warningimboring

[warningimboring]

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

[warningimboring]

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

[warningimboring]

Please don’t say: I discovered there is still a large part of me that is alive. No, my darling! You are entirely alive. It’s just that you’ve lived an irrational life, a life that doesn’t resemble you.

— Clarice Lispector, from a letter to Tânia Kaufmann wr. c. January 1948 

[warningimboring]

“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”

— Paul Auster, Winter Journal

[warningimboring]

[warningimboring]

children in gaza are losing their sight due to malnutrition. losing their sight. in the 21st century. in an entirely engineered famine, constructed by the "only democracy in the middle east" and facilitated by the rest of the civilized world including the united states and egypt. all in the name of defeating hamas, one of many groups to take up arms as a response to israeli determination to forcibly bring the myth of a land with no people for a people without a land to reality.

the problem is when you try to impose a settler colonial state on an indigenous people and they resist, you will be doing things like starving children until they lose their sight. and there's nobody else in the world to blame for that except the people who let you do it.

[warningimboring]

Mary Oliver, "Blue Iris." Devotions

[warningimboring]

from Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

[warningimboring]

Ilya Kaminsky, from "Alfonso Stands Answerable", Deaf Republic

[warningimboring]

Joy Sullivan, "Teeth", Instructions for Traveling West

[warningimboring]

Shara McCallum, "Domestic Interior"

[warningimboring]

Oh Allah, indeed You are Forgiving and You love to forgive, so forgive me

[warningimboring]

- Mahmoud Darwish from 'Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut c. 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi)

[warningimboring]

Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, "Extracting the Stone of Madness", Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

[warningimboring]

it is sad to me how our hands are growing idle, losing the tangible intimacy of beloved objects...something about the way touch deepens connection; the soft rustling of pages, the familiar click of a VHS slotting in, the crisp snap of opening the dvd case — the small, tactile rituals that once made love and memory tangible are slowly fading into intangible echoes. there was a kind of reverence in the way we handled tapes and DVDs, how mindful we were of fingerprints, scratches, and dust. to lend a favorite VHS or cassette was an act of trust —Here. This is a piece of me. Take care of it.

now, everything is becoming instant, weightless, intangible, impersonal, and the saddest part is that by losing the delicate act of handling what we love, we also lose the proof that we ever held it at all.

[warningimboring]

from Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, by Marc Lamont Hill & Mitchell Plitnick

[warningimboring]

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven