caitri | Entries tagged with bookmarks

"Essay: The digital death of collecting: How platforms mess with our tastes" by Kyle Chayka

Snip:

The shifting sands of digital technology have robbed these collections of their meaning; the context in which they originally existed can no longer be experienced and they only appear as nostalgic ruins, the remains of once-inhabited metropolises gone silent. ...

Algorithmic feeds are by their nature impersonal, though they promise personalized recommendations. The more automated a feed is, the less we users feel the need to gather a collection, to preserve what’s important to us. If we can always rely on Instagram’s Discover page or the TikTok For You feed to show us something that we’re interested in, then we have less impetus to decide for ourselves what to look for, follow, and save. The responsibility of collecting has been removed, but that means we offload it to the black box of the automatic recommendation system. Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture — like maintaining a personal library — has moved from being a necessity to a seemingly indulgent luxury.

It goes back to the significance of the bookshelf: When we didn’t have access to automated feeds and streaming platforms, we had to decide for ourselves which culture to keep close by.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Dr. Eric Lander, Science Advisor to the President, has an interesting statement on the five hundred year old text he chose to be sworn in on. Very much worth reading in full if you have any kind of interest in books or the usage of books, but above all here is the snippet on his choice:

So, that is the story behind my choice of book on which to take my oath for my roles in stewarding science and technology in the federal government:

- a book that bears upon the paramount ethical obligation to repair the world, which I hold dear and which underlies the goals of this Administration and the goals of science;

- a book that is one of the earliest fruits of a revolutionary information technology that swept the world;

- a book whose year and place of publication speak of religious tolerance and intolerance; and

- a book whose existence would not be known but for the work of a scholar who chose to enter into public service.

Current Mood: thoughtful

The Power of a Skeptical Captain America by Sophie Gilbert

Snip:

From the first episode, in which Sam’s bank manager tried to place where he knew this telegenic Black man from (“Did you used to play for LSU?”), to the end, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has wrestled with an idea: Who are superheroes for? And can a nationalist symbol be reclaimed by someone whom that nation has consistently and historically rejected?"

...

But The Falcon and the Winter Soldier also presents an opportunity to see what might be coming in the next phase of storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as how far things have come. Only six years ago the MCU was still being overseen by Ike Perlmutter, the longtime Marvel CEO best known for reportedly stalling Black Panther and Captain Marvel because he didn’t think tentpole movies framed around a Black character and a woman would attract audiences. (Perlmutter is also known for allegedly scaling back production of Black Widow merchandise in 2015 because he didn’t think girls cared about superheroes, and for donating $360,600 in 2019 to the Trump Victory committee funding the former president’s reelection efforts).

There's A LOT to be broken down in Marvel generally and MCU specifically going back and forth between progressivism and reactionaryism. (Also I pointed out recently in convo when Bucky became Cap in 2007 there was a chonk of pushback because the ideal Cap was not supposed to carry a gun, vs. the pushback of Sam becoming Cap in 2015 which was very much about pushback to a Black Cap that the show was getting at.

I have more thoughts but they are still jumbled, but generally I ADORE how the show has been so bluntly political and have thoughts on that. But in the meantime the scene I can't get out of my head is Sam going full angelic pieta.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Reviewing the Book Review

As the publication celebrates its 125th anniversary, Parul Sehgal, a staff critic and former editor at the Book Review, delves into the archives to critically examine its legacy in full.

Journalist goes through 125 years of book reviews looking for women, people of color, queerness.

Revisiting the midcentury: "I’d innocently turn a corner and find you back at it, comparing a woman writer to a trout — as praise."

The relevant line from the original review, of an autobiography called "That Pellet Woman!" by Betty Pellet: "Nevertheless, a valiant woman comes through, an indomitable spirit leaping at life with the drive of a Dolores River trout."

Snip:

It was a clubby world put into a panic by the success of “the lit’ry lady,” as a 1907 article termed her. Early issues of the Book Review were lively with alarm. Why Are Women Using Male Pseudonyms? How Dare Women Write From the Point of View of Male Characters? Why Are Women’s Books Selling So Well? “Is Woman Crowding Out Man From the Field of Fiction?”

(NB All these reviews are hyperlinked in the article.)

Current Mood: awake

BLACK, LATINX, AND MILLENNIAL READERS ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE BOOK WORLD by Kelly Jensen

Snip:

The research, undertaken amid the COVID-19 pandemic, involved surveying over 4,300 qualified individuals across an array of age groups, races, and locales in the United States. To qualify, individuals have to have indicated engaging with one book over the course of the previous year. The data explored three age groups: Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. Researchers also looked at five US regions and numerous racial demographics. It is believed to be the first such study and offers conclusions to questions and assumptions many in the industry, from booksellers to publishers to librarians and book influencers, have been eager to learn.
...

Of the three age groups studied, it was Millennials who engaged with books more than any other. But more specifically, it was avid Black, Latinx, and male-identifying Millennials who engaged with books the most, though across all age groups, it was individuals who did not identify as white who engaged the most. The singular exception was when it came to the context of buying books as gifts. This was the one space where white, female-identifying Baby Boomers outpaced any other group.

Books sales over the last year during COVID-19 saw an increase of over 8 percent, and study participants reported not changing their habits during that time. It was instead avid book engagers — those who engaged with four or more books per month — who helped drive that spike in sales."

Hilariously, they link to the study results which is apparently a Google doc in someone's trash. OOPS.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Bookmark: He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? By Rachel Poser

Snippets:

If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.” Padilla’s vision of classics’ complicity in systemic injustice is uncompromising, even by the standards of some of his allies. He has condemned the field as “equal parts vampire and cannibal” — a dangerous force that has been used to murder, enslave and subjugate. “He’s on record as saying that he’s not sure the discipline deserves a future,” Denis Feeney, a Latinist at Princeton, told me. Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.

...

Padilla began to feel that he had lost something in devoting himself to the classical tradition. As James Baldwin observed 35 years before, there was a price to the ticket. His earlier work on the Roman senatorial classes, which earned him a reputation as one of the best Roman historians of his generation, no longer moved him in the same way. Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me. He revisited books by Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson and others working in the traditions of Afro-pessimism and psychoanalysis, Caribbean and Black studies. He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system of power relations that produces certain gestures, moods, emotions and states of being. They helped him think in more sophisticated terms about the workings of power in the ancient world, and in his own life.

To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether. Classics was happy to embrace him when he was changing the face of the discipline, but how would the field react when he asked it to change its very being? The way it breathed and moved? “Some students and some colleagues have told me this is either too depressing or it’s sort of menacing in a way,” he said. “My only rejoinder is that I’m not interested in demolition for demolition’s sake. I want to build something.”

...

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

~

This with some other reading I have been doing plus general observations. The exhaustion of trying to change a discipline, and its necessity.

But also I like the exercise he does teaching in class to get students think abut the shift from republic to empire.

Current Mood: contemplative

Is This the End of Writing in Cafés? On the Appeal of Lingering During (and After) a Pandemic by Emily Temple

snip:

One obvious problem that comes up with the loss of free or cheap public spaces to sit and write—and this includes cafés as well as libraries and train station lobbies and wherever else one might scribble—is that it further narrows the already narrow field of who can, practically, write. The publishing industry already struggles with elitism and a lack of diversity; I worry that if cafés become unsafe in the long term, it will exacerbate the issue. Knecht invoked the image of the frozen writer’s garret as part of our romantic ideal of the literary life, but while the pervasive story that J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in a local café because she couldn’t afford the heat in her flat turns out to be a rumor, it’s not hard to imagine something similar being true for plenty of writers—who cannot afford a room of their own, literally or figuratively, and therefore have taken up writing in public places to get a little functional solitude.

Btw, for me coffeehouse writing was a function of my personal reward system: A nice drink of something to make me go for a couple hours, and then when I finished or had made good progress on something, I could buy a dessert or something. In the New Normal, this has translated as trying to differentiate the coffee I made to wake myself up in the morning vs. the coffee to research with, which is honestly usually the difference between adding different flavored creamer and whipped cream topping. /TMI

Current Mood: thoughtful

Socknography, if you will.

Bookmarking for later when my brain works.

Current Mood: awake

I feel like this concludes the debate about whether or not I am a millennial. (Apparently I am.)

https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/millennials-coffee-shop-fanfiction/

Snip:

“Coffee shops have become a highly influential space that’s poised somewhere between the public and the private: it’s obviously a business, but it mimics the comfort of home. This means it’s a space that’s easily customizable and allows nearly endless possibilities,” McCain says. “How in the world do you get struggling art student Steve Rogers to meet billionaire Tony Stark? Easy, if Tony comes in for a coffee, ends up losing track of time as he works, and Steve strikes up a conversation once the shop closes for the night. Coffee shops are a strange equalizer that allows for [interactions] that would normally seem too far-fetched or contrived.” ...

Fandom has always inspired this memetic spread of popular tropes, but it’s much easier when everyone posts on the same platform. When a particular idea starts appearing everywhere, it illustrates something fundamental about the fanfic ecosystem: People aren’t just in Star Wars fandom or Sherlock fandom, they’re in “Fandom,“ period. They’re part of the overarching fanfic community, and while individual fandoms come and go, tastes remain the same. A coffee shop AU is the same whether it’s based on Supergirl or Voltron, because it caters to a different desire from the source material.

Current Mood: amused

The White House chief calligrapher has a higher clearance than Jared Kushner

Snip:

<i>The calligrapher's office plays a key role in White House diplomacy. The East Wing, which oversees the calligrapher's office, declined to comment on the role of the chief calligrapher or why a top secret clearance is necessary.

But former chief calligrapher Rick Paulus, who served in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and had a top secret clearance himself, attributed the need for it due to the knowledge of the President's schedule, as well as the calligrapher's proximity to world leaders. When he was a White House calligrapher, Paulus told CNN, he "never, ever dealt with intelligence matters."

...

The office of the calligrapher began informally in the 1860s when first lady Mary Todd Lincoln delegated the task of writing White House invitations to a staff member, a position that eventually needed an entire staff, according to Matt Costello, a senior historian at the White House Historical Association.

In 1977, Rosalynn Carter formally established the Office of the First Lady, the calligrapher's office falling under the East Wing's social secretary.

As the US emerged as a global economic power beginning in the 1940s, Costello said, there was a "drastic increase" in state dinners at the White House. Those dinners, which included between 140 and 200 people, required handwritten invitations, envelopes, menus and place cards.

The calligrapher's function is intertwined with US diplomacy as the US hosts heads of state, demonstrating that the US is committed to working with or wants to improve relations with other countries.

Ahead of a state dinner, Paulus would delve into the history of the hosted country, its symbols, and its fonts, which calligraphers call "hands" throughout time.

"As calligraphers, we feel like we're playing an integral role. The invitation sets the stage for the whole event. Calligraphers are helping, simply, to set the stage for diplomacy," the former chief calligrapher said.

"Whatever happens, whatever conflicts they have, if you see your name beautifully written on a placard, your nation's flag on a menu, you can't help to soften up a bit," he said. "Protocol is about human interactions, and as calligraphers, it's our job to introduce creativity and beauty."

...

While the number of calligraphers in the office has ranged as high as eight at the beginning of the Carter administration, there are currently three full-time calligraphers in the office, including the chief calligrapher. Calligraphers Debra Brown and Becky Larimer do not have security clearances, per the data. White House salary disclosure data indicates that Blair made $102,212 in 2017, with Brown at $90,828 and Larimer at $70,100.

There has been change throughout the years at the office -- for instance, Paulus ushered Macintosh computers into the office in 1998. The deadlines have gotten shorter and aspects of the work has been taken into the digital era. Design and style has also changed over the years.

"I think there's a general misconception that things have been forever unchanging, but the calligrapher's office is one of the places that has changed with the times," Costello said.</i>

"We Need To Talk About How We Talk About Fan Fiction" by Ciara Wardlow

Contextualizes fanfic as part of women's SFF reading and writing: Yay!!!

Anyway, as fan fiction has started to seep into the wider public consciousness, I have also noticed a growing derisive attitude towards it, especially since coming to be damned as the source of 50 Shades of Grey. A review of The Last Jedi for WIRED magazine features the line, “After a recent decade in which the majority of big-budget blockbusters have become at best, impressive adaptations of old comics and at worst over-engineered fan-fiction,” and such comments are not uncommon. When it comes to derisive comments about fan fiction, we culture critics seem to be the worst perpetrators. Over at The Verge, a critical review of the most recent season of Game of Thrones ran under the headline “This season of Game of Thrones feels like fan fiction.” While I actually agree with the majority of the complaints made in the review in question, I must take issue with the headline. Season 7 felt like just okay fanfiction, because have you ever read the really good stuff? It would blow the pants off the penultimate season’s lopsided character development and at times unfortunately trite plot machinations.

“Like fan fiction” is an increasingly common criticism being thrown around in the world of pop culture commentary. Fan fiction is a female-dominated expression of fandom, and it is arguably the expression of fandom that is quickly starting to receive the most derision, even as fan culture becomes more and more mainstream. There is a long and well-documented history of things considered feminine—whether personality traits, pastimes, or forms of entertainment—being devalued and disproportionately criticized. I think it entirely possible that these two things are not unconnected.

Current Mood: awake

DON’T ROMANTICIZE SCIENCE FICTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH SAMUEL DELANY

Snip:

Don’t romanticize science fiction. One of the questions I have been asked so many times I’ve forgotten what my stock answer to it is, “Since science fiction is a marginal form of writing, do you think it makes it easier to deal with marginal people?” Which—no! Why should it be any easier? Dealing with the marginal is always a matter of dealing with the marginal. If anything, science fiction as a marginal genre is more rigid, far more rigid than literature. There are more examples of gay writing in literature than there are in science fiction.

Current Mood: thoughtful

The Dangers of Reading in Bed by Nika Mavrody

In his history of masturbation, Solitary Sex, the historian Thomas Laqueur draws a direct link between 18th-century distress over solitary, silent novel reading and masturbation’s new status as a public menace: “Novels, like masturbation, created for women alternative ‘companions of their pillow.’” These “solitary vices,” as Laqueur calls them, were condemned for fear that individual autonomy would lead to a breakdown in the collective moral order.

...

People feared that solitary reading and sleeping fostered a private, fantasy life that would threaten the collective—especially among women. The solitary sleeper falls asleep at night absorbed in fantasies of another world, a place she only knows from books. During the day, the lure of imaginative fiction might draw a woman under the covers to read, compromising her social obligations.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers' Workshops Can Be Hostile

What Nguyen says about writing workshops I want to apply to printing and bookmaking workshops:

As an institution, the workshop reproduces its ideology, which pretends that “Show, don’t tell” is universal when it is, in fact, the expression of a particular population, the white majority, typically at least middle-class and often, but not exclusively, male. The identity behind the workshop’s origins is invisible. Like all privileges, this identity is unmarked until it is thrown into relief against that which is marked, visible and outspoken, which is to say me and others like me.

We, the barbarians at the gate, the descendants of Caliban, the ones who have no choice but to speak in the language we have — we come bearing the experiences and ideas the workshop suppresses. We come from the Communist countries America bombed during the Cold War, or where it sponsored counter-Communist efforts. We come from the lands America occupied, invaded or colonized. We come as refugees and immigrants, documented and undocumented. We come from the ghettos, barrios, reservations and borders of America where there are no workshops. We come from the bedrooms and the kitchens of the American home, where we were supposed to stay, and stay silent. We come speaking languages other than English. We come from the margins, where English is broken. We come with financial aid and loans and families that do not understand what “creative writing” is. We come from communities we do not wish to renounce in the name of our individualism. We come wanting to do more than just sell our stories to white audiences. And we come with the desire not just to show, but to tell.

But what is that art that is also political, historical, theoretical, ideological and philosophical? How is it to be taught? It must be taught not only as an isolated craft or a set of techniques. It must be taught in relation to, or within, courses on history, politics, theory and philosophy, as well as ethnic studies, gender studies, queer studies and cultural studies.

Current Mood: thoughtful

#thanksfortyping has been trending on Twitter. It's a tag full of people uncovering the often unnamed wives and secretaries who are acknowledged as typing male academics' manuscripts: basically, that's literally what invisible labor looks like, folks, some poor wife typing up some asshole's book FIFTEEN times, and his editor gets all the thanks.

Current Mood: frustrated

11 Sandwich Cakes

Vertical Cake Recipe

Over at Bustle: "Why Fan Fiction Shaming Is A Feminist Issue" by Emma Lord

Snip:

The two most "famous" fan fictions aside, the shame associated with fan fiction originated long before these works reached readers outside of their usual sphere. Unfortunately, fan fiction at large lends itself to mockery in a much safer and subtler way than other forms of female desire-driven works: the writers are, for the most part, anonymous and unpaid, with little training. They are often young women, subjecting the works to the same dismissive attitude society frequently takes over things that young women enjoy. And while there is a wide range of writers and types of fic on the internet, a majority of fic — the fic that most people are aware of — is written primarily by women, for women, holding it to the kind of scrutiny from people who do not consume it that makes it all too easy to mock. ...

If you don't think that fan fiction shaming in particular is a feminist issue, then consider what we're really doing when we shame fan fiction writers: we are shaming women — often young women, who are just starting to get a sense for what they want not just in a narrative, but in their adult lives — for expressing their desires. We are setting up women to apologize for their writing before it even leaves the keyboard. We are attacking them not only personally, but professionally; we are discouraging them owning a part of themselves, and from profiting from it, should they ever decide to write their own original work down the road.

More than that, though, we are discouraging them from engaging in the incredibly diverse and open learning environment that fan fiction provides. Fan fiction has historically been a safe place to experiment with and read about all kinds of romance — no matter the gender or the orientation, be it the cheesiest trope or the most specific kink. It is a place without judgment, and a place that introduces young writers to perspectives outside of their own — sometimes normalizing diverse relationships for writers who would otherwise not be exposed to them, ultimately making them more accepting and empathetic not just as writers, but as human beings.

With that in mind, it is all the more disheartening that the judgment of others so critically affects the writers and readers of fan fiction, which itself is such an open, nonjudgmental place. But once that misplaced shame is there, it never really goes away. Even now, fully aware of the root of my feelings, I see it in motion in myself and the people around me. I write my own fiction now, and whenever somebody asks about it, I frequently preface any plot descriptions with "it's silly," or "it's dumb". I hide my fiction writing with the same kind of crippling embarrassment that I shielded my fan fiction usernames. And I hear the same apologies from other female writers everywhere I go — be it with other fic writers on Tumblr, or fiction writers who write in genres targeted at women that I meet out in the real world, there is all too often a disclaimer to soften any exchange of their work. The very work that should empower us and embolden us, the same work we feel safe celebrating in anonymous corners of the internet, often makes us cower in the light of day.

Of course, ending the fan fiction shaming isn't going to solve everything; fan fiction shaming is just one of countless things lurking under the umbrella of things women are conditioned to feel shame for. But it is high time to recognizing fan fiction shaming for what it is at its core: the shaming of women's desires, and their daring to take control of them.

Current Mood: awake

Bookmarking because it's beautiful, and apparently this is the only freaking poem you can get in English from this author because it was shown on a kdrama. >_<

“The Physics of Love”
by Kim In-yook

The size of a mass is not proportional to its volume
That little girl as small as a violet
That little girl that flutters like a flower petal
Pulls me with a mass greater than the Earth
In a moment, I
Like Newton’s apple
Mercilessly rolled and fell on her
With a thud, with a thud thud
My heart
From the sky to the ground
Continued to swing dizzyingly like a pendulum
It was first love

"Full-body reading: Literary criticism taught me to scrub my feelings out of my reading, but a medieval mystic showed me how to put them back in" by Anna Wilson

The Book of Margery Kempe challenges what it meant to critically engage with a text. Amid Kempe’s loud weeping and marriage ceremonies with Jesus, there was her rebuke to the priest about his closed-mindedness, her challenge to the Archbishop of York about his hypocrisy, and an assertion that she – an illiterate woman – had the right to teach others what the Bible meant.

Reading The Book of Margery Kempe alongside fanfiction makes it clear that physical, imaginative reading is still associated with women, still considered embarrassing, and still employed as a form of resistance to mainstream narratives. People, in short, are still using this style of reading to elbow their way into texts from which they are restricted, just as Kempe and other women did with religious texts.

Just as important, Kempe’s Book argues that writing is also reading – transforming other texts, enriching them for readers – and it evidences a long intertwined history of women’s education with alternative literacies of power and resistance. Through Kempe, I came to realise that fanfiction, qualitatively so different from the literary criticism I learned in the classroom, is itself a powerful critical tool. My fanfiction community gave me a healthy disrespect for the ‘author’ in ‘authority’, teaching me to notice where a text dissatisfied me and to dig deep into my own feelings to work out why. I learned that identifying with characters can be valuable. Indeed, my identification with Kempe helped me notice something about her mysticism that hadn’t previously been studied: the importance of ‘Mary Sue’-style self-insertion into Bible stories, which formed the starting point of my PhD dissertation.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Revenge by e.c.c.:

Revenge

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.

I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending

the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;

I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel

and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;

I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.

With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,

my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck

and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,

because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.

You just delayed our coronation.

We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;

we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business

because it’s still nobody’s business;

there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic

for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,

and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:

we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,

the buildings here are not on your side just because

you make them spray-painted accomplices.

These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.

Even the earth found common ground with us in the way

you bootstrap across us both,

oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,

and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them

but I won’t, because they’re my family,

in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.

If you’ve never loved someone like that

you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.

I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;

I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,

I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down

and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.

But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.

We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder

the longer they spend burning us,

we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,

by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?

We know everything we do is so the kids after us

will be able to follow something towards safety;

what can I call us but lighthouse,

of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.

And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,

anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.

This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.

You cannot deport our minds; we won’t

hold funerals for our potential. We have always been

what makes America great.

-e.c.c.

ETA: LJ is being LJ and not showing the text breaks properly, so go to the link to read it properly and in rhythm. But this is so beautiful I want it on a poster, you guys.

Current Mood: hopeful

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Bookmark: The Digital Death of Collecting
Bookmark: Statement on Repairing the World and Book Selection for Swearing-In
Bookmark: The Power of a Skeptical Captain America
Bookmark: 125 Years of Book Reviews - and women
Bookmark: On Book-Buying in the Pandemic
Bookmark: He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?
Bookmark: Is This the End of Writing in Cafes?
Bookmark: The Importance of Preserving Fan Creator Biographical Data
Bookmark: "Millennials can’t stop writing fanfiction about coffee shops"
Bookmark: The White House Calligraphy Office
Bookmark: "We Need To Talk About How We Talk About Fan Fiction"
Bookmark: Interview with Samuel Delany
Bookmark: Anxieties about reading (and sex)
Bookmark: Notes on Workshopping
#thanksfortyping
Bookmark: Sandwich Cake and Vertical Cake Recipes
Bookmark: Why Fan Fiction Shaming Is A Feminist Issue
A Gorgeous Korean Poem
Bookmark: "Full-body Reading"
This beautiful poem made me happy-cry

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Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

i'm a digital brat with an insect mind

Entries tagged with bookmarks

Bookmark: The Digital Death of Collecting

Bookmark: Statement on Repairing the World and Book Selection for Swearing-In

Bookmark: The Power of a Skeptical Captain America

Bookmark: 125 Years of Book Reviews - and women

Bookmark: On Book-Buying in the Pandemic

Bookmark: He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?

Bookmark: Is This the End of Writing in Cafes?

Bookmark: The Importance of Preserving Fan Creator Biographical Data

Bookmark: "Millennials can’t stop writing fanfiction about coffee shops"

Bookmark: The White House Calligraphy Office

Bookmark: "We Need To Talk About How We Talk About Fan Fiction"

Bookmark: Interview with Samuel Delany

Bookmark: Anxieties about reading (and sex)

Bookmark: Notes on Workshopping

#thanksfortyping

Bookmark: Sandwich Cake and Vertical Cake Recipes

Bookmark: Why Fan Fiction Shaming Is A Feminist Issue

A Gorgeous Korean Poem

Bookmark: "Full-body Reading"

This beautiful poem made me happy-cry