Long Links #1

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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I read Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. It's a depiction of being a governess. The protagonist finds herself with higher moral standards than the people around her, unable to voice her real views. She is alone in the household of her employer, is an alien who has only distant connection to the people who have the same tastes as her.

I think this book could be helpful to people who find themselves stumbling on new moral truths, but unable to be with the people who also believe in those truths. Or for anyone who is in the situation of being a missionary, whether sent officially or not.

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I watched some videos from Andy Edwards' YouTube channel. He is a drummer, teacher, and prog and jazz fan who does music criticism and music history. I watched his videos on what's wrong with jazz and on "the English aesthetic", among others.

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Another book I read: A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed is a memoir of her young life in Egypt around the middle of the 20th century and her transition to Western academia.

It has interesting discussion of "men's Islam" vs. "women's Islam". "Men's" being text-based, scholarship-based, while "women's" being formed by the recited Quran (the emphasis of the text as remembered from hearing it recited) and by moral life. ("Women's" is more or less the perspective of the non-elite, according to Ahmed.)

Like Agnes Grey, the book has discussion of people isolated in foreign cultures (a European nanny in Ahmed's childhood household in Cairo, Ahmed when she was in graduate school at Cambridge).

Additionally, discussion of race, nationalism, the constructed identity of "Arabness", imperialism. Also reminiscences of Muslim female spaces and Ahmed's feminism.