Sarah Schulman is one of America’s most profound witnesses. As a writer, activist and caretaker she has seen HIV/AIDS from the beginning. She was an early member of ACT UP, the seminal social action AIDS activist collective; she was among the first reporters to grasp the importance of HIV; and her novel, People in Trouble, was a ground- breaking work, among the first to give voice to what it was to live in a world with HIV.
H.
Water finds ways
to communicate
to look inside the unspoken door of history.
Listen during a North-Eastern wind
and the waves and commotions of the molecules
will rumble like a chorus
Join us to celebrate 12th Street Online’s launch with an evening of readings by Patrick McGrath, Leigh Stein, Sarah Schulman and student editors and contributors. Hosted by Robert Polito.
If the news is anything to be believed: Egypt is a nation in a state of more or less constant political and social strife; Egyptians are nearly all Islamists, coercing the few and far between secular intellectuals into silence; it is a society not only incapable of democracy, but more generally, incapable of progress.
If the news is anything to go by, there are only two kinds of Egyptians: There are Islamist fanatics who want to reshape Egyptian society and position it as hostile toward America, and hostile toward multiplicity, and there are the young, hip, activists, who only want democracy. The former are no good because they look nothing like us. The latter are only good because they look just like us. The wide swath of Egyptians in between, the rural and politically active, the moderately religious but mostly tolerant, all the apolitical bystanders, are utterly absent from the conversation, and lost from our imaginations.
Don’t go to Alabama!
Don’t go if you’re not white, that is. On June 9, 2011, the State of Alabama passed the HB56 Immigration Bill. This bill allows for the state to profile, harass, and destroy the lives of those who don’t look like they were born in the United States.
The law forces schools to determine their students’ legal status and it encourages police officers to profile by giving them the power to file criminal charges against anyone who doesn’t look white. That’s right. The law states that the police can do this if the person has no documentation or if “they appear to be in the country illegally.” Law enforcement officers are never going to stop anyone who is white and if they happen to be here illegally, they will never be questioned simply because of their color. The same can’t be said for the Latino immigrant. The moment the person looks like they “do not belong” it gives the state the right to mess with them.
1. The girl with scratched pink ballet flats sat carefully counting her change. Piled on her lap: nickel, quarter, penny, dollar at a time, disappeared into the pocket of a black jacket. Leather, maybe. Her lips moved at only the far corners, white fingers stayed busy. I watched the blue and fading home inked tattoos, [...]
Writer Christine Sneed chats about her 40th birthday, Tea Partyland, clowns, pettymindedness, sex-scoundrels, her forthcoming novel, and why she writes stories.
What do raps about the working class, Shakespeare monologues and stories about the south have in common? What responsibilities do writers have within the OWS movement?
On Friday, November 4, New School Riggio Writing and Democracy students along with friends gathered to find out during an event entitled Reading + OWS Discussion While the Reading is a regular event, the discussion about Occupy Wall Street was added as an acknowledgement that the movement is impacting lives.
Midway through Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, she recognizes tone as though it were a found object held in her hand— a photograph of her daughter Quintana Roo, who died in 2009. It’s not stoicism that keeps her from staring at it but more of a kind of nimbleness (or agility?) of mind, flipping through a book of sketches of when Quintana was three years old, of when she got married—the stephanotis woven into her braid—and ultimately, when she passed away.
I am not well informed on the intricacies of the national budget, international trade policies, or even how exactly a hedge fund works. I’m embarrassed to say that I remain averagely ignorant on how exactly my country has gotten itself into the present economic mess. Until recently, I have remained relatively unaffected by the recession. [...]
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