#what a pleasant surprise

[missvonivory]

hi medic

[gael-garcia]

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people. Drawing together writers, editors, and other culture workers, WAWOG hopes to provide ongoing infrastructure for cultural organizing in response to the war. This project is modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam, an organization founded in 1965.

Statement of Solidarity

October 26, 2023

Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of human rights groups, scholars, and, above all, everyday Palestinians: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project. 

We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. At least 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers have faced severe harassment, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.

What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, buttogether we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing. 

We act alongside other writers, scholars, and artists who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of sumud, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has advocated for organizations to join a boycott of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.  

Signed,

WAWOG Interim Organizing Committee

Hannah Black

Ari Brostoff (Senior Editor, Jewish Currents)

Elena Comay del Junco

Kyle Dacuyan (Executive Director, Poetry Project)

Kay Gabriel (Editorial Director, Poetry Project)

Kaleem Hawa

E. Tammy Kim

Shiv Kotecha

Wendy Lotterman (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Muna Mire

Perwana Nazif

Brendan O'Connor

Alex Press (Staff Writer, Jacobin)

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Dylan Saba

Zoé Samudzi (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Jasmine Sanders

Claire Schwartz (Culture Editor, Jewish Currents)

Janique Vigier

Harron Walker

Chloe Watlington

Gabriel Winant (Department of History, University of Chicago)

Audrey Wollen

Hannah Zeavin (Founding Editor, Parapraxis)

Signed, In Solidarity

Fatimah Warner (Noname)

Saul Williams

Susan Sarandon

Janeane Garofalo

Gael García Bernal

Danez Smith

Ocean Vuong

Aria Aber

Saidiya Hartman

China Miéville

+ full list here

[bookwyrminspiration]

I feel. so special rn

[blueeyeddarkknight]

I was today years old when I learned this fact 😳🤯

(Source : vulture)

Bonus :

[moonchild-in-blue]

Two Queens 💅

[acecroft]

MELANIE SCROFANO as Captain Batel in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1.01

[wilmonfc]

Ray in my notifs after a really long time

[shizukais]

"That was... That was my face...?"

[inoankin]

tell me bout the overanalysed shitpost 🥺

(shitpost in question)

well let's start with the obvious being that vincent and leo are not in the same frame, rather separated by a line they don't realize exists but nonetheless does. a clear metaphor for the inherent disconnect between them, how they could never truly be together because of who they were and what they wanted. one of the first things i noticed was their outfits; leo is wearing his jacket from the second act, but vincent is wearing the t-shirt he takes for the last leg of the story. this indicates that these two perspectives are not only separated by space but also by time.

there is an argument to be made about these two frames being depictions of both timelines (one where vincent dies, and one where leo dies), but i'm going to work within one timeline for simplicity's sake.

figuring out what time wouldn't be too hard. in vincent's half of the drawing, we can see grass in the background, while leo's half has no ground. it would probably be a safe assumption to say that vincent's half takes place after the climax of the game. but it would have to be the same day. so perhaps it's directly after he's killed leo. but, as for leo, where in the game has leo been off the ground? the only thing that comes to me is when they chased ray in the construction site. this, however, doesn't make much sense, because he has no reason to be crying, and that sequence happened in broad daylight (compared to the dark nighttime of the drawing). so it may take place in or outside the hospital.

both are crying, but leo's eyes are open to the sky, as if wistful or hopeful, although he is looking to the viewer's left. languages using the latin alphabet (like english, the original language of the game, and swedish, the primary language of the developers) read left to right, so this may mean he's looking backwards, perhaps already mourning their time together now that the end seems so near, now that he knows vincent will have to go back to his wife and child once this is all over. vincent, however, has his eyes closed, and his head down toward the earth. he is mourning the loss of his could-have-been lover, this fresh wound. it weighs his head down, it weighs HIM down (he does seem awfully close to the ground).

[stardestroyerss]

Vancouver lately

[crabsnpersimmons]

hiii Crabs :D placing him gently down in your inbox ✨

OHHHHHH RAM I LOVE HIM 💖💖💖💖💖💖

i will treasure him and feed him and water him and play with him and take him for walks and give him brushies and headpats and prepare a little bed for him and dress him up and and and

[haveyouseenthisromcom]

Does Beverly Hills Chihuahua count as a rom-com.......

Letterboxd lists it as a Comedy and Romance, so sure!

[wigster07]

Cassanova Kit Teaser:

What she also realizes is the feeling of waking with Jade in her arms again. Short of the morning after her breakdown, they stopped their sleepovers when their benefits situation started. Getting to have Jade wrapped in her arms and burning off sexual energy was great, mind blowing, everything Kit needed. But, not having those lazy mornings and late night conversations while staring at their ceilings, Kit needed that too. She needs Jade, all of her. 

Jade feels warm in her arms and safe and Kit drops a soft kiss at the back of Jade’s neck. Jade shifts a bit, humming and breaking the quiet of their bedroom. 

“Morning sweetheart,” Kit whispers it at her shoulder and drops another kiss on warm freckled skin. Her thumb sweeping against the skin exposed from Jade’s raised shirt. 

“Morning,” Jade stretches a bit, shirt lifting more and Kit takes advantage, sweeping her fingers in longer strokes along Jade’s abdomen. 

[willkimurashat]

HAMISH DARLING AHHHH HOW I MISSED YOUUUU🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹

You bet if he were the host in s5 asking to run away with him, I would, I swear I would lmao

[stromboli-muncher]

It's been a while since I drew the bros together-

So sorry if it's really messy 😭

YAYAYAYAYAYAY THEYRE SO SILLYYYY

[theblackestofsuns]

"What A Pleasant Surprise"

Ginger Fox #2 (October 1988)

Mike Baron and The Pander Brothers

Comico