gay beetroot

•this worthless depression of mine••rants•• desi•Muslim•20•she/they

[somerabbitholes]

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*

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 :)

[days-of-reading]

Favourite works of literary theory?

“Against Interpretation” by Susan Sontag

“Against Decoration” by Mary Karr

“The System and the Speaking Subject” by Julia Kristeva

“Word, Dialogue, and Novel” by Julia Kristeva

“Walter Pater’s Eucharist” by Benjamin Taylor

Conclusion to The Renaissance, Walter Pater

“On Beauty and Being Just” Elaine Scarry

“Transmission & the Individual Remix” by Tom McCarthy

“The Laugh of the Medusa” by Helene Cixous

“Sesame: Of Kings’ Treasuries” by John Ruskin

“The Nature of the Gothic” by John Ruskin

“Tradition and Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot

“Days of Reading” by Marcel Proust

“E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction” by David Foster Wallace

“The Art of Fiction” by Henry James

The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner

Real Presences by George Steiner

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction

Heroines by Kate Zambreno

Literary Women by Ellen Moers

[apollosms4nger]

made my little reading rec blog on substack and put out my first post too!

feel free to subscribe bcz its free!

https://apolloreadsthroughme.substack.com/p/introductions-in-july?sd=pf

[thedankmemes]

[cursedwoods]

remember that you're white before you're anything else and this impacts every single way you interact with the world compared to poc

[cursedwoods]

whiteness is a shield for you as a person and its part of your privilege, ignorance on said privilege is complacency and support to white supremacy. a poc saying you have privilege is not an insult but a fact and a lot of you seriously have to think critically for once and question as to why you feel insulted

[20percent-attendance]

Coming back here is so funny after you had a gf like

[sweatermuppet]

being in yr 20s is abt experiencing the worst thing you can imagine & then having to go to the grocery store

[beaft]

characters who view themselves as tools/weapons first and people second... characters who martyr themselves for a cause because they think that's the only way they can be worth something... characters who push themselves past their breaking point again and again and again... characters for whom devotion and masochism are inseparable... characters whose self-sacrifice becomes self-annihilation...... what was my point again? i had a point. anyway.

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

I stopped reading DNIs because 90% of the time they were just fucking inscrutable to me. I’d go to somebody’s page and it would be like “DNI if you’re a COSLA apologist,” so then I would Google COSLA and it was just like “Welp, either things are really heating up in the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities fandom or I still have no idea what the fuck this person is talking about.” Or “DNI if you identify as ANFO.” Okay, well, I definitely don’t identify as Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil, but that’s probably not what you meant (although hey, maybe you did; I obviously don’t know enough about your views on chemical compounds to outright dispute that option).” Like, you have my blessing to hate whatever obscure fandom pairing or super niche kink group you want, but just know I am embracing ignorance on this one and will not be looking that shit up. Peace.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

reading DNIs is like reading conlang-heavy sci-fi

[broke-bruce-wayne]

[sarkos]

[cowpokeprose]

Uh??? The facts abt ur parents??? Whadda hell would u be open to doing more facts abt ur wild parents bc I love them

Sure! They’re very weird.

My dad regularly sings to my mom about how much he loves her while standing exactly in the way of whatever she’s trying to do

My parents didn’t marry until I was 4 and they regularly forget that they’re spouses. They generally refer to themselves as partners

My mom proposed to my dad by yelling at him from a room away that her taxes were fucked and they had to get married to which my father replied “this is how I always dreamed you’d ask me!” and pretending to swoon

My dad appears as an actor in the movie Swoon, supposedly an important piece of queer cinema 

My parents were both punks in their youth

When I came home for thanksgiving with a mohawk, unannounced, my mom started crying because I looked “so handsome” and “just like your dad” and kept petting my head 

My dad only says “that’s my boy” to me when I say something gay about men

My mom and dad have the same taste in women but opposite taste in men

One time we were watching a movie set in Chicago and my mom turned to my dad, and in the most sentimental mom voice, said “Chicago honey! We haven’t been there since the anarchist convention!” 

My dad worked on California’s weed legalization bill

[lou-the-naga-queen]

The anarchist version of gomez and morticia

[hamletthedane]

There’s a lot of excellent examples of the difference between a million and a billion, but here’s my new personal favorite from a conversation I had today:

A million minutes ago was April 2021, the height of the COVID pandemic.

A billion minutes ago was November 121 CE, the height of the Roman Empire.

[flootzavut]

There's no ethical way to be a billionaire.

[0fficelady]

some days you are possessed by the spirit of posting. some days you just get on here reblog one post nod respectfully at your mutuals and get off

[sharkgirldick]

Girl knight looking for a Lady to serve. Experienced in monster slaying. Happy to be an extension of your will in exchange for but a fleeting moment of your lips against mine.

Willing to spar with my shirt off.

Blade length 34", if it matters.

[kaijuno]

[myfashionburden]

heaven gaia spring/summer 2021 couture

[woobifytonysoprano-deactivated2]

we diagnose you with a creeping sense of alienation forever. incurable

[20percent-attendance]

Alright place your bets if im gonna die before july ends or stay alive & watch this movie

[20percent-attendance]

Im alive now i must watch this