Lyrebird-sings - Bare - Tumblr Blog

I think I'm holding my happiness prisoner.

I'm no longer trapped in my past no, but in some twisted manner, I'm trapped in my present. And I'm running, and running and running but getting nowhere.

Am I unable to feel happiness or am I not letting myself be happy?

I have planned my life to the very last second and for some reason I have decided that I will be happy only when my life is the way I've planned it out to be.

I tell myself I'll be happy tomorrow. Tomorrow when I'm living better, tomorrow when I'm loved, tomorrow when I love.

And deep down, I feel that maybe I'm not letting myself be happy in my now.

Is it okay to be happy now?

Do I have to wait for every last wrinkle in my life to be ironed out and dealt with, before I can allow myself to smile and live and walk towards my good future?

Am I running and running and not reaching the future I have in my mind because I'm not letting myself be happy along the way?

I don't know.

I'm not happy now, but I think I'd like to be.

I don't want for your name to bleed in my mouth.

when naomi shihab nye wrote, “if you tuck the name of a loved one / under your tongue too long / without speaking it / it becomes blood,” v. when sylvia plath wrote, “in this light the blood is black. tell me my name.” 

intro to lit theory

Authorship: Barthes, Death of the Author; Foucault, What is an Author?

Formalism: Eichenbaum, The Theory of the “Formal Method”;  Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

Structuralism: Saussure, Course in General Linguistics ; Barthes, from Mythologies

Psychoanalysis: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Lacan, The Mirror Stage & The Significance of the Phallus

Ideology: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Foucault, Truth and Power

Feminism & Queer: Sedgwick, from Between Men; Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa; Wittig, One Is Not Born a Woman; Butler, Gender Trouble

Deconstruction: Derrida, from Of Grammatology;

Postcolonial: Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth; Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Cultural Materialism: Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception; Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory  

these are about 2/3 of the readings for my intro to lit theory course, if you’ve ever wondered what one studies on such courses, the links lead to free pdfs  

One day I noticed

One day I noticed,

When he walked in, I did not hastily clear out the table and make for my room. I stayed sat on my chair, square, looked up at him, let my my gaze linger in his for a moment and went back to my scribbling. He went about his, mumbling a remark or two in passing.

One day I noticed,

When he asked me what I was doing, I did not stutter and I did not look up, lazily I answered, "Just reading". I felt him pause for a moment, and I heard him puff--was that disapproval I heard?

One day I noticed,

I was not running, I wasn't trying to analyze the sound of his footsteps climbing up to see if he was angry. I did not move out of the chair I was sitting in when he approached so he could sit. I did not close the book I was reading when he made remarks about not wanting his girls to get funny ideas.

"Don't do that." Why. "Don't wear that." Why. "You listen to what I say." Why. "I pay the bills." No you don't, since when. " Girls shouldn't like that." Why not.

I was taking up space? Outside of the safety of my locked room, I was taking up space!? In the house, in conversations?

One day I noticed,

When he dragged my mother into their room, locked the door behind them. I did not grab my sister and run for our room and I did not try to console her. I did not tell her "Ma's fine, she's fine. Shh it's okay they're just talking, like how we are? Shh, It's okay".

I found myself outside that room, fists balled, banging, screaming bloody murder, "OPEN THE DOOR!!!". Bang bang bang. "MA, ARE YOU OKAY!!!?", Bang bang bang. "I WILL BREAK IT DOWN, IF YOU DONT FUCKING OPEN RIGHT THIS SECOND". BANG. (Got myself thrown out of the house for that one x)

One day I noticed,

That I was no longer afraid of my father. I was no longer just sad over the life I was given. (maybe a little bit still, it comes and goes)

One day I noticed, that I was angry. A little of his wrath had snuck past him into my veins, and whoever could've seen that one coming.

One day he noticed, that I was no longer the love starved little girl he could kick to the corner and leave there, because he knew she would come to him if he called her name sweetly.

One day he stood there, a hand raised to hit, when he looked into my eyes, almost the same level as his, and he noticed.

I'm constantly torn between the unconditional responsibility of taking care, and the insatiable desire to be taken care of.

Which I personally think is a confusing space to be in.

I would like to introduce this new piece in my "this lecture couldn't be more drab" series, which I have just spawned into existence, I call it "girl with NO earrings, or even a clearly defined shape whatsoever".

I hope you like it

“she did not want to move or to speak. She wanted to rest, to learn, to dream. she felt very tired.” 

- Virginia Woolf 

My blurry pictures and I are back 🌸❤

What do you do when you feel yourself lose the confidence you once used to have?

How do you get yourself back?

I lay awake at nights these days, asking myself over and over again,

"where did she go?"

I've started writing on, and dog earing the books that I'm reading. I hadn't been doing so before not for the lack of thoughts but I was afraid to do so, as though some "devine retribution" awaited me if I did xD

But recently, I read on a nice Tumblr post on annotating books, "you owning them is what gives them meaning". And since then, I've been looking at my books in a new light.

I've read countless books and have had a wealth of opinions on them, but not one to flip through and reminisce. Sad, don't you think?

So now, with love, I now scribble my raw thoughts on them, I make them "mine". Hoping maybe someday, a few good decades down the road, some fresh mind will find my books in a thrift store, flip through them and agree.

🌸❤

Words, words, words 👑

People who dog-ear and make marks in their books are 10383738x sexier smarter and cooler than people who act like marking books is a federal crime

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

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 *

The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger

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 :)

there will be a moment when you realize you are more grown up than your parents are. this is the loss of childhood, my love. it is when you’re standing in the kitchen and one of your parents is screaming about something and you recognize: you will let them win the fight not because you are wrong, but simply because you know that they will keep shouting unless you drop the subject. you expect them to have childish understandings of things. they will hold onto their concept of the world as if it was not a changing thing. they must be right, and they must be somehow more right than you, always, in everything. their idea of control is so necessary to who they are that you just let it go.

this is the moment. you are 11 or 17 or 21. and you realize that you’re more mature than they ever were. 

and in some odd, sad way, this frees you. where they have stagnated, you continue.

I'm sick today, my body feels weak, and my fear, my insecurities, my tendency to fall back into despair, to give up on myself grows stronger.

When my body feels weak, the darkness in my mind grows stronger.

"Why hold on, when you could just let go"

I don't hear myself sing today.

unfriendly reminder: this is a sex worker positive space. I will not tolerate the disrespect of sex workers here, and if you cant agree with that without a doubt then you're not welcome here.

Fuyugare no

Nobe to waga mi wo

Omoiseba

Moede mo haru wo

Matashimono wo

- Ise

If I consider my body like the fields withered by winter, can I hope, though I am burnt, that spring will come again?

KOKINSHUU (collection of ancient and modern poems)

You know those moments when you're left alone with your thoughts and you let them wander, and then suddenly you feel this tug in your mind? Like you know if you let your thoughts go any further now, you'll fall into a deep spiral that you don't quite know how to come out of? You quickly think of something else or, get up and start walking or do just about anything to just get away from it

It comes out of nowhere and leaves you so scared

How do you stop having these moments..

"My days take after my skies" series part 2

Okay. Now I will talk about what happens in my country.

Everyone remembers Californian and Australian fires?

Well, this is Donbass region in Ukraine now:

Only, it wasn't created by some unfortunately dry weather and people's stupidity and carelessness.

Two days ago, Russian Federation forces and their allies, who has been occupying parts of Ukrainian territory, fired tracer ammunition on regions under Ukrainian jurisdiction throughout all the front line. They waited for the right wind and set fire.

This is hundreds of kilometers.

Since then, Donbass is on fire.

Countless villages and small towns has been destroyed. 15 people are already dead. Many received severe burns. Hundreds lost their homes and their livelyhood to the fires.

That's not talking about animals.

Cows and goats has been left to burn alive on the farms. People would have tried to help them, but since the fires were created unnaturally and got VERY big VERY quick, thousands of people, hundreds of villages had to simply leave EVERYTHING and just RUN away. Can't get a cow on a bus🤷🏻

People said they were woken up in the middle of the night by police banging on their doors and telling them to abandon everything and get on the road. Many left simply in their pajamas leaving even their documents behind. One boy talked about how they rode on the road that was already surrounded by fire on the outskirts. He said he was glad the fire only touched the tires and didn't get to the windows.

Roads are litered with dead cats and dogs.

Foxes and hedgehogs, who have only lived in wilderness, are now coming into human houses to hide from fires. People try to save as many as they can, choking on smoke and risking their lives.

There's around 300 km between the fires and the next big cities - Kharkiv and Dnipro. Nevertheless, the fires in Lugansk region are so big, people in Kharkiv report huge smog all around the city and being unable to leave their homes because it's hard to breathe.

The situation is also dire because the region where fires are has a lot of pine forests and the summer was very dry. Also the wind is high now.

I don't know who to ask and for what help, since our 🤡 president refused to acknowledge the military nature of the fires and has kept silent since then, despite everyone - the army, political opposition, local administrations, OSCE, witnesses - saying tracer bombs are what caused the fires.

And even without this evidence, the are over a HUNDRED different origin places of the fires, all of them unconnected to each other, and spread throughout the whole front line of hundred km. This is just not possible when fires originate naturally.

So, please, just spread word to #helpLugansk #helpUkraine

My days lately have been taking after the Skies above me, and I'm starting to find it amusing.

I'll call this piece,

"I'm simping real hard for Aurora"

There is a singer from Norway by the name of Aurora. She is 25 years old and often forgets her shoes. She doesn't like to hug and she sometime likes to eat baby porridge - but only if it rains.

The moon, the stars, and mother earth are her muses, and she likes to call herself a mere vessel, through which the music flows.

She says that each time she writes a song, she loses a part of herself, and so it has to be worth it.

She likes being barefoot, and I'm starting to think she "forgets" her shoes by design.

I Would like to meet her someday, not on stage and certainly not in the streets.

Heaven knows how it will seem, two mad women on the middle of the road, and one of them barefoot.

One day should the stars allow, I would like to meet her in the woods.

And should the trees and the winds feel kind, they will sing for us as we dance.

Alone and barefoot, and unapologetically ourselves.