Relentlessly Showcased

Headed to New York this week to visit old friends, and to read some poems at the Cornelia Street Cafe. Will be the first time in the city in over 10 years. Can't wait.

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Most authoritarian states treat the Internet the same way they do print media: They censor it. Azerbaijan has taken a more insidious route. They do not heavily filter or block the Internet but instead leave it open, allowing the government to better monitor and punish rebellious activities. In 2010, two online activists were arrested for posting a video satirizing government waste on YouTube. Their case was never mentioned in Azerbaijan’s print media—but was relentlessly showcased online, where it frightened the bloggers’ peers. As a result, Azerbaijan’s frequent Internet users became less supportive of activism, and online dissent has quieted.

This strategy worked quite well with elites. But after the events in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, the Azerbaijani government decided to adopt a more aggressive strategy to shield regular citizens from discussions of dissent or collective action. Azerbaijan has moved from intimidating users who are already online to keeping the rest of the nation offline by making social media use seem like a form of bad citizenship.

-via Slate

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At some point I decide to do something with this love—I trust it. I wholeheartedly believe that poetry can teach me how to live my life. I see that godawful earnestness in me and am embarrassed. I want so desperately to mean. When I make that choice, I accept that I will pass from the permitted to the forbidden. I’m not sure love is a descent, but I hope it is a move towards something deeper, something unknown. It not only asks for change, but for a willingness to accept whatever lies on the other side of the threshold. What can a poem teach you? A poem is not a poet, who is flawed and weak and sometimes cruel. But I trust the idea of poetry—that there is a way of living that keeps you wholly awake to the world. There is a power I can learn from, a consciousness I can inhabit that teaches me to face my life bravely. I want to deserve the life I’ve been given.

-Traci Brimhall in the new issue of Waccamaw

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That’s how adolescence works. It’s a place of tremendous pain and recklessness, a place where you have to pretend not to care about anyone or anything too much because to do so would release the chaos of your actual self into the world. It’s a place where tyranny resides as much in circumstance as in character, a place where our shadow selves emerge: ugly, ferocious, lit up by shame.

I remember every single cruelty I endured and inflicted, teasing a disabled teacher behind her back, grappling with a classmate and ripping open the stitches on his head, weeping in fear and confusion at the kids who bullied me in metal shop. Adolescence scrawls its crimes on the heart.

-Steve Almond is writing beautiful and true things again at The Rumpus


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