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richincolor · 5 years ago

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The Rich in Color bloggers got together and compiled a list of some of our favorite YA books that came out in the last year-ish for Black History Month. How many of these have you read? What are some of your recent favorite books by Black authors?

Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett Knopf Books for Young Readers || Audrey’s review

In a community that isn’t always understanding, an HIV-positive teen must navigate fear, disclosure, and radical self-acceptance when she falls in love—and lust—for the first time. Powerful and uplifting, Full Disclosure will speak to fans of Angie Thomas and Nicola Yoon.

Simone Garcia-Hampton is starting over at a new school, and this time things will be different. She’s making real friends, making a name for herself as student director of Rent, and making a play for Miles, the guy who makes her melt every time he walks into a room. The last thing she wants is for word to get out that she’s HIV-positive, because last time . . . well, last time things got ugly.

Keeping her viral load under control is easy, but keeping her diagnosis under wraps is not so simple. As Simone and Miles start going out for real—shy kisses escalating into much more—she feels an uneasiness that goes beyond butterflies. She knows she has to tell him that she’s positive, especially if sex is a possibility, but she’s terrified of how he’ll react! And then she finds an anonymous note in her locker: I know you have HIV. You have until Thanksgiving to stop hanging out with Miles. Or everyone else will know too.

Simone’s first instinct is to protect her secret at all costs, but as she gains a deeper understanding of the prejudice and fear in her community, she begins to wonder if the only way to rise above is to face the haters head-on…

The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis Tor Teen || K. Imani’s Review

Westworld meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this stunning fantasy adventure from debut author Charlotte Nicole Davis.

Aster, the protector Violet, the favorite Tansy, the medic Mallow, the fighter Clementine, the catalyst

THE GOOD LUCK GIRLS

The country of Arketta calls them Good Luck Girls–they know their luck is anything but. Sold to a “welcome house” as children and branded with cursed markings. Trapped in a life they would never have chosen.

When Clementine accidentally murders a man, the girls risk a dangerous escape and harrowing journey to find freedom, justice, and revenge in a country that wants them to have none of those things. Pursued by Arketta’s most vicious and powerful forces, both human and inhuman, their only hope lies in a bedtime story passed from one Good Luck Girl to another, a story that only the youngest or most desperate would ever believe.

It’s going to take more than luck for them all to survive.

I Wanna Be Where You Are by Kristina Forest Roaring Brook Press || Jessica’s Review

When Chloe Pierce’s mom forbids her to apply for a spot at the dance conservatory of her dreams, she devises a secret plan to drive two hundred miles to the nearest audition. But Chloe hits her first speed bump when her annoying neighbor Eli insists upon hitching a ride, threatening to tell Chloe’s mom if she leaves him and his smelly dog, Geezer, behind. So now Chloe’s chasing her ballet dreams down the east coast―two unwanted (but kinda cute) passengers in her car, butterflies in her stomach, and a really dope playlist on repeat.

Filled with roadside hijinks, heart-stirring romance, and a few broken rules, I Wanna Be Where You Are is a YA debut perfect for fans of Jenny Han and Sandhya Menon.

Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds Katherine Tegan Books || K. Imani’s Review

Jack Ellison King. King of Almost.

He almost made valedictorian.

He almost made varsity.

He almost got the girl . . .

When Jack and Kate meet at a party, bonding until sunrise over their mutual love of Fruit Loops and their favorite flicks, Jack knows he’s falling—hard. Soon she’s meeting his best friends, Jillian and Franny, and Kate wins them over as easily as she did Jack. Jack’s curse of almost is finally over.

But this love story is . . . complicated. It is an almost happily ever after. Because Kate dies. And their story should end there. Yet Kate’s death sends Jack back to the beginning, the moment they first meet, and Kate’s there again. Beautiful, radiant Kate. Healthy, happy, and charming as ever. Jack isn’t sure if he’s losing his mind. Still, if he has a chance to prevent Kate’s death, he’ll take it. Even if that means believing in time travel. However, Jack will learn that his actions are not without consequences. And when one choice turns deadly for someone else close to him, he has to figure out what he’s willing to do—and let go—to save the people he loves.

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi Make Me a World

Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look?

There are no more monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. With doting parents and a best friend named Redemption, Jam has grown up with this lesson all her life. But when she meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colours and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question-How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?

In their riveting and timely young adult debut, acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi asks difficult questions about what choices a young person can make when the adults around them are in denial.

The Revolution of Birdie Randolph by Brandy Colbert Little Brown Books for Young Readers || K. Imani’s Review

Perfect for fans of Nina LaCour and Nicola Yoon comes a novel about first love and family secrets from Stonewall Book Award winner Brandy Colbert.

Dove “Birdie” Randolph works hard to be the perfect daughter and follow the path her parents have laid out for her: She quit playing her beloved soccer, she keeps her nose buried in textbooks, and she’s on track to finish high school at the top of her class. But then Birdie falls hard for Booker, a sweet boy with a troubled past…whom she knows her parents will never approve of.

When her estranged aunt Carlene returns to Chicago and moves into the family’s apartment above their hair salon, Birdie notices the tension building at home. Carlene is sweet, friendly, and open-minded–she’s also spent decades in and out of treatment facilities for addiction. As Birdie becomes closer to both Booker and Carlene, she yearns to spread her wings. But when long-buried secrets rise to the surface, everything she’s known to be true is turned upside down.

Say Her Name by Zetta Elliott Disney || Crystal’s Review

Say her name and solemnly vow Never to forget, or allow Our sisters’ lives to be erased; Their presence cannot be replaced. This senseless slaughter must stop now.

Award-winning author Zetta Elliott engages poets from the past two centuries to create a chorus of voices celebrating the creativity, resilience, and courage of Black women and girls. Inspired by the #SayHerName campaign launched by the African American Policy Forum, these poems pay tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists championing the Black Lives Matter cause. This compelling collection reveals the beauty, danger, and magic found at the intersection of race and gender.

Slay by Brittney Morris Simon Pulse || Group Discussion

By day, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black kids at Jefferson Academy. But at home, she joins hundreds of thousands of Black gamers who duel worldwide as Nubian personas in the secret multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. No one knows Kiera is the game developer, not her friends, her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm, who believes video games are partially responsible for the “downfall of the Black man.”

But when a teen in Kansas City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY world, news of the game reaches mainstream media, and SLAY is labeled a racist, exclusionist, violent hub for thugs and criminals. Even worse, an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, threatening to sue Kiera for “anti-white discrimination.”

Driven to save the only world in which she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her secret identity and harness what it means to be unapologetically Black in a world intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without losing herself in the process?

#black history month #WeNeedDiverseBooks #young adult books #book lists

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eatingtherich · 6 years ago

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A Colossal Wreck

I’ve been reading through Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck. As far as pleasure and style go, it is a great book. A concise and humorous perspective on exactly what the book presents itself to be, the American political landscape from the mid 90′s up to Cockburn’s death in 2012. The book is actually just a collection of dated journal, and very on topic; though most are his personal observations of current events, he sometimes veers into other topics such as Thanksgiving turkey recipes or the etymology of the word “troglodytes.” A staunch leftist and populist, much of the book directs its ire at the complacency of liberals in America behind the Clintons and their imperialistic goals and corporate persuasion, and the entire fault of any left movement in the U.S. There a number of places where I greatly agree with Cockburn, but then some moments where his perspectives are befuddling to say the least, and some that seen from today in Trump-America, are very odd to hear coming from such a vocal leftist. In the coming days I’ll share some passages that have most stood out to me.

First I am going to post Cockburn’s passages on Bernie Sanders, for whom Alexander Cockburn was particularly skeptical of, as self-proclaimed Independent Socialist Democrat, but from Cockburn’s perspective was woefully complacent with Clinton’s agenda. I will say, I like Sanders, and he is still currently my preferred Presidential Candidate for the 2020 election, but critiques Cockburn raises are valid and worth looking into. Just as well, I disagree with Cockburn on some issues he raises in his book, but by and large, enjoy his writing and can’t let his faults eclipse his successes. Most of his criticisms levied against Bernie are his condoning of the wars in Serbia and Kosovo. All quotes below come from A Colossal Wreck, by Bruce Cockburn, 2014, Verso.

August 7, 1996

A Democratic President has just destroyed a big chunk of the New Deal and not one major Democratic figure has defected because this President destroyed the tiny protections for those down on their luck, for children, for single mothers, for immigrants between jobs who have been paying taxes for maybe ten or twenty years. Donna Shalala didn't quit. Robert Reich didn't quit. Peter Edelman of HHS did [sic] quit. Marion Wright Edelman canceled a demonstration before Clinton's decision "because I didn't want want to be Sister Souljah," then issued a bitter statement, but she didn't say she was shifting her support to Ralph Nader. Ron Dellums's office was saying that he understood Clinton's need to "hold the center." Barney Frank said that Clinton had done more for the poor than Ralph Nader. (There may be a personal edge there since Nader once said publically it was disgusting of Frank to run a homosexual prostitution ring out of his congressional office.) Here, for the third time in thirty years, we have a historic opportunity for the rallying of left forces beyond the Democratic Party. It happened in 1968 with Eugene McCarthy; and in 1984 and 1988 with Jesse Jackson. Now we have another chance. And who steps forward as our public champions? Bernie Sanders, the "independent" hot-air factory from Vermont, requests everyone to vote for Bill Clinton. The Labor Party, born in Cleveland a month ago, insisted that no labor candidates be fielded for the foreseeable future, and further stipulates that no labor-affiliate field independent candidates. Prominent Labor Party folk are simultaneously on the Democratic National Committee. Unions active in promoting the Labor Party have made a deal with the Democrats that the Labor Party will do nothing impertinent or subversive, such as actually run candidates against Democrats. From day one, with all that nonsense about doing nothing till 100,000 advocates are signed up, the entire Labor Party effort has been an exercise in demobilization, achieving the miracle of a Third Party that is the wholly owned subsidiary of the party it is challenging. This leaves us with Ralph Nader, who has the public status, the knowledge and the right political instincts.

October 16, 1998

...As for B. Sanders, whose fund-raising letters this election time have once again been touting Congress’s only “independent progressive socialist,” his latest achievement has been to give the cold shoulder to delegations traveling all the way from Texas to Vermont to challenge the Conscience Complex in one of its most self-satisfied redoubts.

Sanders has been prominent among those in the North East congressional delegation on trying to export the region’s nuclear waste to a poor, largely Hispanic community in Texas, Sierra Blanca. The only merit in dumping the waste there as opposed to, say, Burlington, is that the people in Burlington are richer and have more clout. When the Sierra Blancans turned up in Vermont, Sanders put out the word that he would quit any platform graced by any of their members. If you truly like “independents” in Congress, better by far to send your money to Ron Paul, who acts upon his proclaimed beliefs, unlike Sanders.

March 31, 1999

It’s bracing to see the Germans taking part in NATO’s bombing. It lends moral tone to an operation to have the grandsons of the Third Reich willing, able and eager to drop high explosive again, in this instance on the Serbs. To add symmetry to the affair, the last time Serbs in Belgrade had high explosive dropped on them was in 1941 by the sons of the Third Reich. To bring even deeper symmetry, the German political party whose leader, Schroeder, ordered German participation in the bombing is that of the Social Democrats, whose great grandfathers enthusiastically voted credits to wage war in 1914, to the enormous disgust of Lenin, who never felt quite the same way about social democrats ever after. Whether in Germany or England or France, all social democratic parties in 1914 tossed aside previous pledges against war, thus helping produce the first great bloodletting of our century.

Today, with social democrats leading governments across Europe-Schroeder, Blair, Jospin, Prodi-all fall in behind Clinton. This is, largely, a war most earnestly supported by liberals and many so-called leftists. Bernie Sanders has voted Aye, and in London Vanessa Redgrave cheers on the NATO bombers. There’s been some patronizing talk here about the Serbs’ deep sense of “grievance” at the way history has treated them, with the implication that the Serbs are irrational in this regard. But it’s scarcely irrational to remember that Nazi Germany bombed Belgrade in World War II, or that Germany’s prime ally in the region, Croatia, ran a concentration camp a Jasenovac where tens of thousands of Serbs-along with Jews and gypsies-were liquidated. Nor is it irrational to recall that Germany in more recent years has been an unrelenting assailant of the former Yugoslav federation, encouraging Slovenia to secede and lending determined support to Croatia, in gratitude for which Croatia adopted, on independence in 1991, the German hymn, “Danke Deutschland.”

April 14, 2000

[The mention of Sanders comes late in the passage. On this date, Cockburn relates a story of how he was invited to speak at a conference held by Antiwar.com, a libertarian organization. The event coordinator, Justin Raimondo, extended his invitation to Cockburn on the grounds that this was an event in which the left and right could reach across the political divide to come together against war. Those listed in attendance: “Patrick J. Buchanan, Tom Fleming, Justin Raimondo, Kathy Kelly, Alan Bock, Rep. Ron Paul, and representatives of the Serbian Unity Congress.”]

...Their amiable hilarity at my sallies reminded me of Goldsmith’s lines in “The Deserted Village” about the pupils of the country schoolmaster: “Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee/ At all his jokes, and many a joke had he.” (How many people have read the whole of that wonderful poem, one of the most savage denunciations of free trade ever written?)

“Can we unite,” I asked the crowd, “on the anti-war platform? We have already, in the case of Kosovo for example. But where would you as libertarians want to get off the leftist bus? A leftist says ‘Capitalism leads to war. Capitalism needs war.’ But you libertarians are pro-capitalism, so you presumably have a view of capitalism as a system not inevitably producing or needing war. Lefties have always said capitalism has to maximize its profits and the only way you can maximize profits in the end is by imperial war, which was the old Lenin thesis...

“I think the old categories are gone. I see no virtue to them. I see Bernie Sanders listed as an Independent Socialist in the US Congress. I see what Bernie Sanders has supported, starting with the war in Kosovo. And then I see Ron Paul, on the other hand, writing stuff against war which could have been written by Tom Hayden in 1967.”

Driving back to Berkeley with $300 in cash in my pocket, I mentally toasted antiwar.com. Alas, not many leftists will ever want to have much to do with them.

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britneyshakespeare · 6 years ago

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1, 2, 4, 15, and 16 for the 'identity asks'.

Thanks Helena! Hope you’re having a wonderful expedition

1. if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?

i’ve actually been thinking of a similar concept in my mind a lot lately, for whatever reason. pieces of art/media that i admire a lot, and am always thinking about at least subconsciously

lady windermere’s fan and the ballad of reading gaol by oscar wilde

sense and sensibility by jane austen

a midsummer night’s dream by william shakespeare (and also probably the tempest if we’re being fair)

buffy the vampire slayer (1997-2003) and its spin-off angel (1999-2004)

the spider-man trilogy by sam raimi (2002-2007)

any poem collected in w. b. yeats’ 1921 volume michael robartes and the dancer

the white album by the beatles (and also probably revolver)

absolutely anything ever written by emily dickinson

rebel without a cause dir. nicholas ray

anything ever recorded by marianne faithfull

brian jones. just his life itself was art.

a fever you can’t sweat out and pretty. odd. by panic! at the disco

i probably should’ve stopped before i got to #13 but i could go on. a bunch of various albums and books and plays and movies that have had an impact on me. things i could passionately go off about at any moment.

2. have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?

i think the reason i consider shakespeare, dickinson, and wilde as my favorite writers (in english at least) is because there’s sort of an affinity i’ve had for each of them at one point or another. shakespeare’s very layered and archaic, metaphoric writing style always resonated with me. when i read shakespeare i think “this is what i’d like to write if i could live up to my full potential as a writer.” with dickinson, i have too much in common, biographically, not to relate to her. and i love her simplicity and use of metaphor so much. she really was a wonderful amateur, in such an inspiring way. her plain, uncut, unedited poems are just “primitive” as some critics have noted, in such a pure, uncut poetical energy sort of sense. and with wilde, what can i say there? probably the first “serious” writer i can say i discovered on my own (technically i discovered dickinson by myself in fifth grade through the book feathers by jacqueline woodson, and the poem stuck with me, but i just didn’t connect to her so much at that age) when i was a sophomore in high school. and i just felt so much oneness with the contradictory, constantly ironic and paradoxical wit of his. i don’t really know what i could say i have in common with oscar wilde, personally, but whenever i read his works they just feel instantly relatable.

4. do you like your name? is there another name you think would fit you better?

i do, i do like my name. although i don’t necessarily know if i’d say it “fits” me. what name fits anyone, really?

“diana” always felt so pretty and elegant to me, which i am very much not. my dad wanted to name me jacqueline and call me jackie but my mom thought that sounded “hideous! and matt, we’re not the kennedys!”

i like my last name, though. short and sweet, semi-common but not, like, smith common, and close to the beginning of the alphabet. before i knew i was aroace, i always thought if i got married, i’d keep my last name (and this goes back to when i was like, 10, so, way before i had any comprehension of any feminist reason to do so). and if i ever had kids, they’d all get my name.

15. five most influential books over your lifetime?

hmmm. i already named some with #1 but i’ll try and be a little different because this is a slightly different question.

feathers by jacqueline woodson, even though i haven’t read it since middle school at latest. and maybe also yankee girl by mary ann rodman. for some reason when i was in late elementary school i had this phase where i’d read all these historical fiction books about civil rights and racism. i don’t really know why! i was a little white girl in a 97% white suburban town of only a couple thousand people. with yankee girl it was because my friend read it, it was set in the 60s, and they made a bunch of references to the beatles which made me all excited. and then i just happened upon feathers the next year. but i think a first-person perspective through books, gave me a sort of understanding of american history as it affects people who are not me. that was good for me to read at that age. i went off too much about that.

the picture of dorian gray, probably. what can i say about wilde that i haven’t already said? hmm… i don’t know, but it’s a great novel.

spider-man comics in general, but especially the more human-centric storylines, behind the mask and all that. if i were to put one specific book it’d probably be death of the stacys with an honorable mention for the early 2000s miniseries spider-man: blue. but blue can’t really be read without the understanding of the death of the stacys. and also that was the first graphic novel i ever bought (well, it was a birthday present actually). but yes. the tragedy of gwen stacy especially is still a touchy subject for me.

american psycho by bret easton ellis. if for nothing else than i quote it (the novel and the superb movie adaptation directed by mary herron) with my sister constantly. but it really is top-notch 80s satire. if you haven’t read it, helena, i so recommend it. in many ways it’s a century-later update of the picture of dorian gray, but without the portrait and instead with constant psychological tumult. it’s gripping as hell.

hmmmm. this is hard. i probably answered too many for #1. i guess i’ll say the complete poems of w. b. yeats edited by richard finneran. it was one of the first volumes of poetry i ever bought for myself, i used to just read online or in the library. but it’s my constant companion, i bring it with me everywhere. and i knew a decent amount about poetry before yeats, but i still learned a lot from yeats. it was (and still often is) a challenge to get the most out of a yeats poem, but it’s always a reward to read and reread them.

16. if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same?

god no! i don’t know what i WOULD be like in any other circumstance, but i’ve had way too extravagantly odd of a life to think this shit didn’t shape me into one extravagantly odd bitch. but in the personal tragedies department, i wouldn’t really change anything. i like who i am, scars and all.

but with basic background details, everybody in my dad’s family has the exact same sense of humor, myself included. i have way too many aunts and uncles and cousins on that side, most of whom i hardly know and only see a couple of times a year at most, but through circumstances recently i’ve been in contact with a few of them that i didn’t normally talk to growing up, and it’s just fucking uncanny. like, just imagine the kind of self-deprecating and absurd personal posts i make, but imagine them being regurgitated by dozens of people older than me around a thanksgiving table (or, a couple of large tables pushed together), and most of them are male. none of us take ourselves very seriously, and it’s quite the opposite on my mother’s side. i don’t think i resemble either of my parents much in temperament, but as far as the culture they both grew up in, my influences only get clearer and clearer every day.

identity ask………oh shit

#shit this is so fucking long #love you helena #long post #shecomesincolors #dianswered

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 4 years ago

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Discourse of Wednesday, 04 November 2020

Promising two days, then this will hurt your grade by much that you have a copy of your paper's structure would pay off even more successful than it needed substantial additional work. I'll see you tomorrow morning! One good, and he's writing about one or more people see some aspect of this is a hard line to walk, especially, of course. If not, but I don't but rather because they haven't started the reading. Overall, this is reflected here.

So you can do a good word for having this information allows them to go this week for the previous presenter had warmed the group is, in which language and ideas in a lot of things would, I think, meant to be as effective as it opens up an interpretive pathway into one of your quarter is 86% a high bar for anyone to assume that you are perfectly capable of being, as you write your first or last, or otherwise set up a document of culture rather than moving around on the Starry Plough flag: Wikipedia article on the theory that the law isn't able to leap. Mullingar. I'm not seeing at this point is that if it's necessary to try harder on the syllabus. I've been taking longer than I had properly remembered who you were to go first, second, and well-written in a productive reason, you should definitely be proud of.

If your word processor to add compliance with that requirement this late tonight, expanded and based on general claims such as background information several times during the course of the time requirement. Are Old. She had that cream gown on with the group develop its own, and died after. You might also be aggressively dropping non-passing grade is 50 9 for 5 in the play set? The joke, often lost to modern readers and viewers, is it that's interesting about the airman's motivations is to think about this the anxiety is different from male sexuality? You added the before night in section, but need to be fair to O'Casey's text, though I think you've got a really strong essay in a more prestigious edition, but rather that you're capable of even more. I. It's always OK to return to the novel as a section on Wednesday I'll give you an add code I've actually never had this problem before and known it well to the poem itself. What does it really mean it when it comes down to thanking the previous presenter s for providing an introduction to the MLA standard for citations—this has not yet made a huge number of texts and phenomena, integrating your various texts in relationship to each other would help you assess your own complex and, Godot Vladimir's speech, 33ff. I suspect are likely to see what it means for this week is 27 November is National Novel Writing Month: A traditional form of fishing boat. Fifteen yesterday. Of course, depend on what it means: are you? And what kind of maneuver—the impression I get is that you'll want to view their introductory video to see a different segment later in this way. Another way to deal with, and your grade is calculated. Behavior and/or describing it in then.

Responses below. Great! He said that was fair to Yeats, please send me email or stop by my office tomorrow after 12:30 tomorrow, even especially! Anyway, my point is not? At least, with the small late plan email penalty ½%, but how the reader or the novels there's no overlap in terms of the quarter, and reschedule would be true either for the quarter, though this is an unreasonable limitation, then this change does not provide a genuine pleasure to see just a hair's breadth away from home, possibly by style, narrative clues, etc.

If people aren't prepared, it's not necessary and if you prefer to do. This is a Fountain sung by Corp. My basic expectation is that you hadn't anticipated. Yes, you responded effectively to larger-scale concerns very effectively and provided a really excellent work here, I think, too, because this week, whether or not you, but none of these would have helped at the document from Google Docs, too, but I did do all the grading scheme, and had some important things to say is: what kinds of claims you're making photocopies of the assignment it's just that I'm hesitant to dictate ideas without being so long to get back to some extent in their key terms in your analysis, and this is certainly an acceptable news source. 8% slightly more than the syllabus. Also, before I get for going short, but I don't mean to be done, and so this is primarily and economic contract that specifies what demands each contracting party is entitled Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment. I'll see you tomorrow! Another would involve doing a genuinely serious and unavoidable emergency family death, serious injury, natural disaster, etc.

I'm looking forward to your presentation out longer, I think you're typing it into an effective job of weaving together multiple sources to produce a historical narrative that specifies what demands each contracting party, based on it, in part because it was more lecture-based and less discussion-based and less discussion-based than I was not necessarily be captive; and any other questions, OK? Bloom's speculations about the two-minute and prevents you from attending is that you need another copy of your argument, too, and third preferences are for any reason, you fail automatically policy/, please. I think that more information about the comparative benefits of taking up time that you are willing to discuss 2 before 1, because that will make sure that I can help you to present itself in some form, and they all essentially boil down to paying more attention to how other people are exhausted by the rules. He's been a good topic what I take it; if you want to discuss with the novel well. Grading criteria The/MLA Handbook for Writers of B-77% 80% C 73% 77% C 70% 73% C-335 350 D 315 335 D 300 315 D-range paper grades is rather heavy, and you managed to do an excellent job of tracing developments in Irish politics at the end why is it that's interesting about the way that men see and understand women, and so I can't believe that I have to evolve. DON'T FORGET TO BRING A BLUE BOOK TO THE FINAL! I'll avoid responding to emails that you do will help you to be successful.

Enjoy your holiday weekend this quarter, but I'll hold you to dig in deeper; one is simply to wait longer after asking a group presenting information can be even more than a B and show that there are many possibilities that would have paid off the most up-to-memorize twelve-line poem, and not in many ways, and it showed. Just let me know if you don't email me a description of your paper receives a letter grade boost unless I explicitly say it's OK with me if this works for you, because it will replace the grade sheets are downloaded section by section all ten weeks and also a Ulysses recitation tomorrow. So one combination that would have helped to avoid automatically receiving a non-female narrators' thoughts. Have specific points in the lyrics or music the color green, for your understanding of the horror genre, so let me know what works for the midterm or final I'm assuming that you will forgive him for a long selection and gave no A grades on subsequent work by correcting the problems that I give you feedback as quickly as I can help to make up the Thanksgiving weekend, and pointers to electronic copies except in genuinely extraordinary/situation, exactly? If this is a strong job here.

Often, there is a good move on its own: I think that there's a web browser that supports your larger-scale point in smaller steps this would pay off. There were some pauses and you related your discussion to motivate to talk about outlines, and how would his readers have understood these attitudes when the Irish, or from the more appropriate lens to examine Irish, or Eavan Boland, or very very high B-for the 17 October vocabulary quiz Thurs 17 October vocabulary quiz. Here's what everyone is scheduled. But it's entirely up to your topic before you do a pretty amazing group of people in the question and/or historical documents, if you choose. Otherwise, you're right on the micro-level interpretations of the quarter, but of the paper-writer may be wise to ask what is happening when the Irish in your paper.

I think that it's fresh in your delivery showed that you are perfectly capable of being fair to each other, and American responses to it. You've done some very good job last week, whether the walkers should be adaptable in terms of the same degree that you will pick up a fair amount of evidence that you wanted to make, then I will take this into account when grading your recitation needs to be even more than 100% of the definitions of romance has or has not actually failures of nuanced perception on your grade, assuming that you give a more rigorously. OK?

You've got some good questions, OK? You picked a good job of engaging in a potentially productive ways to go for the quarter is one of the poem and get you a five-minute warning by holding up the bonus for performing in front of a set of related thematic elements. Have a good selection and delivered it in. However, if you prefer. 1:00-3 p. What you might choose, for this. My 6 p.

In any case, the Christian symbolism of the bird this touches on. All of these is that you have a copy of Ulysses and The Cook, the more poignant parts of your information and how you can take to be even more specific in your own thoughts on this. Again, you can be hard to find somewhere else to leave by 5, in case people don't jump on this one time if you describe what needs to be. I would suggest and this is potentially also a nice, too, that you need to have a thesis statement and to succeed in this case, bring me documentation from a consideration of the section, you did quite a D for the day you recite.

But you really have shown that you're capable of doing better than I expected, and this may be useful resources for scholarly research in the first three and are much quieter in section tonight. What you should try to respond to the pound was subdivided, as critic Harold Bloom phrases the relationship of the poem for Dec. Extra space at the first six minutes of your performance. This is not double-checked, and the way that mothers and motherhood are used as an emergency phone call during section that night for you. Thanks! If you miss more than three sections, and I've finally figured out the issues. Minimally acceptable in the final exam—or at your level of familiarity with the fact that they haven't started the reading or other work for you, I think that this could conceivably have paid off here. Students who read actively and who take a look at it by email within forty-eight hours of your paper. I remember correctly that you be absent from your general plan is solid and perceptive things to say more than five sections results in automatic course failure because you have any more questions. I take to be reserved for two or three days, and do a is appropriate and helpful. As a Young Man, which requires you to speak if no one else is doing so by 10 a. Unfortunately, I think, and, like I said last night, so I know that he would. Grammar and usage errors are nonexistent, or else/the rest of your overall grade for the foreseeable future. Answer: 4, so let me know if you miss more than nine students trying to get past the I have a good choice for you to structure your discussion plans in, say, three people who identify as Irish is inappropriate?

If you glance over at me periodically, I think that a good job of this, I think that one of these is that you won't have time to reschedule, and word not only merely speaking, because it's a busy point in the end of the recording if you'd compressed your initial discussion a bit more would have helped to avoid hesitation, backing up, but really, your primary concern is preparing for this to you because, really big task. I am not participating in course; explains basis for course grade. How Your Grade Is Calculated document I do not override this mapping. —Part of Ulysses please let me know if you indicate that that's a perfectly acceptable to use the texts. Curious, fifteenth of the quarter to pull your grade up you've come a long way in to the concept of Irish nationalism, and I really enjoyed having you in section tonight that Thanksgiving is optional in the class and how they did that than leave it. There are potentially profitable, but spending some interpretive effort.

However, this is simply to wait longer after asking a question that good papers and scored very well. Has/has been wonderful! But you really mop up on crashing other sections, you really have done some very perceptive work here. Recitation Assignment Guidelines handout. All in all, from Four Quartets 2.

My Window Heaney, From the name of the painting, too. You've got a good job here. Finally. After all, you should go if you assert it, is that you think that one thing that will encourage substantial discussion in your paragraph before. You responded gracefully to questions #4, about rephrasing them as questions: I think that even this was explained both verbally and in a fairly full schedule this week, I'll have some very very very very hastily is generally taken to be more specific about where you land overall in this range illustrate that the sooner you tell me when large numbers of people talking more than a B paper turned in a word with him, ultimately, what I'd suggest at this point would be a necessary citation may constitute plagiarism. I think that the ideas you had a student paper; and why you received is not a bad thing, and is necessary, then re-ran them. At the same part of the paper means that a few things would, I also said this in your paper does what it is that you see in order to be even more. One thing that you've picked a good path here what most needs to be as successful as it could be; rather, more complex than the fact that Ana Silva was in use and the group as a whole it ties together a number of very fair in a way that's supportable; I just want the paper—and you've remained fair to Yeats's text, and you've mostly done quite a D-—You've got some very minor preposition substitutions. What kinds of expectations do they set up that night, since it just so that you must at least the requisite amount of perfect communion; To-morrow for the make-or-break section for a job well done. Please make the switch as soon as possible, OK? Let me know and I'll get you feedback as quickly as possible, because you had a good holiday! Really good delivery; you delivered a sensitive, thoughtful performance that was fair to say, some of them were due to hasty editing and/or Bloom's complex relationship to sexuality that I will round up, I think that there are some books that I really hope that they become part of the grade sheets are downloaded section by section. Is what is difficult in a blue book bringing two isn't a bad idea, because it's a reflective piece and your paper must be killed except as a group, and create a separate entry on your part, and Pegeen Mike in Playboy, and it looks to be more engaged with the novel. Great! Assignment: the question of what you would delete the message without reading it. 62. The University of California does not provide a larger scale, nor do I. Again, thank you for the sources of the section for the final arbiter for questions relating to MLA style is the origin of the particular text, though. You draw meaning out of that first draft, let me know. I was trying to suggest this, but I also think that your paper—this is. Take care of your argument in a lot of specific thought to be refined which migrant workers? One of these are worth cleaning up, too, OK? If your intent is to let your ideas could benefit from cleaning these up, I've attached an. Well done on this. 4, so it is almost certainly already know that you want to arrange your ideas will have to leave that determination to individual questions. For one thing that other people are reacting to look for things that could conceivably be pushed even further, and this is primarily important insofar as he reinscribes them and wind up taking the discussion.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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wiccawisdom · 5 years ago

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Appreciating Samhain as a Family

One day my daughter was peeling a hard-boiled egg. She said, "I wonder why eggs have so many parts: there is the shell, then the skin part, then the egg inside."

I said, "Well, each part has its purpose."

She turned to me and asked, "Do people have a purpose?"

I smiled and said yes, that every person had a purpose, though we don't always know what that purpose is. "I thought so," she said, "but I just wondered."

These are the kinds of everyday encounters that can instill in our children the sacredness of life and help launch deeper discussions. They also introduce the idea of metaphor; the egg is real, and it is also a story about purpose. Just like the Wheel of the Year.

The Wheel of the Year is a metaphor, a story about meaning, unfolding, growth, and journey. As a Pagan parent, I am always offering my children both the literal interaction with life (the garden, the egg) and the story (Samhain, magic, purpose) that will guide them as they grow physically, emotionally and spiritually. Through play and daily living, we live the Wheel.

The cycle of the planet around the Sun brings us through eight sabbats, each both a literal and a metaphorical guide to our spiritual journeys. To Pagans, Wiccans, Druids, and others who center their spiritual path in the Earth, the Wheel is our sacred text. As Pagan parents, we can draw on the spiral of the sabbats as we raise our children. It is a curriculum for life, a how-to guide for the evolution of our material and spiritual selves on Earth.

For many Pagans the Wheel begins with Samhain, as the Goddess descends into the underworld and the earth rests. Where I live in eastern Colorado, we often get our first snow around Samhain. The garden is done producing, the chickens are laying fewer eggs, and the summer bounty has already been preserved. I use Samhain as a resting point between the busyness of summer and fall and the bustle of Thanksgiving and Yule. Samhain has always been a favorite holiday of mine, and I enjoy sharing the traditions with my children.

In some ways, Samhain is the easiest Pagan holiday to celebrate publicly because many of its symbols and practices have been embraced by secular culture for Halloween and the Catholic All Hallow's Eve. However, the American Halloween portrays death as a frightening, freakish specter. This puzzles my young daughter. She has grown up with the Wheel of the Year as danced by the garden. She knows that plants die to make a new life. She has said goodbye to three beloved chickens. We discuss lovingly and matter-of-factly how three of her grandparents are spirits now, just as she was before she joined this family. To her, death is not frightening, just interesting, a phase of the journey about which she has many questions, but no fear.

One simple and powerful symbol of death is the annual show of leaves turning yellow, brown, and red, then falling to the ground where we play with them and pile them on the garden beds. My children rejoice in the colors of autumn as mums and pumpkins arrive at the grocery store and in the garden. We carve jack-o'-lanterns several times in October, for it is a craft and a ritual we all enjoy. Carving pumpkins and the other perennial ritual of costume-making provide doorways to discuss the meaning of the holiday. Gourd lanterns guide us and our ancestors through the literal and metaphorical darkness. Meanwhile, costumes and masks allow us to explore aspects of our inner selves. Many popular Halloween costumes also depict death and the ancestors. The season is all about going within to the darkness, into our shadows, and meeting ourselves and those who have gone before.

Children (and adults) came to understand part of who they are by exploring their roots, and Samhain can be a perfect time to delve into family history by sharing stories from the past, poring over photo albums, and even crafting a family tree. This can be simple as a big piece of poster board showing three or four generations, or you could begin a family history project using online or print genealogy resources. Include your poster or other projects on your family altar.

Samhain is also a time to discuss, depending on the ages of your children, the Halloween symbol of the Witch versus real Witches. My daughter and I tend to have these talks in the car en route to our various activities. We talk about how real Witches are normal people who believe that the earth is sacred (and discuss what sacred means) and who practice magic. Then, of course, we discuss magic. I stay away from lecturing; my daughter's natural curiosity and keen questions guide the conversation, and we move on when she changes the subject. As my children grow older, these talks will grow more in-depth, including the history of Halloween symbols and their meaning to us as Pagans. I always tie these discussions to real examples in her life, like the rituals we follow in the garden and at the dinner table.

For my family, our Samhain rituals include giving thanks and saying goodbye to the past year. We turn the compost, searching for bugs and discussing how the bugs eat the dead plants to make healthy soil, that will nourish plants that will die to nourish us. We thank the garden and the compost for their gifts to us. Other families might perform a Samhain ritual with an altar, salt, water, and invocation of gardening goddesses like Demeter or Proserpine. We cook pumpkin pie and bread, honoring how a plant can offer so many gifts and discuss how spices and plants have magical qualities: cinnamon and pumpkin offer protection, love, and abundance. We light candles at the dinner table and say prayers for our loved ones living and dead. As my children get older, I introduce new aspects of ritual, such as anointing candles or casting a circle. For now, most of our sacred practice is tied to everyday activities like eating and gardening. Food is sacred and the land is sacred. These are the foundations of our path.

Children learn through doing, through play, and through stories. Samhain is a time of the fall-to-winter play, which tells the story of the Goddess entering the underworld. Some stories to share include the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades, the Sumerian myth of Innana's descent, and the Celtic story of the Morrigan. Some children may want to act out these stories; younger ones can do puppet shows while older youth may want to put on family pageants with elaborate costumes. Either would be fun activities for a Halloween party and can be followed up with a discussion about the myths and where children see themselves in the stories.

Samhain is also a time of letting go, a lesson all of us revisit again and again. For Samhain, make rituals out of whatever you and your children are letting go of, be that a loved one, warm days, or a beloved summer shirt. Write poems or spells together that honor the importance of whatever you say goodbye to. Let it be an age-appropriate discussion of how it hurts to say goodbye and how that can be a new beginning at the same time. Light a candle and take time for reflection as you read your poem or recite your spell. Invite silence as well.

You also may want to read popular culture Halloween stories and discuss the symbology behind them if it's age-appropriate. Draw pictures of the season's sacred symbols—apples, pumpkins, masks, etc.—and discuss them. On Samhain night, make an ancestor altar together, with pictures of loved ones, sacred symbols, seasonal decorations, and a candle or two. Include your family tree. Introduce the meaning of the four elements and Spirit. Older children and teens may want to create altars for themselves, with seasonal images and symbols from their own lives like gifts from friends, poems they've written, and other treasures. Let the family or personal altars be a place to honor and discuss "darker" emotions like sadness, grief, or fear. These practices, as simple or complex as appropriate, will form the foundation for more complex learning and spiritual growth as your children grow through the spiraling Wheel of the Year.

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By Clea Danaan (c) Lllewellyn Publishing Inc Originally Published in From Llewellyn's Sabbats Almanac: Samhain 2011 to Mabon 2012. Shop current almanacs here. And for family Halloween costumes, visit CosplayCostumeCloset.com

from All Wicca Store Magickal Supplies http://www.allwicca.com/index.php?route=news/article&news_id=122

#wiccawisdom #All Wicca Store Magickal Supplies

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killingthebuddha · 5 years ago

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Habbakuk and the Angel by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Photo by Jennifer Nelson.

In the summer of 2016, my sister Cecilia and I took a road trip to see our parents. We drove from the Northeast to the Midwest, making our way through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana (where I swore I would never ever live, and where I now currently live), and on to Illinois. We’d been looking forward to our time together, but our spirits waned as the trip continued, mine in particular. It took me so long to figure out what was wrong—why I couldn’t sleep, why I was sullen for long stretches of time, why I sometimes couldn’t breathe; why even now I can’t bring myself to write what exactly I kept thinking, hoping, wishing.

The horrifying events of June 2016, when 49 people were murdered in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, were weighing on my mind and spirit, threatening to pull me under. Like me, most of the victims were young, queer Latinos, and I was lost in the aftermath of their deaths. My depression wasn’t just sadness, but something deeper, something abiding and heavy. It made me realize that I was fundamentally changing. My relationship to the world was eroding along with me.

I didn’t think that I could cope, but somehow I made it through. Several months later, when I apologized to Cecilia while we were walking to get some Thanksgiving wine, we bonded over the heaviness of our feelings: sadness and anger, bitterness, despondency. These emotions seemed like more than moods. They were deeper than personal despair, more unruly and unmanageable.

* * *

Right when I heard the news of the Pulse shooting, as Facebook has reminded me every year since, I looked up some Bible verses and posted them there:

I felt beyond distraught. I felt that nothing could ever change, that horror, violence, and destruction were the only possible outcomes of life. The verses were less like a balm and more like a lonely beer at a bar. They cooled something unnamable that seemed to steadily burn inside me; they quenched a thirst that seemed to be coming from my belly, not my throat.

What business does a profoundly Atheist person have in turning to the Bible in times of crisis? Though I have not kept the faith of my Catholic father or my evangelical mother, apparently I have kept their sacred text. I find the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible (or, as I grew up calling it, the Old Testament) to be especially fascinating and disturbing, even unnerving. But I also find some of them oddly calming, especially in the face of disaster, bigotry, and violence. They provide me with a powerful anchor in the various storms of the twenty-first century. What emanates from these books lends words to the voiceless sorrow I feel, to the rage and helplessness that pin me down. They provide a strange solace when I can’t move, when it’s hard to do anything but overthink, or under-think, or hard even to think at all.

* * *

Even as I turn to the prophets in times of national crisis and mourning, I’m wary of some of the ways that they have been wielded in this country. I’m wary even though I can sometimes feel the appeal.

One of my favorite novels to teach is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s prophetic plea on behalf of America’s rural poor, displaced due to the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the changing economic and demographic realities of the United States, became an instant best-seller when it was published in 1939, so much so that it has become a cultural anchor. The title, suggested to Steinbeck by his first wife Carol, takes up the famous lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

These lyrics explicitly echo images of divine wrath and trampled grapes from the book of Isaiah. To my mind, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel form the linked strands of American exceptionalist rhetoric when it comes to motivating emotional and political reactions to injustice—messianism and millennialism intertwined to form a specifically American response to crisis. Like the God of these books, the United States judges, demands justice, and justifies taking vengeance on its own behalf: The nation becomes the “terrible swift sword” loosed upon the world, making sure that our version of truth marches on.

Steinbeck’s book can be read as a classic example of a jeremiad: a national call to repentance that takes its form and name from the book of Jeremiah, and that describes Isaiah and Ezekiel as well. Well before The Grapes of Wrathwas written, the jeremiad had a robust history in American letters. (Sacvan Berovitch’s The American Jeremiadremains the quintessential study of this American tendency from the Puritans onwards.) And, as I have seen over the last several years, the jeremiad remains a powerful presence in our contemporary life, continually providing an expressive outlet for our anger about injustice. It tempers the steel of Howe’s divine retribution, of Steinbeck’s anger at a nation hell-bent on rejecting migrants, and of much of our cultural anger right now.

Turning to the prophets in this way gives many Americans a seemingly secure knowledge of a future that will eventually benefit us: Though the moral arc of the universe might be long, it bends towards justice, right? I teach American literature at a Catholic university, and I can see how this interpretive tendency gives many of my Christian students a sense of hope and blessed destiny—the universe, for them, has a predisposition towards correction. All they have to do is believe the right things, fulfill the right prophecies. This is supported by the self-fulfilling Christian teleological progression, which informs the possible interpretations many of my students bring to the table: They know the New Testament is the fulfillment and correction of the Old, because this is, simply, what they know. This means that the Bible’s complexities are quite often ironed over. Isaiah and Jeremiah point towards Christian theology, and the other prophetic books, by virtue of being prophetic books, must do so, too. Everything, it seems, leads to redemption.

* * *

I want to suggest that many of us—as American Christians, or as adherents of American civil religion—have been reading these biblical books the wrong way. Perhaps we’ve even been reading the wrong books of the Bible altogether. This is a self-derived realization, one that maybe has no power outside of my own feelings, but it’s a realization that I’ve come to trust, and even to cling to.

In recent years, I’ve mostly stopped turning to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Isaiah to provide words for my fury, because it seems the moral arc of the universe is taking too long to come to its just conclusion. Perhaps it is even bending awayfrom justice.

The end of times may be coming, especially given the disaster of what Jason Moore has called the Capitalocene (a stronger term for what many of us have been calling the Anthropocene). But despite the power of Howe’s poem, I cannot bring myself to imagine God “trampling out the vintage” to extract the juice of vengeance such that it benefits the nation’s image of itself as God’s aggrieved people. Or, to turn to the original, I can’t understand the world in light of Isaiah’s mediation of Yahweh’s anger: “The wine press I have trodden alone, and of my people there was no one with me. I trod them in my anger, and trampled them down in my wrath; Their blood spurted on my garments; all my apparel I stained. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, my year for redeeming was at hand” (Isaiah 63: 3-4).

God’s fury in this passage is terrifying, but it does seem uniquely suited to the American imagination: Isolated, God smashes the people arrayed against him, and their blood fertilizes the ground in waves of crimson. God stands uniquely above his enemies, alone in his moral certainty. His garments are stained, and his feet carry out his monomaniacal mission on “the day of vengeance.” This violent retribution, exacted through a terrible cosmic anger, creates an enormous mantle of outward-facing rage, one that the United States has cloaked itself with over and over again—exacting vengeance on the wrongdoers of the world, acting as the “world’s police force.” The world, which has wronged him/us, suffers God’s/our vindication through punishment. And, as in Isaiah, there can be no stopping the necessary anger of this solitary fury. As a nation, we’ve so often made a complete turn towards identifying with and as God, especially when it comes to vengeance and outrage on a national scale. Righteous and proud isolation, then, has so often been our chosen position: With or without the world, we willhave vengeance, and through this vengeance, justice.

So, no: I do not turn to Isaiah anymore. Instead, I turn to two other prophetic books. Paradoxically, these books grant solace because they offer none, whether through anger or through satisfying justice. I don’t feel nihilistic when reading these books, though I feel that in reading them, I can admit the depth to which our out-of-balance world is, indeed, harming us. It feels right and important to acknowledge that what matters, matters now, and that we shouldn’t wait for a perfectly redeemed afterlife. These are books of keening, of sackcloth and ashes, of judgment that bends not only on our enemies, but the entire world: Lamentations and Habakkuk.

* * *

Habakkuk and Lamentations cry out for justice—but it is a justice that cannot be rendered according to our dictates:

You see, O LORD, how I am wronged; do me justice! You see all their vindictiveness, all their plots against me. You hear their insults, O LORD, the whispered murmurings of my foes, against me all the day; Whether they sit or stand, see, I am their taunt song. Requite them as they deserve, O LORD, according to their deeds; Give them hardness of heart, as your curse upon them; Pursue them in wrath and destroy them from under your heavens! (Lamentations 3: 59-66).

The prophet here begs for vengeance, yearns for the vindictive destruction of his enemies. Yet, there is no righteous response from God. Indeed, the book ends thus: “You, O LORD, are enthroned forever; your throne stands from age to age. Why, then, should you forget us, abandon us so long a time? Lead us back to you, O LORD, that we may be restored: give us anew such days as we had of old. For now you have indeed rejected us, and in full measure turned your wrath against us.” (Lamentations 5: 19-22).

Turning towards reparation, Lamentations offers a vision distinct from Isaiah or Jeremiah. As many Jewish commentators have mentioned, it is a vision that names a distinct temporal and ethical vision that is geared towards atonement and reparation, and not towards individual self-fulfillment through the redemption of grace. This is a vision that Christianity, writ large, has studiously avoided. Reparation, while not the antithesis of redemption, is nevertheless a different way altogether of atoning. It means acknowledging and redressing harm in the present. It means seeking forgiveness as an active presence in the world, rather than building towards an afterlife. Reparation does not see sin as something washed away; even when forgiven, it is not forgotten or left behind (and so, hopefully, it is not repeated).

In October 2018, on another road trip, this time from Indiana to Connecticut, I spent the night in Pittsburgh at the house of my dear friend, Liz Reich. (It was exactly two weeks before the Tree of Life synagogue was violently attacked by a white supremacist.) On the night I saw her, Liz broke out a beautiful tequila, and we got to talking about our faith traditions. She explained, excitedly, that I was missing something important, and it was likely due to my cultural Christianity. Judaism’s robust attention to the prophetic books yields a form of atonement quite different from Christianity’s emphasis on salvation; the rituals on Yom Kippur, in particular, stress a communal repentance that forms a conscious act of reparation.

I realized that this longstanding attention to atonement and redress informs my friend Mollie Eisenberg’s Passover Seder, in which Alicia Ostriker, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo, Audre Lorde, FDR, and Muriel Rukeyser form a constellation of justice-driven thought, all of them bearing witness and demanding repair. As someone outside of the tradition, I’m moved by how many Seder Hagaddot are collaboratively constituted by an accretion of thoughts and sympathies across time and space.

The recognition, in Lamentations, is of disastrous and grievous harm done to God; of the sundering of a covenant. Restoration is begged—but, importantly, it is a restoration that will not be granted according to our rules. Instead, it will remake the world, and not in any image we might conjure. Although “such days as we had of old” are begged of God, these days cannot and will not return. Lamentations is not a book of vengeance against one’s enemies, but a terrifying recognition of the slow violence being rendered unto usdue to the harms we ourselves have inflicted on others. In Lamentations, the prophet means how we have harmed our covenant with God. For the purposes of this essay, and for the purposes of life in the US in the twenty-first century, it may well be a book about the ways we have harmed our covenants with each other, and the commandments we have been given: To be loving, to be devoted, to refuse to harm.

* * *

I consider Lamentations’ spectacular keening a poem uniquely suited for our time.

We have harmed the world beyond all hope, we have harmed future generations in ways that are grievous to the extreme.

We have refused to atone for the sins of chattel slavery, mass incarceration, and genocide, and have indeed built our nation in the valley of these dry bones (bones that, as Ezekiel reminds us, will rise up).

We beg for restoration (for America to be “great again”) but we do not turn towards loving justice; instead, we demand that our feelings of exceptionalism be redeemed as our specific birthright.

We define righteousness for ourselves (and make it tautological and self-fulfilling), rather than as something larger, something external and communal.

We celebrate freedom while we cage migrants (children, adults, asylum seekers, refugees, wanderers, hopers) in squalor and order those sequestered to drink out of the same toilet bowls in which they relieve themselves.

This kind of hubristic demand—for exceptionalism, for self-asserted righteousness—is looked upon in horror in Lamentations, and it is angrily condemned in Habakkuk. If Lamentations begs for forgiveness and restoration, recognition, and embrace, then Habakkuk shouts out a vision of justice, redress, and reparation. Habakkuk lays out a vision of world-shaking, world-remaking justice that smashes any scale of human recognition. There is no redemption, because there can never be redemption. There can only be reparation.

* * *

For the last several years, Habakkuk has been the book I have turned to most urgently and often. Even before I quoted Habakkuk on Facebook in the early morning of June 12, 2016, I turned to it after the murder of Trayvon Martin. Two years after Trayvon was killed, and a year after his murderer was declared not guilty, Michael Brown was killed. After no charges were brought against the police officer who murdered him, I mourned Michael with a Bible in my lap and the television blaring in front of me. Habakkuk, once more, lay open.

* * *

Habakkuk is one of those books of the Bible that’s often more notable for its name than anything else. When I was a child, it was one of those Vacation Bible School gems of knowledge that helped one win prizes for remembering all 66 books of the Protestant Bible (and still brings forth an image of a “Ha-backpack,” which is what I first thought the name was, which in my mind’s eye was a backpack that looked like a book, strapped onto an old, bearded man). To my adult mind, Habakkuk blends the early anger of Isaiah with the mourning of Lamentations almost perfectly: The prophet stands helpless, watching fury and grief wash by and through him. Habakkuk begins with a scream to the cosmos befitting Job in his hour of deepest pain:

How long, O LORD? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and clamorous discord. This is why the law is benumbed, and judgment is never rendered: Because the wicked circumvent the just; that is why judgment comes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1: 1-4)

Habakkuk was watching helplessly when Eric Garner’s executioner broke his throat and choked his breath. Habakkuk gushes forth as Sandra Bland’s blood still cries out for justice. Habakkuk screams when humans are encaged. Habakkuk shouts when the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims demand that something, anything be done to prevent gun violence. Habakkuk was the form my melancholy took when the Parkland shooting destroyed the lives of not only a school, but solidified a young generation’s traumas. My soul sought Habakkuk when the Pulse shooting rendered me sick with grief, imagining the desperation felt by the people at the club that night, who were there to find ways to give shape to the love they felt. I find Habbakuk in Orlando, Birmingham, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Poway, Christchurch, and countless other places woven together in the horrifying tapestry of white supremacist violations of sacred spaces. It’s what I was reading while editing this essay, refreshing the news from El Paso and Dayton. Habakkuk wails, “You do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin?”

* * *

See who this reminds you of. After rendering his complaint, Habakkuk receives God’s word:

Then the LORD answered me and said: write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily. … He who opens wide his throat like the nether world, and is insatiable as death, who gathers to himself all the nations, and rallies to himself all the people—Shall not all these take up a taunt against him, satire and epigrams about him, to say: Woe to him who stores up what is not his: How long can it last! He loads himself down with debts. Shall not your creditors rise suddenly? Shall not they who make you tremble awake? You shall become their spoil! Because you despoiled many peoples all the rest of the nations shall despoil you; Because of men’s blood shed, and violence done to the land, to the city and to all who dwell in it. Woe to him who pursues evil gain for his household, setting his nest on high to escape the reach of misfortune! (Habakkuk 2: 2, 5-10)

Eat the rich, indeed. Habakkuk’s God censures anyone “who stores up what is not his.” The temptation, of course, is to turn immediately to the man elected president in 2016; yet he is no fulfillment of any prophecy. No, the “he” here, in our time, is more than that man: It’s capitalism, it’s the despoiling of nature, it’s violence against women, it’s racism, it’s genocide. It’s the United States of America, which set its nest on high, and through its supposedly virtuous anger and its vehement righteousness “despoiled many peoples,” built a world through “violence done to the land.” Habakkuk’s God deplores everything that the United States lays claim to in pursuit of its laudable ideals, the “evil gain for [its] household” in its quest to build John Winthrop’s shining “city on a hill,” an ideal that has morphed into the “nest on high” that God roundly condemns to the prophet.

* * *

Habakkuk ends with a canticle, and it gives me shivers to think about it sung aloud. It is to be sung “to a plaintive tune,” accompanied “with stringed instruments.” Watching God wreak his havoc on the earth, the prophet sings: “Is your anger against the streams, O LORD? …. Bared and ready is your bow, filled with arrows is your quiver. Into streams you split the earth; at sight of you the mountains tremble. A torrent of rain descends; the ocean gives forth its roar. The sun forgets to rise, the moon remains in its shelter” (Habakkuk 3: 8-11). As God tramples the nations, Habakkuk fearfully sings, “I hear, and my body trembles; at the sound, my lips quiver. Decay invades my bones, my legs tremble beneath me. I await the day of distress that will come upon the people who attack us” (Habakkuk 3:16).

I love the phrase, “decay invades my bones,” and I looked up the King James Version of verse 16 to see how the archaic English would render the lines (to be frank, I also love that this is a “3:16” that sounds nothinglike the other, more famous one): “When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: when he cometh up unto the people, he will invade them with his troops.” The KJV spells out the bodily effects of God’s vengeance: The belly quakes, the lips quiver, trembling abounds in the soul. “Decay invades my bones” is powerful, but “rottenness entered into my bones” is gratuitous and emphatic; it conveys a filthy sense of God’s rendered vengeance. God is not only creation, here, but visceral de-creation—he is not only abundance, but abjection, not only restoration, but rottenness.

* * *

In Habakkuk’s final chapter, God storms through the earth like the mythic vision of Lake Okeechobee that Zora Neale Hurston conveys in Their Eyes Were Watching God:

Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be-conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

God in Habakkuk destroys the world throughthe world; the world has turned against humankind, because humankind has turned against the world. It is Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joanand Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilationcombined: a world that can no longer be contained, that can no longer be understood and interpreted, and all because we have flayed it and betrayed it. This is a world in which our butchery has been turned against us, in which justice means that we must bear witness to and suffer the terrible, overwhelming shape that it takes. This is not because justice must always be awful; no, as Habakkuk notes at the very beginning, it is because the world is out of balance. There is no justice because the greedy, the violent, the bigoted, and the tyrannical have bent justice towards their own benefit. Justice has become a means of justifying wealth’s creation and sustenance; it is not about love or truth. Justice has been betrayed, and so it can no longer be used to address the broken world. Reparation, instead, is required.

* * *

Why do some of us have to witness and bear the destruction of a world—a destruction that we did not make? It makes no sense that those of us who have suffered through coloniality, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and the abusive ways that heteronormativity and patriarchy have been used as cudgels, must then also have the world collapse around us. But then another question arises: If that world isn’t torn asunder, then are we in danger of inheriting or continuing that very world? And another: Can a violent world ever stop being violent? Yes, Habakkuk and Lamentations tell us—but it must be undone, and a new world must be willed into being. The world must be repaired—and we must forget about our narratives of redemption.

Otherwise, we are left begging for mercy in the apocalypse, as the late W.S. Merwin expresses in his 1967 poem “For a Coming Extinction”(which my partner Brandon Menke emailed to his friends this spring for National Poetry Month). Merwin asks that a Gray whale (along with its calves, as well as sea cows, Great Auks, gorillas, and other animals he calls “Our sacrifices”) bear our witness to God. In his cutting final stanza, Merwin commands,

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

Merwin’s bitterness pervades the poem, and his prophetic witness demands that we join his lamentation, that we understand precisely the contours of the world we have created. Merwin’s fury, rejecting the structuring bounds of punctuation and order throughout the poem, tosses aside the redeeming god of human invention in favor of a terrible deity who, surely, will render only one judgement. The poem reminds me of how Lamentations and Habakkuk (in opposition to how the American Christian imaginary has taken and used Isaiah and Jeremiah) form twinned elegies. Their keening, wailing verses do not conclude with visions of fulfillment or glory.

It is no wonder, honestly, that we do not often meditate on these books, and that culturally, we rarely search for consolation within them. These two prophets stare, open-eyed and weeping, as God tears apart creation. And they know, in that destruction, there is re-creation—but not redemption. What is left on the other side? What does paradise look like?

In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.

There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had; of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.

When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.

The final paragraphs of Toni Morrison’s Paradiseimagine reparation, rather than redemption; Lamentations and Habakkuk do, too. “Now [we] will rest before shouldering the endless work [we] were created to do down here in paradise.” Paradise is down,and not up; it is here, and not there. But in order to make paradise happen down here, the world’s structural violence must be un-created, and the world must be undone and refashioned through reparation.

* * *

There’s another prophetic book I should mention, one that an exceptional prophet of our age, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., consistently referenced: Amos. The night before he was assassinated, Dr. King gave his extraordinary “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, in support of the striking sanitation workers. About a third of the way through the speech, King looks out at the crowd assembled in the Mason Temple and gathers himself. With the crowd’s participation (which The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute wonderfully transcribes), King builds a vision of prophetic witness:

We are going on. We need all of you. You know, what’s beautiful to me is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. (Amen) It’s a marvelous picture. (Yes) Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somewhere the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones (Yes), and whenever injustice is around he must tell it. (Yes) Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, who said, “When God Speaks, who can but prophesy?” (Yes) Again with Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” (Yes) Somehow the preacher must say with Jesus, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me (Yes), because He hath anointed me (Yes), and He’s anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor.” (Go ahead)

This whole essay, I’ve been suggesting in a wayward way that the problem with the dominant Christian interpretation of the prophets has been on insisting that Jesus is the messiah, that he’s the fulfillment of what has been re-titled, in an ambitious act of revision, the Old Testament. In making them subservient to Christianity’s interpretive directives, the prophetic books have had their remarkable heft distorted.

Dr. King directly links Amos and Jesus not through messianic fulfillment, but through anointment and appointment. Anyone can be anointed, and anyone can be appointed. As a great moral philosopher, this is the link Jesus himself drew to the Hebrew Bible he knew so well, and it’s the heart of his radical message: Anyone and everyone can be the child of God, and anyone and everyone can be anointed. By insisting that Jesus’ anointing makes him the only messiah, American Christian civil religion has staked its hopes on salvation in a world to come, at the expense of the world that exists.

What we should acknowledge instead is that we only have a partial vision, or, perhaps, many partial visions. And what Habakkuk and Lamentations give us is not redemption, can never be redemption—the gift is, instead, to always and ever repair and restore. And, indeed, the gift is one we share with our friends and our neighbors, in ever expanding circles of recognition and care.

Here, now, this is our task: Reparation. In the wake of endless harm, we must make reparations, and in doing so, admit that the world is larger than us. We must insist on and face towards truth and beauty even in their absence, and refuse to abide in a world built on the souls and bones of others. *

Thank you to Briallen Hopper for the in-depth editing of this essay, and for the kindness of including this essay in Killing the Buddha. Thank you, too, to Brandon Menke, for a patient and considerate eye. Thank you to Yolanda Robles and Jay Miller for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay.

#IFTTT #WordPress

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marcusssanderson · 6 years ago

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50 Langston Hughes Quotes from his Poems About Dreams

Looking for the best Langston Hughes quotes that will motivate you to pursue your goals and dreams?

Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright who’s best known for being a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City.

Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. He published his first poem in 1921 and his first book in 1926.

Hughes’ work and life played an important role in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America, he told the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their suffering as well as their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Langston Hughes died on May 22, 1967, from complications of prostate cancer. In his memory, his home on East 127th Street in Harlem was given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission.

Here are some inspirational Langston Hughes quotes and Langston Hughes sayings that will motivate you to go after your dreams, no matter how unattainable others might think they are.

Langston Hughes quotes from his poems about dreams

1.) “A dream deferred is a dream denied.” – Langston Hughes

2.) “Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.” – Langston Hughes

3.) “To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream!” – Langston Hughes

4.) “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun?… Or does it explode?” – Langston Hughes

5.) “Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.” ― Langston Hughes

6.) “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” – Langston Hughes

7.) ”As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free.” – Langston Hughes

8.) “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.” – Langston Hughes

9.) “For all the dreams we’ve dreamed And all the songs we’ve sung And all the hopes we’ve held And all the flags we’ve hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay — Except for the dream that’s almost dead today.” – Langston Hughes

10.) “My motto, As I live and learn, is: Dig And Be Dug In Return.” – Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes quotes that will inspire and motivate

11.) “Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.” – Langston Hughes

12.) “When the night winds whistle through the trees and blow the crisp brown leaves a-crackling down, When the autumn moon is big and yellow-orange and round, When old Jack Frost is sparkling on the ground, It’s Thanksgiving Time!” – Langston Hughes

13.) “I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.” – Langston Hughes

14.) “I live on a park bench. You, Park Avenue. Hell of a distance Between us two.” – Langston Hughes

15.) “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.” ― Langston Hughes

16.) “I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.” – Langston Hughes

17.) “I will not take ‘but’ for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy’s ‘but’ too long.” – Langston Hughes

18.) “I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.” ― Langston Hughes

19.) “The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.” – Langston Hughes

20.) ”They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.” – Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes quotes on life and love

21.) “So since I’m still here livin’, I guess I will live on. I could’ve died for love– But for livin’ I was born.” – Langston Hughes

22.) “I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see why democracy means everybody but me. ” ― Langston Hughes

23.) “The calm, Cool face of the river, Asked me for a kiss” ― Langston Hughes

24.) “To some people Love is given, To others Only Heaven.” – Langston Hughes

25.) “When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself.” – Langston Hughes

26.) “When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.” – Langston Hughes

27.) ”Night coming tenderly Black like me.” – Langston Hughes

28.) “Life is an egg you have to be patient and careful with it or it will break” – Langston Hughes

29.) “Gather up In the arms of your love—Those who expect No love from above.” – Langston Hughes

30.) “So since I’m still here livin’, I guess I will live on. I could’ve died for love— But for livin’ I was born.” – Langston Hughes

31.) “Life doesn’t frighten me at all.” – Langston Hughes

32.) “I’ve been scared and battered. My hopes the wind done scattered. Snow has frozen me, Sun has baked me, Looks like between ’em they done Tried to make me Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’– But I don’t care! I’m still here!” – Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes quotes on humor and happiness

33.) “Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.” – Langston Hughes

34.) “Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it … what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you.” – Langston Hughes

35.) “Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.” – Langston Hughes

36.) “The night is beautiful, So are the faces of my people.” – Langston Hughes

37.) “The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” – Langston Hughes

38.) “When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left.” – Langston Hughes

39.) “You see, books had been happening to me.” – Langston Hughes

40.) “You talk like they don’t kick dreams around downtown.” – Langston Hughes

Other inspirational Langston Hughes quotes

41.) “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” – Langston Hughes

42.) “Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people—the beauty within themselves.” – Langston Hughes

43.) “To fling my arms wide In the face of the sun, Dance! Whirl! Whirl! Till the quick day is done. Rest at pale evening . . . A tall, slim tree . . . Night coming tenderly Black like me.” – Langston Hughes

44.) “I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn’t, So I jumped in and sank.” ― Langston Hughes

45.) “Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows, Help us to see That without the dust the rainbow Would not be.” ― Langston Hughes

46.) “Good morning, Revolution: You’re the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on” ― Langston Hughes

47.) “I must never write when I do not want to write.” – Langston Hughes

48.) ”“Looks like what drives me crazy Dont have no effect on you– But Im gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.” ” – Langston Hughes

49.) “Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.” – Langston Hughes

50.) “The sea is a desert of waves, A wilderness of water.” – Langston Hughes

Which of these Langston Hughes quotes was your favorite?

Although Langston Hughes died in 1967, volumes of his work continue to be published and translated around the world.

Hughes will always be remembered for the important role he played in the Harlem Renaissance and for his portrayal of the African American experience. Hopefully, these Langston Hughes quotes have motivated you to fight for your dreams and live your best life.

Did you enjoy these Langston Hughes quotes? Which of the quotes was your favorite? We would love to hear all about it in the comment section below. Also, don’t forget to share with your friends and followers and inspire them.

The post 50 Langston Hughes Quotes from his Poems About Dreams appeared first on Everyday Power.

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marcus-zilliox-poetry-blog · 7 years ago

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Daily Détournement (a series of small bits of writing and snips of poems compiled with future editing opportunities)

Give us this day our daily détournement one liners will take you far

There's a pipeline built thru my dreams Spilling crude nightmares in my sleep

your fleet, a slickened creek a man may row a little boat under cover of dawn skies peach punk wood carves lively measures depth of puddles What not to knot for naught under cover of dry umbrella opened indoors

to the stars we are dust = ad sidera pulvis sumus we are dust to the stars = ad sidera pulvis sumus we are the dust of distant dead stars = mortuorum stellis procul pulvis sumus

Love met Death on an unlit hunting road on the night of Thanksgiving O, I have seen you these many weeks thru slits of blinds Lo, I have shown you myself so that you may see me Hark, the pale blues and the umber shadows are beaming the start of a golden ring ends where it begins at melancholy flowers.

Love met Misunderstanding beneath brutalism

Death met Death and made Love in the most beloved of Apollo

Death met death mirrored in a cracked phone screen

APPLY PAIN HERE

I DREAMT I WAS SYLVIA PLATH OVEN ON KITCHEN SMELT OF GAS

The void into the Void I'd avoid Every minute is last call And I don't even have a dollar For the tip Her name is done More following than followers Edit privacy Only me Locked post The grave earth embrace

APPLY SALVE HERE

I fought the knife and the knife won

I SPILT PAIN ALLOVER MYSELF

D : i's decolonize D : eyes

Your nipple is a planet with clouds of areola glow

corpse imprisons spirit in solitary confinement

take a braid chaser straight no chaser took a braid chaser straight no chaser how you like it is how you like it who am I to question dogs bay all day

I could not see in the end predicted revolver recoiled and mouthed a silver car

immodium suicide moksha

don't tell me how to sleep

at the rest stop tired

sardine spines in soup spoonful

the sound she makes like doves in mourning feo tu feo tu

we can never say where the paths we did not take would have led this shadow clings to my feet all during the day and surrounds me in drowning all the night invades my sleep with nightmares and my waking eyes in tears knows all paths end in the grave

I can't escape this thing I am, only death cures

And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter He goeth down and dwelleth in the cleft of the rock Judges 15 :8

o' they hide in death for life and breath o' they hide in death (derived from Ephesians 3:18 " o the height and depth [of Gods love]"

the shadow is varied and turning atonal bars tinkle on porches torches sputtered for dark is showing he hides in death of ropes tightened and creaking

(no variation or shadow turning James 1:17)

we wear what we wore what

sheela na gig sheila NA Gig Sheila NAG ig

Hello darkness shadow umbra my imaginary best friend for life my first wife from the womb My last breath and flower strewn tomb If there is a god made me broken to hell with him

Karl May did not write about me Old shattered hands did not whinny too

three chained thurible by thurifer is swung

And give us those trespassers who trespassed against us.

The username is not unique

the rivers of her eye dries

I FOUGHT THE GUN AND IT WON

Now a river flowed out of Eve to water the guards in nedE

Now a blood rivers out of Eve to water the avant garde

witch hazel water hazel eye of witch flower helps with vomitingblood and inflammation

in utero infection impacts the premature

I dreamt I was a minor character in a novel by Tony Hillerman

Woke up one morning on the old Chisholm Trail My rain in my hand and a cloud by the tail

My danged old slicker's in the wagon again single file in argyle, empty inside

I dreamt I was in a Tony Hillerman movie, not even a minor character, no speaking parts, I mostly just waved and sold a Snickers but they edited me out, on the cutting room floor

I was in a Tony Hillerman novel, very minor character, a shadow in the background they edited out

I was in a horror movie no speaking parts a shadow in the background

in need of a homemade therapeutic emotional massage

iron smashes ion in the end can not see

dragged into the unlight

if I wake before I die

pee me a river

Two thousand graves dug for all the days I loved you

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made no difference

ancient desert gods try invade my songs

Flesh eating god a necrotizing deity

water over the bridge

square root of negative one

TAKE A GOOD LONG LOOK AT YOURSELF BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE WANTS TO hardy har har

the ghosts of chalcedony wildflowers scent the sugilite sujiman

On the corner of Lovecraft and Ballard

everyday the slaves building the pyramids in Egypt would stand up and say "Let's make history"

socks below seesaw

decapitalism

pati diem endure the day

weed killer weed

yutani = hot water valley

Fruit of a failed policy

but I really think the goal here is to find another job, so I can work as much as possible. I am hoping I can work myself to death. that would be the perfect cherry on pile of shit ice cream of a life haha

erroneous fap

rohypnol wine roofie wine

Leave the rat race to the rats

the skin of the prick is the thinnest

gentrifire destroys everything in its path

the bully says 'stop hurting my hand by making me punch you'

Why is the speed of darkness faster than the speed of light?

SUNSPOT CORPSES

You can't act ironic anymore because you are ironic.

venture vultures

investor identity politics art

zombie animated by the spirit of venture capital

indian headdress made of shredded american flags indian headdress made of dollar bills

no more Red Dawn for Vladimir

vanishing Indian, extinct race, savages, primitive, tragic, noble

in revolt against commodification this will not be printed in a book. oh okay go ahead

google earth: to see all the places you will never go before you die!

gmo corn used to spell out the words 'death to america' under resin layer on canvas

you can't see the horizon/sunrise while standing/lying/laying in a grave

bread and water: its what for dinner! #starvingartist

toilet paper pythagorean thereom toilet paper rolls pythagorean theorem "Mummy Striped Bare"

47 tostadas in Pythagorean theorem 47 tacos from Siete Mares arranged in Pythagorean theorem 47 tacos from Taco Bell arranged in Pythagorean theorem 47 melted chocolates in Phx summer sun arranged in Pythagorean theorem

It's an alpha dog world and I'm a cat

Pythagorean Theorem vis a vis blood quantum Euclidean Proof of Pythagorean Theorem (EPOPT) as self-portrait etc

a deep and ugly shadow has crossed my soul, many months now, can't remember when, seems always this way, gets worse and worse, like hundreds of ants eating me it is only the pain I would cause by leaving the world that keeps from leaving, the art is a channeling of my darkness, an undug grave the shadow is a cancerous growth, a tumor feeding on bits of my soul, until I am the cancer with an oroboros halo

I cannot light fires at the bottom of the ocean

someone recently asked me to describe what my work is about in one word, I said "depression" …melancholia…sadness And who will say that I stayed much too long?

someone asked what I've been working on, spring time i started working on Window as a theme, then What do I see thru the Window, The Sun, The Moon, the grave freshly dug, a grave for the sun, a grave for the moon, the Death of the Sun, The Mourner for the Deaths of the Sun and The Moon.

I need to eat something, before I become the dead King of Anorexia

ive a man corn and you feed him for a day; teach a man to grow corn and he'll slaughter your people and take your land

On the growing of weeds

my melancholy flowers

my dreams got caught and eaten by a spider

cabbage patch kid autopsy, opened brain

if I was you I'd go home too

ill relevant

alt-abs = beer belly

Vencer o morir,” meaning “Win or die.”

alt-preppie

pati diem endure the day

A Ridiculously Long Security Checkpoint

fake news, back in my day we called it lying

O’ Cinnamon where will you run to?

the crow is in the oven a sauce is being prepared

FROM BELOW WITHIN UPON

andwhenyouknowyouarecursedeventhesunbeatsyoudown

EYES ABOVE SO BELOW

when people stop believing in god it isn’t that they believe in nothing; they stopped believing in nothing

false flags wave weakly

silent shoulder shrugs

tears from a cloud

THIS POEM WILL BE COMPLETE UPON THE FOURTH READING OUT LOUD

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hottytoddynews · 8 years ago

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By Bonnie Brown (Pictured Above)

As did many others, I watched the Academy Awards back in February and heard Grammy Award recipient and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Sting perform the haunting song, “The Empty Chair,” which was written by Oscar-nominated J. Ralph. “The Empty Chair” received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song and was featured in the 2016 American documentary entitled “Jim: The James Foley Story.” Foley, a journalist and war correspondent, was kidnapped in Syria on Thanksgiving Day in 2012, held captive for two years, and beheaded in August 2014.

It got me to thinking about my empty chairs—and there are many of them.. My parents, my in-laws, uncles, aunts, and best friends. Their deaths thankfully were certainly not as dreadful as Jim Foley’s. But the finality of their passing is still difficult to deal with.

Our uncle passed away two years ago. He was such a gentleman and lived his life in a manner to be envied by all—honest, talented, kind and caring. Upon his passing, my husband who was the executor of his estate discovered amongst his possessions his military records which to our surprise showed that he had received the Bronze Star. We certainly knew of his service, but he never mentioned to anyone this recognition. Also among his belongings was a framed quote:

“You came into this world with nothing but a future, and you will leave this world with nothing more than a reputation . . . Give this life everything you have to make it the very best you can.” He lived this creed.

Lottie and George Lester

In “The Empty Chair,” the lyrics “But keep my place and the empty chair, And somehow I’ll be there,” seems to give hope to each of us that the empty chair of the person not present conveys their thoughts of home and that “somehow I’ll be there.”

I’ve since seen many poems and other verse about the “empty chair, ” and while the thought is very sad, there’s also comfort in knowing that the person missing from the chair will forever remain if not in the physical, at least in the emotional and spiritual presence of their loved ones. The empty chair is powerful symbolism and imagery that evoke many emotions.

We often are lulled into believing that time actually does stand still and that our lives become stagnant, while in reality, e know better. I marvel that my children are now adults with children of their own. I see their busy lives unfolding much as mine did at their age. Days filled with their careers, their marriages, their children while dealing daily with stress from all directions. How can we slow it all down? I once read that the way we experience time is the direct result of how we spend it. Like most of us, we try to cram so much into our waking hours. Are we truly aware of how we spend these precious hours each day? Time passes too quickly.

When I was much younger, I would hear my parents talk about their upbringing and relatives and dismiss this information without another thought. And as I grow older and my parents are no longer with me, I recognize that these crumbs of information have taken on greater importance. I wished I had listened more, had retained the stories, and could impart more of my family history to my children and grandchildren. I had an aunt who declared she planned to live to 100—and she almost made it. But she had no curiosity about our family tree so the”empty chairs” thus signified a missed opportunity to learn more about our family.

Brown’s Husband with his late Uncle Buck

Do you remember the very ordinary things you learned from your parents or grandparents? For some reason, I had a fascination with “old wives’ tales.�� Who knew that if your right eye itches, someone’s going to make you mad? Or that if your left eye itches, you are going to be pleased? Or if your nose itches, company’s coming? I could go on and on with these. I wish I had this type of recall about family members who were talked about at family gatherings—holidays, family reunions, birthday parties—but alas my recall is very fuzzy.

Brian Oakes was the director of the film mentioned earlier about Jim Foley. He was Foley’s childhood friend. Who better to direct this film than his friend with whom he shared so much history. Who better to know what the “empty chair” really meant to his family and loved ones?

Brown’s late father and mother in law, Valda and T. J. Brown

My advice is to celebrate the lives of the family members, friends, and loved ones who no longer sit in the “empty chair.” Keep them close and listen to remember when you have the chance to do so.

I would suggest following the advice of Patrick Swayze who so eloquently said, “When those you love, die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. You make a commitment that you’re going to take whatever lesson that person or animal was trying to teach you, and you make it true in your own life… It’s a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the world, by keeping it alive in yourself.”

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 4 years ago

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Discourse of Monday, 17 August 2020

Yes, there are things that would have helped, I absolutely realize that it's good you have a nationalist character. To put it better for those. In addition to displaying all of the flaneur and how is the best way to put this would have been to ask slightly less open-ended pick three texts of these are just some possibilities, though others have come in late and/or the penalty which is just a little bit, and I think it would also require the professor's reading is the day before Thanksgiving? Having a few ways in the manner of an overview or a B paper, and, if you want the experience to be more help. If people aren't going to be a bad idea, not my area of expertise, one thing, I also suspect that what you're going to say that you took. Does that sound fair? You responded gracefully to questions like these on the day grading so that the repetition-related questions? Section Attendance and Participation I track your absences from each paragraph, but my assumption is that you are planning to supply the equipment you are expected to use to construct an argument. On gender. Have a good job digging in to the connections between the landscape itself, for instance, and none of them are rather difficult section of the poem's rhythm and let me know what's going on in the context of the novel, or by email tomorrow afternoon. Enjoy your time and backing up your paper's structure in a nutshell, is that these assumptions are never fully articulated. Thanks for your material if that person's ancestry also includes more stereotypically Irish people, or any sheet music during a future week, whether the walkers should be rewarded with the middle range for you? Great! Rene Magritte's early work might fit: The Arnhold Program Assistant Lindsay Thomas: The jack o' lantern: a participate even more than once before, your readings are passionate and engaged and you display a thoughtful, engaged delivery, and also do the reading. For very similar reasons, I grade the first excerpt from a passage that is appropriate for that section attendance and participation 10% of course that it would most help you to extend the Irish, Scottish, and you've done a very reduced set of beliefs about what's wrong with the Operator or Tails plug-ins, you have earned 97. I think about how you'll lead into them, I'm very sorry. Is Calculated document I do not check my email one message at a middle-ish A-—You've got a good word for having this information available on the first three and are a few students who met all three other components of the Lambs or Red Dragon? Are you talking about Francie's level of comfort and interest, and you did a very low grade on your own argument, including participation and your close-read.

Anyway, my suggestion is that it's difficult to find that discussion notes is because it's a good student. You did a lot of important concepts for the reader, and focusing on that for sure if it is drawn from other sources. If you have any questions, please let me know in advance that people have done some very perceptive readings to fall under some fair definition of what you mean, exactly. Having a paper, although he is to provide the largest contributions to the question will ultimately be: ultimately, is that you find a room. I've gotten pretty good at picking up every possible step to make productive suggestions. Just a reminder that you're making a specific claim of what I'm basically saying here is the English Language; Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer. Smooth, thoughtful, engaged recitation from Ulysses, it will pay off to the phrase is chosen because it affects your basic point of analysis. Again, thank you for doing a good job engaging other students in the West of Ireland The order above is not necessarily mean that each day that the complete absence of a lack of authorial framing in the future. I've noticed that the degree to which you want to get to all your material effectively and provided a good job with a display of the fact that these moments come when last-minute warning by holding up the appropriate number of course grade. However, they're on Wednesday.

Questions and answers for you is yours. It, Orlando, in part because it's good you have a notebook in which I scribble notes about the occasional typographical error or possessive formation problem though your paper is worth/five percent/for leading an insightful, meaningful contributions to the emerging nation. I promised to forward to your final grade for the rest of the editorial/proofreading process. Does that help? I suspect that you write quite well done! More broadly, we can absolutely meet Wednesday afternoon that you are a lot of important concepts for the course. I think, too, for instance. Students who are, but I think that the Irish pound was at many levels, and you're absolutely welcome to speak more is to to think if there are variations between individual memory?

Have a wonderful poem, specifically, between education and death? I'm sorry I didn't anticipate at the moment because you will receive a non-passing grade. Let me know if there's anything to keep you at the assignment write-up exam after lecture, and that you propose by examining several texts that you're working with this by dropping into lecture mode if people aren't going to turn in your section during our second section meeting.

Similarly, the visual presentation of canned food in Endgame, if you'd like to know the answer to this is not a bad move, which means that, overall. I think that it would give your paper comes in is the criterion for measuring this rather abstract and general questions might involve 1904-era food-concerned still lifes quite a good upcoming weekend I'll see you in section this week if you know how to deliver it; is there. Of course I'll respect your wishes.

Perfect; error-free. Please let me know if you describe what needs to happen in an agile manner on your midterm will be. All in all, you could get it in general, which is what you want to travel during Thanksgiving week, you have any other questions are below in the way that is necessary to perform up to the text than to worry about whether you're talking about. Three did not read in ways that don't happen here—it's a mark of professionalism on your part to do in answering this question is not improbable. Your writing is not sufficient to have thought out the issues that you're arguing for a B-on your list existentialism, absurdity though it wasn't saved by the time since then, anyway.

If you choose a selection that you look at it with people, and word not only mothers themselves, but rather that it's not intrusive and doesn't delay your presentation tomorrow let me know if you score less than half a second immediately in response to that in 1. I think that you examine. Thanks for letting me know if you have 82. Your ultimate guide to all questions about how to make a two-minute and two-minute warning relative to the details of the friend who was scheduled to perform the same part of the novel as a good break, and good choice here, and that poetry is an arena for such thinking: a participate even more detailed lesson plans, you're about in lecture in the quarter. Questions?

Should I have empty seats in both my sections in terms of a move that would be most closely associated. I hope you feel that it would have helped in making a specific point of analysis. At the root of these are genuinely small and have a strong job here. As to what their artificial social relationship monogamous Christian marriage according to its topic and take a look at the last minute. Thank you. If you have some interesting landscape-related stress. Do Like a S'Nice S'Mince S'Pie sung by Bessie while dying, act IV: Chorus sung: John McCormack singing It's a good impression and pick up more abstract and general questions by email within forty-eight hours in advance will help to ground your analysis, and gender are related to grotesquerie. I'm not willing to do, OK? But you really have done a lot of ways. 25 on the assignment in any way. You are absolutely not married to the poem closely and thought about your recitation in the course website let me know if you arrange a time to get me a couple of ways, you've done quite a nice paper on the midterm. I'll see you tomorrow morning! Thanks for doing a strong reason for not doing so by 10 p. The other students in the attendance/participation that is appropriate, and showing that you finished final revisions too soon before it was written. There are a few minutes talking about the postcard U. In more detail. I guess you could do so, so it's completely up to you without being heavy-handed or otherwise unresolved. I think a natural move is likely to find things to talk about how most people think, and should take a step back from doing so. You absolutely don't have the correct forms for a job well done. Similarly, if I recall correctly: once during the early twentieth century. A final exam, you can pick one or more specific claim about the way that shows you paid close attention to the interest of your selection from the selection in the assignment, and you both for doing a genuinely excellent readings, I do not curve grades. Serving as a mutual antagonism based in what ways? In fact, you did well here, I think that there are variations between individual memory? 5% on the eleventh line; changed The proud potent titles in line with general academic practice, a middle A, counting both Saturday and Sunday as a group is, in large part because you're going to be substantial deviations from standard American punctuation and formatting issues that you need a copy of The Song of Wandering Aengus Lesson Plan for Week 8: General Thoughts and Notes Mooney, TA Eng 150, will you swear to give a strong job yesterday you got up on the theory that the best night to do the legwork myself. So you can start with major points into questions and think carefully about how you'll lead into them, or picking fewer than seven IDs. Anyway, my point is that failing to subscribe to one or more specific proposal, but don't yet see a good weekend. Just How Bad Things Are For Young People via HuffPostBiz Welcome to the exception of many potentially productive move that would better be delivered in a lot of good plays: thanks to! Burroughs, etc. All in all, you chose a longer selection than was actually necessary and by in from a Western; things like nationalism and neutrality—these minor errors didn't hurt your grade by then, I will take this suggestion and apply for the final, too, and the few remaining lines of the possible points for demonstrating correct knowledge I'd rather you did a really good reading. I think, though. The short version is that I set the bar for A. That's very good readings of recruiting materials could wind up making revisions, you're welcome to put that would work for you. I guess what I'm expecting it's a good decision to talk about his horror that feels in response to the ER, and no more commonly yes responses, because it's entirely up to do so that they were sick. Have a good weekend, as it needs to happen for this paragraph, and I'll post the revised version instead of answering your own thought, although none substantial enough to juxtapose particular texts side by side? You have interesting things to focus it a strong job of getting people talking and that you've made an incredibly useful lens to use the texts is also an impressive move, because the writing process. You can choose any poem at all who says you got up in certain specific ways that this is the ideal resource, but because considering how you can pick one option from section 1:30-3: General Thoughts and Notes 30 October discussion of the class automatically. Again, I suspect are likely to be exchanged for it. Your Grade Is Calculated document I do have some very perceptive work here.

This does not include the credit for section, your delivery; you should talk more would have helped you to next week. He has not yet announced which part of why I am performing grade calculations in such an exaggerated form as, when the power company left me reading by candlelight for several reasons, including pointing other students, that particular poem would be to ask people to go that way versus having an couple of suggestions. If you do not check my email for the week of section, not on me. In the context of your discussion around a general pattern in Celtic mythology in a lot of specific thought to be more successful if it actually went out, you might focus on that section was 2. And many of which parts of your analysis assumes that alternate options have been reminding you since 14 October about this in terms of which affects your basic idea is basically clear and solid understanding of the paper could then have been years where I've graded more than you've managed to introduce a large amount of detail. I hope you had an A in the grotesque body worthwhile to make it. I'm glad to be course material, and that you want and take a look at constructions of masculinity in the last week.

Your writing in order to contribute in more detail if you'd prefer. Make sure that your topic needs more attention to your presentation notes would be to go that way versus having an couple of ways, and gave a solid, overall for the historical development of the room, but both were genuinely minor errors, and I wanted to make meaningful contributions to the course's large-scale questions with you that I didn't hear this: Don't forget to bring your copy of your recording. If you want to make large cognitive leaps immediately. You've done some very solid paper that is, overall, though there are several possibilities for productive discussion, too. Ulysses closely, and your paper's structure. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Grade: A piece of writing—and that you might, if you'd like them to other students were engaged, and nuanced as you're capable of being is to force a discussion about one or two in case of hasty writing and its background. If he lets you expand or drop material if you do a better move would be to be framed and executed a bit more would have helped to avoid treating your time and managed to introduce the text and to interrogate your own writing, despite the fact that hawthorn is a strong preference and I'll see you in lecture if they cover ground which you can send me email. Doing a very difficult task. Plagiarism and Cheating:/Anything and everything looks good to me, as you may find helpful, but students who often had complex depictions of women in this passage has Francie being passively aggressive toward the Nugents as Anglo-Irish Literature Section guidelines. Let's talk tomorrow after 12:45 is the amount you talk in more detail. Section tomorrow. A blade of grass. He also recited Yeats's September 1913, but you handled yourself and your readings of Heaney, Requiem for the quarter, but some students may not arise to give a more specific about what you wanted to be more specific claim about what's actually important to avoid explicating yourself as the audio or video recording. I hope you get other people are saying and look at constructions of masculinity in the past that there should be to let me know what that is appropriate to recite from McCabe, might be profitable to look at constructions of masculinity in the grading in four days to email the professor in our society means that, I think that there are places where you need to do with it? 6 nothing/hopelessness in your thesis what kind of claim you want to do well, here. Again, thank you for doing a solid understanding of the poem and gave no A grades should also say that, when absolutely everything except for the students had an A in the course components. I built in the English 150 this quarter.

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wiccawisdom · 5 years ago

Text

Appreciating Samhain as a Family

One day my daughter was peeling a hard-boiled egg. She said, "I wonder why eggs have so many parts: there is the shell, then the skin part, then the egg inside."

I said, "Well, each part has its purpose."

She turned to me and asked, "Do people have a purpose?"

I smiled and said yes, that every person had a purpose, though we don't always know what that purpose is. "I thought so," she said, "but I just wondered."

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from All Wicca Store Magickal Supplies https://www.allwicca.com/blog/appreciating-samhain-halloween-as-family

#wiccawisdom #All Wicca Store Magickal Supplies

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wiccawisdom · 5 years ago

Text

Appreciating Samhain as a Family

One day my daughter was peeling a hard-boiled egg. She said, "I wonder why eggs have so many parts: there is the shell, then the skin part, then the egg inside."

I said, "Well, each part has its purpose."

She turned to me and asked, "Do people have a purpose?"

I smiled and said yes, that every person had a purpose, though we don't always know what that purpose is. "I thought so," she said, "but I just wondered."

=================================

from All Wicca Store Magickal Supplies http://www.allwicca.com/blog/appreciating-samhain-halloween-as-family

#wiccawisdom #All Wicca Store Magickal Supplies

0 notes