Not new content, but a new simple #SmallWeb website I put together yesterday for a small handful of #notes, #memos and #essays that I selected for a new book I posted to #InternetArchive.
https://www.letters.directory/
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Book Review: King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes
Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory is a fierce and foundational text of modern feminism, a Molotov cocktail in book form. Part memoir, part punk manifesto, it is a raw, unapologetic, and deeply personal exploration of gender, power, and sexuality in our modern world.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Non-fiction, Memoir, Essays, Feminism
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK, 2020), The Feminist Press (US, 2010)
Review in one word: Joyful
Originally published in French in 2006, this classic feminist work is now available in English. Despentes is a punk iconoclast, rebel writer and confrontational filmmaker. Arguably her most famous book is her first novel Baise-Moi, was later adapted for the screen. She is the author of more than fifteen works, including the acclaimed Vernon Subutex trilogy. Always seeing life from the outskirts, Despentes draws from her own experience as a former sex worker and rape survivor for her scathing and excoriating analysis of surviving in a world mired in misogyny and misandry.
Far from being depressing in nature, this book is irreverant, hillarious and cheeky in its analysis of our world.
There’s a whole range of taboos that are exploded in this book. As she states in the explosive opening, “from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh”.
The essays in this book are provocative, explosive and generous in their philosophical reach and insight. Despentes examines concepts of rape, prostitution, pornography and the myth of the ideal woman. She strongly rejects victimhood and refuses to apologise or explain her reasons for doing anything she has done.
The book shows its age in the discussion about the ultimate waif-like beauty of the 90’s – Kate Moss. Despentes joyfully aligns herself not with the unreachable ideal of Kate Moss but instead with the mythological monster – King Kong who is beyond male and beyond female. He is a potent symbol of polymorphic sexuality and raw power before he is captured and destroyed by society.
The overarching themes are of railing against oppressive forces of sexual and societal control in our world are refreshing and interesting. I particularly enjoyed the ethos so closely intertwined with rebelious culture, art and music which showed in her amazing Vernon Subutex series. Despentes argues for a “new punk feminism” that embraces and loves what society deems monstrous or unacceptable in women and any one else who feels marginalised.
She challenges the binary thinking that pits “good” women against “bad” ones, virgins against whores, and victims against aggressors. Her style is blistering, direct, and brutally honest, characterised by precisely phrased rage and a refusal to soften her message for the comfort of the reader.
Despentes’ tone is provocative, warm and unapologetic. King Kong Theory is an essential work that rejects polite discourse in favour of a raw truth about sex and power that is as uncomfortable, liberating and joyful. I cannot tell you how much this book means to me, it is foundational, liberating and life-changing in every way.
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The Stakes Have Never Been Higher for Drake
If I want to browse articles, essays and thought pieces on various topics, ideally in one place, what's a good alternative to Substack?
A lot of people publish there but I don't agree with their opinion on censorship and protection of audiences.
(pls share)
#PlatformAdvice #essays
The Self
A bicycle isn't its wheels. It isn't the frame, the chain, the person pedaling, or the road. Take any one away and you don't have a broken bicycle but something that was never a bicycle to begin with. We point at things and say that's 'it'. That's the self. That's what's real. But every time you reach for the thing itself, you find it's made entirely of other things, which are made of other things and somewhere in that regression you either panic or you start to find it funny. The self […]https://ridiculousbharath.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/the-self/
The sandpile metaphor matters because collapse often looks sudden from the outside.
But inside the system, pressure has been accumulating for a long time.
The crisis is not always the failure. Sometimes it is the correction.
👇
https://reviewsrantsandraves.substack.com/p/what-the-sandpile-knows-a-foreword
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A lot of modern exhaustion comes from being told to solve structural problems with personal discipline, personal problems with ideology, and moral problems with tactics.
What the Sandpile Knows is a series about learning to identify the level of the problem.
Read Essay 👇
https://reviewsrantsandraves.substack.com/p/what-the-sandpile-knows-a-foreword
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Living Simply. Not Simply Living
I read an article this week that was poking fun at and dismissing Thoreau’s solitary stay at Walden Pond. The reasons were that he could easily walk back home, and he did.
Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond from July 1845 to September 1847, in a cabin he built on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. During those 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days. He walked to town regularly. Concord was only about 1.5 miles away. He’d visit family and friends, pick up supplies, and yes, sometimes have dinner at his mother and sisters’ house. His mother did his laundry. He had visitors. The cabin wasn’t isolated. Friends, curiosity-seekers, and even runaway slaves seeking help on the Underground Railroad stopped by.
He wasn’t trying to set a hermit record. In Walden, he writes, “I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life.” So the image of Thoreau as a man who vanished into the woods and never saw another soul is a myth. A d it’s a myth he never claimed to be the truth.
But Walden is still a touchstone for simple, solitary living, because Thoreau’s experiment wasn’t about total isolation. It was about deliberate living and self-reliance — testing how little he actually needed to live well.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
He reduced his needs, built his own shelter, grew beans, and kept meticulous accounts to show you could live on ∼$28.12 for 8 months. The point was economic and spiritual independence.
“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
The book Thoreau wrote about those two years helped start American environmental writing, influenced Gandhi’s and MLK’s civil disobedience, and still shapes people’s ideas about a “simple living” philosophy.
Thoreau was opposed to the dogma of organized religion but took his spirituality seriously, treating July 4, 1845, when he moved to Walden Pond, as his own “spiritual independence day.”
He was a follower of transcendentalism, a 19th-century movement, largely centered around the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalists believed that individuals needed to form transcendent connections with the universe. For many transcendentalist philosophers, writers, and religious figures, that meant seeking it in nature.
Although Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a poet during his early years, he was later discouraged in this pursuit and gradually came to feel that poetry was too confining. So, it was as a prose writer that he made his most meaningful contributions as a stylist and as a philosopher.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862, in his native Concord.
You can live deliberately in Paradelle or Concord without going totally off the grid. Thoreau would probably say his cabin was just the lab. The real experiment is in your head.
Mist
by Henry David Thoreau, 1817 –1862
Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.
This New England transcendentalist was a prolific poet, writing verse that, like his essays, tackled nature, man, and society. You can read some at poets.org. If you don’t mind reading on a screen, Thoreau’s books are all in the public domain, and on Project Gutenberg, where you’ll find Walden, and lesser-known works such as A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Walking, and The Maine Woods.
In case you never have the chance to visit Walden Pond, go there virtually with Professor Larry Buell.
https://youtu.be/GV6nepqzrFc?si=jcGmbjquc_NevKwu
#essays #HenryDavidThoreau #isolation #poetry #solitude #Thoreau #Walden
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