an aria in present tense

inapropos /n/: INTJ; an amalgamation of Chinese culture, art, scientific skepticism, poetry, general wonder, and a thousand beautiful things.

[inapropos-blog]

Yeah.

It's time to sit here until blood leaks out of my eyes.

[inapropos-blog]

.

[iamjapanese]

[snowce]

Valerius De Saedeleer, Winter landscape, 1931

[farewell-kingdom]

Keiichi Tanaka

[inapropos-blog]

In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is 'total' — perfect, complete, and whole — and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) — that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All — the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.

From “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, translation by Andrew Hurley

[theartofchina]

© Feng Hai | 冯海 (b.1971), New garden fantasies. 

[aseaofquotes]

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

[mingsonjia-deactivated20170120]

明鏡亦非台 - 左峰奇

[inapropos-blog]

saotome-michi replied to your post: Back when I was in high school, I followed this...

Oh wow, I read the same blog as well! Thank you for informing me of the update, I’m so glad to know she’s all right. And I agree with everything else. It pains me to hear people say that the US is the best country in the world…

Wow, I knew she had a large readership, but that's still such a cool coincidence. I hadn't met someone before who had also read her blog! America's image was severely tarnished after that, both internationally and domestically. I could actually see it sliding downhill, especially when the recession hit and the country clearly wasn't even reaping any economic benefits from the war. Now, for example, when Australia announced the discovery of large oil fields, the thread on Reddit was filled with people joking about how America might want to "liberate" Australia too. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.

[theartofanimation]

Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor

[inapropos-blog]

Back when I was in high school, I followed this blog called Baghdad Burning, run by a young Iraqi woman (pseudonym Riverbend) who posted about the shitshow that was the Iraq War and the ruin and pain it was causing in ordinary people's lives. She was eloquent, furious, and raw, and I admired her so much I wrote an essay about her for a contest.

In 2007, she and her family moved to Syria, and the updates just stopped. There wasn't an entry for years. I thought about her a lot, especially when the Syrian civil war broke out. Turns out she'd updated again last week for the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. She had moved to another country before the civil war started. She's all right.

It makes me so glad to know that. At the same time, reading her latest entry is horribly saddening. Iraq is still a bombed out shell of a country. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost can't be returned. America might be ashamed now, but people ate it all up 10 years ago.

The Iraq War was a turning point in my perception of America. Before that, in elementary and part of middle school, I genuinely believed that it was the best country in the world. And then the government accused Iraq of having WMDs. They tried to link the government to 9/11. I was 13, and even then to me it was so obvious that they were making shit up. There were no WMDs. Saddam Hussein was a despicable human being, but he had shit all to do with 9/11. Every single national news network just spewed out lies and covered up atrocities. What sort of "liberators" threw bombs onto civilians and called the lives lost "collateral damage"?

I'm pretty sure a huge part of my conviction that the war was utterly morally abhorrent was because of Riverbend's blog. I can't describe how happy I was when I found out she had updated. She touched me on an incredibly deep level, and I still wish her all the best. Beyond that, there's nothing more that can be said, other than, "Look at what we did."

[peonypavillion]

Jiangnan Gardens, Suzhou, China.

[armchairreasoning]

I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.

Hugh Mackay (via armchairreasoning)

[rdjlock]

Album of Painting 《Flower · girl》 By My friend —— 呀呀(YaYa) I love her painting~they are so beautiful!

[ecstasis]

This is my formula for the fall of things: we come to a river we always knew we’d have to cross. It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks

of corn and half-blown sunflowers. The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.

Now tell me there is a pause where we know there should be an end; then tell me you too imagined it this way

with our shadows never quite touching the river and the river never quite reaching the sea. John Glenday

[inapropos-blog]

"A Poem" by Robert Hass

"You would think God would relent," the American poet Richard Eberhardt wrote during World War II, "listening to the fury of aerial bombardment." Of course, God is not the cause of aerial bombardment. During the Vietnam War, the United States hired the RAND Corporation to conduct a study of the effects in the peasant villages of Vietnam of their policy of saturation bombing of the countryside. That policy had at least two purposes: to defoliate the tropical forests as a way of locating the enemy and to kill the enemy if he happened to be in the way of the concussion bombs or the napalm or the firebombs. The RAND Corporation sent a young scholar named Leon Goure to Vietnam. His study was rushed by the Air Force which was impatient for results, but he was able to conduct interviews through interpreters with farmers in the Mekong Delta and the mountainous hillside farm regions around Hue. He concluded that the incidental damage to civilian lives was very considerable and that the villagers were angry and afraid, but he also found that they blamed the Viet Cong--the insurrectionist army the U.S. was fighting--and not the United States for their troubles, because they thought of the Viet Cong as their legitimate government and felt it wasn't protecting them. Seeing that the bombing was alienating the peasantry from the enemy Vietnamese, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, General William Westmoreland, the commander in charge of prosecuting the war, and Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, ordered an intensification of the bombing. In the end, there were more bombs dropped on the villages and forests of South Vietnam than were dropped in all of World War II. The estimated Vietnamese casualties during the war is two million. It was a war whose principal strategy was terror. More Iraqi citizens have now been incidental casualties of the conduct of the war in Iraq than were killed by Arab terrorists in the destruction of the World Trade Center. In the first twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were deaths of civilians. There are imaginable responses to these facts. The nations of the world could stop setting an example for suicide bombers. They could abolish the use of land mines. They could abolish the use of aerial bombardment in warfare. You would think men would relent.

[purenonsens]

Trung sisters

My piece for the upcoming Lady Warriors zine (debuting at MOCCa) put together by Abby, Julia and Roxie!!! Check out more submissions wandering around, they’re awesomeee *w*

[trunglesinperson]

Hai Bà Trưng

My dad used to tell me stories about them when I was a baby, historical badass ladies of Vietnam.