Is literature political? How about can literature use activists? If they are people too, I guess it can.
I am awakened by a smell, sweet and smoked. Clouds brisketed above the lake. Startled and unsure, I close the windows. Check first on the children.
Or, not really a famous writer, not, I mean, someone whose stories were made into movies or so-called prestige television, not someone who appeared on talk shows or whose tweets went viral as a matter of course, but still a writer famous enough to be asked to give talks at writers' conferences like the one I was attending when I heard this talk.
do we live here — wedreamstories
scenesbutwedontlivethem (Notley) — or here — ppleatcronuts
frankoceanieatbusily
betweenyourlegs (Chang)
To even be suspected of treasure—to be indistinguishable from those who possess treasure—is to become a target. This is the lesson of the oyster.
Pancake’s stories are a testament to the notion that the real Appalachia is a fiction born from a need to make sense of a region that, having been depopulated of indigenous people, was then repopulated by settlers who were in turn used as pawns in a mighty extractive industry that left the region scarred, barren, a perpetual social problem to be raised when politically convenient but never solved.
The next time they tell you that you are naïve, that it is not as easy as you make it sound, know that it has nothing to do with you.
The people who run the art world are aware that if a true and great artist were to be recognized during their lifetime, they would have immense power. So the artists who are promoted are the lap dogs, the ones they can control.
It is an anti-elitist, capaciously democratic argument against the disfiguring mystifications that turn labor into commodities and art into the purchase of a privileged few.
When Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received.
Attention Library: the phrase verges on redundancy. But unlike in most libraries, where the act of attention is a means to an end, in this Library attention is the main attraction: one visits the Milcom Room to attend, as it were, to attention itself. Is such an exercise possible?
Both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped.