Read a little, write a little

One emotion I didn’t expect among this year’s avalanche: I feel blunted. I can’t find the words to describe things I care about; the ground is moving faster than my feet.

I’m old enough to know this usually means I haven’t been reading enough. Makes sense, with so many stresses to juggle, so much intellectual comfort food at easy reach. I’ve tapped two new lines – ‘Read a little / Write a little’ into my daily checklist, in an attempt to rehabituate myself and resharpen those edges. Which makes this day one of a new routine, I suppose.

Kelly Pendergrast’s Home Body is a curious essay, opening with womblike hauntings and cyborg urbanism, but settling on the habit infrastructure has of binding us all together, even when we feel most isolated. However, Pendergrast warns, we mustn’t fetishise the infrastructure itself at the cost of overlooking the social forces that shape and sustain it.

All the mapping and “making visible” in the world can’t right what’s wrong, and even the most good-faith attempts at rigorous transparency can’t avoid glossing over or eliding the horrors buried in global supply chains and local power structures.

It’s a weird, nuanced, challenging piece, and exactly the sort of thing I love Real Life Magazine for.