5 Things I Consumed Last Week (essay kaise 💁🏼♀️)
on keeping a notebook, shooting an elephant, don't eat before reading this, walking and men explaining things
Unlike last week, this week has been full of activities and reading. I maneuvered my way through 3-4 books, slacking my way through first few chapters of some and casually scrolling others while I also made time to read some long form pieces, hence it’s essay week this time.
Quite a few of you joined this newsletter last week, welcome welcome! This issue’s recommendations are going to be a little harsh on the eyes to read cause it’s only long-form but bear with me, I keep sharing short form articles, blogs, podcasts and other stuff too. I urge you to read at least one of these pieces during the weekend, and let it simmer.
Men Explain Things To Me | Rebecca Solnit
I have been reading about women and literature by women quite a lot this year and this essay came up in some podcast I was listening to. Anecdotally, Rebecca’s essay is one of the contributors to the origin of the word ‘mansplaining’.
Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
As a woman, I have experienced mansplaining in nuances - extremely banal situations which we don’t talk about, especially being in corporate where I am told what to do even when I don’t need it. Rebecca’s essay is a primer to understand all those trivial situations where intentionally or unintentionally, men appear to be didactic even when they don’t have to. In simple terms, Nobody’s asking for it.
On Keeping a Notebook | Joan Didion
Joan Didion was in news this month since her personal belongings went on auction and were sold for a fortune which made me traverse through her writings.
I am a notebook hogger and I own far too many journals than I should which are scattered with random notes, recipes, ideas and scribbles that make no sense. Or in Didion’s words:
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
From her 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem comes a wonderful essay, originally written nearly half a century ago, the insights at its heart apply to much of our modern record-keeping a.k.a. commonplace books.
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.
Don’t Eat Before Reading This | Anthony Bourdain (paywalled)
If you don’t know who Anthony Bourdain is, watch this trailer.
At my book swap event last week, someone got his book Kitchen Confidential to exchange (I did not get it, if you are curious) and on digging I found out this New Yorker piece (it is paywalled but you can read free articles, unless you have exhausted your limit this month on New Yorker), in which Bourdain sharpened his teeth on lax restaurant practices which led directly to this best-selling memoir, and to everything that followed his stardom.
What really makes the essay pop is Bourdain’s unmistakable voice. There’s lots of bad-boy posturing but it’s all mixed in with a sensualist’s genuine appreciation for and love of food. Nobody wrote more passionately and unabashedly about food like him.
Anthony Bourdain will be be remembered as a chef, a writer, a television personality, a filmmaker, a world traveler and a geek.
Shooting an Elephant | George Orwell
When Orwell writes, it has to be something about writing or else about the government. Shooting an Elephant is as literal as it sounds - it is - an account of killing an elephant but it is also about how those in power act when they are aware that they have an audience.
It is about how so much of our behaviour is shaped, not by what we want to do, nor even by what we think is the right thing to do, but by what others will think of us. It is a narrative essay about Orwell's time as a police officer for the British Raj in colonial Burma but that’s just one vantage point, there are layers to it - as much as you can unreel.
Walking | Henry David Thoreau
Proclaiming that “every walk is a sort of crusade,” nobody has wrote about walking so much as Thoreau. Though I have mixed reviews on his book Walden (I slept while reading it so many times) and I think a summary would have been enough because he does seem strident at times. I still admire him for the idea he wanted to put forward - sauntering and solitude.
In his 1861 treatise Walking (free ebook), he sets out to remind us of how that primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness.
For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.
Okay, this might burn
When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them — as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon — I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago
It’s not an easy piece to read, much like his other work but definitely something to think about.
Things I’m doing lately
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The Hummingbird🌺