Friday, April 26, 2013

make me sound important

Hannah Horovitz was raised in New York City and moved to the Pacific Northwest to work at Kill Rockstars, a record label in Olympia, WA. She received her BA in American Culture from Vassar College in 2007, with an emphasis on Sociology and Urban Studies. While at Vassar, Hannah served as the Music Director of WVKR. Her thesis, “Eating Our Way Out: Locating Agency and Resistance Within the Consumer Cooperative Movement,” was awarded the grade of “distinction.” Hannah was the winner of the Helen D. Lockwood Prize for excellence in the study of American Culture and graduated with departmental honors. Since 2009, Hannah has collaborated with artist Bridget Irish to co-produce the critically acclaimed Hair Zine. She is currently a development intern and event planner at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, Oregon, where she is also pursuing a certificate in creative and nonfiction writing. Her academic interests include critical race theory, feminism, and American studies.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

april

Today, I was sitting in a park downtown, reading next to a little fountain. A sparrow flew up and started splashing around in the fountain and I watched it for a moment, and noticed how tiny it was, and how its little feathers were all rumpled up from the water. I thought how nice it was that the sparrow was so small and so unafraid as to splash around so close to a human. It flew right by me, almost grazing my leg, up into the tree overhead. I continued to sit, reading. I heard a sound overhead. A hawk flew out of the tree with the sparrow in its claws and landed on the grass. It spread out its wing, so the sparrow was blocked from sight, and sat there for a moment, then it picked up the sparrow in its tallons and flew away. 

that felt really fucked up.

Friday, April 19, 2013

nothing to report


i'm in love with boston, massachusetts, and i'm never going to stop feeling that love. long ago, it seeped into the cracks and crevices of my heart. the slab and the stairs by the fens, the kitchen at lawn street, the practice space next to stevies, the final miles of the chinatown bus route from new york city...that shit sticks like tar. I never want to scrape it off.


maybe i'm so tired, maybe it's too close too home, maybe whatever...but I can't seem to move past the sinking in my stomach at the names of those familiar streets or the flashes of places i've biked and walked through a million trillion zillion times, pooled with blood and fear.

I'm having a really hard time working through to the big picture, having a really hard time thinking relatively.

Friday, April 5, 2013

In the library. Again.

I'm sitting in the library at Concordia University. The sun has left us again, the clouds are back. Before I begin thesis revisions, I'm looking through a magnificent coffee table book called Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps. All I can think about is the relative arbitrariness of temporal vocabularies used to describe state domination, national domination, human domination. Invasion and domination and colonialism all bleed into each other somehow. How can we claim post-coloniality when we live in an age of cultural and social colonialism and control? De facto colonialism.  How can we make that distinction and still honor the experiences and histories of those living in the aftermath of structured colonialism? How can we make sense of our places on each side of the equation, which is not so much an equation as a jumbled mess of contradictory truths?

The USSR was massive. It took up a lot of space, it swallowed up a lot of space, it spread over a vast amount of space. Is size it? Can we ascertain the effect of a thing by the size of it's influence? How can you measure the size of horror? It's not just big, it's something different. Or happiness? Or do feelings exist separately from spatial quantification? Where's the overlap?

Back to the photos, back to the revisions.