oh wow, 13 hours of staring at my computer and i'm pretty sick of this.

at least i'm good at something

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is this gauche? it's not really advertising...

My friend, Carrot, is trying to raise money for their book-writing adventure on kickstarter. They've written a train hopping novella is astounding-- not only is it a million times better than 'off the map' and other punk traveling stories, but it's a million times better than any other travel narrative out there. It's right up there with "Miles From Nowhere."

Carrot's writing lodged itself in my heart with this, one of the most heart stoppingly evocative, hopeful, wonderous piece of writing out there. Seriously, this is why writing is so fucking important.

You can pour your heart and hope into these words that remain after the feeling has passed, after you've sunk back into the regular drudgery of life. You don't need to be an inspiring magical conjurer all the time, and it would be pretty insuffereable if you were, but if you can figure out how to pin down that feeling of elation and hope and belief in possibility, then you've done it. Maybe it doesn't work on you anymore, but it's a charm out there in the world. I am also such a sucker for 2nd person narration, but only when it's memoir-y.

Here is a link to Carrot's kickstarter. I know that no one really reads this blog, but please donate if you can. I promise it's worth it.

still fucking HOMESICK

i'm on spring break and i wish i was in olympia.

to study

I finished my readings this morning at a laundromat, washing my disgusting gym clothes that have been mildewing in my locker at school for weeks, months, years. My advice to anyone: study at the laundromat. it's warm. It always smells of clean clothing, it sometimes smells of unwashed humans. The music is rebroadcast, song for song, of the hits of 1996. No one else is in there reading, not at 9am. Fuck the coffee shops and fuck the libraries, I love a laundromat.

the little things

1. free 40s at the Critical Art Ensemble's Block Party, plus orange juice on my food stamps.
2. I finally figured out how to important citations directly from zotero to open office...
3. 6 pages of bullshit into the infographics chapter of my thesis.
4. it's springtime.

I don't want to go back to school this week, I want to stay home and work on my paper.