B. Pladek

@bpladek

Ben. Literature scholar & writer; Ass. Prof. of English at Marquette University. He/him, boring transsexual. DRY LAND (2023, UWP): other stuff elsewhere. website: bpladek.net

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B. Pladek@bpladek· 5d

I had forgotten that Djuna Barnes's Nightwood takes place in the Les Misérables extended universe

She strayed into the rue Picpus, into the gardens of the convent of L'Adoration Perpetuelle. She talked to the nuns and they, feeling that they were looking at someone who would neer be able to ask for, or receive, mercy, blessed her in their hearts and gave her a sprig of rose from the bush. They showed her where Jean Valjean had kept his rakes, and where the bright little ladies of the pension came to quilt their covers; and Robin smiled, taking the spray, and looked down at the tomb of Lafayette and thought her unpeopled thoughts. Kneeling in the chapel, which was never without a nun going over her beads, Robin, trying to bring her mind to this abrupt necessity, found herself worrying about her height. Was she still growing?"

B. Pladek@bpladek· 6d

also have some Wisconsin trans folks from the 1890s: Mrs. Howe, a Kenosha woman who ran a charity dancing troupe, and Frank Blunt, a MKE/Eau Claire guy whose wife threatened to take their case to SCOTUS

"Anna Morris, alias Frank Blunt, the woman who has tried to be a man for the last 15 years was sentenced to the penitentiary for one year... She was arrested several months ago in Milwaukee, charged with stealing $175... It was then discovered that the prisoner was a woman, although she had worn masculine attire nearly all her life... After the sentence had been passed, Gertrude Field, a woman who claimed to have married the prisoner in Eau Claire, fell upon the neck of the prisoner and wept for half an hour. This woman has furnished all the money for Blunt's defense and now proposes to carry the case to the Supreme Court."

"The society people of Kenosha are worked up over the discovery that a person known as 'Mrs. Howe' is not a woman but a man. He went there some time ago to get up a 'Kirmess' for a church, and several ladies joined in the performance. The peculiarity of her manners was commented on at the time, but none suspected the real truth. Now there is regret on the part of the participants that they joined 'Mrs. Howe's troupe of dancers.'"

B. Pladek@bpladek· 11d

ah... regional literature

cover of the novel WISCONSIN! by Dana Fuller Ross: two burnished 70s-makeupped pioneers(?) in front of some log cabins. they're arguing. her eyebrows are on-point. he is wearing velvet lapels for some reason?? above the title, in allcaps: "THE MAGNIFICENT SAGA OF DEFIANT MEN AND PASSIONATE WOMEN CLAIMING A WILD LAND... AN DMAKING IT THEIR OWN." above that: an american fuckin eagle, radiating patriotism

B. Pladek@bpladek· 18d

yesterday I returned from 2 weeks of hiking in the US west w nearly no internet. like its ppl, this country is at once brutal & deadly & heartbreakingly beautiful. it's also parched, charred, clearcut, often over 100F. idk how the west will survive the 2030s. anyway here's me at the Badlands

guy in sunglasses against sweeping dun and rose hillsides of soft, eroded rock; the west is shockingly pastel

B. Pladek@bpladek· 20d

ft the very wet, very green, & very beautiful Pukaskwa NP

rich green temperate rainforest coastline in grey fog

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jul 10

old hyperlocal histories of small towns are such bizarre & fascinating reading & it‘s sad that the internet/death of print journalism means they’re unlikely to be printed anymore

Cover of Mineral Point: A History by George Fielder; mineral point is where Wisconsin’s nickname “the badger state” came from—not the animal but a bunch of 1830s lead miners who were so fixated on striking it rich they never bothered to build houses or grow veggies but literally lived in dirty scrapes in the ground, supposedly like badgers tho that’s an insult to badgers

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jul 8

the great folks @locusmag.bsky.social are crowdfunding a new best-of anthology--starting with 2025, a banner year for short fiction! In a time when traditional publishing faces so many threats, collections like this matter more than ever. support it at locusmag.com/anthology!

To the left side of the image, a hardcover book The cover of the book shows an illustration of a caped figure in front of a surreal landscape. The title reads: "The Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Of the Year: Volume 1". Text to the right of the book says: "The Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Of the Year: Volume 1. An anthology of recommended short fiction from 2025"

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jul 5

city prairie

milkweed, ox-eye sunflower, some sort of fleabane on a slope prairie overlooking the Milwaukee river

wet meadow of (alas) probably invasive grass beside the Milwaukee river

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jun 28

there was also this. mid-tier cursed object

pony made of logs in the middle of a rainy wood

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jun 28

more prairie posting

midsummer prairie in full bloom: orange butterfly-weed, purple prairie-clover, lead-plant, purple coneflower, and compass-plants

guy standing in the background of purple coneflower, lead-plant, purple prairie clover, white false indigo, and compass plant; further back, a golden sea of coreopsis

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jun 9

ok ok one last eerie thing about this. photo-referent for MC was toilet-horseshoe-guy, but the character is actually semi-based on Aldo Leopold, the famous WI conservationist. they don’t *not* look alike

toilet-horseshoe-guy, a disheveled white guy in thin glasses

Aldo Leopold, a seemingly older version of the same white guy, somewhat but not much less disheveled with similar glasses

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jun 6

Btw the novel is not about toilets but a WWI conservationist who discovers a magic power to grow plants, is drafted to grow war timber, & realizes that magic is Bad, Ecologically. Also about self-harm I guess, & it’s gay. If you want more it’s here: uwpress.wisc.edu/Books/D/Dry-...

cover of the novel DRY LAND by B. Pladek, a tree coming out of darkness

one more stock photo of the Kohler's toilet wall, because why not

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jun 6

only to find a *different* photo of the same horseshoe team from the same year—and a new photo of my MC—clearly the same guy! still no idea who he is. But he still lives with the toilets in the toilet museum. Bless him

my protagonist again, this time kneeling in a tam o shanter, posing with a horseshoe. it's the same guy! still no idea who he is

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jun 6

the toilet museum and my MC: a thread. for my novel DRY LAND (2023) I found photo referents for chars. my MC was based an unknown guy in a 1930s horseshoe team pic I saw in the dinky basement museum of the Kohler Design Center—a bath/toilet showroom in Sheboygan WI that features a wall of toilets

my protagonist Rand Brandt, a weedy man in glasses and a collared shirt -- I don't actually know his name

the wall of toilets at the Kohler Design Center, featuring one of the many tasteful nude mannequins posed among the cans

B. Pladek@bpladek· Jun 2

this weekend my husband & I visited Pendarvis, an old Cornish miner's cottage c. 1830 in southwest WI that was restored into a tearoom in the 1930s by an openly gay couple, Bob Neal & Edgar Hellum; a reminder that there's so much interesting queer history outside the metropoles

Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum standing in front of the Pendarvis property

B. Pladek@bpladek· May 29

learned this from an excellent talk by curator Robert Cozzolino about the vibrant group of c20 midwest surrealists working in/around the Madison-MKE-Chicago corridor that included Priebe, Gertrude Abercrombie, John Wilde, Dudley Huppler, & others; extraordinary stuff

John Wilde's "Wisconsin Wildeworld" painting, a blue-toned painting of a southern WI suburb filled with strange animals and classical ruins; the artist in bright red and checkered pants stands in the foreground

Gertrude Abercrombie's "Self-Portrait of My Sister," a self-portrait of Abercrombie wearing a green dress and long black gloves

B. Pladek@bpladek· May 29

TIL that my uni has the papers & art of Karl Priebe, a fantastic c20 WI queer surrealist known for his detailed bird paintings & loving/celebratory portraits of the midwest's Black arts community, incl his lover, Ebony editor Frank Harriott, who died tragically young; Priebe was his caregiver

surreal nightjar perched against a teal-black background with an egg below, looking at a collection of colored moths

portrait of Frank Harriott, wearing a wry expression and a carnation boutonnière

B. Pladek@bpladek· May 24

an oak savanna in spring is the greenest green

B. Pladek@bpladek· May 22

hey this is tomorrow! @alexjennings.bsky.social, @lpkindred.bsky.social, and me are reading at Arts & Literature Laboratory in Madison at 7 pm! come through if you're around! details here: artlitlab.org/events/lab4-...

poster of Alex Jennings, LP Kindred, and Ben Pladek: Speculative fiction is coming to our Watershed Reading, Saturday May 23 at 7 pm

poster from Art Lit Lab's facebook page

B. Pladek@bpladek· May 19

got my most anticipated 2026 read from @littlepuss.net today & I’m pumped for the moon prism power make-up of it all mecha nonsense w Lispector footnotes & buckwild incantatory typography, yes pls

Purple cover of plastic prism void by violet allen

truly wild incantatory typography inside the book

B. Pladek@bpladek· May 10

sometimes the abandoned picnic ground is a liminal space

B. Pladek@bpladek· May 2

Wisconsin spring is my favorite green

B. Pladek@bpladek· Apr 29

& yet: my students/colleagues remain wonderful, & in strange synergy I finished a notebook tonight. I get to start another tomorrow. onto pastures new

a written-in notebook in scratchy cheap ballpoint pen, my favorite type

B. Pladek@bpladek· Apr 23

one of my favorite portraits of early summer, from Glenway Wescott's 1924 novel The Apple of the Eye. I love hyperlocal nature writing, & describing horses as "mahogany" against green fields is so strikingly true of June in Wisconsin.

3. SUMMER CONVERSATIONS
Like the breaking of a dream, spring vanished. The pearl air, and the moisture and melancholy richness, and corollas of wet wax, and tart aromas, and the languorous dew, and dusk falling all afternoon, and the mist—their season was over. Disappearing, they uncovered a bright land in rectangles of graduated green, with trees immobile in straight lines like fountains of vegetation. Meadows of small flowers in flat colours—mullein, mustard, blueweed, and sweet clover; crowds of bees, glistening and mechanical. It was June, the morning month, trodden by bronze cattle, horses of mahogany. Slowly the eminent, poised sun arose, and sank deliberately.

B. Pladek@bpladek· Apr 21

Auden's "In Memory of Ernst Toller" been jangling in my head lately "but existing is believing / We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving."

In Memory of Ernst Toller
The shining neutral summer has no voice
To judge America, or ask how a man dies;
And the friends who are sad and the enemies who rejoice
Are chased by their shadows lightly away from the grave
Of one who was egotistical and brave,
Lest they should learn without suffering how to forgive.
What was it, Ernst, that your shadow unwittingly said?
O did the child see something horrid in the woodshed
Long ago? Or had the Europe which took refuge in your head
Already been too injured to get well?
O for how long, like the swallows in that other cell,
Had the bright little longings been flying in to tell
About the big friendly death outside,
Where people do not occupy or hide;
No towns like Munich; no need to write?
Dear Ernst, lie shadowless at last among
The other war-horses who existed till they’d done
Something that was an example to the young.
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.
It is their tomorrow hangs over the earth of the living
And all that we wish for our friends; but existing is believing
We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving.

B. Pladek@bpladek· Apr 17

husband took a pic tonight that’s probably the coolest I will ever look, thanks horrible 2026 Milwaukee floods I guess? also pictured: stairs to nowhere

middle-aged trans man sits by flooded river

B. Pladek@bpladek· Mar 16

teaching a Romanticism class in the fall again and keep thinking about how we're doing PBS's "England in 1819" as a checklist www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45118/...

England in 1819

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

B. Pladek@bpladek· Mar 1

1. offsite reading on Thursday night w a ton of rad SFF writers:

Proxima arcanum reading, current space at 421 north Howard, doors 5.30 pm

B. Pladek@bpladek· Feb 24

The end of "Scars Poetica," the penultimate poem in Patricia Smith's magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder:

I feel like I’ve been collecting answers to the question "what good can poetry do?" for years now, as I think about it a lot and even wrote a historical novel (RIP never sold) kind of about it. It's striking how so many poets respond with some version of Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen." This is Smith's version, from the penultimate poem in her magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder:

"On the F train in New York, a woman was set on fire.
Click for the photo. She stands in the train car, sways
like a bone-tired commuter, fully aflame, alone. It was
decided that the controlled burn was best. All I am is

poet. I am small, just one enfeebled fist, a whimper
beneath the weight. I am seventy years of witness that
poetry can change your life, but changes nothing else.
No unleashed havoc calms to my quatrains, no ghazal

coaxes our earth from her cliff's edge. I write because
it's contrary to kill. Because anemone sounds the way
it does. I write because George Floyd cried out for
his dead mother. I write because she answered him."

B. Pladek@bpladek· Feb 3

having written upwards of 90k, fiction & nonfiction, about-or-thinly-veiled-about my favorite Modernist antifascist wife-guy Bryher (pictured), there's now the possibility I might get to publish a bit of it in essay form this/next year. fingers crossed it happens, & grateful for the chance.