pickI enjoyed this book, from the essays about racism, gender, misuse of power, & capitalism & how they interlink, & stories about the same issues in the form of contemporary fantasy, folklore, sci fi & romance. And fungi. This is Pear Nuallak's 1st book & I hope they write more.
Also, it's really too late for me to be drinking coffee but it's also too late for me not to, as I have! Oh well, more reading tonight, & feeling tired tomorrow afternoon 😏☕
"It was once a concern that ex-billionaires would escape to space. Perhaps that is difficult to imagine since we have long since stopped trying to colonise the worlds above. Some ex-billionaires attempted to live on the moon, but they died in the process, starving or exploding among the stars, and we have to say, it is rather nice when problems solve themselves."
- An Injury to One
The science fiction short story as wish fulfillment!
“We make ourselves in order to destroy ourselves, becoming compost for the next thing.”
"Fifth Finger, Left Hand" is the first of the fiction pieces in the book, a contemporary fantasy based on Thai folklore, featuring kinnaree, supernatural half-bird/half-human beings; witches; interstitial dimensional spaces; the nature of memory & its relationship to the self; Western fetishization of Asian bodies; & includes queer characters without feeling the need to justify their inclusion, as it should be (the irony of my commenting noted).
"Regurgitating stories of suffering seems to be part of the process to access any kind of support, whether it be a bursary, deadline extension, therapy, social housing or asylum. I want no longer to see this as natural, as just how things are."
This resonated with me, as I'm complicit in the process. Part of my work in an NHS counselling service is to assess whether a person's expression of suffering is enough, but not too much, to access ?
"Do you need someone else to tell you it's ok just to say FUCK THIS SHIT?
For all its revolutionary gestures, this movement remains essentially a neoliberal project. To the RepresentAsian activists, the problem is not capitalism but rather that ESEAs* do not feature more prominently among the higher rungs of its hierarchy. I do not want to live within a hierarchical power structure at all."
* East and South-East Asians
"This is a book about the body - not the sacrosanct or safe or enfleshed body, but all the strange, gorgeous, sensate forms that experience the world."
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
"I would like to draw your attention away from your image in the eyes of another and instead to your mouth, which is filled with teeth. It is never too late to bite the hand that feeds."
"Art should be action, a way of forming relationships with each other, a way of anticipating new worlds and testing ideas for liberation. If we don't want art to be an aesthetic repository for rich people's money, we have to claw it back."
My #HajarPress subscription brought me this surprise today. The cover blurb doesn't exactly clarify the book's contents, but it's a mix of stories & essays by Nuallak, who is an artist and writer. Their other writings seem mainly to have been stories anthologised in sci fi collections, so I'm expecting at least some of that. I've only read the introduction so far, which has me chuckling a couple of times and created a good vibe, so I'm hopeful 😊
Pearls from Their Mouth | 
