Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain

Poem: The Dead Outside My Window

The dead outside my window

dance in the breeze. The web

that enshrouds them catches

the sunlight. The spider is small,

thick and brown. I look at it

from the other side of the glass,

my own web, my kitchen, where

a fresh kill roasts in the oven.

My essay "Noir: The Marxist Art Form" is in the new issue of The Big Click →

There are also stories by Tony Mason and Joe Clifford and an (online only) essay by Tom Piccirilli, who’s recovering from brain cancer. Go get it, and, better yet, subscribe. It’s one of the best magazines out there.

As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way behind us. They’re not. Sweden and South Korea have more advanced high speed internet networks. Japan has the most advanced trains and transportation systems. Norwegians make more money. The biggest and most advanced plane in the world is flown out of Singapore. The tallest buildings in the world are now in Dubai and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America http://bananenplanet.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/10-things-most-americans-dont-know-about-america/ (via curlycherie)

There are two areas where the USA is way out in front of the rest of the world: war and prison. The technology of killing is the main investment of US national energy, and of course the semi-public semi-private incarceration economy is flourishing while schools and roads crumble. In many other quality-of-life terms — housing, healthcare, public transportation, public access to technology, mental health support, support for people with disabilities, childcare, primary education, maternity support, social safety net — I think a lot of US Americans personally know that things are not exactly rosy but see no options for fixing it.

(via zuky)

(via aoawaywego)

A Story of Rape or Something Else

It was the summer of 2004. I was living in East Tennessee, in a house on the edge of woods, at a halfway point between a mental hospital and a sewage plant.

Someone knocked on my door, and I knew it had to be trouble.

(via aoawaywego)

Anonymous Asks:

I think you are extremely insensitive about the subject of Gabrielle Giffords. She is so much more than just a survivor of a bullet. She is dedicated, hard-working, and a fighter in every way. You do not know her.

barrygraham Said:

There is a difference between the public and the private self, and with Giffords - whom you’re correct in saying that I don’t know personally - I comment on the public self. She may be hard-working and dedicated, but what she has worked hard at and shown herself to be dedicated to is conservative, pandering, racist politicking.

Her objection to SB 1070 was not that it was racist, but that it was impractical. She cheered the deployment of the National Guard to the border, to combat a problem that does not exist. Even though her being shot has been cited as an example of why guns ought to be banned, she herself supports gun rights.

daishinstephenson:

room

Hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art if you are always yelling ‘Look at me’ like a three-year-old who has just shit in the sandbox.

Jim Harrison, the Dalva notebooks

Today is Karl Marx’s 195th birthday. I remember the awe and gratitude I felt when I first read him in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow nearly 30 years ago.