Yess! These All Sound Dead Brill Would Love To Read Or Write This.

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

Also the murders.

Irene: Do you think all of my wanted posters are for petty theft?

Irene: [Several stolen books fall from her jacket]

Irene:

Irene: Well, that’s part of it.

This is fabulous! You’re is hilarious and I love their dynamic, especially Vale leaping from the chair like his life depends on it. Thanks so much for writing.

Hiya, could you do number 1 on the quarantine writing prompts for Silver and Vale please?

“You. Me. Quarantined for two weeks. Anything could happen.”Silver purred, leaning on the arm of Vale’s chosen armchair, well stuffed, near to the window, within arms reach of a coffee table. It was dark red.

“Yeah. I may kill you. Or we may both get sick.” Vale dryly said, he was flipping through a notebook, going over the notes of a recent case that would hopefully be going to trial when the quarantine was over. “Can I help you? You are in my light.” Silver got up, walked around the back of  the chair, dragging his fingers across Vale’s shoulders and back, Vale suppressed a shiver. He sat on the other arm.

“Is this better?”

“If you insist.” He said dryly. “Are you just here as an irritating distraction? Or do you actually have some purpose in being here?”

“This is my home.”

“Yes. You are an incredibly observant man. So you have any other shockingly new observations? Anything else that I may have missed?”

“I like this armchair.”

“I can tell. There were three strands of your hair on it when I sat down, and your slippers in front of it. I assume that the position by the window was intended for you to be able to watch the streets.” Vale said, flipping his page. “You like to know what is going on at all times and the view allows you to see who is coming to your door, and when they leave as well.”

“Anything else?”

“It was recently reupholstered, suggesting that you frequently throw yourself down onto it in a pique of melodramatic fitting.”

“Actually it was because I happen to enjoy bringing my bed partners up to this room.” Vale jumped out of the chair, stumbling over Silver’s slippers. “Oh, good lord you are gullible.” He slipped off the arm and landed over the chair. “No, you were… right the first time.” Vale had dropped his notebook in his rush to get out of the seat and Silver picked it up and held it out to him. “Thank you for the entertainment though.”

Vale snatched the notebook out of his hand. “You disgust me.”

“Would whiskey make you feel better? There’s a drinks cabinet over there.” He waved his hand toward the sideboard at the side of the doors. “If you fancy one, feel free to pour me a glass too.” Vale was going to snap back at him that he wasn't a servant, but a glass of whiskey sounded like a good idea, so he opened up the cabinet and plucked out the first bottle that he found, holding it up to examine it.

“This is good stuff.” Vale mainly said to himself as he unstoppered a bottle and splashed some into a glass.

“Of course it is.” Silver replied with an idle flutter of his fingers. “I have superb taste in alcohol, amongst other…” He watched Vale bend over to put the bottle away again. “Things.” He finished.

“I doubt you have good taste in most things.” Vale replied. He put the glass within Silver’s reach and kept the bottle in his hand. “I will give you this though. Thanks for the drink.”

“You’re welcome!” Silver called as Vale let the door shut with a thunk behind him.

This is unbelievably horrendous, I really didn’t realise you could get it that wrong, I mean wow!

We interrupt today’s anniversary posts to bring you, possibly the worst attempts at a Scottish accent-ever, from Scooby Doo and “A Highland Fling with a Monstrous Thing”

I looked it up on Youtube and they want £1.99 to view it all!!! If there is something I know about the internet if content is online, it is also free somewhere, so here is the full episode including bagpipes and Heilan Coos……

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10tmeg

inspired by (x)

reblog if ur mom is smart and beautiful

You know what’s great- HALLOUMI! It is such a fantastic cheese, I genuinely get cravings for it. Yeah, I understand the French cheese love that you’ve got going on.

Irern: So what’s for dinner?

Vale: [staring at the food he just burnt] Regret.

Ooh, I understand the belly thing, it’s just a strange word. This is great fluff!

Here's a little secret about me, I hate the word belly. You will never ever hear me say it and very very rarely see me writing it, I avoid it whenever possible

"You... Don't have a navel?" Irene said, almost frowning as her eyes glided down Kai's firm muscles, following the trail that her fingers had made as she unbuttoned his shirt.

"A what?"

"Navel? A belly button? Do... Do dragons lay eggs?"

"Of course. What did you expect?"

"I don't know!" She exclaimed. "Have you never been with a human before?" He ruffled his hair. "I thought, well, you implied, that you'd had a good many partners."

"No, I said that I was good in bed. No, there were no humans before you." He said. "And I take it that you've never been with a dragon then?"

"No, only humans... Well, there was a vampire once." She shrugged. "Never a dragon. God, that's weird."

"What's a navel?" She opened her mouth, and shut it again.

"Well it's... Well, do you know what an umbilical cord is?"

"I have vague memories from a biology class well over ten years ago." He said. "Something to do with repro... Do humans not have gen-"

"We do!" Irene interrupted. "I just assumed that your bodies would be identical to humans." There was a side note that she hoped that they were... compatible. "No, its to carry nutrients to the foetus before we are born. Everyone has one, its a small mark on our stomachs."

"Really?" Kai wrinkled her nose. Irene sighed and started on the ties of her dress. "Oh..."

"Shush." She muttered, she let the dress pool to fall at her feet before starting on the strings of her corset. "Men have it so easier with fashion." She said, not unkindly but with a sharp edge.

"I'm more than happy to help." He smirked as Irene managed to get the knot undone and parted the boned fabric at her chest. "Heaven and earth, how many times have you been stabbed?"

"Not that many times? Maybe four or five times?" She said, looking down.

"That one is awful." He said, putting his index finger on her navel.

"That's my navel." She said. "I guess it's technically a scar?"

"But you said it was so you could eat as a baby."

"No, it- have you ever studied human biology? And- oh you- you're messing with me, aren't you?" He grinned and nodded.

"I'll admit that I have never seen one in real life and was unaware that it does in fact look like a scar." He said. "But I'm not that dim."

"You are the worst."

"Yeah, but you like me anyway." He said, stroking her jaw. "It looks weird though."

"Says the man without a navel."

"Technically, not a man."

reblog if you're gay, not gay, slightly gay, or if you just want to launch donald trump into a dying star

there is not a single reason to not reblog this

Ouais has to be pronounced as if you’ve just thrown up in your mouth.

french is for nerds? French is for nerds?! *scream and start beating you with bread*

Don’t give me pain because it’s true