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🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Noah Kahan
JVL
tannertan36
The Stonewall Inn
Cosmic Funnies
almost home
YOU ARE THE REASON
bliss lane
titsay
will byers stan first human second
cherry valley forever
Monterey Bay Aquarium
PR's Tumblrdome
occasionally subtle
Product Placement
roma★
The Bowery Presents
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from China
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Canada
seen from Brazil
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Thailand
@forwantofclarity
“Whether you are alive or not makes all the difference. In Spanish, fish are peces till dead; then, pescados—one syllable from animal to meal, from subject to object. In death we’re reduced to the body’s usefulness: cow becomes meat, human becomes organ. But a dog remains un perro. A child can be nothing but a child.”
— Alicia Catt, “WHEN I PUT BLUEBEARD’S KEYS IN MY POCKET THEY STAIN MY DRESS & I HOPE YOU DON’T NOTICE,” published in Toad
andrei voznesensky, from the window of a plane
not sure if anyone is interested in this but here is a list of the most joyfully vital poems I know :)
You're the Top by Ellen Bass
Grand Fugue by Peter E. Murphy
Our Beautiful Life When It's Filled with Shrieks by Christopher Citro
Everything Is Waiting For You by David Whyte
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Is Alive! by Emily Sernaker
Instructions for Assembling the Miracle by Peter Cooley
Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
Barton Springs by Tony Hoagland
Footnote to Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman
Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower by Bradley Trumpfheller
At Last the New Arriving by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
To a Self-Proclaimed Manic Depressive Ex-Stripper Poet, After a Reading by Jeannine Hall Gailey
In the Presence of Absence by Richard Widerkehr
Chillary Clinton Said 'We Have to Bring Them to Heal' by Cortney Lamar Charleston
Midsummer by Charles Simic
Today by Frank O'Hara
Naturally by Stephen Dunn
Life is Slightly Different Than You Think It Is by Arthur Vogelsang
Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck
The Imaginal Stage by D.A. Powell
Lucky Life by Gerald Stern
Beginner's Lesson by Malcolm Alexander
Presidential Poetry Briefing by Albert Haley
A Poem for Uncertainties by Mark Terrill
On Coming Home by Lisa Summe
G-9 by Tim Dlugos
Five Haiku by Billy Collins
The Fates by David Kirby
Upon Receiving My Inheritance by William Fargason
Variation on a Theme by W. S. Merwin
Easy as Falling Down Stairs by Dean Young
Psalm 150 by Jericho Brown
Pantoum for Sabbouha by Zeina Hashem Beck
ASMR by Corey Van Landingham
A Welcome by Joanna Klink
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
At Church, I Tell My Mom She’s Singing Off-Key and She Says, by Michael Frazier
Hammond B3 Organ Cistern by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Sorrow Is Not My Name by Ross Gay
You Can't Have It All by Barbara Ras
I saw your post about ecofeminism. Could you recommend some books or essays about animals? Like about anything wrt animals. Possibly something discursive or philosophical or even aesthetic. Does that make sense? I am really interested and would be grateful if you know of any reading material.
Paul Kingsnorth’s essay “In the Black Chamber” (on animal de-extinction, mostly)
The article “Do Elephants Have Souls?” in the New Atlantis
Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights
Later [swifts] gather higher in the sky, their calls now so attenuated by air and distance that to the ear they corrode into something that seems less than sound, to suspicions of dust and glass. And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they fall silent and rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vesper flights, after the Latin vesper for evening. Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day, and I have always thought “vesper flights” the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue.
J.B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be
Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (I’m currently reading this one and it reminded me of your ask—which you sent such a while ago, I’m so sorry! Halfway through this book I suddenly thought “oh, I think I got an anon at one point who might be interested in this?”)
Philip Cafaro’s essay “For a species’ right to exist” (arguing that we should establish animals’ legal right to exist and exploring the consequences of this idea)
Sooyong Park’s Great Soul of Siberia (I like how he’s hoping to see tigers but, in the meantime, observes the activities of a mouse with equal interest)
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.
Diane Ackerman’s The Moon By Whale Light
On my to-read list: Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Network of Nature: The Delicate Balance of All Living Things
J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine
John Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life (basically a cat-flavoured intro to philosophy)
Unlike dogs, cats have not become part-human. They [...] are other than us in the deepest levels of their being. Having entered the human world, they allow us to look beyond it. [...] Feline ethics is a kind of selfless egoism. Cats are egoists in that they care only for themselves and others they love. They are selfless in that they have no image of themselves they seek to preserve and augment. Cats live not by being selfish but by selflessly being themselves.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (ah, I keep recommending this one. It’s so sweet. I love snails.)
Jonathan Balcombe’s What A Fish Knows (here’s my favourite part!)
I did not enjoy Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ The Hidden Life of Deer all that much, but I liked this observation:
A useful way to look at another life-form is to assume that whatever it may be doing—chewing bark, digging a tiny hole, wrapping itself in a leaf, sending up a sprout, turning its leaves to face the sunlight—it is trying to achieve a goal that you, in your way, would also want to achieve. In fact, you can be sure of that. The closer you are taxonomically to what you are looking at, the more likely you are to recognize what it’s goals might be, and the further you are, the less likely. Either way it’s fascinating.
[The sentiment expressed here is also explored at length in Andreas Weber’s Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science—but it is about the living world as a whole rather than specifically about animals]
if u dont mind id love to know more of ur fav poems :-) trying to get into reading more poetry
missing persons by sam sax
ode to prince by hanif abdurraqib
social skills training by solmaz sharif
men by maya angelou
DL N8 4 3SOME by jake skeets
having a coke with you by frank o'hara
jubilate homo by ellen bass
carpet bomb by kenyatta rogers
border patrol agent by eduardo c corral
heart condition by jericho brown
tell me something good by ocean vuong
letter to S, hospital by emily skaja
we lived happily during the war by ilya kaminsky
long division by matthew dickman
the american security against foreign enemies act by lucie brock-broido
you will never get death out of a system by dana levin
letter to chi by franny choi
14 lines from love letters or suicide notes by doc luben
said the confederate flag to the american flag by RJ walker
worms by shyla hardwick
blood makes the blade holy by evan knoll
the 17 year old & the gay bar by danez smith
mountain dew commercial disguised as a love poem by matthew olzmann
Short Story Recommendations
These all fuck me up to a varying degree of emotions
Crime
Philomel Cottage - Agatha Christie
Lamb to the Slaughter - Roald Dahl
Death and the Compass - Jorge Luis Borges
Horror
The Landlady - Roald Dahl
A Walk in the Dark - Arthur C Clarke
The Wife’s Story - Ursula K Le Guin
The Veldt - Ray Bradbury
The Hanging Stranger - Philip K Dick
The Colour out of Space - H P Lovecraft
The Spider - Hanns Heinz Ewers
Sad
The Life You Save May Be Your Own - Flannery O’Connor
A Small, Good Thing - Raymond Carver
Cathedral - Raymond Carver
The Haunted Boy - Carson McCullers
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Chef - Andy Weir
The Martyr - Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Jambula Tree - Monica Arak de Nyeko
The Rats Do Sleep At Night - Wolfgang Borchert
Sci-Fi
Love is the Plan the Plan is Death - James Tiptree Jr
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov
The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C Clarke
The Star - Arthur C Clarke
Reunion - Arthur C Clarke
The Commuter - Philip K Dick
Exhibit Piece - Philip K Dick
To Serve Man - Damon Knight
Brothers Beyond the Void - Paul W Fairman
What the Fuck?!
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
A Collapse of Horses - Brian Evenson
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby - Donald Barthelme
Hopeful Monsters - Hiromi Goto
The Box Social - James Reaney
He-y come on ou-t - shinichi hoshi
The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges
Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just the entire collection bro)
Other
Broken Routine - Jeffrey Archer
A Man Who Had No Eyes - Mackinlay Kantor
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been - Joyce Carol Oates
The Lady, or the Tiger - Frank R Stockton
The Continuity of Parks - Julio Cortázar
The Dinner Party - Mona Gardner
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - Gabriel García Márquez
On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges
“Ruinous female eroticism, and its myths, begins and belongs with Crete’s obsession with bulls. Zeus is a bull when he kidnaps and impregnates Europa. Minos’ mother is tricked by the false image of a bull. Minos’ wife tricks a bull by the false image of a cow. Pasiphaë (”All-Shining”) is daughter of Sun. Female lust, to Cretan imagination, is radiantly bestial. Result: Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, Crete’s shame and destruction… Whatever the labyrinth comes to mean in myriad contexts, it is essentially a hiding place for the devouring monstrous expression of Minoan civilisation and its passionate involvement with the bull.”
— Ruth Padel, excerpt from “Labyrinth of Desire: Cretan Myth in Us”
This volume develops a comprehensive framework for applying the theory of hauntology to everyday life from clinical and ethnographic points of view.
A Hauntology for Everyday Life
Meaning, Language, and Subjectivity
Ghosts, Metaphors, and Structures of Feeling
The Haunted Objects of Desire
Hauntology sans Exorcism, from Justice to Networked Subjectivities
Epilogue by Michael M.J. Fischer: Hauntology’s Genesis, Catacoustics, and Future Shadows
Correction to: The Hauntology of Everyday Life
Ya Zareef al-Toul / ياظريف الطول
Among some of the most famous Palestinian folk songs is Ya Zareef al-Toul, which is a love song turned revolutionary, addressed to an enigma; a tall handsome revolutionary man during the British mandate of Paletsine.
Zareef al-Toul, which translates to tall and handsome, is rumored to be a Palestinian young man who got the nickname because of his physical height. He was working in a town away from his own. The women in this town were infatuated by his manners and all wished for him to marry their daughters.
One day, terrorist gangs raided the town and he was amongst those in the frontlines defending the town. It was then discovered that he would save up his money from his carpentry work to buy rifles for the men of the town.
One day, Zareef al-Toul left the town and never returned, which prompted the first verse of the song:
يا ظريف الطول وقف تقلك رايح عالغربة و بلادك أحسن لك خايف يا ظريف تروح و تتملك و تعاشر الغير و تنساني أنا
Oh tall, handsome man, wait so I can talk to you You are choosing to go abroad but your homeland is better for you I worry that you will leave and start to own land elsewhere, Accompany others, and forget about me
Naturally, poets and composers built on this verse and created many versions of the song based on the feelings they wanted to invoke making Ya Zareef al-Toul a song about sadness and longing but also about revolutionary love, giving the first verse a popular space within Palestinian wedding songs.
Throughout the years, the song travelled across the region, most notably landing in Lebanon with Nasri Shamseddine. The first verse also landed on various music genres such as with Palestinian artist Haifa Kamal's version of the song who used electric guitars.
Perhaps one of the most popular additions is sung by Palestinian band El-Funoun (translation included) and more recently with Palestinian band 47SOUL who added this verse to the song:
يا ظريف الطول الحق يا ظريف اللي قالوا عنها تريدك نزفت عالرصيف بيقولوا دورك يا خيتا عنّا خفيف هدول اللي ما عرفوا تاريخ بلادنا
Oh tall, handsome man Hurry up, your beloved is bleeding on the sidewalk Those who say your role, dear sister, is insignificant Are those who are ignorant to the history of our land
Although the whereabouts of Zareef al-Toul have been debated, as some claimed to have seen him in other neighbouring Palestinian villages while others insisted he had joined groups of Palestinian freedom fighters at the time, one thing is undebatable: Zareef al-Toul had an everlasting impact on Palestinian culture and folklore, making his nickname recognizable across generations both in Palestine and in the diaspora, to whom love and revolution are closely connected in the fight for freedom.
More songs are shelved at my (humble but growing) Palestine folk music library.
books available at my local library;
the last pomegranate, bachtyar ali
names for light: a family history, thirii myo kyaw myint
disorientation, elaine hsieh chou
palestine +100, ed. basma ghalayini
blackouts, justin torres
hangman, maya binyam
brotherless night, v. v. ganeshananthan
tremor, teju cole
Both ethically and aesthetically, I’m more compelled by the thought of translator as eternal guest. Or, at any rate, as the kind of guest-host forged by being a long-term inhabitant, an apprentice, a participant-observer in another place: an arrival that becomes an entire life. A life in which being a friend and neighbor defines your everyday reality, even your identity, more than anything else. When I translate, I am not merely a guest in the Spanish language or in the culture of the poem or story or novel I’m translating; I’m also made more aware of being a guest in my own. No: not my own, because I don’t own it. I translate into English not because it’s “mine,” my “mother tongue,” my “dominant” language, but because I have learned it immersively and will never stop learning it. I sleep in it, steep in it, speak and write myself into it. It is relentless, this learning, with my object of study neither English nor Spanish per se, but rather the material, ever-evolving relationship between the two. I am a guest in both houses.
“Hosts and Guests” by Robin Myers, published in Words without Borders, December 15, 2022
Mary Ruefle, on poem endings, from Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
march by Mary Oliver
never before joined across the cold airless terror of space…
“She had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucleus of — of ecstasy, let’s say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn’t know that she was meditating because she didn’t know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
