You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
I see him still. He’s helpful to me, real helpful. Tells me things I need to know.
Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.
That skill allowed her more freedom hour by hour and day by day than any other work a woman of no means whatsoever and no inclination to make love for money could choose.
(TM)
and by the power of that amorous hope
that sustained you, though life was bitter,
disburden the air of this dark weather
From poem 34, Petrarch:The Canzoniere. Translated by: A.S.Kline
Appropriate for A Landscape longed for.
In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.
Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon — everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother — a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.
Beloved, Toni Morrison
via The Marginalian.
Cécé, Emmelie Prophète. Translated from French by Aidan Rooney. Archipelago Books, 2025. Les villages de Dieu, Mémoire d’encrier, 2020 (Un extrait (PDF) est disponible).
Laferrière loves it.
Discours de reception de Dany Laferriere, 28 mai 2015.
“C’est Legba qui m’a permis de retracer Hector Bianciotti disparu sous nos yeux ahuris durant l’été 2012. Legba, ce dieu du panthéon vaudou dont on voit la silhouette dans la plupart de mes romans. Sur l’épée que je porte aujourd’hui il est présent par son Vèvè, un dessin qui lui est associé. Ce Legba permet à un mortel de passer du monde visible au monde invisible, puis de revenir au monde visible. C’est donc le dieu des écrivains.”
Devoted to the cause … of here, presentness, their conjoined expression.
In The Nation, Akbar asks us to help the vulnerable.
What is the purpose of an app, owned by a man who cheered on the new regime at inauguration, that carousels these videos in between baby photos from casual acquaintances and ads for underwear and linen sheets?
What is the purpose of a government that disappears its people? Ozturk had a valid student visa, as did Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia grad student, who were both disappeared in similar fashion this month.
[…]
The videos, the disappearings, are obvious intimidations intended to choke dissent, both in the specific cases of Ozturk, Doroudi, and Khalil, and in general, in the cases of all of us who look or pray or believe or vote like them. The Trump regime, like every despotic autocracy before it, is making examples of a few to terrify the many. Into what? Silence, compliance, submission? Anguish?
I hate their harm. I hate the countless rifts they’ve torn open across time as they preen for cameras and expand their bitcoin empires. But they don’t give a shit about me or my hate. My place of birth (Tehran [or Port-au-Prince]) disqualifies me from concern. It also endangers me.
[…]
I think about the children Ozturk was learning to help. The hours of tenderness stolen from them. I think about my father, whose beloved big sister is right now this second desperately fighting a serious cancer in Tehran. My father became an American citizen some years ago, but feels he cannot safely, under this regime, return to Iran to be with her. I want to hurl my laptop through the window typing that. The hours stolen from them. From Doroudi and Khalil and every soul domestic and abroad who has ever been stolen or stolen from by the American project.
