Hello and belated Happy New Year, I am coming to you feeling slightly more refreshed than I was at the actual turn of the year. I vowed to spend January hibernating and so far it has been paying off. I have stopped making to do lists for the weekend, taken as many work items off my plate as possible, and stayed inside most days (Although that may be less of a choice and more of a necessity given the ongoing circumstances). I am reviving the newsletter for 2022, so welcome to the first edition. I will endeavour to send one free Substack newsletter a month, and the weekly rendition continues to be found on my Patreon. In case you are new here, Sunday Bookmarks is my monthly cultural round up, with a healthy dose of disability justice. I tell you what I’ve been reading (in book and article form), listening to and living through. So let’s get into this month:
READING // LONG FORM
I am having a bumper start to the reading year, which is a relief given ever other part of my personal life is seemingly not staying in line. I have noticed a penchant I have for books that teach me something obscure, and mostly useless. That is not to say I won’t some day need to know about Biker Culture in 1970’s London, or the ways in which I can preserve Japanese fruits, but it seems unlikely in my immediate future at least. A mark of a well told narrative is an author’s ability to entice me into something I should have no interest in. It is easy to turn pages when the protagonists could be me, either young and lost, or sick and lonely, I am bound to their stories as alternative versions of my own. It becomes harder to retain my interest when tangents appear without much notice, but those are the books I seem to love the most this month.
Box Hill by Adam Mars Jones is a short novel following an eighteen year old boy who falls, literally, into a coercive and somewhat abusive relationship with a older man, set in the context of Motorcycle culture and covert queerness at odds with masculinity. It was obscure, and funny and horribly sad by the end, but a story full of specifics, and that is the part that will linger.
I am still thinking about The Book of Difficult Fruit that I finished a couple of weeks back. I enjoy cooking, and am trying to reignite that this year, but I have no desire to pickle or preserve, or learn how to forage on a California trail, and yet, I was enamoured by Kate Lebo’s ability to merge the stories of such foods to her own life. This collection of essays in an A to Z in fruits that you may not have heard of. Throughout she makes deft points on the marketisation of some of these ‘exotic’ fruits, the impact of colonialism on our produce and our taste buds, whilst talking earnestly about the breakdown of a relationship, estranged family ties and learning to garden. Again, it was full of specifics and tangents, of personal stories from a person I do not know, and yet will now think of every time I garnish a drink with a juniper berry, or rifle through the produce at my local asian supermarket.
READING // SHORT FORM
We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids by Joshua Hunt (also available as audio). A stark read uncovering a more obscure (in the sense that mainstream American journalism hasn’t made it there yet) part of the opioid crisis. Hunt is a Native American writer, and talks here of the socio economic and geographic predisposition his homelands of Alaska had to the kind of exploitative practices that allowed the prescription drug market to run rampant.
This Brand is Late Capitalism. Rachel Connolly, whose writing I can only look on in awe at, writes so brilliantly on the ever present argument for there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, an adage I for one, am sick of hearing. She takes other writers to task on the missing element of so many of those think pieces denouncing Glossier or Our Place pans as a cult. Is it really naivety of customers being conned into thinking they’re buying a new life, or is it more well off people justifying the consumerism of slightly less well off people, and thus capitalism as a system we (including the we with money and time) are unable to disrupt.
(image via New Statesman)
New Statesman interview: Ben Okri: Climate change and oppression are born of the same “devouring instincts”. An interesting interview with author and thinker, Ben Okri, dissecting the role of people like him, and in general contemporary writers, in the current state of climate breakdown. He deftly explains what many other academics in the Climate movement have been attempting to make mainstream, that human and nature are one and the same, and must be tackled as such, although he does not suggest (As others previously have) that we wait and tackle one at a time.
LIVING THROUGH //
I am almost entirely lost for words when it comes to the current state of affairs in the UK, although the Netherlands isn’t a great deal better either. I have run out of ways to ask people to care about the lives of disabled folks, and those most vulnerable to this virus. I am sick of reading about the concern for the mental health of non disabled people as a reason to lift protections, as if the mental health of disabled people who have shielded, lost medical appointments and been told their life is worth less in the face of deadly disease, is somehow not valid either. I write for publications who publish ‘post pandemic’ dating advice, I have friends who go to bars and clubs all weekend long and follow people online who complain about being ‘over it’, and I am still coming to terms with the fact I seem to be living in an alternate reality.
It is always easier said than done, and that has become so obvious in the past two years. You all say the right things but when it comes to actions, none of you care. When the journalists and general faces of the online, who write about social justice issues, who scream feminism and abolition are refusing to acknowledge disabled lives as marginalised in the current context, you really have to question what integrity is. They build careers on their support for issues that affect people with less privilege but cannot fathom curtailing their weekend plans to save lives. They want to defund the police but call Boris Johnson’s rules reasonable. They say don’t trust the government but suggest any irresponsible actions are the fault of the legality, the missing restrictions. It seems lots of people want both: For the pandemic to end but for no more protective rules. For people to care about each other but not take personal responsibility.
You can criticise the government and distrust their voices and still act as if we are living in a pandemic, because, we are. I am yet to find a valid reason for someone to need to go to a nightclub, but you all seem to believe it so. I can however explain the hundreds of appointments disabled kin have missed because of the ways others act. I have a friend who walks a 4 hour round trip to their specialist because the underground is too dangerous, too full of people who frankly do not give a shit. Friends who have missed life changing diagnosis, who’ve ended up in A and E because their GP’s are overrun or who have avoided help all together because nowhere seems safe. When you say you want to get back to normal, do you not think that disabled people do too? Do you think people enjoy getting sicker at home, without friendship or connection, without access to whatever it is you all believe is so vital to your existence that you can’t live without it, because trust me when I say, we’re dying to too.
This letter is dedicated to Lizzie, RIP. Their legacy lives on in The Access Documents for Artists.
Catch you all on another part of the internet,
Hannah x