Tag: literature

permanent fugue

“Ghost Writing: Carceral Legacies, Haunted Bodies and Spaces” by Mauve Perle Tahat

mauve

One of the most terrifying ghost stories the U.S. has is incarceration. The prison is a haunted grotto. Prisons and prisoners are haunted by traumas caused by white supremacy. People admitted to these spectral spaces are part of its phenomenological architecture. When prisoners leave they are forever escorted by phantasmal histories. Most tangibly they will be cursed by restrictions like probation, employment and housing discrimination, voter suppression; the philosophical underpinnings of the prison itself are part of this ghost story. Prisoners, then, become ghosts themselves, observing society without a place in it, destined to float around disembodied until something sets … Continue reading “Ghost Writing: Carceral Legacies, Haunted Bodies and Spaces” by Mauve Perle Tahat

Visitants

Meaning-making in Literature and Life: an Introduction to Existentialism by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro

terseeditor

In literature, it is the reader who gives meaning to a text. The process of creating this meaning is in the dialogue between the reader and the text itself. Giving it meaning is their way of understanding it. We should recognize that the text, once birthed, becomes a separate entity apart from its writer, much like a newborn from their mother. The writer’s significance should remain unquestioned, as it is they who has created the text, but they do not hold the power to set a standard meaning for their work. The text speaks for itself; it is no longer … Continue reading Meaning-making in Literature and Life: an Introduction to Existentialism by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro

Outlying the Avenues1 Comment

Advertisement by Paul Michael Whitfield

Paul Michael Whitfield

Front Album Cover of Corrupted’s 1995 Nadie 1. Beginning one of his many books, 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard writes a preface. In the book I have in mind this is followed by another and that by yet another. This book of Kierkegaard’s is a book of them. A book of beginnings of books. i live in san francisco. I read. I write. I listen to Corrupted and the Melvins. My aesthetic is the literary and the λόγος, and the zeitgeist of the longue durée–the auld lang syne. This aesthetic is the love of Des Esseintes and jewel-encrusted, murdered tortoises. … Continue reading Advertisement by Paul Michael Whitfield

rumination(s)3 Comments

The Ring Shout and the African Presence in America by Anwar Uhuru

anwar uhuru

In African American and/or Black American culture, the African and or ancestral presence is both visible and invisible. The ways to name what is Black American is in music and the infamous cuisine that has come to be called “soul food.” The production of highly consumed products of Black labor and the descendants is more American than apple pie. For example, no one realizes the blue that appears in the denim that Americans wear so regularly, the corn they consume, the peanuts, soy, rice, the domestic tools, or the music that is deemed “American” owes to Black labor. Those things … Continue reading The Ring Shout and the African Presence in America by Anwar Uhuru