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“Falling Back to Earth”
Cai Guo-Qiang
Source: nuyorc
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Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), dir. Arwen Curry
The next line of her speech is also great: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.
Thank you.
nikyatu reblogged
Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”, Glass, Irony, and God
Claudia Rankine, “Some years there exists a wanting to escape…”, Citizen: An American Lyric
Kaneko Tomiyuki
Manifesting my reality from the inside out. I hope you all are finding peace, in spite of...<3
I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense.
Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory" [Originally published in Cultural Critique, No. 6, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (Spring, 1987), pp. 51-63]
nikyatu reblogged
Nyanderi Deng by Axle Jozeph for Nataal Magazine
Natalie Díaz, from “Isn't the Air Also a Body, Moving?”, Postcolonial Love Poem
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Judith Jamison
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-Simone de beauvoir „The second sex“
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Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
pedagogy of the oppressed by paulo freire
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The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of dehumanization.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!
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Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation.
Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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Danielle McKinney (American, 1981) - Sandman (2023)
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✨Dear Black Girl, It’s ok to rest. ✨
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“I stopped explaining myself when I realized people only understand from their level of perception.”
— Unknown