Aww, This Was Sweet! You Kept Them Hanging Though, I Guess They’ll Have To Wait Until Next Time To

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 :)

leftist antisemites are really everywhere on this hellsite making & reblogging their posts like “the Jews have too much power and privilege and actually their very recent genocide was not that bad compared to what my group experiences and antisemitism doesn’t even exist in my country and especially not in liberal spaces”

This should just be a legit popular opinion. He was sweet and lovely in the original series there’s no way he’d become a Death Eater.

unpopular opinion: they did Cedric Diggory dirty in cursed child.

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pink in the night

Oh my gosh, I adore this. He’s super beautiful, thanks for the movie recs as well.

It took me nearly two weeks to figure out who I was picturing as Kai while I was reading. But when I tweeted at Genevieve and she mentioned Chow Yun Fat, that reminded me of Zhang Ziyi (who starred in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with him) and a movie she starred that I sobbed to last night - House of Flying Daggers. This is a long way of saying I remembered this beautiful man who I was in love with back in 2005 and was who I've been picturing as Kai without even realizing.

Everyone please look at Takeshi Kaneshiro who, circa 1996-2007, is the perfect look for Kai:

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That sounds so wonderful! You’re lucky, my room is so small I can’t do anything with it, like there are literally guard toilets in Stirling castle that are bigger than it!

I'm turning one of the corners of my room into a cozy little reading nook, but the fairy lights that I got are so bright that it may not be cozy, and just a rather garish nook

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hey there LGBTQ kids who are also Christian/Jewish! If you feel like you’re disobeying God, questioning your faith, or feel wrong and dirty for loving who you love, there’s this fantastic site I found today called hoperemains that accurately and thoroughly combs through scripture and its (many) mistranslations, validates your orientation, and basically let’s you know that you’re not pissing off God. It’s insanely thorough and after reading through every page on the entire site it’s super helpful. Go check it out!

Me having never broken anything: what the actual hell.

Invisible Library characters as stupid things that I've done

Irene: missed her stop on the train because she was reading not once, not twice but four times on three seperate occasions

Kai: fallen down the stairs of a bookshop because he couldn't see over the top of the pile of books in his hands

Vale: set fire to a science experiment because he was bored

Silver: fallen over laughing and been too drunk to stand up again.

Everiste: missed a train so he burst into tears

Li Ming: went ice skating, fell through the frozen lake and got pnemonia

Ao Shun: got stuck three miles from home in the middle of a thunder storm because he thought he could run faster than a storm

Ao Guang: fallen into the canal because he didn't want to cycle through a patch of mud.

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This is amazing! Your writing is beautiful and it’s so in character for both of them- especially the proposal idea which I love. Also Jesus Christ Irene needs a break! Someone get that woman some chocolates, good books and a lock for her door, dear lord. Thanks for writing this, it made me super happy.

Day one: Holiday

Tags: fluff, light ansgt, hurt/comfort, implied sex

Rating: T

Pairing: Irene x Kai

Holidays whilst working for the Library practically never happened. Unless you were injured or someone that you were close to had died in tragic circumstances, you were expected to work. Sure Irene would compare some of her assignments to being like holidays (procuring a book through legal methods on the south coast of France was simply much nicer than thieving one from a mad scientist in Svalbard,) it was incredibly rare that she would be able to sit down and relax without the knowledge that some task was waiting for her.

And that was true for her current assignment, she knew that she was here purely for talks on the treaty, but staying at a very expensive hotel with very little to do outside of the few talks she’d sat in on for the morning, and a panel that she had the next day, to take questions, then she was free to do as she please.

The idea was to try to inform people of the minutiae of the treaty, but most of the people attending were more interesting in making their own much smaller arrangements. She didn’t mind that too much, it meant more paperwork for her, Kai and Sterrington, but as long as they were being civil, they were all quite happy to let the people who had cards in the game to play, whilst they watched and waited to intervene if necessary.

So far, it hadn’t been necessary, so Irene found herself with a free evening, leaning on the edge of the balcony and watching the sun go down between thin wisps of pale white clouds. The sky was painted with brushes of peach and pink, and when Kai looked over from his balcony (one floor up and to the left) he could have sworn that she was aglow with the light.

“Opposed to a visit, madame ambassador?” He softly called, and Irene startled and looked for his voice before finding him. “I fancy a walk in the gardens if you care to accompany me.”

“How long have you been watching me?” She asked, smiling but crossing her arms across her chest. Kai’s pale skin was turned pink in the sunlight, making him look like he had a healthy flush to him, and his hair shone like the wings of a raven as it soared through a summer sky, a black and blue lustre that she wanted to run her fingers through.

“Long enough to know that I’d rather watch you than the sunset.” He replied. “So, that walk?”

“I’ll meet you in the reception in five minutes.” She said. She already had a thin shawl draped around her shoulders but was barefoot.

She beat him down there and she waited by the reception desk. He made her startle again, she’d been watching the lift but he had taken the stairs. “Something is on your mind.” He said as he offered her his elbow. “What is the matter?”

“Nothing.” She shrugged before hooking her arm around his. “It’s so nice and… peaceful. I cannot believe it really.”

“Different to Paris.” Kai acknowledged. “It is quiet. I… kind of like it.”

“I think I would get bored if every day was like this, but it is nice.” There was a side door through into a restaurant, and then patio doors out into the hotel gardens. “I would get so much reading down at the very least.”

“I never thought I would hear you complain about too much reading.”

“No, not that. I don’t know. I think I am too used to things going wrong.” Kai sneezed as they passed a large lavender bush. Irene broke a twig of it off and tucked it into her pocket, knowing that it would make her wardrobe smell of the flowers. “I keep waiting for something to happen. I am tense and anxious because I am so used to things going wrong.”

“I know the feeling,” Kai said. There was a small fish pond and they stopped by it. Kai looked around before tugging her toward the shade underneath a large tree, where they’d only be found if someone was purposefully searching. “I want to relax, but the longer it stays quiet, the harder it gets.”

“Why do we miss people trying to murder us?” Irene sighed before wrapping her arms around his shoulders and rising to her tiptoes in order to kiss his cheek. 

“Will anyone miss you soon?”

“No, I have the evening to myself.”

“Excellent.” She smiled. “I have you all evening then.”

“You can have me all night too.” He said with an almost cheeky smirk and a knowing look in his eyes. He tightly wrapped his arms around her middle and pulled her to his chest. “One day, we are both going to wake up and we won’t be waiting for the other shoe to drop. We’ll have days where nothing happens and we aren’t scared for when something does.”

“I want that.” She rested her forehead on his shoulder. “I want to be able to… I don’t want to always feel this massive weight on my shoulders that makes me ache to keep going when things are hard. I want to sleep and not have these nightmares. And I want you to make me jump, not because I am expecting assassins, but because you decided to surprise me.”

Kai pressed his lips to the top of her head. “One day, ‘Rene. I promise you all of that one day. And until then, I promise that I’ll be with you when it is assassins, to hold you when you have nightmares, and I am not half bad at massages, I am sure I can deal with the aches.”

Irene snorted, the sound muffled by his shirt. “That sounds like a proposal.”

“Would it be strange if it was?” She took a step back and looked up at him with wide eyes. “I know that we’d have to keep it a secret and that… if anyone found out we could both be in a lot of trouble, and I am not human but… we could come up with something.”

Irene’s lips were soft against his. One of her hands slid up the back of his neck and found a place in his hair as she pressed herself even closer. He could taste the cherry flavoured salve on her lips and smell the lavender in her pocket as he held her as tightly as she held him. He cupped her face, long fingers stroking over her cheeks and then down the lines of her jaw.

He pulled back a mere inch. “So, what do you say?”

“I don’t need it.” She said, shaking her head. “I need you and your promise, and not any bit of paper or shiny rings.” He smiled. “But if you want that, then yes.” He pulled her in for another kiss, pushing her back against the tree that hid the outpouring of emotions. His hands settled on her hips, keeping her pinned as he parted his lips against hers.

“I don’t need that either.” He said, voice a little rough. “I need you. That is all I need. A promise between just us.” He put two fingers underneath her chin and tilted her head back. “Your word and mine, the promise that we will get peace one day.”

“I promise,” Irene said. She felt a little breathless, heart thudding heavy in her chest. She could feel Kai’s too, beating almost in sync, so close together. She untangled her hand from his hair, and set it against his chest, feeling it underneath her fingertips, feeling the way that it was racing because of her. Racing for her. “I swear.”

“And I promise too.” He said, he ran his thumb below her lip, kiss swollen and parted slightly as she tried to catch her breath, drowning in his embrace but craving that sweet fate of his lips on hers again and a night in his arms. “If we ever don’t have to hide, we can maybe change our arrangement. But for now, this, and you, are absolutely perfect, and far more than I could ever ask for.”

When he kissed her it was hot and rough and just a little bit desperate as neither of them held back any emotion. Irene had never been any good with words, at least not when it came to those purveying to a softer side of her.

But she was good with actions.

And Kai didn’t need any words but her promise when he could feel the outpouring of love that she put into her actions. In the way that she grasped a fistful of his shirt above his heart, in the small, soft purring noise when he parted his lips against hers. In the whimpering noise that she made that night as he kissed his way down her body until they were both sweaty and exhausted and curled up against each other, clinging like the other person was the only solid thing in the world, and like something would rip them away if they weren’t careful.

Irene fell asleep with her head on Kai’s chest as her pillow, hair fanned out like a halo, his fingers running up and down her back and with a promise to fight the nightmares away.

‘Yours, always.’

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Gorgeous Ineeffable husbands!

big ol twitter doodle dump bc i never post anything on here oopsies

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