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I work here. You can find more of my Internet stuff on that other thing. I write real things sometimes. Email me at gillian.reagan at gmail.
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NotesBeautiful!
Shugo Tokumaru “Katachi”
The video is made with approx. 2000 silhouettes extracted from PVC plates using computer-controlled cutter. How it was done.
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My amazingly talented Girls Write Now mentee Bushra Miah will be reading a piece alongside MARIA FROM SESAME STREET (!!!) at the first GWN Spring Chapters reading series. Join me and cheer her on in the crowd. Gloria Steinem will be the keynote speaker at the June reading so get your tickets for that too! All proceeds support this amazing program.
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Notes time-based metadata god: 'Initiation Song from the Finder's Lodge' by Ursula K LeGuinPlease bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
(via themodernistwitch)
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Mythological Moments from India’s First Biennale
Wangechi Mutu, “Dutty Water” (All photos by author)
KOCHI, India — I finally made the trip to…
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Notes"Depression can be political, can be a process of breaking through. What others—family members and bosses, in television commercials—see as depression can be in fact the use of one’s own body as a site of refusal to participate and function fully in capitalism, (hetero)normative social behavior, or gendered labor: an ongoing space to cultivate one’s self as a political and sovereign subject by shutting down. Why is Cvetkovich in such a hurry to get over depression? Perhaps what appears as a space of nonaction and passivity, is actually a site of activism, a strike of sorts, of bodily contemplation, of working through. The girl in bed can be a type of activist. Perhaps there is something worthwhile in her failing and flailing and documenting it. In Cvetkovich’s reclamation of the ‘girl culture’ of diary writing, she notes rightly that this practice now most often happens on the Internet, yet in this wild confessionalism of Tumblr girls, both white and of color, I see the potentially radical that diverges from Cvetkovich’s project. Online I see contemporary examples of the agitated and restless and hopeless, of Ahmed’s ‘angry black woman’ and ‘feminist killjoy’ who are well-versed in the discourse of therapy and sometimes refuse rehabilitation — ‘self-care’ being an ambivalent, popular hashtag. These are girls who have come of age reading feminist confessional literature and affect theory, and they’re performing this constant awareness of the self in their diary entries and selfies, performing rage and sadness as if against the culture and all its desirous consumers and consumptives. They posit that the petty too, and all of our tremendous feelings, can be political."kate zambreno on ann cvetkovich’s depression: a public feeling at the new inquiry. this is relevant to many discussions. i like the part about needing new forms of writing to counteract the mainstream depression memoir; the mention of barbara’s i’m trying to reach you (obviously); the idea of linking despair to “the often humiliating experiences of capitalism”; and that this article is related to my last post. (via karaj)
(via modraucous)
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Notes"For me revolution was never an interim ‘thing-to-do’ before settling down; it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or new kind of social life—made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime."Angela Davis, An Autobiography
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Notes"it was a dream
"
in which my greater self
rose up before me
accusing me of my life
with her extra finger
whirling in a gyre of rage
at what my days had come to.
what,
i pleaded with her, could i do,
oh what could i have done?
and she twisted her wild hair
and sparked her wild eyes
and screamed as long as
i could hear her
This. This. This.Lucille Clifton, “it was a dream” (via litverve)
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Notes PrioritiesJust a note for people talking about “priorities” in relation to the concern over the public treatment of Quvenzhané Wallis.
The dehumanization of little black girls here in the US is related to the process that makes it politically easy for the US to dronekill black and brown kids overseas. It’s not a choice, it’s not even a continuum. It’s facets of the same process.
Yes.
(via themodernistwitch)
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Notes As long as feminists are lauding the ascension of women to boardrooms for equality’s sake and not questioning what happens in those boardrooms, true liberation is a long way off. -
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Jon Crispin’s photos of suitcases from New York’s Willard Asylum for the Insane.
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Notes"“Toni Morrison?” asked a neatly dressed girl in the corner. “Yes,” I replied. “Toni Morrison, didn’t she win that award for being like the only black author alive?” “No. That award doesn’t exist. Toni Morrison …” I began, but was cut off by a boy in a newsboy cap who mumbled, not looking up from the notebook he was doodling in. “Toni Morrison. I know her. I read her in English. Some dude started flying to freedom at the end? And the other one was about the girl who wanted to be white? Am I right?” “Yes,” I said. “Yeah, Toni Morrison,” he said, “I know her. She is deep. And she still writes about us.”
If I mentioned all of my skeletons, would you jump in the seat?
Would you say my intelligence now is great relief?
And it’s safe to say that our next generation maybe can sleep
With dreams of being a lawyer or doctor
"
Instead of boy with a chopper that hold the cul de sac hostage — Kendrick Lamar As excellent a lyricist as Kendrick Lamar is, as a young writer who is quietly committed — like Morrison — to telling stories about the community most familiar to him, he also enters his story at a time when black American literature has become splintered between battling narratives: the haves and the have-nots. It was because of my students’ struggle to find contemporary stories they could relate to that I realized we no longer hear many narratives from black Americans who did not go to college, who are not middle-class, who aren’t privileged with access. The problem is not that these authors are privileged — that is not at all the issue. The problem is that during a time when moralizing about the lower-income, black body is once again at an all time high, many of these authors continue to tell us about all the ways they are “feeling rich,” while for everybody else, as Joan Didion would write in The New York Review of Books, it is glaringly apparent “that we [are] living in a different America, one that [has] moved from feeling rich to feeling poor.”Thanks to the great dream hampton for pointing me to this excellent essay/review of Kendrick Lamar’s album. It’s a must read.
(via syreetamcfadden)
This essay simply reeks of high-mindedness and care. You should really read all of it.
(via bmichael)
(via bmichael)
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NotesJapanese-born artist Sayaka Ganz creates sculptures out of discarded plastics found in thrift stores, converting these unwanted materials into graceful imitations of natural beauty. For her Running series, Ganz created life-like horses in mid-gallop. “Japanese Shinto beliefs are such that all objects and organisms have spirits, and I was taught in kindergarten that objects that are discarded before their time weep at night inside the trash bin. This became a vivid image in my mind,” Ganz explained her interest in recycled materials. She collects multitudes of plastic objects, organizing them in dozens of color-sorted bins in her basement. She then decides what to make when she has enough of one color, referencing photographs of her chosen species to convey its distinct movements and characteristics. Take a look at some photos of her work below as well as a video of her process, images courtesy of Sayaka Ganz.
MORE: http://hifructose.com/2013/02/19/sayaka-ganz-graceful-sculptures-made-of-recycled-plastics/
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The youthful fantasy worlds of writer Karen Russell are growing up
“I think the original impulse was, what if there’s a vampire who has figured out, he’s in a strange like kind of purgatory, like recovery, like recovery from an addiction or something, and he’s in a pretty sour place in his relationship as well because he’s realized that he’s not, he doesn’t have to be a monster, you know, that he doesn’t have to be governed by this appetite, and also that it wasn’t in fact fixing anything for him, helping him at all. But he really doesn’t have a new story that’s giving him any kind of consolation. I mean he’s really sort of stuck, he’s just sort of—he’s got these lemons that are like vampire methadone or something, you know. So that, I think, as a way to think through—and I, it’s funny because there’s I think the same questions that sort of will plague us on a regular Tuesday often bother these characters.”
The reader never learns whether there are other vampires, besides Clyde and his partner, Magreb, nor what their ideal form of sustenance is—though both lemons and blood can be ruled out.
“So, it turns out that there are many myths that I don’t have to believe about myself,” she said, adopting the vampire’s point of view. “I thought of it in a weird way as kind of analogous to overcoming any kind of addiction, alcoholism or whatever, where there’s this funny Limbo, you know, sort of like what do you do, how do you avoid, um, despair now, now that you’ve discovered that this isn’t necessary, it was never the solution? Kind of, what’s next?”
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NotesNina Simone - Four Women
in honor of the High Priestess of soul.
Happy birthday, Nina.
(via themodernistwitch)
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Notes“No Man’s Job”
Latest personal project by photographer Anthony Kurtz. Kurtz took these dynamic portraits of workers at Femme Auto in Senegal.
(via femmefatalist)
