And the back alleys have that familiar smell of wet leaves, lost dreams, and oil from Shell

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! The end of March disappeared like so much of the month before it in a total lack of sleep. I did not spend most of it as I wished. Current plans are for April to start out differently at least. Wish me luck. Have some links and no joke.

1. Francesca Forrest's The Bee Wife (2025) is a luminous, deceptively plainspoken short story that reads like a cross between a fable, a folktale, and a family story and does not resolve exactly as any of these modes might lead the reader to expect. The beautiful cover illustration is also the author's work. Any day now she could come out with a collection and I would rejoice.

2. Via Gillian Daniels: a fundraiser for the legal support of Rümeysa Öztürk, organized by her legal team.

3. By now JewBelong has scraped industriously through the lithosphere as well as the bottom of the barrel and is starting on the upper mantle, but Anthony Russell's rebuttal and musical receipts are on point.

4. I love to discover new poetry by R.B. Lemberg, in this case "The blanket, the secret, the dark" (2025).

5. I would in fact read a book entitled Blatant Lies About Citrus Fruit.

I am still not especially sleeping, but managed to dream about meeting the future inhabitants of the house of my childhood and they seemed to be doing all right, which would be nice.

Comments

[sovay]

They're in theory trying to be welcoming to Jewish folks who have felt unwelcome, and yet, their political messaging is, I would say, confused. So they are sort of difficult to describe.

Even before October 7th, it was highly unclear who they envisioned as their target audience and they have kept on putting up billboards in Porter Square and I have kept on wanting to vandalize them. At this point I have them currently characterized as not helping at best and most of the time a shande.

[julian]

Yeah, I can't remember if the first one I saw was "Radicals ruin America" or "Let's be clear, Hamas is your problem too," but either way, I was *not charmed*. (They rent out one of the rotating billboards on I-95 South.)

[sovay]

(They rent out one of the rotating billboards on I-95 South.)

I wish they wouldn't.

[yarrowkat]

they have a billboard up in Albuquerque saying "throughout history, the good guys never hide their faces." which i, a covid-conscious immunocompromised person who masks in all public places for my health, would love to smash into a thousand pieces.

[sovay]

they have a billboard up in Albuquerque saying "throughout history, the good guys never hide their faces." which i, a covid-conscious immunocompromised person who masks in all public places for my health, would love to smash into a thousand pieces.

In the same position, I'll hold the sledgehammer for you.