“They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism. They investigated the treatment of the campus proletariat, including janitors, cooks and construction workers. They volunteered to help struggling rural families and dutifully recited the slogans of President Xi Jinping. Then, after graduation, they attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action, converging from across China last month on Huizhou, a city in the south, to organize labor unions at nearby factories and stage protests demanding greater protections for workers. That’s when the party realized it had a problem.”
— China’s Leaders Confront an Unlikely Foe: Ardent Young Communists – The New York Times (via the-grey-tribe)
“He is not a socialist, who does not, in time of imperialist war, desire the defeat of his own country”
– V.I. Lenin
Please reblog!!
I’m currently working with the mother of a peer of mine who was brutally murdered last December. His 1st year death anniversary is upcoming and his mom reached out to me confidentially for help in securing plane tickets for herself and her two daughters to be with her family for the anniversary of his death.
he’s buried in Najaf Iraq, where her family is, and she wants to be together with them during that time.
HOWEVER she rejected the idea of online fundraising bc her son’s situation is actually a really media-focused situation and she’s currently involved in a civil suit and is in the news all the time etc over her son’s murder and she doesn’t want the invasion of privacy OR for people to think she’s (quote unquote) a bad person for asking for money (which is heartbreaking but that’s how she feels)
My question to you guys is: do you guys know (esp those of you living in Hamilton, the greater Toronto area or Ontario in general) of religious organizations that might privately sponsor her trip somehow?? She needs 4500 dollars and needs it discreetly and I obv can’t provide that for her and I’ve had no luck figuring that out on my own.
Do you guys know of any place that she could *privately* reach out to for help??
if so please reach out to me and maybe I can connect you guys with her?? I really would like her to be able to visit her son’s grave but have legit no idea where to start asking for something that could remain private. If you guys know a possible solution please DM me!! And thanks in advance
John D. Graham, Two Sisters (1944)
when I found this painting in the museum I was startled by how snugly it fit inside my head, as if my body had reserved the space, as if we had known each other very long ago
Sandie Yi, Re-fuse Skin Set, 2011 (photography by Louisa de Cossy)
Imagine a house without words,
The family speechless for once
At the kitchen table, & all night
A hard wind ruining
The mottled skin of plums
In the orchard, & no one
Lifting a finger to stop it.
But imagine no word for “house,”
Or wind in a bare place always,
And soon it will all disappear—
Brick, & stone, & wood—all three
Are wind when you can’t say
“House,” & know, anymore, what it is.
Larry Levis, from Though His Name Is Infinite, My Father Is Asleep
(via nemophilies)
(via nemophilies)
All I think about these days is how Anne Carson took 2 years out of her degree (finishing her BA at 24), Marie Howe didn’t come to poetry until she was 30 (& earned her M.F.A. at 33) and Anne Boyer ‘worked for a company that sold anal thermometers & cadaver hooks for meatpacking plants/ stockyards but only as a lowest level pink collar employee then fired upon getting pregnant’ (her own words from Twitter)
Ya ladies anytime is the right time to find your words & the purpose contained within them!!!! You’re not a lost cause just cuz it hasn’t happened yet. With every year that goes by you are able to connect yet another set of dots, make even more sense of your world and how you best move within it. Don’t rush the process!!!! Let yourself grow
this passage from anne boyer’s e-mail newsletter has always stuck with me:
And most writers who have any success are actually just winners no matter how they self-present, winners with winning habits in winning places born from winning people educated as winners looking like winners with their winning new yorker profiles about winningly winning, too, even as they win at presenting as losing, but not me, I have lived the shit bottom of the barrel life for more years than I have ever lived any other kind, most of it my own fault, crying in parking lots outside the call centers crying in break rooms crying in cubicles and restaurant kitchens crying without jobs and also crying with them, crying for love and also against it and also because of it and without it, tears always falling down my bloated unhappy face as I insisted that I was prouder than my circumstances but never figured out how.
Once I worked for and was fired by a company that sold anal thermometers and cadaver hooks for meatpacking plants and stockyards. Or I’d work in call centers smoking ditch weed and crying softly high in my Mercury Tracer during breaks and getting fatter and fatter off the vending machine food until I’d quit by driving away and saying nothing, stay unemployed until my checks would bounce got another call center did the same. I wept and ate too much and got high and slept with whoever and turned the music too loud in my friend Jeff’s broken-windshield Nissan Pulsar and yet could never shake the feeling all during that somehow the hours of our lives were worth more than to be spent in the sheer and total hell of sheer and total hell.
To ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you. Even to oppose or challenge the Other, you must say “at least I speak to you,“ “I say yes to our being in common together.” So this is what I meant by love, this reaffirmation of the affirmation.
Jacques Derrida, interviewed by Nikhil Padgaonkar
(via abrce)
countervisuality 