Sunday Bookmarks 09//22
Hey friends, welcome back to Sunday Bookmarks. I hope you were able to find rest during September. It feels like the world continues to move at an unfathomable speed, but turning away from some of the less pressing noise, has been helping me, just an inch, this month. Today’s letter is full of brilliant reads, two great books and many other articles, and a joyful essay about embracing cringe music habits. Enjoy!
READING // SHORT FORM
Again this month I find myself reading two books that are aware of one another. I wrote briefly on instagram last week, that Elaine Castillo’s essays and Siri Hustvedt’s newest non fiction book felt like they were sparring in my mind, and that it was reason enough for me to endorse cheating on your monogamous book habits. Well this week it has happened again.
I am having a truly awful time with sleep at the minute, the hours between midnight and seven am feel utterly endless. Once i eventually give up on real rest, i usually start reading, around three. Short stories work well for the middle of the night brain, because you only need to hold onto a narrative thread for a short time and misremembering a character’s name isn’t so big a deal if they’re leaving in a few pages. I am part way through An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao, a book downloaded from my library app. It was on TBR for a reason, what specifically that was, I can’t remember. My nocturnal reads are dictated by two things: availability to read them on my kobo, and length of the book so I can feel satisfied after a couple of nights. I quite enjoy the randomness this creates given so much of my daylight reading is governed by deadlines and book stacks.
An Unrestored Woman was published in 2016 but the interconnected stories concern themselves with the months following the partition of India and modern day Pakistan in 1949. I always say I ignore historical fiction, but I see goodreads tagged this title as such, so maybe I have just been assuming a narrow view of the genre. The characters formed with detailed backstories and familial histories re-appear as aunts, neighbours or passerby’s in another’s. That richness gives depth to relatively short encounters with each of the women Rao studies.
Also, Jill from Goodreads said: “There were so many unknown words that left the stories in gaps. I appreciate that the author put a glossary in the back of the book but I didn’t want to constantly stop and look up what words meant in the middle of a story. It just became too much of a barrier for me to connect with these stories.” so if you, unlike Jill, want to read about things that don’t make you the main character, and are interested in stories that examine the westernised revision of partition history, through the lens of women’s grief, intimacy and desire, Rao has it for you.
I also started listening to Burning My Roti, which is a contemporary memoir with unexpected interview elements, commenting on modern British Indian identity. It centres a lot around Sharan Dhaliwal’s experience as a queer woman, which Rao writes into her characters from seventy plus years ago too. This memoir looks at the multiple oppressions Dhaliwal faces, and attempts to trace, and then deconstruct the histories of much of the harm that comes from both whiteness, and inside her community too. She looks at body hair, eating disorders and homophobia. She speaks to artists, other writers and community activists about the future, what must change and reflects with them on the traumas they’ve endured. It is providing such a perfect companion to the historical short stories, if not a depressing sense that much of what Rao’s women were fighting for during that period of unrest, still pervades today.
READING // LONG FORM
I love when twitter sends older pieces to the front of my view. I am on the internet a lot, and still I am unable to keep up with the barrage of content it produces. This history of fashion piece by Sam Miller for Alma was truly a ride. They rehash the main talking points of a documentary (that I must now watch) on the nazism and anti semantic beliefs of the iconic 00’s brand, Von Dutch.
Emmanuel Onapa writes with such vigour, on a shared interview between himself and artists Jenn Nkiru & cktrl. The trio dynamic was so refreshing to read, understanding creatives interacting with each other, their histories and their futures, was brilliant. It is not often you get such a feel for the (virtual, in this case) room, through written work. These conversational type meetings with more than one person being subjected to an interview, feel more commonplace at panels or festivals, but Onapa’s construction of the space within the article felt alive.
My friend Catriona wrote this brilliant piece for Mashable, on the inaccessibility of future tech, unpicking why instagram/ meta’s obsession with video content will isolate thousands of disabled users.
Gunerica produces some of my most thought about reads. The writers they commission often have such inventive ledes to open their stories, I am left re reading just the opening again and again. Andrew Morgan’s piece is no exception. There are copious stories on gun violence in the US, and multiple perspectives are valid, but I hadn’t read Morgan’s before now. To go behind the curtain on what it is like to be forced to desensitise yourself and the students you oversee, to the absolutely real and ongoing threat to life you face, each time you walk into a classroom, is really something. Moreover it is Morgan’s reflections on growing up in a ‘gun person’ household, and how proximity, no matter how tangential, impacts our ability to remain hopeful, that target me.
BLOWING MY OWN TRUMPET //
In September I wrote for myself a-lot, a practice I am trying to return to. Its hard to detach writing for pay-checks from writing for pleasure, for the self. But i am trying, and endeavouring not to publish those pieces as thinly veiled diary entries either.
For The Spill, I wrote a personal essay that had been brewing since I read Rebecca May Johnson’s memoir cum social commentary, Small Fires. She published it a couple of months ago and it truly lit something underneath me, to get back in my kitchen and make some things I know I can. It is a musing on finding joy in sickness, missing having my mum close and always a deep love for my partner, Tom.
I interviewed Ione Gamble earlier the summer, and the results are live on Bookish now. We talked about internet sickness, the future of feminism and the exposure involved when writing about illness.
For the Yahoo News US unearthed series, that centres under reported angles of climate change, I reported on the ways climate change will impact disabled people. It was weeks of research and revisions but I am really proud of this ‘hard’ journalism piece. It also garnered my first hate email, woohoo! A man called Steve called it “pure drivel”, so read it and let me know if Steve is right.
For Screenshot, I spoke to current and previous university students who are studying whilst trying to manage their chronic illnesses. The thread that ran through so many of the conversations I had, which is the same for most other times we talk about institutional based access needs whether it’s work or school or university, is that they are extra. By design these spaces are not built for us, and your ability to succeed is based on sheer luck of those who hold power, in this case, lecturers and faculty, having an up to date understanding of disability. And moreover, those same individuals to be prepared to bend the rigid system they too are working in, to properly serve their students. Like much of the UK right now, the education system is a bin fire.
LIVING THROUGH //
For the love of singing along
Do you want to know what I am listening to right now? The soundtrack to The Greatest Showman. I listen to it more often than you might think. I shout at Alexa when I am home alone and I cannot, for the life of me, get out of bed. I blare it in my headphones when I need to do chores around the house. When I need to just WRITE something, and stop thinking about what I am writing. That’s cringe right?
It is two fold. I know The Greatest Showman is a film that has garnered rightful critique for rewriting history. PT Barnum, the movie’s star, was in fact an awful person, in part due to his work making the proliferation of the freak show, the humiliation of disabled people and their experiences for ‘entertainment’. It is also just a badly acted, blockbuster movie, loved by people who don’t take film seriously - it’s me, I am that person.
I could give you the reasons why I like the music, despite the fact musical theatre type tunes are written to evoke emotions and purposefully get stuck in your head. I spent the best part of a year blasting these songs on repeat when I nannied two boys who loved to sing. They were picky, we had three albums on repeat: Wanted on Voyage by George Ezra, The Greatest Showman and Infest by Papa Roach - best not to ask why well mannered five year olds loved to scream CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES, but they couldn’t get enough. I would occasionally slip in new songs to the rotation, it had to be repetitive, bouncy, easy to remember. I tried Bennie and The Jets - Elton John, Murder on the Dance Floor - Sophie Ellis Bexter, Alot of Abba, Californation - Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I inadvertently encouraged the musical minds of these two young boys to embrace the cringe.
What's cringe to me, might not be to you. I am talking in generalities, which is always dangerous. The proliferation of online culture has created a democratisation of taste making. It is no longer only critics at broadsheet papers declaring what is and isn’t - in vogue. It is the internet. Fan culture has grown exponentially. There are swathes of young people who worship at the feet of Harry Styles, and an entirely different corner of the internet who consider his work unlistenable. I don’t think Harry Styles is cringe. Cool as the antithesis to cringe is a construct, obviously. Plenty of people find Styles’ cool. But those people also tend to construct part of their online presence or offline personality around their love of a particular musician. Perhaps it is the openness of which fandoms show their joy, that makes it hard to suggest that their musical love is cringe worthy? But declarations of obsession and undying love for a singer or an album, isn’t anything I have felt before.
It is all fuelled by social media aesthetics and creation of a persona that paints a person in what is assumed as the best light. I am sure If I asked people who’ve never met but follow my instagram, what kind of music I listen to, they would not think - Hugh Jackman’s circus themed power ballads.
But there is assumption in the things you like, from the person you present online, and that translates into physical, offline existence too. My boyfriend is a music snob. He will tell you otherwise but from the moment I met him, I knew he would not appreciate an Adele sing along or a shower rendition of let it go. So perhaps by osmosis, I have skewered my music taste away from cringe in the five or so years we’ve been together. His taste is varied, and to my ears, at least some of it, is just shit. I am sure he will argue against that, but we have developed a rhythm of what he can and can’t play out loud. There is an entire section of his beloved records that is designated for ‘times Hannah isn’t home’. We do have some shared loves, artists we have discovered together or songs that represent milestones in our life together. But we do not, for the most part, bond over music.
Recently I have thought that maybe I am just not a music person. I definitely used to be, or I thought I was. I had favourite bands, went to festivals, danced at gigs. I had many eras; boy bands, indie rock, late night jungle, anything to stay up to 6am to . But I turned to my boyfriend last night and said, I think I would be okay if I didn't go to a concert again. That isn’t because I don’t enjoy live music, I still remember gigs years later that took me to another world. Seeing Alt J with a group of childhood friends the week before I took off on a year long backpacking trip; Watching Elton John whilst hugging my mum; dancing in the pouring rain to Florence and Machine; Lost out of my mind on a final festival night screaming to the Black Keys with my best friend. Reuniting with three girlfriends I have loved for years, in the grounds of a London garden, laughing to Lewis Capaldi.
Maybe that is a rash statement to say never again, but the thought of it makes me feel overwhelmed. The pandemic fundamentally changed life for so many people, me included. The idea of, even in the distant future, being in a room with that many bodies, sort of terrifies me? My illnesses often manifest in what feels like a random accumulation of symptoms, but intolerance to noise arrived at the start of the pandemic and it hasn’t gone away. It took me a long time to recognise it as a problem, because spending so much in isolation, noise became less of a problem. In the years preceding the pandemic, I stopped listening to music for the most part, not with intention, more just a craving for silence which contradicted a need to be distracted at all times. Music wasn’t enough to stop me feeling, hurting throbs, aches, shudders. I moved to obsessively listening to audio books, podcasts, shipping forecasts; just noise of people talking.
But, during those months inside, I tried to listen again. My boyfriend and I developed many silly rituals to get us through the weeks. We instated the good times, which started on a Thursday at 4pm, and a Friday after lunch. We poured summer fruits squash into our water bottles, we split an ice cream, or a pack of biscuits, and we played music whilst we worked. I say we, but it was him who played DJ. I requested a feeling instead of a song. I want to dance, I said. I want to scream along. I want to know the words. I started to realise that music, for me, was so much about singing. About expressing the day, breathing out, reciting the lyrics that lay dormant in the back of my mind since I was fourteen. I noticed in those good time hours, that I cared less about listening and more about embodying the songs I was hearing. I noticed a change in how and when I played music. Tom and I went down youtube rabbit holes, looking up the theme songs to early 2000’s TV shows, CD’s our parents played in the car, albums that we begged for at HMV. He relinquished his own tastemaking, for the sake of nostalgia, during a time when we were all desperate to time travel. I started taking my phone into the bathroom, playing music whilst sitting in the shower, having a two minute dance whilst I brushed out the knots in my hair. I took over in the good times, forgot about my own embarrassment for the sort of music we were supposed to like, and just played the things that made me feel.
I know when Tom reads this, he will say that the music he listens to makes him feel something, which I am sure is true. I am not attempting to say cheesy music is the best music or that singalongs are the only way to enjoy it but just that, for a while, I stopped listening to music because I didn’t feel like it did anything but rattle my brain cells around. It either hurt my head, or failed to stimulate me enough to forget about what I was feeling somewhere in my life. Then as I tried to regain a connection to the music I thought I liked, I realised a lot of it was just social conformity. I had many musical eras as a teenager precisely because I didn't know what parts of it I really, truly liked, for myself.
Those two boys I looked after had no concept of cool, they didn’t know that Abba could only be enjoyed ironically, or Papa Roach was for dads and angsty pre-teens, they just loved to sing, to move, to writhe with joy in the back seats of the car on the way to swimming lessons. They felt music in their bones, and I embraced it with them. I know now that the music I listened to with them was the most me I felt.