Culture Commentary and Miscellaneous Musings
Continue reading “Review: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi”The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.
page 34, The First Declaration of War, 1917-1939
Continue reading “Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone”I want to be a body for you.
I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious–I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
Chapter 16, This Is How You Lose the Time War
Continue reading “Review: The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith”There is no apology for my acts. We have a choice, all of us, in seeing the world and system we participate in. At some point, we are confronted with the cost. What suffers for happiness. What dies for life. Even Caesar couldn’t keep such a thing hidden, the blood that waters an empire’s soil. You have a choice. You can choose to close your eyes and enjoy your lucky position on the good earth. You can choose to walk away.
Or you can choose to rebel.
Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE
Chapter 41, The Library of the Unwritten
Continue reading “Review: How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra”Whether it’s a telephone or a T-shirt, most modern goods are made possible by cooperation and standards, the products of humans working together to make use of technologies that no one person can understand in their entirety.
Page 10, Behind the Lights
What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just–like flowers–through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.
page 1, Prologue Autumn Aroma, The Mushroom at the End of the World