your wednesday field notes 🦋🥵👾
essays on friendship, the nostalgia trap of food culture; indya moore's stealing sunset documentary and some passages from recent reads
I don’t know if you know, but I love reading about friendships, interpersonal relationships, how people keep in touch etc etc. So here are all the things I’ve read about friendships recently. I read about the curse and privilege of friendship, an essay on the value of floater friendships, an essay on the art of keeping in touch. Who doesn’t love when people text or call you out of the blue! To feel the love when someone thinks about you randomly! Lastly an essay about being misunderstood in friendships. “There are histories written in silence, entire maps of who we are even if we struggle to navigate.” Non-friendship essays include The Nostalgia Trap by Rahel about the authenticity of nostalgic food culture. As my birthday is coming up, this article reflects on how growing up is a “process of excavation, sifting through the layers of your mother’s life.”
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I have long been a fan of Shi Han’s adventures settling down in Langkawi and creating @humanedition. She’s just published a lovely coffee table book about the stories of 21 humans she’s met along the way that have changed her life on her journey of quitting her job and moving to Langkawi.
Ironically, an academic paper was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, that looked into what makes a person cool. The survey interviewed 6000 people across the Australia, Chile, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the United States. People who were cool had the following attributes: extroversion, hedonism, power, autonomous, adventurous, and open to new things. I have so many thoughts about this, but found the limitations of the research interesting. While the survey covered a wide range of countries, it would be intriguing to see what the findings would be in more traditional cultures: “One thing we would propose is that in those cultures, ‘cool’ people don’t have as important of a role because innovation, or cultural innovation, isn’t as important in those cultures,”
Indya Moore has been busy making a satirical documentary about illegal developments in occupied Palestine. Stealing Sunbird follows the actress as she, Rain Dove and Heydon Prowse interview Israeli property developers and expose the legal loopholes and financial incentives being offered to foreign buyers. Full documentary should be coming out on their youtube channel soon.
Some passages in a couple of books I read recently. Weird Fucks by Lynne Tillman about the power of absence. One of the last pages in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye underlines the entirety of a very gut wrenching story.
see you next time! Hope everyone is having a whimsical summer 🪁
