how to get smart again: weekly syllabus [october week 1]
books, lectures, essays, podcasts, movies, and video essays for the week
I have way more free time on my hands these days, so in my continued attempt to fix my attention span and gradual short form content induced brain-rot (and hopefully distract my brain which always spirals when I have any sort of free-thinking time during a depressive episode), I thought I’d plan a weekly syllabus. Here’s a collection of books, essays, podcasts, movies, video essays, and online lectures I’m interested in looking at this week, along with a recap of last week’s syllabus! I planned this thematically by each category.
Also, update: if you follow me on Instagram, I finally switched around my usernames (so my bigger account is now postcardsbyelle and my smaller account is ellereadsomebooks). I’ve been neglecting my bigger account for the last year, simply because I can’t seem to post anything casual and I feel like everything has to be put together and polished because of my following size (to be honest, I do feel the same way with my Substack but at least it’s not picture focused). I associate myself more with ‘postcards by elle’ anyway, since I’ve been tunnel-vision-focused on my Substack in the last year, so it made sense for me to switch them around.
Nothing will change that much and both will be literature centered. If you followed me on my smaller account, you’ll know that I just post stories of whatever I do on a free day, which is mostly just reading and cooking and going on walks. I’ll continue to stick to my usernames and do that on my bigger account now after the switch. The only difference is that ellereadsomebooks will be more of a book club, with casual reading updates and mini book reviews, while postcardsbyelle will have all the reading guides and lists up and have some reading adjacent / unrelated content!
some highlights:
Sula may be my favorite Toni Morrison. I read this back in senior year of high school because my best friend wrote her honors thesis on it and I remember really liking it. I did, however, always think my Toni Morrison holy trinity was Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Song of Solomon. But rereading it this week floored me at how brilliant Morrison is. Sula explores a complicated friendship between Sula and Nel in the early 20th century—a friendship which is at times intense and messy all at once. It’s just so, so brilliant and fantastic and I urge you to read it.
I rewatched Phantom Thread and Punch Drunk Love this week before going to see One Battle After Another. While Phantom Thread still remains my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson feature and is in my top 5 films of all time, One Battle After Another was pretty much perfect. It’s a blockbuster in every shape and form, and every scene in the movie is electrifying. I went to watch it with my dad which felt very special to me because this is at its core, a movie about a father and daughter. Best score since Succession, and it complements the movie in an instrumental way. And watching the road scene in IMAX was probably the best movie experience I’ve had so far this decade. Might write a joint essay on this movie and Eddington…stay tuned.
Toni Morrison’s interview from my syllabus last week was one of my favorite things I’ve read this year. Please go and read it, she’s brilliant.
playlist of the week
books
Main focus: Kafka’s diaries and letters. This man had never had a good day in his life, and I’ve sort of been in a bad depressive episode for the last month. I thought it was fitting to read his two nonfiction works; his prose is also beautiful and I have been feeling like my writing has been getting too simple and choppy. Hopefully Kafka’s endless anguish and angst can help me retain a poetic flair and brush up my writing skills as well. Writing is a muscle! that you have to train! And what better way is there to do so than reading about a man who felt too much and too deeply?
Diaries, 1910 to 1923 by Franz Kafka
page count: 521
These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped, and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt, and his feelings of being an outcast. They offer an account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.
Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka
page count: 293
In no other work does Kafka reveal himself as in the Letters to Milena, which begin essentially as a business correspondence but soon develop into a passionate “letter love.” Milena Jesenská was a gifted and charismatic woman of twenty-three. Kafka’s Czech translator, she was uniquely able to recognize his complex genius and his even more complex character. For the thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was “a living fire, such as I have never seen.” It was to her that he revealed his most intimate self. It was to her that, after the end of the affair, he entrusted the safekeeping of his diaries.
essays / articles
Main focus this week (and maybe for every week re: essays or articles) are supplementary readings that will hopefully help me have a deeper understanding of my weekly reads and also just a few miscellaneous articles that piqued my interest while I was browsing. Also a few others unrelated to the syllabus that have been on my reading list.