5 Things I Consumed Last Week (love it if we made it)
on i who have never know men, region-beta paradox, laughing with kafka, windup and truth be told
Hello Nello!
I spent this weekend reading in silence at a quaint cozy place near a beach and it was the most surreal feeling. Silence seems almost luxurious after the daily humdrum and chaos, I wish I could experience it more often. The title for this issue is inspired by a song by 1975 - an anthem of angst against everything wrong with the modern world. See for yourself!
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I Who Have Never Known Men | Jacqueline Harpman
Forty women live in a prison cell. The world as we know it doesn’t exist anymore. People have been imprisoned and the guards are watching them non-stop. How did the women find themselves there?
I got this one in my last book swap and my mind = blown. Dystopian in genre, the novel is a multi-faceted layered examination of matters grounded in reality.
The prose is exquisite, the dialogue is sparse, poetic and cryptic. There is a tranquility and a subtlety that reminded of The Handmaid’s Tale and even the hardest moments are described almost melancholically. It is a treatise on the nature of humanity - what makes us human in the absence of society and in the face of a dehumanising futility.
Unhappy medium | Maybe Baby
When things are bad-bad, people are too busy dealing with them to write into an advice column. When things are medium-bad, meanwhile, people are full of immobilizing qualifications: gratitude, perspective, acknowledgments that things could be worse.
I am sure each one of us starts to act quickly when deadlines are close, when the do or die situation becomes serious enough for us to work and this is exactly what region-beta paradox is. It describes the phenomenon whereby, sometimes, a person may benefit from being worse off versus just mildly off, because being worse off may mobilize them to take action to address the problem, whereas being mildly off can lead them to stagnancy.
Penned beautifully by Haley with anecdotes from her personal life, read this issue to find out more about it.
Laughing with Kafka | David Foster Wallace
An essay written by DFW in 1998, it speaks volumes about how Kafka’s work is funny and people simply don’t get it. Read the intro for yourself.
For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication -theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called “compression” — for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.”
WiNDUP | Animated short film
WiNDUP chronicles the bond between an ailing daughter named Kiki and her father. The story is an emotional one, as Kiki’s father repeatedly attempts to connect with his unconscious daughter by playing a windup music box of her favorite tune. It’s a story about the relationships between people and the lives we share.
Truth Be Told | The Whole Truth
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Hey have you read about system thinking ?