Hello again friends and comrades,
I'M BACK! It’s been a while since I sent my first ever newsletter on Sept 22, 2019, halfway into my first master's. My second, Ecology, Culture & Society, is kicking off next week.
Previous seasons of this newsletter have been a chronicle of almost everything I read, from uni and elsewhere, books, articles, etc. I've decided to do things a little differently this time around.
There's was a peculiar side effect to including everything. I felt this pressure to mention every news cycle or crisis that was happening in the world (like the need to post on social media to show that you, too, are on the "right side"?). I was probably just sharing articles that you also saw on Twitter.
For season 3, I'm only going to write about the texts I'm reading for my degree as well as whole books. The rest of the world will seep in, how can it not, but this isn't a running commentary on the news.
As before, I send this fortnightly on Sunday and I don’t collect any data.
Highlights of the books I've read since the last newsletter.
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn
Juanicu warned me, “Sleep faceup! If a jaguar comes he’ll see you can look back at him and he won’t bother you. If you sleep facedown he’ll think you’re aicha [prey; lit., “meat” in Quichua] and he’ll attack.” If, Juanicu was saying, a jaguar sees you as a being capable of looking back—a self like himself, a you—he’ll leave you alone. But if he should come to see you as prey—an it—you may well become dead meat.
How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things ... Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
...until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it – grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift. We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings.
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Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami with Sam Bett and David Boyd (Translators)
Read on the recommendation of Zarina at The White Pube. A very strange read, in the best of ways.
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Mr. Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo and Autumn by Ali Smith
Both as audiobooks, thanks to the recent discovery that Libby works in the UK too (No excuse to use Amazon). Books have a different flavour listened to. I enjoyed them both. Prefered Evaristo. Her characters are fantastic, as everyone who has read Girl, Woman, Other will know.