#a one way ticket out of this hellscape of a country

[nahhhlina]

My first full-length poetry collection, Toska is out now from Deep Vellum! The gorgeous cover art is by Katy Horan.

You can find it at the following places:

Deep Vellum

Bookshop.org

City Lights

Open Books

Barnes & Noble

Target

Amazon

your favorite local bookstore, if you ask!

If you’d like an inscribed copy, please get in touch with me here.

These are poems about the untranslatable but essential concepts that form us, and Alina Pleskova is the interpreter of their simultaneous hold and flight: “What you call me in the dark / isn’t what I am / & that helps me float / above the moment.” Toska is a book of the immigrant daughter in her not-quite-own world, and a book of contempt for striving and capitalism—but the centripetal force that powers these poems is the nameless part of the self, “ruthlessly / down for whatever,” the locked room that nobody can open even while you long for a breach. Pleskova, generous and funny and modern, is a poet of forthright intimacy. —NIINA POLLARI, author of Path of Totality

Alina Pleskova’s debut collection is into grabbing things by the neck, & not always gently: eros in the ancient bedroom & the age of apps; transcendence & complacency & spirituality under capitalism. Pleskova’s poetics is deliciously generous, even in its moments of ambivalence; reading Toska is like chatting with your best friend about pursuing & evading pleasure while the American project unravels. These poems don’t just see to the heart of queer & immigrant subjectivities; they enact them. I sank with this book, was buoyed by this book—how it, like so many of us in America, experiences perpetual attempt, failed translation, the feeling that we are always missing something just beyond our reach. If only we could tighten our grip, want wanting itself, we might unearth language for identity & desire language, of course, being ephemeral, timeless, fleeting, & stunning, all at once. —RAENA SHIRALI, author of summonings and GILT

Alina Pleskova's Toska bears the burden of the eponymous longing melancholy of living even as it phases into the burn of real threats to human-and humane-existence. Writing from "The country where I live- / its surveillance of us surveilled by the country I'm from-" she counterpoints the impersonal gaze of the state and algorithms that follow our movements with the poet's infinitely careful attention to the flow of the everyday: "Made it this far / without mentioning the rain. // Here it is; it's perfect." Solace is found in community, the imperative to "Daydream what mutual care could do," the vast motions astrology tracks, ancient poet gossip. Overwhelmingly, too, in the mysteries of queer desire and its dream of transcendence, the desire to desire unbounded by intolerance, or worse-murder. These poems telegraph in a seductive whisper that keeping each other alive is enough-it's everything, because "I want the class wars to start, but everyone's so tired." The poet asks, "What song was playing when my heart's chambers I got thrown open to let these breezes in?" This book is the song, its frequencies coming through the voices of friends, lovers, family, the poets of the past, and Pleskova's tender plaint that would "Mourn the redwoods, fireflies, platypuses, permafrost, all else that deserves to outlive us & won't ..." In her hands, poetry is the hack for our earthly hangover, toska / saudade its secret sauce in whose ingredients hide the seeds of a new world. We'll be together there,' "covered in each other's hair." —ANA BOZICEVIC, author of New Life

Reading Toska was a spiritual and whole-body experience. I laughed, I screamed, I teared up, I nearly bought a one-way ticket back to Moldova, I called my mom. No one captures the poetics of eros and diasporic longing amid our late-stage capitalist hellscape like Alina Pleskova. 'Assuring various robots / that I'm not a robot several times daily' does not prevent our speaker from 'stockpil[ing] intimacies almost too ephemeral to clock.' And what a gift this book of intimacies is. Toska is a tender and wry instruction manual for navigating desire and the void. I will follow Alina Pleskova anywhere. —RUTH MADIEVSKY, author of All-Night Pharmacy

[bibliophilejen]

Tw: major injury and medical procedures

Facebook is a hellscape I tend to avoid, but I do look at the memories of previous posts - (admittedly in part to edit out some of the terrible takes I had). Holy shit, I got hit with a cinder block this time. Everything in this period is so fuzzy and nebulous, but there are moments that hit with immense clarity.

This was thirteen years ago today, when I had a fantastically silly night out with some folks I worked with at the airport. I was 29 and while life wasn't easy, it wasn't bad.

Less than two weeks later, the Duke ICU would be as familiar to me as TSA.

I remember my mother texting me over the course of the afternoon, into the evening, trying to make things sound normal, but they weren't normal at all. My family didn't go to the doctor unless you were dying.

<Dad's leg is hurting so we're going to the urgent care.>

<They want an X-ray.>

<Now they're getting an ultrasound.>

<They want us to go to the ER, but I'm just going to drive instead of taking an ambulance.>

Then she called. When they got to the ER Dad was immediately admitted and taken to surgery. The urgent care had called ahead to warn them he was on the way so they could prep. By this point it was seven and I would be off work by 7:30, so Mom told me to finish my workday, then come.

I tried so hard to drive deliberately but carefully to get there, but on the way out of the airport one of the cops I see every day pulled me over to write a ticket for going 46 in a 35. Guy I saw every day inside the airport, knew his name, knew his kid's names, and he took 20 minutes while my dad was in emergency surgery to write me a ticket. I would have taken one for 70 in a 35 if he would have just done it faster.

I got there eventually, and my mom and I were both tense with red-rimmed eyes, but we're not cryers. We're doers. When things are hard we make plans and accomplish them, but there was nothing to do but wait.

My Aunt Kate is a nurse and flew in the next day to stay until dad got out of the ICU. I believe she was a huge help, especially since the medical interventions were most intense that week, but I honestly don't remember much. She made sure Mom and I slept and ate, because otherwise we would have sat there waiting for news, waiting for Dad to wake up, waiting for anything we could accomplish to feel like we weren't failing at everything.

Dad spent at least the next week in the ICU, having two surgeries a day interspersed with other treatments. If we had lived almost anywhere else in the country he would have died 2/16/11. If they had decided to go from the urgent care to UNC's ER instead of Duke, he would have likely lost his leg and maybe his life.

This became my life, with occasional outings to distract myself. Work, hospital, home, on repeat. Days off were entirely at the hospital so my mom could get some rest. We didn't leave him alone for more than 4 hours the entire time he stayed at Duke.

Here's his birthday. He'd been in the hospital two weeks at this point, was released from the ICU a few days prior, and had had around 20 debridement and reconstructive surgeries in that time, with more to come. He just turned 55.

He would spend the next month or so at Duke, and another three months in a rehab facility learning how to walk again. Mom had to teach the nurses there how to perform the dressing change on his leg, where he still had an open wound several inches deep and the size of both my hands (with another square foot or so covered in skin grafts). The nurses there were used to helping stroke patients and the elderly, not severe burn wound care (the closest correlation most medical professionals will see).

When they sent him home in July? August? he still had an open wound on his leg where Mom did a dressing change every day. And by this point? This was normal. I had moved back home shortly before he did, so I could be there to help out.

I don't know where I was going with this. I saw that first picture and this entire horrible, hard year snapped into my head and wouldn't let go until I spilled it out somewhere.

[aspidities]

I became a patron today although I had planned to do so after I'd get a job. I'm a student currently and do a lot of savings for my tuition but I figured this couldn't wait. I really had to, considering you're paying for your father's treatment. All my love to you. Know that we're with you in this. ❤❤❤❤

Dearest, dearest anon, I know that student life. You save your pennies! But thank you, I truly appreciate it.

I want to address this for anyone feeling weird or guilty about Patreon right now: I do not need you to over budget for me. I have no desire for anyone to be in the red at the end of the month because of my smut. We have all lived paycheck to paycheck (or less) in this hellscape of an economy and I deeply support and relate. Do not overspend yourself for this! I love all of you, regardless. Every single one of you is so fucking important to me. Please believe that.

And I should clarify: Patreon is not paying entirely for my Dad’s cancer treatment—I should not have worded it that way. I’m definitely paying for his expenses right now, and had to take on a third job to do so, but he’s also paying for some of it, and since he’s now living with me, some of my expenses are cut too. Granted, Patreon is a huge help for big ticket medical items and unexpected bills—of which there are many because our country refuses universal healthcare for some reason and it makes me more and more insane every day—and don’t get me wrong, I definitely wept when I saw that we would be able to cover Temodar. It’s a massive, enormous helping hand each month, but its not the only thing I have going to cover these bills. It’s what enables me to do better than some, and I am forever fucking grateful for that in ways I would never be able to express here.

Please do not feel obligated to support me because of my Dad’s cancer. Support me because you love bad smut on a sorta-schedule and you want first dibs on it. Support me because you wanna see if I’ll eventually ever write any original work like I keep saying I will. Support me because you like supporting independent queer creators, or because canon sucks, or just because you want to, but don’t ever feel you have to. I want you all to be living your best lives out here, no struggles. Let’s all just get by together. ♥️ 🌈

[theconservativebrief]

The first 24-hour Krispy Kreme in Ireland opened its doors on September 26, but unfortunately for doughnut-eating Irish night owls, its initial premise proved faulty within just a week. The following Wednesday, Krispy Kreme announced that the all-night shop would now close at 11:30 pm, demoting it to just a regular ol’ doughnut store.

The culprit was the same as it always is: Too many people were lured by a tantalizing idea that the promise-makers couldn’t, for a variety of reasons, fulfill.

In Krispy Kreme’s case, that meant a line of hundreds of honking cars in the wee-est hours of the morning, disturbing neighbors and causing huge traffic jams. But it’s a story that has replayed again and again over the past few years: A limited-edition product, a free event, or a huge sale sounds a little bit too good to be true on the internet and, of course, ends up being exactly that.

I have spent literal years of my life thinking about — and contributing to — this phenomenon. For about a year and a half, my job was to write listings for free and cheap family-friendly events for a New York City kid’s magazine. More specifically, my job was to make these two-sentence descriptions sound as fun and exciting as possible without straight-up lying about what parents and kids would actually find when they got there.

This led to a lot of vague phrases like “hands-on activities!” and “music, performances, and food trucks!” that didn’t totally capture the reality of the only two possible situations. The first is that these “hands-on activities” and “performances” would be extraordinarily dull and not worth leaving the house for. The second is that even if they were free and decidedly non-lame, it still wouldn’t be worth the ridiculously long wait times, brutal crowds, and general feeling of total dehumanization that anything with the word “festival” can bring. (Fun fact: you can slap the word “festival” on literally any event with more than one thing to do!) It wasn’t uncommon for us to receive emails from angry parents complaining about a too-crowded or otherwise disappointing day.

My next job was the opposite: I’d scope out sample sales and report on whether they were worth waiting in the multi-block lines. Almost always, my personal answer was, “Uh, no???” but this kind of lazy reporting was, unfortunately, frowned upon. So instead, as fashion writers are wont to do, I described many pieces of clothing as “worth” buying when in fact I had no intention of doing so myself.

i come home to ireland for the first time in months and the whole country is at a standstill over a krispy kreme

— The Chronic Project (@TheNapKween) October 3, 2018

Both experiences have instilled in me a deep skepticism about any kind of buzzy event or sale, to the point where I have a deep mistrust of anything with the words “food festival” or “sale” in it. But I think more people should have that, too.

Because over the past few years, there’ve been tons of examples of overhyped and ultimately disappointing events, and almost always, social media is to blame. It isn’t just that the internet makes it easy for us to stumble upon fun-sounding experiences and then share them with our friends — it’s that there’s now a social media ecosystem that makes real money off hyperbolizing what you’ll find when you go to them. Essentially, whole brands and publishers are built on causing you FOMO.

When Build-a-Bear Workshop held its “Pay Your Age Day” sale on July 12, thousands of shoppers across the US, Canada, and the UK lined up outside stores hours before opening, hoping for a chance to stuff and buy an animal for only the cost of their child’s age.

Build-a-Bear, however, was woefully unprepared. Most stores cut off lines by mid-morning, though some shoppers claimed that even if they arrived early enough, the barrage of crowds forced them to wait hours. Others said that despite their early arrivals, they were turned away and told to come back later, only to find that the store had already closed.

The fiasco may not have happened had Build-a-Bear been able to gauge interest far enough in advance — it had announced the sale just three days before it went down, and the event was quickly covered by national news outlets.

In a similar case, McDonald’s attempted to capitalize on a joke from the popular animated comedy Rick & Morty by rereleasing its Szechuan sauce, but ended up revealing how toxic some corners of the fandom could be. When it turned out that McDonald’s had either barely stocked the sauce or failed to tell some stores the promotion was even happening, thousands of angry fans protested outside stores and wreaked havoc inside them. On social media, others proposed boycotts or filing a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s, which distributed so few packets of the sauce that, due to supply and demand, one woman was able to trade hers for a car.

As Vox wrote at the time, “McDonald’s made the classic mistake of a corporation that suddenly finds itself engaging with a large fandom: When fans began to interact with its branding, it signed up for the free publicity and easy marketing, but didn’t do the work of understanding just what kind of fandom it had on its hands.”

The peculiarities of the Rick & Morty subculture surely had something to do with the level of vitriol expressed toward McDonald’s. But the blame is also on the way McDonald’s teased and winked at fans in its advertisements: It knew the Szechuan sauce was an item that customers desperately wanted, and it failed to deliver.

And the biggest, most prevailing example of this kind of failure is the food festival. The idea of a free or low-cost never-ending feast, spread out over a maze of stalls with different cuisines, satiating every possible sort of person, and all attendees leaving happy and perhaps even culturally fulfilled, is generally far too enticing to ever reach its Platonic ideal. But because people keep organizing them, other people keep buying tickets.

In September 2014, the organizers behind the massively popular outdoor food market Smorgasburg attempted to arrange a one-time-only night market inside Central Park, to much fanfare. Though the event, which was to include food, drinks, DJs, and dancing, was scheduled to run from 5 to 9 pm, by around 6 o’clock, police had to turn hundreds of people away, which ended up resulting in tons of leftover food.

But it shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. Two years earlier, a similar fiasco occurred when the organizers of Bonnaroo attempted a giant food festival and concert in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. It would be called the Great GoogaMooga and would be free to enter with registry, though attendees could also purchase $250 VIP tickets that promised exclusive viewing, attendance to culinary seminars, cocktail demos, and wine and beer tastings.

A GoogaMooga worker holds a sign as festivalgoers wait in line for food. Mike Lawrie/Getty Images

Though the festival ended up making headlines for its absurdly long wait times, technical payment issues, and the fact that beer and wine reportedly ran out by 3 pm, it wasn’t much better for the VIP customers. A Gothamist piece headlined “$250 VIP GoogaMooga Tickets: You Would’ve Gotten More Full Eating the Money” described some folks waiting “15 minutes for a bite of a mortadella hot dog and another 15 for a single piece of beef with some corn,” and zero vegetarian options to speak of. The VIP section eventually ran out of food entirely, leaving attendees to watch celebrity panelists like David Chang and James Murphy eat delicious food while they couldn’t.

These two are far from the only disappointing food festivals. If recent memory serves, most of them end up being a disaster on some level: There was the “unlimited” cheese festival in London whose cheese selection was in fact very limited, the African food fest with a measly two vendors, the “drunken hellscape” that was BrunchCon, the pizza festival that was such a scam that it ended up being investigated by the attorney general, and, uh, that other one.

Though food festivals that don’t live up to the hype and sales that get out of control are two different beasts, they share some important commonalities. The first is that both of them hinge on brands and organizers promising something they can’t always deliver. Build-a-Bear and McDonald’s may have had the tools and staffing to follow through on their promotions for some customers, but both failed to take into account the rest of the equation, which is that a massive number of people wanted to take advantage of them at the same time.

Very sad slices of pizza from September 2017’s disastrous New York City Pizza Festival. Facebook

The same goes for events — GoogaMooga may have been a lovely experience for all if only fewer people had shown up (but in that case, organizers knew exactly how many people had registered, and had no excuse not to be prepared).

Part of this is obviously due to how social media is able to spread information much, much faster than it ever has in the past. When Build-a-Bear announced its Pay Your Age sale on Facebook, the post was shared by nearly 20,000 people, exposing it to huge swaths of potential customers.

And thanks to Facebook’s events feature, an event that’s labeled “food night market” or “ultimate cheese festival” can travel enormous distances. When users click the “Interested” button on events that are set to public, that event will then show up on their friends’ timelines, so that even if neither party ends up actually attending, everyone involved will still be aware of its existence. Plus, it’s so simple to create a public Facebook event that even if said “food night market” has zero proof of its quality or viability, people are made to assume that it’s legit because it looks exactly the same as the superior ones.

But the other problem the internet poses, besides simply allowing more eyeballs on events, is that there are an increasing number of brands and publications whose businesses depend on getting you excited about going to them. There are the kinds of local magazines and blogs where I’ve spent years writing this kind of content. But in the past few years, there’s also been the ascent of Facebook video creators like Insider, Refinery29’s RSVP series, and BuzzFeed’s BringMe, which traffic in getting users hyped to visit a certain place or attend a specific event.

“This Cheese Festival Could Be Coming to a Place Near You Soon,” reads the title of one video by one of Facebook’s largest publishers, the viral content site LadBible. The video itself is the same kind of mobile-friendly, simple text-on-screen stuff you’ll see on any Facebook feed, and none of the footage is original — mostly it’s close-ups of different kinds of cheese and an aerial view of the festival, all provided by Cheese Fest UK. But it didn’t need to be any more complicated than that: All viewers needed to know was that there was a cheese festival possibly coming to a place near them soon. As of now, the video has 13 million views.

But when the actual Cheese Fest UK landed in Brighton last August, the event devolved into hour-long lines, cheese shortages, and expensive prices, and Cheese Fest was eventually forced to apologize.

Essentially, there’s an entire economy within social media that trades off people’s FOMO. And in order for these videos, posts, or events to go viral, they require organizers and publishers to hyperbolize as much as possible, without any real concern for what customers can actually expect to get for their time and money.

But until social media engagement and virality aren’t important markers of brands’ and publishers’ success, it’s not likely that we’ll see the tale of the overhyped and underwhelming event end anytime soon. The only thing we can do, really, is take our 10 million–view videos about rosé-soaked pool parties with a hearty dose of skepticism. Or just do what I do and avoid them all entirely.

Original Source -> The internet helps cheap, fun events spread faster than ever. It’s also totally ruined them.

via The Conservative Brief

[affairsintop]

Petula Dvorak: ‘All we can do is cry now’: Salvadorans face the loss of their American dream

New Post has been published on https://www.anblogger.com/petula-dvorak-all-we-can-do-is-cry-now-salvadorans-face-the-loss-of-their-american-dream/

Petula Dvorak: ‘All we can do is cry now’: Salvadorans face the loss of their American dream

Because she didn’t know how else to calm her nerves on Monday, Carmen Paz Villas did what she does best. She went to work, cleaning rooms at the hotel. On her day off.

“And now, I cry and cry,” Paz Villas said, in between rooms, when she learned that, no matter how hard she works, the country she’s called home for 18 years doesn’t want her family anymore. “Everybody with TPS, all we can do is cry now.”

Welcome to the limited-edition, 2018 version of the American dream.

Because according to our government today, it’s not enough to work hard, open a 401k, buy a home, obey the law, start a business, get a Costco card, become a sports fan, win employee of the month and have a family to become an American.

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced the end to Temporary Protective Status for 200,000 immigrants from El Salvador, who have until Sept. 9, 2019, to find a way to obtain a green card or leave the U.S.

That means Paz Villas’s husband can’t stay. He’s from El Salvador. She’s from Honduras, and the administration announced two months ago that roughly 57,000 Hondurans in the U.S. with protective status like her will also have to leave soon. So much for their home, their kids, their neighbors and friends in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Across the nation — especially in the Washington area, which has one of the nation’s largest concentration of Salvadorans — immigrants went to work, picked the kids up, paid their bills and worried if this new America is not for them.

“This is devastating for them, yes,” said Lindolfo Carballo, 55, who came to the U.S. from El Salvador 27 years ago, escaping a civil war hellscape that meant seeing five or six dead people in the streets every day. “But what about America? The country will hurt, too. These people own homes. They have jobs. They help build this country. They aren’t going to be the only ones hurt.”

The folks I talked to — workers and business owners with Temporary Protective Status (TPS) — are quietly despairing. Because staying quiet, staying out of trouble, is what gave them legal status year after year.

“Why don’t they just become legal?” people angry about illegal immigration always ask. Because Grandpa Giuseppe did it legally. Uncle Seamus did it legally.

Yes. But in those days, immigration was much, much easier. Today, the backlogged immigration system makes applying for political asylum or other forms of permanent legal status far more difficult. Obtaining citizenship can be impossible.

“That process is over a decade long. It can cost thousands of dollars. It’s not realistic,” said Ava Benach, an immigration lawyer in the Washington, D.C., area.

Benach proved that point Monday morning, when she looked at her calendar for the week.

“I’m going to the asylum office this week for a client who applied for asylum, let’s see, July 8, 2014,” she said. “The interview on her asylum application was finally scheduled this week.”

And during those years of waiting, the immigrant can be sent back at any moment, on the whim of an unforgiving immigration official or judge.

“They can always initiate removal,” she said. Traditionally, unless a crime is committed, officials have been generous in waiting the process out.

“But now, we’re operating in a brave, new world,” she said.

Carballo, the man who escaped the daily bloodshed of El Salvador’s civil war, didn’t become an American citizen because of his hard work, years of law-abiding citizenry and doting fatherhood. He got the golden ticket of citizenship because he married an American.

At a quick rally gathered outside the White House Monday, the mood was defiant, not sad.

There was the woman wearing a red hat, matching the rest of her red-white-and-blue outfit. Her Texas-sized, bleached-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders and she lugged a huge, American flag on a wooden pole as she posed in front of the White House for a selfie.

When the speaker at a rally said “Make America Great Again,” Ivania Castillo, a self-described Reagan Republican, cheered. Because for her and for the dozens of Latinos gathered in the sleet outside the White House, America used to be great. Before Monday.

“I am the voice telling people like me to vote,” said Castillo, who came from El Salvador in 1980. She had a clear path to citizenship back then and took it. But today, the country isn’t as open to hard-working people like her, she said.

“I used to believe in Republicans. But what those Republicans did today, they are going to pay for it,” she said. “There are 27 million Latinos like me, and we are going to vote to change America. To make it great again, so everyone like me has a chance at citizenship again.”

The immigrants, “they are the ones that are making America great,” said Abel Nunez, executive director of Carecen, a Latino advocacy group. “This is what America is about.”

“Based on careful consideration of available information,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, “the secretary determined that the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist. Thus, under the applicable statute, the current T.P.S. designation must be terminated.”

No matter that El Salvador remains one of the nation’s deadliest places.

But even if things got better in El Salvador, would that mean they should return? What about the Irish who fled the potato famine? The Germans? The Italians? Oh my gosh, Prague is doing marvelously now. Should my Czech immigrant parents, who fled Communism, be forced to return?

Nunez asked the crowd: “Are we leaving?”

And the crowd yelled back: “No!”

“That’s right,” he said. “We are here to stay.”

And they should. They have earned it.

Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Washington Post’s local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things.