Anyway, the Finals are off to a good start! Go Spurs, but also the Knicks rock. No bad outcomes from this series, truly. I just want to note a few things I keep seeing people take for granted. Don’t take this Finals for granted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, literature!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I’ve Been Reading This Week<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A book that I saw on a Women and Children First display table when it came out, was immediately entranced by the title, interest further piqued when I found out the author was trans, but already I had too many books in my hands and was in the checkout line. A book that I have to thank my mother-in-law for\u2014this proved to be an excellent Christmas present. A book that, despite its evocative title, I wasn\u2019t sure what I was getting in to. Turns out, I was getting in to a really lyrical chronicle of living with a found family of eccentric artists who also happen to be immigrants and “successful” revolutionaries. I\u2019m talking, of course, about Notes From A Regicide<\/em> by Isaac Fellman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notes From A Regicide<\/em> by Isaac Fellman: <\/strong>just how monarch-murdery are we talking here? Well, the first thing to understand is that two stories are happening. First, narrator Griffon is telling the story of his adoptive parents, Etione and Zaffre. Griffon comes to live with them when he is 15, escaping a father who isn\u2019t thrilled with Griffon being trans, and makes his displeasure known through violence. Etione and Zaffre, on the other hand, are also trans. They\u2019re also a recovering alcoholic and a schizophrenic, respectively. They\u2019re also famous and talented artists. They\u2019re also immigrants to New York, arriving in the city shortly after a revolution in Stephensport, their home city-state. The chapters switch between Griffon\u2019s narration and excerpts from Etione\u2019s autobiography, which Griffon is assembling for publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tyranny that the anarchists in Stephensport are attempting to overthrow is more ambient than hard-defined\u2014although it\u2019s possible that it took me 50-60 pages to fully comprehend everything that was going on in the text. I\u2019m blaming my busy past month for my imperfect reading, not Isaac. What I can say is that Stephensport is authoritarian enough to have these quasi-mystic \u201celectors” pick a prince every so often. I sorta pictured the electors like pre-cogs from Minority Report<\/em> because they didn\u2019t seem to be fully alive or dead. The Prince then names the city-state after himself. Zaffre is more of an active revolutionary, but Etoine has painted an icon of an elector who has become something of a revolutionary symbol. Think Che or Guy Fawkes. Etoine also gets thrown in prison on the whims of the prince a lot more, mostly because the prince is capricious and power-mad and evil and all of the other things that princes inherently are. Really, though, the novel is about the three main characters. Even with Etoine\u2019s anti-authority feelings and Zaffre\u2019s more active involvement in revolutionary activity, there is a strong sense that they are not hardline insurgents or adrenaline junkies. They\u2019re the opposite of the French 75 in One Battle After Another<\/em>. But the situation becomes too untenable for them, a trans couple mostly just trying to be artists. That\u2019s the thing about authoritarianism, right? It keeps pushing people. Until people push back. Griffon is not assembling Etoine\u2019s autobiography because he is a partisan firebrand, either. Griffon is a writer first and foremost, but there is the sense that he would also do some Luigi Mangione shit if push came to shove.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing about the world building, it is appealingly piecemeal. This is not some sci-fi\/fantasy that spends chapter upon chapter laying out the rules.This setting is a thousand years in the future, characters talk about rowing boats everywhere as if New York is now made of canals, but characters also, like, get takeout. There\u2019s top surgery and hormone therapy, but we also find out, on page 216, that many \u201ccomputers and electronics\u201d are things that this society \u201cis only thinking about reinventing now.\u201d Honestly, this is all a long way of saying that this novel is firmly grounded in humanity and intimacy, which makes the grander stuff\u2014art, revolution, obliteration of the gender binary, futuristic not-quite-dystopia\u2014feel realer, somehow. It\u2019s exactly the kind of revolutionary novel I want to read. I didn\u2019t even touch on the nuns who homebrew estrogen and testosterone pills. Damn. So much cool shit in this novel!<\/p>\n\n\n\n LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Something to listen to while you browse? It’s Pride Month, which, at least this week, means it’s Big Boys SZN. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/image-8-1024x768.png\")