227. READ. LOOK. THINK.
'I’d made it my mission to find/ All the words', work amnesia, the internet's family unit, a status-seeking strategy of last resort.
READ.
‘Fortunately, my body is not her body’ — an intriguing and propulsive extract from my friend Rosie Dastgir’s new book-in-progress.
‘Books, either written or read, are conventionally understood to be pathways to knowledge. But [Percival] Everett claims to suffer from “work amnesia”; after publishing a book, he forgets its contents entirely.’
I’ve been reading Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain by Aniefiok Ekpoudom. It’s a social history of British rap and grime, beautifully written, what must be hours of interviews distilled into lyrical, novelistic storytelling. This is a new area of interest for me after my experience of jury duty, where we were invited by white barristers and police ‘gang experts’ to be suspicious, even terrified, of the defendant because he was in a grime video.
‘Wow, someone responded, I never had the words.
And I didn’t have the nerve to say
That I’d made it my mission to find
All the words, to fill every room with them,
Let them fall over us, the faithful and the faithless,
Like balloons, like confetti, like glitter
Landing with the gentlest touch.’
— From 'Men’s Sexual-Trauma Support Group', a poem by José Antonio Rodríguez.
LOOK.
‘But Tai has worked mostly from the yellow room at the front of the property, saying “it has the nicest light and feels the least haunted”.’
I haven’t actually done any of this yet but my intention is to sort out my writing neck and back pain via this helpful physio instagram.
We made melting moments — remember them? They always seemed like the most deluxe biscuit.
THINK.
Toxic beauty standards are being passed down to ‘Sephora kids’, just as boomer mums passed down weight-based self-hatred to millennials.
How Daddy, Mother, Babygirl, and The Millennial Teen became the internet's family unit.
‘I think people have every right to be angry, but sometimes the calm exposition helps you see more clearly why we need to be angry’ — Judith Butler.
‘… fans seemed to have turned on influencers precisely because of the closeness they once felt. In their posts, anti-fans spoke of feeling “neglected” and “excluded” from influencers’ lives after those influencers chose to increase privacy measures, or stopped responding to comments.’
‘You can think of need for chaos, in a way, like flipping the board over at a societal level… This is a status-seeking strategy of last resort. A person feels stuck and wants to have recognition, but he feels that he cannot be recognized or valued in the current system of cultural norms, rules, and power. And so, to solve that problem, he says: “Let’s tear it all down.”’
‘… the so-called center is actually made up of biconceptuals — people who are conservative in some aspects of life and progressive in others. Voters who self-identify as "conservative" often have significant progressive values in important areas of life. We should address these "partial progressive" biconceptuals through their progressive identities, which are often systematic and extensive.’
‘If it is necessary to act—and it is—it is necessary to think imaginatively, to think out loud and together in a vast and loose-warped weave. It is necessary to dream the cathedral. It will not come from some politician—and certainly not the current bench of multimillionaire Democratic old heads. It will come, if it does, from activists, workers, policy designers, ordinary people, artists, thinkers, all speaking together across time and space.’
The feeling of exhaustion is key to tackling climate change.
How Westminster fell in love with Australian politics (great podcast episode).
Gary Younge sums up the state of Britain in 3000 words for the New York Review of Books.
Jess x