Even in Arcadia Am I @miriam@octodon.social
Poet w fieldwork-derived practice / investigating modern nomads / cycle tourer / Texan in HK, S'pore, Berkeley / happy cynic+shy loudmouth. Tapir-whorf on Mefi.
This week's poem-investigations: these gorgeously harrowing fieldwork-derived interview poems from Seam, by Tarfia Faizullah, which tell the stories of Birangona, women raped by Pakistani soldiers during Bangladesh's War of Liberation. But don't let a low appetite for stories of abjection (orange yam in office, etc) scare you away; on a line level, from a craft perspective, they're stunning (and great for thinking through fieldwork in the humanities): https://blog.elizabethdherman.com/2011/12/16/the-legacy-40-years/ #poetry #poems
Did a close read of this genius poem, "Chino," by Brandon Som, with the students in my documentary poetics class last week and the multilingual layering blew their (and my) minds: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/142869/chino
A curated collection of personified teeth: http://pteethds.tumblr.com/
I sent Roxane Gay a birthday note and she wrote me back. Be still my fluttering heart, though her email was a single sentence. I understand why my better-heeled aunts told me sending gracious notes was important.
Current favorite eerie illustrators: Tin Can Forest, two Canadian occultist artists: http://tincanforest.com/gallery/ .
Bah, why can't I edit posts! The human eggs that grow in the neck-wrinkles of the she-wolf, of course, like a row of dog ticks!
If you'd written a gloriously grotesque misandrist fable about the origin of humankind, complete with dusty streets through a shanty village, the human eggs that grow from semen leaked out of a sex worker who rides astride a she-wolf, and the ritual disemboweling of children playing keepaway with their own removable genitals, who would your dream illustrator be? Asking for a friend, natürlich.
A grammar question I'm sheepish to ask: can the word 'submit' be used as is in present and past tense? Or does the past tense *have* to be submitted?
When I first started dating my wife, a French woman, I thought it would be good to learn some French. I got an intro audiobook. Likely not the best approach for me, because after the first couple of hours, my most pressing question for her was, "Who in the world is Vousette?" [Vous êtes...]
We have a worm compost bin with a few thousand worms in it. All of the worms are named Vousette.
the wonderful witches of witches.town have introduced me to the glyph ꙮ
it is "multiocular O", a variant of Cyrillic O that is used in certain religious texts in a phrase that translates to "many-eyed seraphim" and basically nowhere else
I honestly am having a hard time thinking of a single witchier Unicode character unless the Leviathan cross is hidden somewhere in the codeplanes
In the meanwhile, letter of recommendation for the Slow Holler tarot: it's the first deck I've ever sought out and paid for, the first that feels like the oracles are barefoot catching minnows in the creek, weaving their own laurels of speckled guinea hen feathers. It's queer in the non-commodified, anti-assimilationist sense; it's augury for an articulated community of feminists, activists, punx; it's anarchist, and its authors probably sketched the first draft from a grainer porch. #tarot
Soon I'll get all my unbridled yearning for the old internet out on the page [such that it is, the four-columned feed] and get on with my life.
BTW, this is the first time I've been overtly female on the public internet (roughly speaking; I do have a fairly impersonal, non-interactive author site) since 1999, and it's neat.
New Garbage Pail Kids alter ego: Uncanny Valerie.
Oh Mastodon, you have the queerest set of emoji I've seen since the days when I eagerly awaited the newest issue of Holy Titclamps, two decades ago when the emoji analog was a little guy with a shovel at the bottom of your personal home page. 
Reading Deepak Unnikrishnan's brilliant story collection, Temporary People. It's One Hundred Years of Solitude for the gulf states' guest workers, laboring in resource extraction as miners might, though the resource extracted is of their own bodies. Read a NYT review here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/temporary-people-deepak-unnikrishnan.html #fiction #books #bookreviews #temporarypeople #migrantworkers #immigrantlit #deepakunnikrishnan
Like, the mere concept of a public library would probably be considered radical if it was a new thing just being introduced in 2017. After all, we tend to treat knowledge like any other commodity. It's something to be bought and sold. Many university students think of themselves as consumers paying for a product, rather than learners exploring ideas.
Cold out there this morning. The tracks showed up nice and clear in the thin crust of dry snow, three claws forward and one back. It was hard to tell how many of them there might have been, as they travel in a narrow line.
She still hadn't caught sight of them, just the damage they left behind; claw marks 7 feet up the siding, a mutilated chicken, an overturned tractor. They seemed to be growing bolder as they found new things to eat, she wasn't sure how long the lock on the barn would hold.
Meanwhile everyone at home in the Bay Area posting Instagram selfies in masks and air filters. (Finally, all the California ang mo [wypipo, I mean] go full Asiaphile with everyday mask-wearing. I'm waiting for old white ladies to adopt forearm-sleeves.)
