New posts from jordanlee.life
📚 Love by Hanne Ørstavik (1997)
A friend recommended this short Norwegian novel about a lonely single mother and her young son the night before his birthday. The paragraphs seamlessly switch between the two inner worlds, often creating ambiguities or highlighting deeply different ways of seeing the world to tragic effect.
As a story it was unbelievable and punishing but as an allegory it was incredibly moving. It was able to depict the way two hurt people, as they create emotional distance, can eventually barely inhabit the same reality. It is a story of what happens when a relationship is drained of love.
It got me thinking a lot about the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s book How To Love, which speaks of these same themes but through the lens of healing. He speaks of difficult feelings as knots of sensitivity that can compound over time and severely distort the ability to be calm enough to see clearly and love. The hope is that the tools of Zen (or whatever works for you) can untie these knots one by one. As an aside, I had written the song Untying a Knot BEFORE I had heard this Buddhist concept!
Powerfully written and difficult, this one will stick with me for a while and for that I am grateful.
Rosie Spinks on private equity salad chains, homeless encampments, and the accelerating logic of extraction
Extraction isn’t my idea; it’s the operating logic of private equity which, by some estimates, controls as much as 20% of the US economy. The general gist is that everything in our world is driven by the impulse to extract power and wealth from one set of people or resources and move it further up the chain. The higher up the chain it goes, the more detached from reality it becomes. The further down, the sadder and more desperate.