The Internet Personified: All the good things I read online in July
The Internet Personified: All the good things I read online in July
A good month!
This morning, two delightful things: one, a mushroom has sprouted, tender and tall in the potting soil of my curry leaf plant. This karipatta was not doing so well, having developed a bad case of scale, but we sprayed it with soap water and repotted it into a tall terracotta pot and changed its position a bit, and now a tender new shoot is coming out on the bottom branch and this mushroom. Also the scale seems to have been replaced by little black ants who are exclusive to the karipatta: balcony gardeners, is this bad? Should I be killing the ants too?
The second delightful thing was that headrush-y feeling when you’re suddenly certain you’re going to enjoy a book, which in my case is The Virgin In The Garden by AS Byatt. Byatt struck me before as a really good author but maybe a bit ponderous, a bit esoteric for me. I adored Possession once I got into it, but it’s a difficult book, full of clues and tightly plotted but on a very specific subject matter. I mean, it’s incredible, please read Possession but it’s not a light and lazy read. Not that The Virgin In The Garden is, either, but while Possession deals with Victorian poets and two academics trying to solve a mystery, this is the first of a quartet of books, which Byatt wanted to do a Middlemarch with. COME ON! Also we recently subscribed to six months of the London Review of Books (they were having a sale, 12 issues for 12 pounds and all the archives) and Patricia Lockwood had a really good essay in it about AS Byatt so I guess I got influenced by a literary magazine, which is a good way to be influenced, I think. Speeding through this so I can get to the next volume.
This listing of delights for me comes from another book I’m reading—slowly—a collection of tiny essays called The Book Of Delights by poet Ross Gay. Gay talks about small joys and little encounters, one of my favourites is an essay about how he is sitting on the stairs of the shop adjoining his favourite coffee shop and the owner of the shop asks him to move because he might scare the customers (Gay is a tall Black man) and then a few years later the cafe takes over the shop so the stairs once again can be occupied by Gay, which is a delight. (Another is the single review from India that I saw on the page before I linked it above: “One of the worst books ..cant even continue few pages....so dumb..there is no such thing called delight.” Ah, the joy and stupidity of one star reviews!)
Here are the rest of my links! (You can read them by disabling javascript in some cases, using 12ft.io in others or, my new favourite: using Wayback Machine to find previously cached webpages.)
This video review of Soft Animal made me SO HAPPY. Please watch it.
“But this emphasis on individual agency comes with a dark side. If you are the author of your own fate, you are also to blame for your own suffering — no matter how far beyond your control it may seem. Canfield calls it taking 100% responsibility. "A lot of people get cancer," he says. "But I always ask them: Did you eat an organic diet? Did you drink filtered water? You're responsible for maintaining your ignorance. You're responsible for not making enough money to be able to afford the stuff you need to be able to buy." - From How Chicken Soup for the Soul lost its soul by Amanda Chicago Lewis
“I was a little shocked when I scrolled my feed and saw that other people had…different reactions to the news. They seemed to think immediately of the work like someone in the path of a hurricane or a wildfire thinks of their delicate artifacts and good plates. That sounds judgmental, and perhaps it is. I do not mean to judge people for their response to the news. After all, we are seldom our best or highest selves when confronted with the unexpected—and, perhaps it is a human impulse, when given the choice between identifying with the oppressed and identifying with the oppressor, we would like as much as possible to distance ourselves from the party doing the wronging. And so, I see in their responses a means of slipping out of the discomfort of complicity and into the more comfortable role of victim. In grappling with the complexities of the situation, we allow ourselves to also be wronged and betrayed but Munro’s actions toward her daughter. It is a means of resolving the horrible, unbearable tension and displeasure of the idea that we have accidentally loved someone who is, in the modern parlance, bad.” - From what i'm doing about alice munro by Brandon Taylor
“Reading the Book Review is a joyless task because it is mostly so massively, stiflingly dull. There is a sameness and a flatness to the reviews, held as they are to some invisible set of Times “standards,” the most obvious one of which seems to be, “Never be interesting.” A recent review of Anthony Fauci’s memoir, On Call, describes it as “a well-pressed gray flannel suit of a book with a white coat buttoned over it,” as if its dullness is the best thing about it. Other than a mild comment about the overuse of “bureaucratese” (phrases like “proof of the pudding” and “pushing the envelope,” which are simply clichés), the entire “review” by Alexandra Jacobs reads like a dutifully written 8th-grade summary. I have read reviews there by some of the wittiest writers whose prose sparkles elsewhere but who, when transplanted to the hallowed and hollow grounds of the Times, quietly shrivel and hush. To enter the world of the Book Review is to stumble into a boring tea party: everyone has nothing but niceties to murmur to each other, everyone is dropping quotes from Joan Didion and some dead white guys, and everyone’s tea is secretly laced with gin just to keep them going.” - From The NYT Book Review Is Everything Book Criticism Shouldn't Be by Yasmin Nair
“Pigeons have complex inner lives and experiments have revealed that they are even able to get their heads around concepts such as space and time – a surprising feat given that they don't have a cerebral cortex, the wrinkly outermost layer of the brain that humans use to grasp such abstract ideas. More recently, scientists discovered that domesticated pigeons solve certain problems in a similar way to artificial intelligence algorithms, using trial and error to learn to recognise patterns and predict the best solution to a given problem.” - From Why do people persecute city pigeons? by Zaria Gorvet (Ed note: I’ve been very interested in pigeons recently, seeing them for all their beauty and splendor. In fact, the balcony across the corner from ours feeds them regularly and I’ve been spotting one large male often, he’s very distinctive and very pushy and I’ve named him…. Salman Khan.)
A pigeon enjoying a drink of water in Kreuzberg ‘What may seem like obvious trolling becomes grimly more credible in the context of the general hysteria of these groups, in which users satisfy morbid fascinations with hours of unsolicited research. In one forum, “top contributor” Steve admits he has spent six hours on Google Maps “zooming in on the satellite view to see if I can find him”, only to realise he was looking at Lanzarote. Little does he know the map function is not even live (he was probably looking at a three-year-old static image of the wrong part of Spain). Better not to waste valuable time doing the research, Steve: show the chutzpah of the anonymous poster who posited that Jay is “still on the mountain” but is simply “attached to a cactus”.’ - From Jay Slater and the horror of true-crime ghouls by Poppy Sower
“They have a cleaner but no childcare; Neeleman does all the food shopping — kids in tow — and cooks from scratch (they “don’t do” ready meals). Despite the more traditional aspects of their relationship, Daniel is a hands-on father, taking the kids out to the farm and doing all the laundry. The children appear to look after each other quite well too — there are so many that they seem to have become an almost self-sustaining entity. Still, Daniel says, Neeleman sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.” - From Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children) by Megan Agnew (Ed note: this is actually such a sad story.)
“The indignities continued to pile up. Worst of all was when people I thought were already my friends, upon hearing of the project I was undertaking, offered to become my friend. This happened for the first time (but not the last!) at a one-year-old’s birthday party. My intention was to ask a friend to set me up with one of her friends. After realizing her mistake, she vigorously reassured me of our status as already-friends for the next half hour as I glumly munched on birthday cake. She promised to put me in touch with a friend of hers by text. The next week, she invited me to a basketball game. She began the invitation by saying, “Since we are already friends...” - From I Gave Myself a Month to Make One New Friend. How Hard Could That Be? by Kelly Stout (Ed note: Currently, I’m a bit of a Sally No-Mates myself so I really felt this story. I tried Bumble BFF once, matched with a woman who was lovely and we had so much in common! And then I never heard from her again.)
‘Most of a Svalinn dog’s price is derived not from breeding but rather the intensity of its training, which takes two to three years. Once a dog’s personality has been established, partway through that process, it is paired with its future owner — the bank head, the construction magnate, the rancher. Although some want the assurance of a lethal sidekick, Greene says, most are not facing an actual death threat. “People just want their dogs everywhere,” she says. “There’s an entitlement.” Her customers are “high-level people, economically and socially,” with an abundance of disposable income and free time. What’s missing from their life, she says, is “that next-level relationship with an animal.”’ - From Behold the $150,000 Dog by Ben Ryder Howe
POSTSCRIPTS: I went looking for a man in finance. ** Are you satisfied yet? ** I drove a Cybertruck around SF because I am a smart cool alpha male. ** Ignore (almost) all these rules about partying. ** When guys brag about what they eat.**
Thanks for reading! As per uzh, here’s my virtual tip jar to buy me a coffee but like, no presh. Only if you ENJOYED as they say. Only if you can afford it, obvs. I do these as a labour of love and so the love continues.
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!) (Although I’m off Instagram these days, so really, this is the only place I come to chat.)
Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people who still thinking running at a flock of pigeons and making them fly is funny if you didn’t.
Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.