Recommendations

The books, podcasts, essays, ideas that have been giving me life

Hello,

Newsletters are a strange thing, aren’t they? The idea that a person should be able to pump out ideas consistently on a weekly or even fortnightly or monthly basis. My life feels a little more cyclical than that, a little more seasonal, and this week, I’m in a quiet season. So this week, I’m sending you some recommendations instead of my own words.

• Since I’m not writing a letter this week, my favourite book on not writing remains Paul Kingsnorth’s Savage Gods, which I reviewed here, in case you’d like a taster of what it’s all about.

• Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy approaches a similar family of ideas from a different but equally brilliant perspective.

• Last week, I had one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. Over the course of two hours, in a room of just 12 people, Alice Oswald recounted the entire story of The Iliad, interspersed with recitations of her own poetry from Memorial. The closest I can get to sharing that experience with you is to send this recording of Alice reading from Memorial.

• Related: this remarkable Simone Weil essay on The Iliad. Written in 1945, it’s a blistering take on violence. “Nearly all the lliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths.”

• Societies used to have better ways of grieving the kind of violence Weil writes about in “The Poem of Force”. They used to have ritual lament. Then ritual lament was outlawed for being too anarchic and feminine. Personally, I can’t imagine a higher commendation than being outlawed for being too anarchic and feminine. If you feel the same way, here’s a great podcast on (and in the mode of) lament.

• If that’s enough violence for you: a good friend and wonderful human gave me this poem to take into the woods with me this summer, when I went on a vision quest. It stood me in very good stead.

• And: if I were in London, I’d definitely try to make it to Olivia Laing’s lecture on Eden, Milton, and gardens, at Birkbeck on 29th November.

And that’s all from me. Hope you’re having lovely weeks.

Love,

xx Ellie