Fresh picked peonies in yellow, pink, and magenta

何人不愛牡丹花

film still from LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, dir., 2003). An exhausted man and a woman, played by Tadanobu Asano and Sinitta Boonyasak, sprawled out on a leather couch

CFP: Special Issue on Asian Crime Cinema GLOBAL STORYTELLING Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow are taking over from founding editor Ying Zhu, as editors of the journal GLOBAL STORYTELLING, and we are currently recruiting proposals for the Spring 2027 special issue on Asian crime cinema. Topics may include-but are not limited to-issues of justice and transgression, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, violence and redemption, gender and desire, vengeance and ressentiment, institutions and heterotopias, genre and industry. We are particularly interested in projects that combine detailed analysis of specific works with broader reflections on the theoretical, methodological, and ideological implications of the analysis. We welcome projects analyzing works set in and/or originating from Asia, particularly East, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as submissions examining a broader range of works that take inspiration from them (such as Scorsese's The Departed, as a remake of Lau and Mak's Infernal Affairs). Also, we welcome projects that examine feature films, but also ones that focus on other cinematic media forms, including serialized television or video episodes, narrative games, and so forth. Please submit a 300-word abstract and short bio by May 15, 2026. For selected proposals, full submissions will be due October 1, 2026. Global Storytelling is an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital-born journal. Conventional articles are certainly welcome, but video essays and other types of multimedia contributions are also possible. **Please submit your proposals to GSTjournal@duke.edu. Please contact c.roja@duke.edu or eileen.chow@duke.edu if you have any questions.

CFP: Special Issue on Asian Crime Cinema

Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow are taking over as editors of the journal GLOBAL STORYTELLING, and we are currently recruiting proposals for the Spring 2027 special issue on Asian crime cinema.

[LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, dir., 2003)]

I've always thought this was one of the greatest novels of all time. I've mostly been alone in that view, in my experience, but I stand by it. It's astonishing - a deeply layered masterpiece of rage, grief, bitterness, loneliness, love, ego, and destructive entitlement. And prescience.

Original 1925 jacket cover of The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate a marvellous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period which reveals a hero like no other one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. .. It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again?" It is the story of this Jay Gatsby who came so mysteriously to West Egg, of his sumptuous er-tertainments, and of his love for Daisy Buchanan a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism, and is infused with a sense of the strangeness of human circumstance in a heedless universe. It is a magical, living book, blended of irony, romance, and mysticism. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS The GREAT GATSBY FITZGERALD

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

-FS Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, published 4/10/1925.

film still from LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, dir., 2003). An exhausted man and a woman, played by Tadanobu Asano and Sinitta Boonyasak, sprawled out on a leather couch

CFP: Special Issue on Asian Crime Cinema GLOBAL STORYTELLING Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow are taking over from founding editor Ying Zhu, as editors of the journal GLOBAL STORYTELLING, and we are currently recruiting proposals for the Spring 2027 special issue on Asian crime cinema. Topics may include-but are not limited to-issues of justice and transgression, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, violence and redemption, gender and desire, vengeance and ressentiment, institutions and heterotopias, genre and industry. We are particularly interested in projects that combine detailed analysis of specific works with broader reflections on the theoretical, methodological, and ideological implications of the analysis. We welcome projects analyzing works set in and/or originating from Asia, particularly East, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as submissions examining a broader range of works that take inspiration from them (such as Scorsese's The Departed, as a remake of Lau and Mak's Infernal Affairs). Also, we welcome projects that examine feature films, but also ones that focus on other cinematic media forms, including serialized television or video episodes, narrative games, and so forth. Please submit a 300-word abstract and short bio by May 15, 2026. For selected proposals, full submissions will be due October 1, 2026. Global Storytelling is an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital-born journal. Conventional articles are certainly welcome, but video essays and other types of multimedia contributions are also possible. **Please submit your proposals to GSTjournal@duke.edu. Please contact c.roja@duke.edu or eileen.chow@duke.edu if you have any questions.

CFP: Special Issue on Asian Crime Cinema

Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow are taking over as editors of the journal GLOBAL STORYTELLING, and we are currently recruiting proposals for the Spring 2027 special issue on Asian crime cinema.

[LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, dir., 2003)]

China’s Most Famous Modern Writer: From Fiery Rebel to Cute Communist Mascot

Seriously?

Lu Xun's Ah Q might enjoy this turn of fortune, though.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/w...

Totally - Lu Xun is a hundred percent more kakkoii than kawaii

China’s Most Famous Modern Writer: From Fiery Rebel to Cute Communist Mascot

Seriously?

Lu Xun's Ah Q might enjoy this turn of fortune, though.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/w...

Longtime Immigration Court Interpreter Arrested by ICE at South Texas Airport The state’s only licensed Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu legal interpreter is now languishing in a Raymondville detention center. She’s lived in America for 35 years.

Texas' only licensed Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu legal interpreter is now languishing in a Raymondville detention center. She’s lived in America for 35 years: www.texasobserver.org/immigration-...

I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on and on with our wounds.

- #SamuelBeckett, 1963 (via @chowleen.bsky.social)

Oh man what a great bookstore with excellent food!! And books too, apparently 🥹

Spotted @chanda.blacksky.app The Edge of Space-Time on the “New and Noteworthy” shelf at Trident Books in Boston!

Magnolias in bloom

From you have I been absent in the spring
—

They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

-Shakespeare, Sonnet 98 (my favorite)
#everynightapoem #fragment

Screenshot of sophiafornc from Threads: This is eleven year-old Genesis and six year-old Denis, two Durham elementary school students whose families came here to seek asylum. On Monday, they were detained by ICE and immediately sent back to Honduras without due process. Don't you dare tell me that this is making our country safer.

I am so angry. Two Durham, NC kids - 11-year-old Genesis and 6-year-old Denis of Burton Elementary Magnet School - were taken by ICE at their regular asylum case appointment, and immediately deported without due process.

Follow SiembraNC on IG or FB or @siembranc.bsky.social for next action steps.

It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides, chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it. Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place; the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching new carnage. But how could you know, brave as belief as you boarded the boats, singing? The end of God in the poisonous, shrapnelled air. Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love you gave your world for; the town squares silent, awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next? War. And after that? War. And now? War. War. History might as well be water, chastising this shore; for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice. Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘The Wound in Time’ (2018)

War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore.

-Carol Ann Duffy, The Wound in Time, written on the occasion of the centenary of the first World War.
#everynightapoem

Catalina Muñoz holds a photograph during a press conference held in Durham, N.C. by Siembra NC on Thursday, April 9, 2026, of Denis, 6, a Burton Elementary School student who was detained by ICE and deported. Kaitlin McKeown kmckeown@newsobserver.com Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article315358386.html#storylink=cpy

Genesis, a fifth-grader at Burton Elementary School, is a “hard worker who never misses school,” according to her teacher Daniel Burton.
www.newsobserver.com/news/local/c...

I went to this elementary school. This is awful.

no words.

This may be lost in the noise--this is as impactful or more than the cuts to NIH and NSF 🧪

this is a more in-depth news article: www.newsobserver.com/news/local/c...

Catalina Muñoz holds a photograph during a press conference held in Durham, N.C. by Siembra NC on Thursday, April 9, 2026, of Denis, 6, a Burton Elementary School student who was detained by ICE and deported. Kaitlin McKeown kmckeown@newsobserver.com Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article315358386.html#storylink=cpy

Genesis, a fifth-grader at Burton Elementary School, is a “hard worker who never misses school,” according to her teacher Daniel Burton.
www.newsobserver.com/news/local/c...

They went to their appointment in Charlotte. Yes, they need to be shut down.

www.wral.com/news/local/s...

They do it for the bounty-style bonuses. And they know people are going to show up at their appointments.

Deporting people who are in the asylum process is just fucking cruel and unnecessary

Screenshot of sophiafornc from Threads: This is eleven year-old Genesis and six year-old Denis, two Durham elementary school students whose families came here to seek asylum. On Monday, they were detained by ICE and immediately sent back to Honduras without due process. Don't you dare tell me that this is making our country safer.

I am so angry. Two Durham, NC kids - 11-year-old Genesis and 6-year-old Denis of Burton Elementary Magnet School - were taken by ICE at their regular asylum case appointment, and immediately deported without due process.

Follow SiembraNC on IG or FB or @siembranc.bsky.social for next action steps.

a spicy take!

Oil and charcoal on canvas, abstract cubist bodies piled together. Description from MOMA site: "With its varying degrees of finish—you can see traces of charcoal and sections of blank canvas—and vast network of undulating lines and geometric shapes, Picasso seems to have obscured legibility in favor of generating a rhythmic abstraction. As if questioning the ability of painting to represent war, he created a shifting, spectral vision."

Picasso's depiction of a fascist massacre, a murdered family unceremoniously tangled together under a dining table.

[Pablo Picasso, The Charnel House, 1944-45]

he better leave that pope alone

Done!