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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · 7d

love that someone else saw soundtrack to a coup d'etat and was like "I wonder who that lady is"

@sandipto.bsky.social's excellent essay about Andree Blouin's memoir made my week: www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

The Inventor of the Future - Boston Review

The autobiography of anticolonial luminary Andrée Blouin captures her era’s euphoric highs as well as its tragic denouement.

www.bostonreview.net

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Reposted by Nandini Ramachandran

The Nation Magazine @thenation.com · 26d

Over the course of several campaigns—some won, some lost—DSA has built an electoral machine that is among the most powerful in New York City. @hadasthier.bsky.social takes us inside the DSA operation that seems set to make Zohran Mamdani mayor. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

How DSA Built Zohran Mamdani’s Electoral Machine

The unsung hero of Mamdani’s campaign is its field operation. It may make him mayor of New York City.

www.thenation.com

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Reposted by Nandini Ramachandran

Vajra Chandrasekera @vajra.me · Aug 23

nightshade for writers: it's a simple technological fix

How do we become inedible to the machine? The visual artists, our beloved cousins, have more tools to poison their data against the colonizers of AI, but what’s there for those of us who work with only words? How do we become inedible to the machine? How do we poison it? Here is my answer: the machine will shake your tree and peel your oranges, but it can only eat the rind, so fill your vesicles with strange juices. The machine cannot understand even the fundamental cells of storytelling (metaphor &c.) much less the more complex organs and frames that we grow to support our stories—the reverse walpolitical manoeuvre, for instance, as a political-ethical-narratological exoskeleton—so it can only approximate the flavedo, and perhaps an albedo may be suggested as an accidental byproduct of a reader’s pareidolia, but beyond that there is only a hollow. Become more than the rind of yourself, and you’ll have employment yet for the rest of your days.

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Aug 9

in one day, lol, it's compassionate in all the right places and brutal in all the wrong ones; highly recommend

Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Aug 9

finished a book for the first time in several months:

strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

Fellman knows exactly how to arrange the shards of experience that make up a story.

strangehorizons.com

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Reposted by Nandini Ramachandran

Mondoweiss @mondoweiss.net · Aug 2

The editors of “Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings” talk to Mondoweiss about what the Palestinian icon’s writings can teach us about resistance to genocide in Gaza today.

What Ghassan Kanafani’s writing on the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle tells us about Gaza’s resistance today

The editors of “Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings” talk to Mondoweiss about what the Palestinian icon’s writings can teach us about resistance to genocide in Gaza today.

mondoweiss.net

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 31

it's almost as if we live in the disenchanted world

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 31

perhaps next I will burn the letters and locate a spell to purge my memories; I did marry "that magical buddhist" as my doctor insists on calling V

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 31

finally deleted the number of my first friend in new york city

sometimes in life a pause becomes a caesura

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 31

Be strange to yourself,
in your love, your grief

your wet eyelashes a black
fringe on brown pain

from "Headlong" by Brenda Shaughnessy

Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 30

the philosophy of delusion: an occasional treatise

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 30

brb busy taking Wittgenstein very personally indeed

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 30

dialectics at a standstill

(also known as: I miss my phone)

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 29

unlimited semiosis sounds fun in theory, but it's both exhausting and terrifying as praxis

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 29

"based on the principles of universal analogy and sympathy... its through similitudes that the otherwise occult parenthood between things is manifested"

(Umberto Eco, "Unlimited Semiosis and Drift" from Limits to Interpretation, 26)

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 29

being [redacted] feels a lot like involuntary hermetic drift

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 28

But the mild anthropologist-- he's
not recent inclined to suppose,
flints palaeolithic like these
Quarternary bones such as those!
In rhinoceros, mammoth & cos,
First epoch, the human began,
Theologians all to expose--
'Tis the mission of primitive man!

from "Double Ballade of Primitive Man"

Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 28

On the coasts that incessantly freeze,
with his stones, and his bones, and his bows;
on luxuriant tropical leas,
where the summer eternally glows
he is found, and his habits disclose
(let theology say what she can)
that he lived in the long, long agos--
'Twas the manner of primitive man!

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 28

turns out it's harder to let something go when it was never yours to begin with

Reposted by Nandini Ramachandran

Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social · Jul 26

Amazon union organizer Chris Smalls was on the Gaza freedom flotilla which was just raided by Israeli forces.

Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition @freedomflotilla.bsky.social · Jul 26

SOS! The crew on 'Handala' have been kidnapped by Israeli forces.

Chris Smalls is a citizen of the U.S.

Tag the U.S. Department of State NOW:
X: @StateDept and @SecRubio

FB: @U.S. Department of State

Instagram: @statedept @secrubio

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 25

other roads & other fates
trembling right before the gates

(from my diary, it scans AND rhymes, its not mine)

(it scans only if you count funny, it might be)

Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 25

The Three Penny Opera

But Polly, are you a
shadow? Is Mackie projected
to me by light through film?
If I'd been in Berlin in
1930, would I have seen you
ambling the streets like
Krazy Kat?

Frank O'Hara

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 24

No, let our wars rage outward hard against the man
who has fallen horribly in love with high renown.
No true fighter I call the bird that fights at home.

Athena, addressing the furies in The Eumenides, but talking really to the Khasis.

Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 24

Only in this place that I haunt do not inflict
your bloody stimulus to twist the inward hearts
of young men, raging in a fury not of wine,
nor, as if plucking the heart from fighting roosters,
engraft among my citizens that spirit of war
that turns their battle fury inward on themselves.

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Nandini Ramachandran @chaosbogey.bsky.social · Jul 24

(from) "City of Beels"

The indifferent terraces empty their days below
and they touch the roads raising the dust of a war.
A hero may emerge out of it,
a star, a voice.
Something may yet shatter that feeling
which plagues inexpressive eyes

Nabanita Kanungo