@discoinfernum - Tumblr Blog

keepingitneutral

distantvoices

Akiima for The September Issues

tiassamiura

dezligando

anarchblr

the Spanish word for “work” —trabajo— comes from “torture”, “to torture”, or “instrument of torture”

doubleca5t

Nosotras vivimos en una sociedad

soracities

“I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. Only the privileged - those with homes and food and the luxury of time in a home - are touched, moved, sometimes changed by literature. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy. What do stars look like on a clear cold winter night, when your children are hungry, are daily losing their very health; or when, alone, you look up from a heat grate? Of course in cities at night you can’t even see the stars.”

— Andre Dubus, “After Twenty Years”

“The point from which politics starts for me is hunger. Nothing less.”

— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel

“A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when [Simone Weil] heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“No, no, I do not feel sorry for those who die of hunger. What I feel is rage.”

— Clarice Lispector, “Dies Irae”

“You and your friends fill your mouths with big words–Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution–and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people sat at the table.”

— José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion

“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.”

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

musicgarlic-deactivated20201112

garlic has never wronged me… been a friend through it all

itswadestore

From Denisse Ariana Pérez

femalerappers

But even lovers have their limits.

agathasc0ven

these images of sandra oh in the 90's/early 00's live in my mind rent free

hey god it's me again

doped-up-marxist-deactivated202

Ever notice how much u watch urself? Fucking cop

oaluz

“I’ve developed an aversion to that word normal ... now, I find it noxious”

“Those in power keep invoking “the normal” as in “when we get back to normal.” I’ve developed an aversion to that word normal. Of course, I understand the more benign meanings of normal; having dinner with friends, going to the movies, going back to work (not so benign). However, I have never used it with any confidence in the first place; now, I find it noxious. The repetition of “when things return to normal” as if that normal, was not in contention. Was the violence against women normal? Was the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism normal? Was white supremacy normal? Was the homelessness growing on the streets normal? Were homophobia and transphobia normal? Were pervasive surveillance and policing of Black and Indigenous and people of colour normal? Yes, I suppose all of that was normal. But, I and many other people hate that normal. Who would one have to be to sit in that normal restfully, to mourn it, or to desire its continuance? We are, in fact, still in that awful normal that is narrativized as minor injustices, or social ills that would get better if some of us waited, if we had the patience to bear it, if we had noticed and were grateful for the miniscule “progress” etc … Well, yes, this normal, this usual, this ease was predicated on dis-ease. The dis-ease was always presented as something to be solved in the future, but for certain exigences of budget, but for planning, but for the faults of “those” people, their lack of responsibility, but for all that, there were plans to remedy it, in some future time. We were to hold onto that hope and the suspension of disbelief it required to maintain “normal.”

“But I hear what they say and many others do as well, “Look we should never live the way we lived before; our lives need not be framed by the purely extractive, based on nothing but capital.” Everything is up in the air, all narratives for the moment have been blown open — the statues are falling — all the metrics are off, if only briefly. To paraphrase Trouillot, we want “a life that no narrative could provide, even the best fiction.” The reckoning might be now.”

slangtasy

Why do you deny yourself heaven? Why do you consider yourself undeserving? Why are you afraid of love? You think it’s not possible for someone like you. But you are the love of my life. You are the love of my life. You are the love of my life.

forafricans

Two girls in close embrace as they skate together. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ©Israel Dejene

hundondestiny

This idea that you are harming, destroying, wasting, or like otherwise abusing books by dog-earing the pages, highlighting things, writing on them, etc. is really whack and makes no sense and literally no one should be beholden to it when they own books.

Literally every single humanities/social science teacher or professor I’ve ever had has books that are covered with sticky tabs and notes in all the margins. Books are meant to be enjoyed. You make a book yours by covering it with your thoughts.

That’s just a part of reading. I don’t know why there’s this aversion to enjoying them but like… books are t decorative. Who are you “preserving” them for by not leaving marks on them?

write in your books!

hundondestiny

Also… if you want to talk about preserving books even when you do own them, you still are, as much as you’re preserving your own thoughts and feelings from your readings. Your book might not end up in a library, but it might end up in the hands of your friends, loved ones, people down the line who find it in your old house or whatever. It doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize worthy commentary, it’s just a piece of you.

hundondestiny

owning books affordably:

check local libraries for “free books” racks. a lot of public libraries, including those at public universities, will have carts and boxes of free books when they take them out of circulation or they’re outdated (especially for textbooks where new editions are being released). this is especially good if you’re trying to get into specific academic subjects–the Sociology department at my university, for instance, has it’s own library and professors will donate extra copies of books they have, and they’re always free. everyone has a right to be on public university grounds because it’s public.

thrift stores. you might not be able to find new / current books all the time, but different thrift shops will have books.

thriftbooks.com is fairly straightforward. they sell all kinds of books at reasonable prices. while new books cannot be shipped outside of the US, they ship virtually everywhere. they have a selection over over 14.8 million books, and their inventory is changing all the time.

Gish Jen just published a science/dystopian/political fiction novel called The Resisters on Feb 4 2020. You can buy it brand new for $23.

Just Mercy, a memoir from civil rights activist and law professor Bryan Stevenson, has been on the NY Bestsellers list for 23 weeks.Brand new paperback? $15. Hardcover? $24.

You can search books by language, including Spanish, Korean, Hebrew, and a dozen others.

AbeBooks.com specializes in used and rare books, including collectibles, and similar to Thrift Books they have classics like Night and Jane Austen for $5. They’re also great for textbooks, though they may be older editions.

Other sites: Book Outlet, Alibris (which boasts having prices as low as $0.99).

book giveaways. Goodreads is fairly well-known and they do giveaways, but you can also look at publishing house websites as they tend to have “first look” giveaways where you can read an excerpt, do a mini-review, or otherwise enter a raffle to win free copies of books. Sometimes libraries have these too, especially when authors are visiting.

you don’t have to shell out $60 for every book you want to keep.

givemearmstopraywith

it would be a shame of someone were to share how you can get free ebooks and pdfs of a vast variety of articles, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry rather than supporting an industry that enormously marks up books while still using royalty rates from forty years ago (you get five free downloads per day without sign up, ten with signup, and unlimited downloads with signup + a donation)

casthegrump

AbeBooks is also a really good site to support because a large portion of their sellers are independent bookstores who have placed their inventory online so when you buy from them you’re supporting a small business that would have otherwise lost your sale to amazon!!

unbearable-lightness-of-ink

also Better World Books contributes to literacy around the world, usually has free shipping, and is almost always the cheapest option I can find!

for new books, Bookshop dot org is intentionally working with bookstores to help prevent am*zon’s evil monopoly, and here’s an article about some others