17. Not All Cats Appreciate Alfred Hitchcock
Where Pesto Is Born | Liguria, Italy.
This little gem *allegedly* a la Helena Bonham Carter ..
“I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”
With that in mind, here’s five things I found and loved this week.
1. Window Swap
What a wonderful idea!
2. A book I’m re-reading
Remember: white supremacy is not the shark; it’s the water.
Order Reni’s incredible book here. In June 2020, Reni became the first (FIRST! EVER!) Black British author to top the UK book charts which is quite frankly, disgusting.
Read this great interview with one of my favourite journalists Jia Tolentino on practicing the discipline of hope.
"I’m also suspicious of the way that Not Being Racist is a project that people seem to be approaching like boot camp. To deepen your understanding of race, of this country, should make you feel like the world is opening up, like you’re dissolving into the immensity of history and the present rather than being more uncomfortably visible to yourself. Reading more Black writers isn’t like taking medicine. People ought to seek out the genuine pleasure of decentering themselves, and read fiction and history alongside these popular anti-racist manuals, and not feel like they need to calibrate their precise degree of guilt and goodness all the time."
3. The Lovers
Contemplating the insane customs fees that the UK charges for anything and everything from Australia because THIS SARONG.
If you’re not familiar with tarot and it’s magic, The Lovers card generally signifies:
.. perfect union, harmony, love and attraction. The Lovers can represent finding the balance within oneself. You are learning to understand yourself, your own personal moral code and what you value in life. This will bring harmony and balance to your life. In general when The Lovers Tarot card appears it is an indication that you have major choices to make or are faced with a dilemma. You may be feeling uncertain about situations, people in your life or what direction you should take. These are important decisions you are faced with. Don’t automatically go for the easy road, make sure you have all the information and make the right decision. Even if it seems like a difficult path, it will lead you on to greater things.
4. The pandemic is a portal
Arundhati Roy writing for the Financial Times.
What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
5. A poem
‘Home’ by Warsan Shire.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
Read the full poem here.
See you next Sunday.