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"He'd Feel It Somehow"

Heartbreak Soup (2007)

Gilbert Hernandez

Fantagraphics Books

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I recently learnt my position at work is being disestablished. I don't particularly like my job, but it did stave off some of the precarity felt from prior years. I'm not looking forward to having to feign enthusiasm while applying for new employment, which reminds me of this amusing letter the late David Berman posted on his blog:

Esteemed gentlemen,

I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free... Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream?

WENZEL

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Remarks by Susan Abulhawa from the Oxford Union debate that are worth taking the time to read.

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Investigating war crimes in Gaza I Al Jazeera Investigations

This feature length investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year long conflict.

The I-Unit has built up a database of thousands of videos, photos and social media posts. Where possible it has identified the posters and those who appear.

The material reveals a range of illegal activities, from wanton destruction and looting to the demolition of entire neighbourhoods and murder.

The film also tells the story of the war through the eyes of Palestinian journalists, human rights workers and ordinary residents of the Gaza Strip. And it exposes the complicity of Western governments – in particular the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus as a base for British surveillance flights over Gaza.

“The west cannot hide, they cannot claim ignorance. Nobody can say they didn’t know.” says Palestinian writer, Susan Abulhawa. This is “the first livestream genocide in history … If people are ignorant they are wilfully ignorant.” she says.

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June Jordan, Apologies to All the People in Lebanon (originally published in Village Voice in 1982)

Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

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“There is a period when it is clear that you have gone wrong, but you continue. Sometimes there is a luxurious amount of time before anything bad happens.”

— Jenny Holzer (via w-ildfires)

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Listen/purchase: The Magnesia Suite by Allan Gilbert Balon

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Christoph El Truento mix

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“I dreamed of the world because it seemed the accepted thing to do, because I could not bear to face the thought that not all prisoners dream of freedom; the prospect of the world terrified me: a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere.”

—

Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

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Listen/purchase: Un Cavretico by Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm

“This rendition of a medieval protest song narrates the cycles of violence that compound over time: “A father buys a goat to sell for two zuzzim, then comes the cat that eats the goat, then comes the dog that eats the cat that ate the goat. Then comes the stick that beats the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat for two zuzzim....” Traditionally sung at the Passover ritual feast in Aramaic, this version of Un Cavretico (The Goat) is sung in Ladino, deliberately slower in pace, to create some space for what’s here, and to imagine the cracks of the possible in-between. To sing this ancient liturgy now is to sing against the violence of the nationstate, to sing for, and along-side, Palestinian liberation. For our paths to freedom are collectively intertwined – no one gets left behind, free Palestine.”

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Romain Urhausen. Squatting Nude, 1957.

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“At the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968, when Hubert H. Humphrey’s nomination was announced, the enthusiasm of the American liberals—that sort of misty, Bavarian, psychedelic delirium—was so unbearable that I got up to leave.” - Jean Genet

via

Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Terry Southern, Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968 by Santi Visalli

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Kumulaʻau Sing (Lloyd Kumulaʻau Sing, Jr.), Native Hawaiian -  Fish trap for wrasse (a type of fish)      x   /   x    

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Listen to: Another Kind of Forever by Darius Jones