What I read this month...
Books, articles, prose, poetry...a little update on my corner of consumption !
BOOKS
- Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
- Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
- Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis w/ Cornel West & Frank Barat
- High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practice that Saved my Life on Death Row by Damien Echolls
- The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart by David Greig
- Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady (Penguin Modern Classics) by Clarice Lispector (with Katariba Dodson’s translation)
ARTICLES
- Who’s Afraid of a Spatchcocked Chicken? by C Pam Zhang (EATER)“It came to feel of a piece: that an empire unwilling to connect a piece of meat to the living animal from which it came would also refuse to connect the education of a mind to the needs of a body; would serve, with exemplary manners, each course over my left shoulder while ignoring, on the other side, centuries of colonial hypocrisies at home and abroad.”
- The Protagonist Is Never in Control by Emily Fox Kaplan (Guernica)“One evening in college, three thousand miles away from the bad man, you’ll be sitting with your roommate on her bed, talking. You’ll love your roommate fiercely; she is grounded and kind and very, very smart. You’ll trust her. You’ll mention — offhand, almost — that you know you’re an angry person, that it’s something that you’re figuring out how to deal with.She’ll look at you, bewildered. “I don’t think of you as an angry person,” she’ll say. She’ll pause. “Like, at all.”You’ll blink at her, swallow.”
- Negative Criticism by Sean Tatol (Point Mag)“Even though Ulysses is one of the best books I’ve ever read, the pleasure of reading it is but one particular enjoyment within the perpetual appreciation of literature, which itself is an enrichment of one’s relationship to language, thought and life. As Richard Howard puts it, literature, sentiment, enjoyment, even love, require an education”
- I Can Feel My Heart Beating Just Fine On My Own by Scaachi Soul (Hazlitt)“Everyone’s wearing their heart on their sleeves with their tech watches. As I write this, a man next to me has somehow closed his activity ring, even though we boarded this flight at 8 a.m. and have been stagnant in the sky for hours. I wonder if it’s an accomplishment, or just a reminder of the little obligations he’s set in front of himself. His watch is the story of duty where there should be none.The body already keeps the score. I don’t need to do it too.”
- They Put a Bow on It Add a neatly tied ribbon and poof! It’s $100 more. By Laura Pitcher (The Cut)
- Jack Antonoff: “I’ve never made anything hoping everyone would like it” by Shaad D'Souza (The Face)“You make what you make, because you believe in it, and sometimes you get your flowers right away and sometimes it takes a minute.”
- Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do by A.W. Ohlheiser (Vox)“But really, Guru says, the key to getting Gen Z better prepared for a world full of online scams might be found in helping younger people understand the systems that incentivize them to exist in the first place.“Why do these scams happen, who is behind them, and what can we do about them? I think those are the last synapses that we need to connect,” she said.”
- Millennial meme marketing must end written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci (Embedded)
“The issue is when capitalism—specifically, brands and public figures—try to brazenly profit off of these things while severely underestimating the creativity required. What we get are lazy, empty invocations of the lowest common denominators of our culture, pitched to a person who doesn’t really exist.” - Stability by Jennifer Hilderbrant (The Masters Review)“As the heart knows how to beat and blood knows to flow, I knew this truth without words. But the night my husband died, I didn’t know if it was possible. That night, I believed my center of gravity was on its way to the crematorium.”
- “Girl” trends and the repackaging of womanhood by Rebecca Jennings (Vox)
“A single video goes viral, some people start talking about it, the media picks it up, and suddenly it’s used as fodder for the kind of lowest-common-denominator broadcast news segments where old people marvel about how foreign young people have become — and it’s not a coincidence that it’s almost always young women they’re referring to here — even though the thing they’re talking about isn’t even really happening on a scale that’s by any measure newsworthy.” - What Does It Mean When We Call Women Girls? by Robin Wasserman (Lit Hub)
“Girl attunes us to what might be gained and lost in the transformation, and raises a possibility of reversion. To be called “just a girl” may be diminishment, but to call yourself “still a girl,” can be empowerment, laying claim to the unencumbered liberties of youth. As Gloria Steinem likes to remind us, women lose power as they age. The persistence of girlhood can be a battle cry.” - Everyone Is a Girl Online by Alex Quicho (Wired)
“In the post-platform age—where the base architecture of social engagement is still predicated on behavioral capture to achieve ever more accurate advertising—the subject of the Young-Girl has not become obsolete. She has only been intensified. Every ordinary person has to, in some way, pay attention to their semipublic image, even if that image is one that resists appearing on a platform.”
SHORT PROSE (fic and creative nonfic)
- Birdhouse by Annie Zhang (via Island Magazine, issue 169)
“The midwife cried out when she saw you and the nurses shrank away. But I stroked your little head with my finger, and you opened your beak and made your first gurgling sound. Love quivered through me. It was a fearsome feeling.” - Gifts from a Harsh Continent by Tehnuka (via Island Magazine, issue 169)
“We have the privilege, on Erebus, of quantifying out environmental impact in the transfer of heat from the warmth of the hut to melting water; in the weights of recycling, rubbish and faeces scrawled in permanent marker onto each container so that the helicopter’s load can be accurately calculated. In this rarified setting we are confronted with the costs normally hidden from us in an urban environment, knowing we only export them in order to protect the local environment…”
POETRY
- Lullaby by Debbie Lim
- Dressing for the Burial by Danusha Laméris
- When I am dead, my dearest by Christina Rossetti
Until next time…
Flick. x
