acyborgkitty

[acyborgkitty]

"While some students are able to do the complicated and courageous self-advocacy work it takes to communicate with medical providers, university administrators, and numerous college professors (many of whom have very little familiarity with disability or medical conditions), far too many students have undoubtedly been dissuaded. In fact, as much as two-thirds of college students with disabilities have not alerted their campus of their condition(s) (see Dolmage, 2017)."

[acyborgkitty]

I just got back to Finland and am trying to restart all the services I had before. Being disabled and an immigrant makes everything three times harder. I called the number for the PA service on Monday and she said I had to talk to a social worker first but wouldn't give me the phone number to call. She said she'd ask someone to call me. Today is Friday and no call so I thought I'd try to find the number myself. Can't google it because I don't speak Finnish well enough yet so tried googling "Raasepori social worker" in English and found a website for Rasepoori city services. Called and she at first refused to speak English with me but eventually switched (her English was perfect!) And gave me another phone number to call. Called that one, for western Nyland Health services I think. Got someone who also refused English at first and then eventually switched when we ran through my Finnish in one sentence. She said she would text me another phone number to call. But I'm autistic and my quota for phone energy is already gone for today so ... Either I risk meltdown by pushing myself further or give up today and make the next series of these phone calls Monday.

As always I want to be clear that I love Finland and love living here and love the services in one had access to that are way better than the US. But it is so hard to access things as an immigrant. And my partner isn't able to help me and I ask my friends already for a lot of help so I'd like to do some things myself.

[acyborgkitty]

"The Sidewalk of High Art" by Miguel Algarín, introduction to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

"Lifting the details of the terrain into the poem reveals the self and shows how the land explains the self to the poet. ... Here the politics of land and people are one, as the poet reinvents the self through the history of the terrain. ... The land is concrete information that feeds the body and the soul and reveals the future." p. 12

"...the great commitment that the poets at the Cafe have made to writing the verse on the page and then lifting off the page into performing action..." p. 19

[acyborgkitty]

"To cut into the immediate moment and deliver an image of what is going on and then move on so that the next image is fresh and alert to the ever-changing present is the business of the poet." (p. 181)

"Once the qualities of the space in which we live are defined by the poets, the next step for communicating meaning is to establish the action of the poem." (p. 181)

"Once the common ground and the action of the poem are established, then what the poem becomes is the event of itself. The poem makes you pay attention, makes you care. It is the moment that imprints a cultural presence upon the world." (p. 182)

Miguel Algarín, "Afterword" from Nuyorican Poetry ed. Miguel Algarín & Miguel Piñero.

[acyborgkitty]

"The poet's right to define his words is his tool, his knife." (p. 24)

"The impulse to create a language that can absorb aggression without fantasy thrives among people who are in situations of extremities." (p. 24)

Miguel Algarín, "Part I: Outlaw Poetry" from Nuyorican Poetry ed. Miguel Algarín & Miguel Piñero.

[acyborgkitty]

"The poet is responsible for inventing newness. The newness needs words, words never heard before or used before. The poet has to invent a new language, a new tradition of communication." (p.9)

"The poet blazes a path of fire for the self. He juggles with words. He lives risking each moment." (p. 10)

"Poetry is the full act of naming." (p. 10)

"Communities are united by small actions that return the law to the people and inspire them to trust each other." (p. 13)

"Language and action are simultaneous realities. Actions create the need for verbal expression. If the action is new so must the words that express it come through as new. Newness in language grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before. The experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York has caused a new language to grow: Nuyorican." (p. 15)

"There is at the edge of every empire a linguistic explosion that results from the many multilingual tribes that collect around wealth and power." (p. 15)

"Nuyorican is full of muscular expression. It is a language full of short pulsating rhythms that manifest the unrelenting strain that the Nuyorican experiences." (p. 16)

"Language breaks down easily between institutions and those laying claims on change and newfound strength." (p. 16)

"A new day needs a new language or else the day becomes a repetition of yesterday. Invention is not always a straightening up of things. Oftentimes the newness disrupts. It causes chaos. Two languages coexisting in your head as modes of expression can either strengthen alertness or cause confusion." (p. 18)

"Around existing, formally recognized languages who empires of rules grow. Rules and regulations about speech are conventions that grow (at first) as patterns of self-expression which becomes fixed in usage—so that as all of the rules and regulations that spring from street usage become established patterns, a body of "grammatical rules" will correspondingly evolve. The evolution of a grammar is slow and at first always a suspicious process for two reasons. The first ist hat a language that grows out of street experience is dynamic and erratic. There are no boundaries around it." (p. 19)

"It takes time to have disruptive, tense, informal street talk arrive at an organized respectability. Nuyorican is at its birth. English nouns function as verbs. Spanish verbs function as adjectives. Spanish and English words are made to serve the tenses of existence. Raw life needs raw verbs and raw nouns to express the action and to name the quality of experience." (p. 19)

"...we will sit and talk of our newness and how to shape it." (p. 19)

Miguel Algarín, "Introduction: Nuyorican Language" from Nuyorican Poetry ed. Miguel Algarín & Miguel Piñero.

[acyborgkitty]

[acyborgkitty]

“Poetry was thus regarded as, in the celebrated phrase of the Spanish poet Gabriel Celaya that Guajana made its own, “a weapon loaded with the future.’”

Puerto Rican Poetry ed. Roberto Márquez, p. 263

[acyborgkitty]

"Nature doesn't just exist in fractals, it also moves in fractals. In nature, processes create change in fractal ways. ... Nothing that's living is fixed or finished. All is constantly emerging. ... Our heart rates are always fluctuating in a fractal process. Laid out in a graph over time the fluctuations of a heart rate look similar to the fluctuations of a coastline, canyons, or mountain ranges. "

The healing magic of forest bathing

[acyborgkitty]

"There is only the mute witness of their unearthed artifacts, their enduring linguistic legacy, the testimony of their still existing ruins, and the accusation of their bones. Any historical discussion of Puerto Rican poetry must thus begin with recognition and acknowledgment of a hovering and vast ancestral silence."

Puerto Rican Poetry ed. Roberto Marquez, p. 4.

[acyborgkitty]

Zoological Mythology: Volume 2 by Angelo de Gubernatis

Second Part. THE ANIMALS OF THE AIR.

CHAPTER I. BIRDS.

“The sky, especially by night, is conceived now as a road on which one can walk, and where sometimes the traveller may be lost, or make others lose their way; now as the air itself, in which one flies or is carried in flight, with the risk sometimes of falling; now as a tree, in which one speaks or builds nests, with the risk of the words[Pg 168] being sometimes sinister, or the nests falling; and now as a sea in which one navigates in peril of shipwreck.”

"The excrement of the mythical bird of night, or of winter, is the sun. Considered in connection with morning or spring, the dark-coloured bird of night, or winter, is propitious; considered by itself, or in relation to the evening sun or the dying summer, it is a funereal and diabolical animal. Such is the bird Kâmek of the Avesta, which stretches its wings over all mankind, which carries off and hides the sun, creates darkness, keeps back the waters and devours all creatures, until after seven years and seven nights, the hero Kereçâçpa strikes it and makes it fall."

[acyborgkitty]

shout out to disabled people who;

are grieving because of their disability

are angry because of their disability

are exhausted because of their disability

are scared because of their disability

and shout out to people with disabilities in general.

[acyborgkitty]

The Politics of Experimental Translation by Lily Robert-Foley

"Situating norms is obviously a fluid and problematic, culturally specific activity. Examining what is opposed to these norms serves to accentuate this. ... Translation very often is inflected with political or ethical aims, a desire to right wrongs in the original or to intervene in the landscape of authority and canon formation." "... experimental translation is any translation practice that opposes itself to translational norms." "It poses a threat to the mainstream dogma of translation, in particular, the place of fidelity, equivalence, accuracy, transparency, smoothness, and legibility. [...] it defines itself in contrast, or in opposition, to other more frequent forms of translation. ... not solely for aesthetic reasons but for social and political reasons. ... supported by a belief that the structures of aesthetics and poetics are profoundly and radically political." "the idea that translation is also radically political, never neutral, always inflected or even generated by the ideologies that frame it and give it its pulse."

"what separates this practice from other forms of experimental writing is the question of language, of the foreignness of languages, and the act of translating in its formal sense and amidst the chaos of its cultural negotiations."

"Tim Atkins’s ‘7 Translation Types’, as part of his unpublished PhD dissertation, which identifies seven discrete practices, including constraint, editing and domestication, misreading, allusive referential, derangement of the senses, intersemiotic, and hoax and parody."

"the question of fidelity is proportional to the text and most importantly, to the context of manipulation and power dynamics in which it is situated. [...] The implication here is that to translate faithfully, an author who does not have much visibility represents a homologous subverting of norms to a translation that, for example, shoots holes in a source text with a 12-gauge shotgun and translates the resulting text. ... And this is because of each practice’s relationship to the norm."

"translation always brings out dimensions of cultural context that might be otherwise invisible, reveals what might first appear as transcendent universals as situated specificities."

"norms do not represent the majority but are always determined by power and by the elite minority who wields it."

"that the notion of sense equivalence is deeply connected to a closed, un-situated relationship between two equal languages and can even be associated with culturally blind constructions of sense and sameness."

"Authorial intention then becomes an instrument of justice: respect for the original is connected to the desire to right a transnational wrong – specifically with regard to the ‘neocolony’."

"Luise von Flotow’s four strategies for feminist translation (supplementing, prefacing and footnoting, and hijacking) (1991) are instructions for experimental translators seeking to align themselves with the feminist cause."

"Spivak has referred to her in her article on the politics of translation as ‘intimacy’ with the culture and language original, necessary for the carrying out of an honourable translation. ... a lack of intimacy with an original, specifically in the case of translating across unequal power divides, can lead to essentialisms that serve more to propagate colonial or misogynist ideologies than they do to enact justice."

"By deforming, mistranslating, or rendering unintelligible a white, male canonical text written in a hegemonic language in a power centre, many experimental translators have political aims of posing a threat to forces of oppression ... a faithful translation of a text written by a subaltern author in a non-hegemonic language or in a marginal situation seeks to do the same thing."

"For Spivak, although the original text is not transparent, the activity of translation is – and must be."

[acyborgkitty]

This is all I'm looking for.

Cold day

(via)

[acyborgkitty]

The funny thing about being genderqueer is that anyone who has a crush on you is automatically at least a little gay. I don’t make the rules.

[acyborgkitty]

Hi everyone,

I found this interesting article about autism and memory. I don’t know about you all, but my memory is not very good. According to this article:

Researchers have been aware that memory deficits or impairments can make it challenging for autistic children to socialize and engage with their peers effectively. But the exact nature of how memory deficits could manifest among autistic children was poorly understood, until now. In a recent study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, a team of California-based researchers found that autistic children tend to face difficulties in remembering people’s faces and certain types of information.

“Social cognition cannot occur without reliable memory,” senior author Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine said in a press release.

“Social behaviors are complex, and they involve multiple brain processes, including associating faces and voices to particular contexts, which require robust episodic memory,” Menon added. “Impairments in forming these associative memory traces could form one of the foundational elements in autism.”

The entirety of this article will be below if anyone want to read it. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. ♥️

[acyborgkitty]

I haven't really been able to write since I got sick. My brain hasn't felt like mine anymore. The words are wrong, they won't come. I don't know if this will ever change. Everything feels like starting over, but all the time, if that makes any sense.