your wednesday field notes 🍄⚡️
finding awe for your brain, palestinian food, internet gardens and more
I have been reading a lot of good things on substack recently. how to remember everything you read, an essay about the benefits of marginalia (writing between the lines). I always battle with deciding whether or not to write in my books, but this essay reminded me about how it can help with engaging with the reading, and really feel like you learn it. Also read about what the disappearance of awe does to our brain. and lastly, i found god twice: “Educating was never an expectation of reputation in my household, but rather treated as a necessity to maintain freedom”.
Influencer Tamsin AKA mum of Rhubarb has been filming her wedding roadtrip as her, her fiance and her friends take a road trip to their wedding venue. In a social media saturated with celebrity-influencer weddings, her nostalgia fuelled camcorder footage is an amazing to make people care (maybe just me?), and emotionally invest in something that is universal but also so overdone. Its also a sweet reminder about the journey itself being as important and even more fun than the destination.
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserThe HTML Review is an annual journal that publishes things from design collections, poetry, essays and more. The website lays everything out in a unique way making you feel like you’re walking the halls of the internet.
I’ve just finished Bad Taste by Nathalie Olah, which describes the way aesthetics and power merge and critiques our inability to discern between the two. While she is a very very long winded writer, she had some valid points. It makes me think about havermelkelite in Amsterdam, and the lengths we will go to, to signal our aesthetic conformity to some sort of social status quo. I also THOROUGHLY enjoyed my re-reading of Jane Eyre. Wow, i know most of us read it when we were younger but reading it with age and experience really gives so much more depth to the feeling of yearn and despair.
I watched Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Palestine. As Bourdain explores culture through food, we explore the different types of cuisine that exist within a region that has been painted in the media as homogenous. The watermelon dish looked delicious. When Bourdain goes to Gaza, I could not help but feel completely devastated with the thought of where this family was right now. Do they have food? Do they have water? (Thankfully Laila el-Haddad, author of the Gaza Kitchen, continues her activism through food in the US). And like Louis Theroux’s Settlers, Bourdain sits and listens to both sides letting people tell their own stories, but also exposing as always the zionist regime’s propaganda. Read also Laila’s piece “A cuisine under seige”.
see you next time, remember to touch grass this week! 🌼
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