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metamorphesque · 1 year
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We Lived Happily During the War, Ilya Kaminsky
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texaschainsawmascara · 7 months
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a conversation with God
Deaf Republic - Ilya Kaminsky / Keep Ya Head Up - 2Pac
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What an amazing moment captured in time:: Physics Astronomy]
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"What is silence? Something of the sky in us."
― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
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“ You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens. ” ― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
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words-and-coffee · 6 months
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At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
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smokefalls · 2 months
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Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.
Ilya Kaminsky, "Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins" from Deaf Republic
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romanfucker · 9 months
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Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
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dumpsterfireofsubtext · 7 months
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Reading through Deaf Republic
While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses
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"I watch neighbors open // their phones to watch / a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When a man reaches for his wallet, the cop / shoots. Into the car window. Shoots. // It is a peaceful country."
Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!
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mitskey · 2 years
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— Ilya Kaminsky, "We Lived Happily During The War" from 'Deaf Republic'
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feywildfiction · 1 year
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Today I have to screw on the expression of a person
though I am at most an animal and the animal I am spirals
"Anonymous", Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
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literary-illuminati · 2 years
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Books I Read In August
38. When the Tiger Came Down The Mountain by Nghi Vo
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I’m an increasingly big fan of Vo’s work. The Empress of Salt and Fortune was good, but honestly didn’t really stick with me nearly as much as this did. 
Part of that is just the increased centrality of the framing device, honestly. I mean first of all I don’t really tend to have much patience for wish-fulfillment characters, but very hard to overstate how much Chih is just living the dream life (and my university indoctrination was thorough enough that the association of the study/preservation/gathering of history and sacredness seems very right and fitting to me. 
Also, I just absolutely adore when the story makes a thing of unreliable narrators. Like, when someone’s telling a story and as the scene’s ending someone else interrupts and goes “You’re telling it all wrong!” and gives a completely different version that’s at least as biased in another direction? Poetry. 
The actual myth with the lesbian romance and the were-tiger warlord and stuff was also a lot of fun don’t get me wrong, but like, would have been a bit forgettable without the framing device stuff around it. 
Anyway, give Chih a tv show. Or at least a half dozen more novellas like this. 
39. Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
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This is the first actual full book of poetry I’ve read….I mean ever, probably, if we’re taking cover to cover. Certainly since I finished high school. So there’s some Culture achieved. 
I was…not especially impressed, if I’m being entirely honest? Or, properly - “We Lived Happily During The War '' and “In A Time of Peace '' were both really affecting, but also I had already read both (posted here on tumblr, actually). They’re what sold me on the book. Everything between them did, well, not really live up to it?
I mean, I’m sure that there’s all manner of genius in craft and stuff that flew right over my head, but it just seemed so focused on being clever with line breaks that it failed to do much else. Like, most of the books on the list have plenty of lines that are more poetic by my (doubtlessly irredeemably philistine) definition than any of the poems that made up the middle of the book. 
40. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
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I honestly forget where I first heard about this book, but it’s been very vaguely sitting on my mental tbr list for the last few years,and the library happened to have it in, so. 
Anyway, the conceit (an alternate history where WW2 went slightly differently, and also Israel lost in 1947, and through a bunch of political compromises there ended up being an autonomous federal district carved out in Alaska as a temporary national home for the Jewish people - ‘temporary’ meaning expiring on the near year as the novel takes place) is just fascinating, and Chabon had a lot of fun with little offhand references to how different the rest of the world has gotten, too. The fact that everyone speaks Yiddish but with occasional catch phrases and curses called out as being said in American was cute, too.
The story itself was just incredibly, almost painfully noir - genius of a police detective with a ruined marriage, crippling alcoholism, and no future is woken up in the middle of the night because a heroin addict who boards in the same hotel as him was found dead by gunshot, discovers that the victim was the firstborn son of a prominent underworld/religious authority, disowned and ostracized for being gay, through this he stumbles into a sinister conspiracy involving the CIA and the death of his sister. He can’t stop the conspiracy but he might just be able to get justice for the murder, etc, etc. The commitment to the genre is fun,but the late night diners and descriptions of hangovers do begin to get old eventually.
It was also kind of dated, in an interesting way? Like, the Federal government spooks being clean cut bible college boys, all polite and well mannered and sincere Christian Zionists trying to get America into a war to help bring about the End Times, really feels like the sort of thing that only gets written during the Bush Administration. (The single tragic too-good-for-the-world dead heroine addict gay guy and the constant jokes about every less-than-perfectly-feminine woman being mistaken for a lesbian, also somewhat dated).
Anyway, think my vocabulary of random Yiddish words about doubled from reading this, and also many themes about Judaism that I am not even slightly qualified to comment on. 
41: Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
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This books are so fun. And just about perfectly bite-sized, too.
Or tv episode sized, really - each has about the perfect amount of plot for an hour long episode of network tv, I think. Pity they’re basically unadaptable. 
Anyway, not too much to say about this, really, except that Murderbot’s complete inability to understand their own emotions would probably be annoying by now if it wasn’t so funny, and reading it really left a grin on my face. 
Or well, also, I do really enjoy all the little hints that the ‘corporate rim’ is actually kind of a galactic shithole, and Murderbot just treats it like the hegemonic default because its all they know. Certainly nowhere else seems to be nearly as bad about synthetic life (nowhere’s exactly good either, mind, but).
42. Radiance by Catherynne Valente
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Oh I adored this book. 
I mean in large part because I’m a big fan of Valente’s prose when she gets all grandiloquent, and also the basic aesthetic of the setting (High Victorian Space Age by way of the Golden Age of Hollywood on the moon) is just utter catnip to me. But the whole epistolary pretension, telling the story through interviews after the fact and remaining scraps of documentary footage and different drafts of a dramatization made a decade latter that are each completely different genres and occasional clips of Severin’s previous films? 
It’s all just showing off to an incredible degree and I’m sure if I didn’t love the book I’d find it unbearably pretentious, but I do, so it’s absolutely great. 
The amateur historian in me was kind of irked by the sort of political stasis - it does the fallout thing where the fin de siecle kind of just continues uninterrupted for another fifty years bit with stranger and more wondrous tech, the apocalypse of the Great War put off by all the virgin lands to colonize and everything just kind of continuing as it was (except for the development of the film industry). But that’s kind of a theme. (Much more minorly, the world only seems to have gotten weird in the late 19th century, except that there are sovereign and internationally significant Seneca and Iroquois nations that get mentioned several times, which kind of require a fundamental change to the nature of the American state significantly before then.) 
The ending also didn’t really land for me - anything about infinite multiverses honestly makes it difficult for me to stay invested, and anything where the fictional setting tries to encompass/include the ‘real world’ almost always loses me instantly (qualified exception for actual portal fantasy, if it’s good. But introducing the real world in the third act has basically only ever worked for me exactly once).
Which is a pity, because aside from those bits the ending could have been designed to appeal to me in a lab. Was so close to perfection. 
43. How to Invent Everything by Ryan North 
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I took a three week break in the middle, so this technically took me a full calendar month to read. Library was getting pretty angry. 
Anyway, I think I said it before but I stand by it  - this book would be a significant improvement over the majority of currently existing middle/high school science curriculums. (In the same way that Magic School Bus and Bill Nye taught me more than science class ever did until high school (and even then)). 
Anyway, did pick up a lot of interesting trivia, and the author is apparently the dinosaur comics guy(?), which really shows through in the writing (not ALL the jokes come anywhere close to landing, but the ones that don’t are mostly dad-joke like enough that it’s kind of endearing). 
Also learned the exact limits of my understanding in (in decreasing order of) mechanical engineering, electricity, and computers. (I really do need someone to gently take me by the hand at some point and explain how basic logic gates doing addition and subtraction ends up with, well, tumblr, or triple A video games, or any of it. Like on a mechanical level.) 
Anyway, I should take up sewing. And write the half-essay floating around my head about how horrible mines are and how morally uncomfortable that is.
44. Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach
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Okay I forget who on here recommended this to me, but thanks! Was a ton of fun, great light morbid summer read.
Roach has a great sort of chatty style, and she does the thing I normally rather dislike working personal anecdotes and descriptions of people she interviewed into everything, but she honestly actually makes it work. 
It came out in the early 2000s and was endearingly dated at times, and vaguely racist in a ‘the strange and exotic Orient!’ way at others, but like generally mostly holds up, I think? 
It’s not nearly as difficult a read as you’d expect given the subject matter (‘the human corpse, how it decays, and things we do to it’, essentially). Or, well,that might me a be mostly a me thing, but I found it a trove of fun trivia, anyway. 
(The one exception being the section on the history of the pursuit of the human head transplant, and specifically the animal experiments done on the subject. That made me more queasy than anything I can remember reading recently, which is I suppose a useful thing to know about myself.)
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metamorphesque · 1 year
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why did you allow this?
― Ilya Kaminsky ("Deaf Republic"), Ocean Vuong ("Notebook Fragments"), Plato, Grave of the Fireflies
buy me a coffee
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random-poetry-account · 8 months
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snailmailthings · 2 months
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The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch (2011) / "After Bombardment, Sonya" from Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky (2019)
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words-and-coffee · 6 months
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Soaping together—that is sacred to us. Washing each other’s shoulders. You can fuck anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
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smokefalls · 2 months
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I am not deaf I simply told the world to shut off its crazy music for a while.
Ilya Kaminsky, "The Little Bundles" from Deaf Republic
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