I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
– Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Read More »by Daisy Solace
It’s 2013. I’m 11, living in Saudi Arabia, and anticipating House of Hades’s release with bated breath, counting down the days. It’s all I talk about, my best friend is getting sick of me. I’m insufferable, and I like it. I haven’t been into Percy Jackson for very long — just about a month by this point, but it’s found its space in my head and settled there.
As a kid who had always felt ALONEALONEALONEalonealonealone, it’s nice to read about a boy who’d changed schools so much that he has no friends, except for the one whose job it is to protect him. It’s nice to read about a boy who knows the truth: that the best people have the rottenest luck. It’s nice to read about a boy who, despite this, fights. After rows upon rows of pleasant protagonists, there’s a certain level of solace (pun intended) in Percy Jackson. He’s not easy. He’s not agreeable. He’s angry, rowdy, and, as Percy would come to say in the musical, impertinent. As a fellow impertinent child, I’m delighted.
Read More »On the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, we are sharing more useful resources, magazines and initiatives that uplift Palestinian voices below!
We are also happy to feature another amazing fellow zine: Wild Greens Magazine, a monthly online mixed-media magazine (founded in Philadelphia in 2020) that publishes art, handcrafts, poetry, essays, short fiction, music, and more.
Their editor-in-chief Rebecca gladly answered a few questions for us.
Read More »Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
[…]
Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together. But for that kind of wider perception we need time, patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
Humanism is centred upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and authority. […] humanism is the only, and I would go as far as to say the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
– Edward W. Said (1935 – 2003), Palestinian American academic, literary critic and political activist, author of Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Out of Place: A memoir (1999), Reflections on exile and other essays (2000) and many others.
[Source: A window on the world, 2003, on guardian.org – text adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Orientalism, published by Penguin]
And I say to myself: a moon will rise from my darkness.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Is your vacation mode on yet? We are soon going to take some time off, so we only have simple questions for you this month, before getting more serious in autumn. We are no less curious, though. Send us all sorts of recommendations or anything that keeps inspiring you. (Invitation always open.) 🙂
Read More »So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
– George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
… this happy white woman who is constantly shoved under our noses, this woman we are all supposed to work hard to resemble – never mind that she seems to be running herself ragged for not much reward – I for one have never met her, not anywhere. My hunch is that she doesn’t exist.
– Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory
I’ve concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul.
– Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
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