krakatoa

Hello. My name is Karolle. @ohkarolle | @themorningnews

[karolle]

(I love this poem so much)

Getting It Right | Matthew Dickman

Your ankles make me want to party, want to sit and beg and roll over under a pair of riding boots with your ankles hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather; they make me wish it was my birthday so I could blow out their candles, have them hung over my shoulders like two bags full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines but smaller and lighter and sexier than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge; they make me want to sing, make me want to take them home and feed them pasta, I want to punish them for being bad and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling, it will never happen again, not in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be hurled into the air like a cannonball and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van. Your thighs are two boats burned out of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them under the blue denim of your high-end jeans, could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry. Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas, a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once when I was falling in love with hills. Your ass is a string quartet, the northern lights tucked tightly into bed between a high-count-of-cotton sheets. Your back is the back of a river full of fish; I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word. Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone, a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions. I am navigating the North and South of it. Your armpits are beehives, they make me want to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey, their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark. I am bright yellow for them. I am always thinking about them, resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms of blue and ice with the blood running to make them believe in God. Your shoulders make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse. Each is a separate bowl of rice steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet and a throaty elevator made of light. Your neck is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven. It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth, which opens like the legs of astronauts who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one voting districts of the Milky Way. Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right!

[karolle]

Watching other people listen to music is too much like knowing their sexual proclivities: You start out curious and end up horrified. There’s one exception: A friend who shares her account with her family in India. During the day she listens to synthesizer-noodling, but at night someone else takes over and some great Bollywood earworm will pop up in her feed, and I’ll jump on it. Listening to the favorite songs of distant strangers is a joy.

Other People’s Playlists

[karolle]

"We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?"

The Book of Unknown Americans | Cristina Henríquez

[karolle]

It’s really hard to have the saddest story in the history of a state like Mississippi, where there are even more sad stories than there are hungry mosquitoes and sticker bushes.

Long Division | Kiese Laymon

[karolle]

"A place can do many things against you, and if it’s your home or if it was your home at one time, you still love it. That’s how it works."

The Book of Unknown Americans | Cristina Henríquez

[karolle]

“It’s really easy to persuade people to be hateful,” I tell him, partly as a diversionary tactic and partly just because it is, and it can’t be said often enough. “You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it’s a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism—all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it. “Mobbing is a natural human behavior,” I say sadly. I’ve started crying again. “Bullying.” Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we’d been hurt ourselves. This response is not located merely in the amygdala, where emotional memories are stored, but also in those regions of the cortex responsible for analyzing the behavior of others. We access our own experiences with pain and extend them to the current sufferer. We’re nice that way.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves | Karen Joy Fowler

[karolle]

I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian.

Chinua Achebe

[humansofnewyork]

"We told her to sit with us so we could share her sadness." (Dohuk, Iraq)

[karolle]

Oh, the humanity.

[karolle]

When schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters. Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, “When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it’s immersed in—the surrounding culture’s illness.”

Our Words Are Our Weapons

[karolle]

At first glance, Kurla’s Platform 8 looks and sounds like any other high-traffic train station in Mumbai.

Commuters wearing backpacks over their chests shout orders of deep-fried vada pav at the snack stalls. Merchants pile burlap sacks of onions and potatoes near the pillar where the trains’ luggage compartments stop. The train approaches; a mob forms. Riders leap off well before the carriage slows to a stop. Limbs and bags entangle as new riders climb aboard.

Amidst the bustle, a unique rhythm emerges. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

...

Following the Tracks | June 2014

My first assignment for Makeshift is about a unique community of blind individuals who make their living on the Mumbai Local.

[karolle]

“The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”

Paul Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

[themorningnews]

Tobacco farmers, churchgoers, and signs of rapid growth along North Carolina’s Highway 15-501, aka Tobacco Road.

Grace Happens by Aaron Canipe

[karolle]

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment.

TNH

[themorningnews]

Large-scale abstract paintings that recall networks, maps, and schematic diagrams—and with each subsequent viewing can transform into anything at all.

The Internet Is So Loud by Joanne Greenbaum

[karolle]

A woman who goes out into the night—to claim the night, to revel in its promise, thrill and comfort—has always been called names. Not all of these names are pejorative. In the Sanskrit canon, she is sometimes the Abhisarika, the wanderer, who goes to meet her lover by the riverbank, or in a forest, or in a garden. Inevitably, she is seen as a source of light. Her desire is a flame that lights up everything around her. In the folk songs of the Punjab, she can be a firefly, a restless, wandering  jugni. And women, together, out on the streets, out to claim each hour, each watch of the night, can light up an entire forest of a city with their flickering, blazing fire.

On the rules of rape vs. the jugni

[karolle]

Mama would clean houses, bathrooms. Cleaning so many bathrooms, using Harpic and acid, she got asthma. Because of this, now mama can’t work as much – but still she’s working. And from cleaning all these bathrooms, puri zindagi nikaali (her whole life has passed) – our studies, our weddings, even our jewelry, she paid for it all from that salary.

Madhuri is a 22-year-old housemaid working in Khar, Mumbai. She took the time to share a little bit about her daily life, marriage, and thoughts on being a woman in India today.

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

[themorningnews]

A sharp rise recently in the price of onions in India is about a lot more than just sandwiches. When onions are up, even governments are at risk.

Having to Do With the Price of Onions