Preston and Carol Queen (The Leather Daddy and the Femme has always been a favorite, with its entertaining gender play), Patrick Califia’s Doc and Fluff has come off of the shelf, along with Laura Antinou’s entire Marketplace series (both the original books and the anthologies of Marketplace stories by other authors.) For more current content, she’s gone through Zachary Zane’s Substack, Boyslut. Zachary Zane is a “bisexual mega influencer” and columnist for both Men’s Health and Queer Majority. A couple of favorite non-subscriber pieces that Erika enjoyed were An Ode to Spin the Bottle: Where Closeted Boys Can Kiss Boys and When the sex advice columnist needs relationship advice, what does he do? When Erika chatted with Zachary Zane before making these recommendations she really appreciated seeing how “a real writer” still got really excited that someone was sharing his work like that. One day this sex scene might actually get written… before then, there will probably be some kind of commentary or essay on the experience of reading erotica from this critical perspective.
