interwar:

Ask Culture and Guess Culture

“One of my wife’s distant friends has attempted to invite herself to stay with us, again,” writes the exasperated owner of a prime 2 bedroom apartment in New York City in this Ask MetaFilter question. “She did this last March, and we used the excuse of me starting a new job and needing to do x, y, and z as well as the “out of town” excuse for any remaining dates. This got us off scot-free, but we both knew the time would come again… and it’s here. We need a final solution.”

He goes on to list two different possibilities he can think of for getting this woman to stop asking for free room and board. The first is a little white lie, something about their keys being hard to duplicate. The other is to be vague, to say something like “Sorry, that isn’t going to work for us” and hope she doesn’t ask why.

The first few answers give this poster very direct advice: Just say no. No need to give an explanation, it’s her who’s being rude by asking. Others give him advice that was probably more like what he was expecting: other ways to be vague like claiming that it’s “One of those random `Life in NYC things.’”

Another thread of discussion popped up around whether or not the woman asking for a place to stay was being rude. Some posters couldn’t understand how simply asking to stay in someone’s apartment was rude, while another went as far to say that putting someone in the position “having to be rude and say no” was rude in and of itself.

It is into this context that user tangerine contributes this answer:

After this comment many users, including the original poster himself, began to use these terms in discussing the issue. And why wouldn’t they? Ask Culture and Guess Culture describe two valid yet opposing ways of interacting with the world with very little value judgment given to them. Framing the argument as such was a stroke of utter genius by tangerine, broadening the perspective of many who participated in the discussion and adding to the general lifebuzz.

if you cant eat you got to, by e e cummings

If you can’t eat you got to smoke and we aint got nothing to smoke:come on kid let’s go to sleep if you can’t smoke you got to Sing and we aint got nothing to sing;come on kid let’s go to sleep if you can’t sing you got to die and we aint got Nothing to die,come on kid let’s go to sleep if you can’t die you got to dream and we aint got nothing to dream(come on kid Let’s go to sleep)

a poem to the black man who called me an arab and told me not to bomb the train like we did in boston

thank you for your honesty the way it spilled out of your lips more potent than the stench of vodka in your breath it has been years since someone has had the bravery to look at me in the face and tell me what they are actually thinking

you see i just came from a dance party what i mean to say is that i started shaving every night before i went to the club so white men would look at me and translate the contours of my face into english and hope that brown found a synonym for beautiful somewhere in the creases around my hazel eyes ‘cause hazel is brown standing at the corner of a bar smiling with all his teeth hazel is brown being asked to dance

i shaved so i could look at myself in the mirror and not be afraid: the way i will button up my shirt all the way in the cab to the airport the way i will ask the white security guards to pat me down, save them the awkward glance, the excuse me sir, the travesty of two dancers fumbling through a routine that has been choreographed for years – hold your hand steady —  i promise you will know how to hold me still, like the way your finger knows how to pull the trigger when are running

the entire flight will stare at me as i walk down the aisle as if i am marching to my own death

i am used to this – the resounding silence of an entire cabin moving but going nowhere

the truth is had it been another night i would have tried my best to ignore you, too

i have read books about you and your struggle and i have used words like color and race to pretend that i am a part of it but that does mean that i would not have felt my pulse tango with the sweat on my back when you looked at me wondered why your hands were in your pockets hoped that you would not jump me like the mug shots on the television screens like the rappers on the radio: your black designed to kill my queer the scripts have already been written hope that you forget your lines tonight

brother: i am sitting on the train home refusing to cry because it is so quiet that i can hear my own heart beating and it sounds like a bomb and i wonder if you were right:

that the terrorist got inside of me: told me i was beautiful at a bar snuck inside that crease of my eye while i was watching the news dressed up in a tux and called himself president and tortured people whose faces looked just like mine – but i couldn’t hear their screams because we drowned them out with our applause – i pledge allegiance is a standing ovation for the biggest charade and we have all been fooled

the terrorist tip-toed in through my ear while i was listening to the speech called himself safety as he sent drones across the ocean – they say that the Sirens’ song is so beautiful that we do not hear the crash until we can taste our own blood from our wilting lips and recognize that we are not being kissed

and it wasn’t long before he took out the knife and disguised the pain as patriotism and took control of my body – steered me to a neighborhood far away from yours and taught us how to hate one another: democracy is another way of saying divide and conquer slowly

and i didn’t even notice until tonight: the way we are running around using our tongues as whips mistaking our puppet strings as spines too busy fighting one another to recognize that we are being used

brother: i have written you a poem and i suppose it works something like a bomb, i have strapped it to my chest like a bulletproof vest so maybe you are right: let it tear you apart let it make you remember your blood let it force you to see me from a distance listen to the crash how it sometimes sounds like honesty: that the true terrorists are sitting in boardrooms sipping champagne in suits, and sometimes their skin seduces us to think that that they are saints, and sometimes we believe them

but maybe we don’t have to: maybe we can cut off the puppet strings use them as ropes to tie ourselves together in struggle, in justice and fight back with all of our love and fight back with all of our love

and they will think that our hugs are hand grenades and they will mistake our revolution as terrorism but we will keep writing, and singing, and dancing and sometimes we will be drunk and sometimes we will be lonely and sometimes we will cry on trains and planes but we will keep going, like our ancestors before us

brother i have written you a poem and i suppose it works something like a dove taking flight from my throat — let me help you remember what they refuse to let us see:

we are not the terrorists, it is them.

if you like this poem please consider supporting the artist

Janani - “trans/national” (CUPSI 2013)

  When I tell my mother  how long I’ve been sitting in the shiftiness of a female body, she cries a million different kinds of monsoon tears. She tells me about the white men who colonized her country, her nightmares. her mother’s sari soaked in saltwater, the traumas she screams about  this is what I remember when I talk to white trans men and witness the million different ways they take up space in my community, and speak for trans women of color, and treat femmes as arm candy, and do not own their position as white men. Brothers, what I mean is did you think the M in FTM stood for misogyny? What I mean is what about your female socialization do you think affords you a free pass to patriarchy? What I mean is I understand your bodies have not always been yours but they have always been beautiful, you have always had words for them.  My testosterone is made by Israel’s largest company. There is colonization running through my bloodstream Every time I take a shot my muscles feel out of place for several days. But there is some perverse satisfaction in this, that even in my body masculinity takes up too much space. Mom, you’re right. this is a painful process. It is violence. It is scarring. But I’m trying to believe in something greater: that there are ways of being a man that do not involve being a white man. When I tell my grandmother that I’m ready to be honest with my body, she says, ok, make sure to call me more often, and I’m sending you a drum set. For days I have no idea what she means but then I realize  in India only boys ever play the drums, and what my grandmother means is there are ways of being a man that do not involve being an American man, that you can still play your music with us, that I do not have words for this process of your becoming but I will work around it with art and love. Grandmother, mom, there is a way to do this ethically. I will build some other, new-old kind of masculinity. I will not worry about the words for it in English. I will honor the mothers in my history, the goddess in my name, I will play the drums for you.

China Mieville at The Guardian

As if I needed any more reasons to like him.

(via thesixpennybook)

how to care for introverts

The Trilobites

The horizon is not far,

not on a clear day,

not on the top of Mary’s Peak

or at the bluffs at Cape Blanco,

not anywhere.

The world is flat, at any rate,

the sky empty.  We walk about

looking neither up nor down

and still are overwhelmed by

the torrent of information.

I wonder if it would not be so different

from the flatlander’s transcendence

to the third dimension,

to step into the ocean

with eyes that could see.

Humanity, I hear, has always dreamed

of flying.  A strange dream.

Better than flying through empty skies, I think,

to swim unblinded in a universe

of penetrable darkness,

with life and death stretched into infinity

in every direction, surrounded by fins

and claws and tentacles, submerged in our own

alienation and the persistent memory

of the things that have seen this world

with eyes that are cold and hard.

- Robbie Eberharr

Manifesto (February 5th, 1920) by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes

So I found a scan of it…

since it’s in a format that doesn’t suit tumblr well I’ll use this in the future

it’s kind of like the tl;dr version of “behold your future executioners” 

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots  Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime … Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen 8 October 1917 - March, 1918

Continuity  I’ve pressed so far away from my desire that if you asked  me what I want I would, accepting the harmonious completion of the  drift, say annihilation, probably.  by A. R. Ammons

A good time to talk about things that fuck me up about discussions of internet piracy!

‘Piracy’ implies profit is being made which is almost never the case!

‘Stealing’ implies property is being lost which is also not necessarily the case!

When throwing around words like property theft and piracy you are talking about hypothetical loss of a hypothetical profit and that hypothesis is based on the PATENTLY RIDICULOUS premise that all shared files are things that someone would have spent money on had they not been able to obtain it via filesharing!

Never even mind that discussions of e-piracy are often framed in a Western-centric way that disregards the disproportional accessibility of media to all people and which wedges Western capitalist notions of intellectual property where they may not/should not apply!

NOREGRETS.GIF

As I’ve said in the past, calling copyright infringement “stealing” is an emotional appeal disguised as a legal argument.

word

THE PHOENIX Being ash, being dust, being what’s left on the plate, being the bungalow with a moss-eaten roof a stone’s throw off from the new glass house, being bone and gristle, being biomass, being something stuck to the fridge floor whiffing of a long-turned tide, being shredded, un-sought secrets, being car exhaust, being half-buried rusted-out bedsprings sleeping it off in the woods, being what was washed from the photo by the years, being what will never wash, being what’s in the storm drain hurrying off, the dust flaring up in the comet’s tail, the toe-nail clippings feeling around under the rug, the sticks laid out on the highway after a storm, the pennies on the dashboard short of a dollar, the hollow core of an old swamp cedar, the crumpled butt of the sweetest cigarette you ever had, I am everywhere and I demand my wings. Christian Barter