then there are blackbirds

-- yeah, I think it's time for a tag. *g* (Though the thought of going back to tag all of my linkspams... oh god. /o\ I NEVER MEANT TO GET INTO THIS HABIT, YOU GUYS!)

+ eccentricyoruba on historical globalization
+ such_heights on recent events
+ some gorgeous photos of Afghanistan
+ Beau Sia: Check Yourself
+ oyceter on 30 Rock (& Tiger Beatdown here)
+ Asian American Women in Leadership conference
+ Historians admit to inventing ancient Greeks (... oh, The Onion. xD)
+ crossedwires: on a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise
+ Driving While Brown (via the_future_modernes)
+ crossedwires has a batch of Undercovers icons!
+ some more Undercovers icons!
+ Pompeiian wall painting of a threesome, via my tumbleroll!
+ Petition for National Holiday for Native Americans
+ 2010 Asian American music festival
+ wistfuljane: on Fanlore's tropes and genres, more on Fanlore and its Tropes & Genres category
+ a blogspam by angry asian man (includes several links on The Social Network, for those of you who are interested!)
+ Oxfam urges that aid for Haiti be earmarked for agriculture
+ 9th Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association
+ Kollaboration in Seattle, 10/23
+ Cayman Islands Brewery recycles for a cause (via Repeating Islands)
+ Get Arthur and Gwen Laid Campaign (Hello Merlin fandom! &hearts Maybe I will come back to you one day...)
+ Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party's Cold War Roots
+ The lovely cherrybina has put up a picspam/math poll that is EXCEEDINGLY HAPPY-MAKING TO MY NERDY SELF, JUST SAYIN'.
+ Deb Reese on Neil Gaiman
+ Reconsider Columbus Day
+ axelrod on Spirit Day
+ Kate Harding On Good Kids and Total Fucking Assholes
+ trinker: Render unto... (interesting thoughts on translation!)
+ Oh Aaron Sorkin, no.
+ Glee linkspam at access_fandom
+ This female character flowchart pisses me off. This post explains some of the reasons why; inkstone's linkspam goes into further detail. marina makes an interesting point, but to me, the chart reduces all those strong female characters AND REAL WOMEN to their (perceived as) problematic characteristics for... what, exactly? We already hold women- real and fictional- to impossibly high and contradictory standards; I'm not happy with the fact that the chart flattens all those different contexts to highlight their flawed narratives/perceived negatives. We should be talking about how these women are flawed and STRONG/AWESOME ANYWAY, not reducing them to their flaws, and frankly, I don't see the chart furthering that discussion much. Even if the creators are just having a spork at notions of/expectations for "strong female characters," this is so totally not the best format in which to do it. **eta for bossymarmalade on Yoko Ono, because YES.
+ VAMP responds to "Prostitutes of God" documentary
+ more links from vi
+ Surprise-- the Very Dark Side of US History (trigger warning applies)
+ Bechdel Test Comment-ficathon!

Still not really here (despite my procrastination via new layout fiddling), but I need to clear some more tab-space for my to-do list. So, in order of stumbled-upon:

+ Health Month! This should be fun, especially in the company of Team White Lotus. ;)
+ For orig-fic lovers: Strength, Gallantry, & Other Useless Bits was hands down my favorite story from the last issue of SSBB.
+ angry asian man (guest post): roundtable interview on multicultural lit
+ Undercovers interview (SHOWWWWW ILU!)
+ effex's amazing post on Yusuf
+ angry asian man (guest post): racism on youtube videos
+ Nisi Shawl: What I Want
+ Reverse Racebending: Mysterious Skin
+ Wiscon post soliciting suggestions & discussion regarding the concom's statement
+ US military documents (SHRIEKING INTO HANDS)
+ Merlin vid by such_heights: Backseat
+ marina: Sleeper Cell
+ 水火 aka AZULA LADIESBIGBANG FIC HOLY FUCK YESSSSSSSSSS!
+ more A:TLA (& Inception) recs from vi
+ angry asian man (guest post): the more things change the more they stay the same (Asian-American history and "hot-button" issues)
+ wistfuljane's top 10 pimps are still rolling in but I wanted to highlight this one because I am a bit crankypants today and it is MAI!
+ Lakme Fashion Week
+ Mexican Poprock Primer II
+ Caribbean corals will show bleaching this year
+ noldo: assimilation stories
+ more MoonFail links from coffeeandink
+ APIA Spoken Word Summit 2011
+ Stone Telling
+ Kalinago: Native Island Tribe Redefining Survival
+ ICS Lecture: A Re-reading of José Marti
+ An interesting article on the African diaspora in Gujarat
+ AVATAR mashup (a What These People Need Is a Honky vid)
+ Disability Blog Carnival: Identity
+ Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk
+ crossedwires put up a transcript along with the video for Elif Shafak's talk, The Politics of Fiction
+ HuffPost is running free buses from NYC to Jon Stewart's rally, apparently?
+ The Pressure to Cover
+ Kamran Pasha: Digging Up Muslim Graves
+ And finally, from a random email list I'm pretty sure I didn't subscribe to: there is a workshop on wheelchair dancing! Tomorrow! In Stamford! I WOULD ACTUALLY HARE OFF TO CHECK THIS OUT IF I DID NOT HAVE SO MUCH TO DO OMG.

so's you can amuse yourselves while I disappear again, to tackle some more of my to-do list! *g*

- crossedwires: icons for My Name is Kim Sam Soon
- Kindness over Genius, by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
- yifu: gorgeous icons!
- karnythia: White Women, Tears, and Coded Images
- angry asian man (guest post): the call of the mall
- &, related, Chinese Remake the 'Made in Italy' Fashion Label
- wistfuljane's put up the final round of the Most Awesome Asian Characters & Celebrities poll! Vote today!
- interview with Rizwan Manji from Outsourced
- Is ethnic beauty the new 'it' factor? via karnythia (HEAD EXPLODING.)
- angry asian man (guest post): on that Ktown reality show
- interview with Harry Shum Jr
- Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing
- such_heights: Magical Misfire, adorable Gwen/Morgana tentacle-fic!
- some links from elsane
- coffeeandink: Wiscon panel brainstorming
- yifu's Recommend a Friend meme is something I would rather like to do for you guys (except that I think most of you know each other already??)
- nachte has an adorable Merlin/Arthur comic, Fonder Than! (The first Merlin/Arthur I've consumed in... months, omg.)
- yuki_onna has put out a targeted call for submissions for Apex Magazine, soliciting works from writers of Arabic descent &/or Muslim writers
- gorgeous art by Zayasaihkan Sambuu
- The last of the sea nomads! Not sure how I feel about the article, but the pictures are GLORIOUS.

See you on the other side! &hearts

Pre-Montreal tab-clearing! Have a good weekend, lovelies; I'll see you on the other side. &hearts

+ This list of the 15 most overrated contemporary American writers makes me wonder just what Anis Shivani's definition of "contemporary" is. (My list would include Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, just sayin'...) Still, the snark was enjoyable to read!

+ Mao's Last Dancer looks shiny.

+ Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather, Devil Wears Prada fic by woldy! UNF.

+ Troy Polamalu's hair is insured for a million bucks. Why do I suspect that this is less whimsical than it first appears?

+ MC Jin's rapping in Cantonese these days. (Interesting commentary on bilingualism!)

+ This Tina & Mike still via angry asian man is HOT, y'all. People who are still watching Glee, promise to let me know if I should poke my head in just to watch that scene? ;)

+ Rambutans in Puerto Rico! ... I have still never tasted a rambutan. ;____; Someday I can has??

Signal-boosting first: kairia has a linkspam on the flooding in Pakistan. If you haven't already, and you happen to have time and/or resources to spare, please hop over to help_pakistan and see if there's anything you'd like to offer or bid on! (Once again, in case anybody's interested, I am offering a short A:TLA fic here.)

Randoms:
+ Via angry asian man, Born in the USA is another excellent article on the history of Chinese immigration through Angel Island.
+ marina's put up five movie reviews with picspams, and all five of them look super-shiny!
+ zahrawithaz has a post that may interest those of you in Merlin fandom: The History of the Arthurian Legends in Ten Easy Steps (With Recommended Reading)
+ This is a note-to-self more than anything, but in case you are like me and haven't been doing much comm reading, fellow Saiyuki fans, the 7thnight_smut fics are up! (Everything is comm-locked, but I believe membership is non-moderated.)
+ vi's gorgeous Inception doodle has effectively kicked me back to excitement rather than resistance, ahaha- hopefully I'll get to watch the movie soon!

Fandom + randoms!

+ musesfool's A:TLA squee post is indeed an instrument of joy- I love seeing A:TLA squee, y'all, and discussions never fail to put a big dorktastic grin on my face. Putting this here specifically so I remember to get back to it!... eventually. Hopefully. /o\

+ Via crossedwires: SULU-OFF! STAR TREK FANDOM, I HAVE NEW SHINY LOVE FOR YOU ALL OVER AGAIN. *____*

+ Guinevere of Rohan by felix_aeternus is gorgeous, omg.

+ The inestimable woldy wrote an amazing HP fic! Chasing Charlie is delightful, I haven't enjoyed reading Harry-POV fic this much in a very long time.

+ A Subversive Expression of Resistance is a fabulous interview with Marlon Hom on the poetry of Chinese immigrants detained at Angel Island.

+ Yakuza 3 reviewed by yakuza, via I think effex?

+ marina made a shiny fanvid: Home Now is breathtaking, and it makes me want to watch East West 101 RIGHT NOW.

+ camelot_fleet is holding a Writers' Round Table! Come and play! :D

... and now I must be off to the library before I faff away the hours until closing time. &hearts!

ephemere wrote Patalim, which is painful and gorgeous (and also triggering for descriptions of violence), even if I wish it weren't so necessary to say:

I don't want to erase this blood staining my legacy. I don't want to forget, as if it never happened. I don't want to keep coming across, "I didn't know the Philippines was a U.S. colony!" as if I do not bear the damage of American occupation written in my nerves and across my tongue. I don't want to see "deathmarching" used as a verb, the same way I deplore how "imeldific" is used as an adjective -- as if history were an erasable thing and words slipping into common parlance an apology or a healing of all these wounds. I don't want people to go on using this in a misguided attempt to remove the blood in it, because forgetting is what gives the evil behind this more power, by allowing the word to go unchallenged and slip under the veneer of acceptability, lightness, cheapening, banality. I don't want the atrocities of war to become equated with mundane things.

I don't want common use. I don't want a sanitized history. I want my stories, past and present, these stories of my people that we have lost and that we're on the verge of losing, held close to my heart and remembered. I want these stories told over and over again, because the need for them will never lift, not the necessity for memory and not the blatant spitting on the dignity of it. I want to claim them though I may choke on tears and tongue in doing so, though I surrender on so many other things daily and remain one frail and weak person still grappling with the fractures in her present and in her past. Because this, too, is part of who I am. Because every story told and every careless use challenged is defiance, is struggle, is me raising my head and saying, this happened, this matters -- is yet another blow against erasure, silence, the unmarking of graves.

(See also: megwrites with context, manifesta on "mythologizing".)

My two cents, modified from a comment I left elsewhere:

You know the thing about turning history into myth? It makes people believe that these things never happened, these things were never true. Take it one step further: suddenly we become replaceable, interchangeable, lives and memories and stories and histories (hair and skin and blood and bones) fodder for your plagiarism, convenient backdrops for your stories- a book of myths in which our names do not appear**.

Turning us into magical unicorns, orcs, a handy spice rack with which you can ~flavor~ your realities and imaginations, all while erasing ours- this is respect? Please. Look me in the eye. Say it again. I'll warn you right now, though: I am not that inscrutable.

*Li-Young Lee
**Adrienne Rich- yes, I am capable of appropriating right back.

eta: two more links while I'm on the subject of history;
- troisroyaumes on history and memory
- The Spirit of Hiroshima, a personal account of August 6th, 1945 by Matsubara Miyoko. Trigger warning applies.

1. Last night's Rizzoli & Isles was underwhelming, to say the least: ( spoilers )

2. I ended up rereading some older fics to take the taste of irritation out of my mouth, and I realized I hadn't pimped them! So:

+ dhobikikutti's Promise of the पुरवाई, a bilingual Mary Poppins fic written for the Racebending Revenge challenge

+ to serve the gods, an amazingface El Dorado fic by bossymarmalade

+ from a few days ago, crossedwires's icon-inspired A:TLA ficbit (Zuko! Mai! Toph!!), eeeee &hearts &hearts

3. Drabblefest is still in progress- I am hoping to get the last couple of prompts finished tonight, but in the meantime you can still pop in a few more requests! :) I'll repost everything for ease of reading (and probably some edits) at... some later point, heh.

Things I am doing this weekend: arranging a thesis defense party (ARGH), another round of Restaurant Week (\o/!), some cleaning, haphazard cooking of random things in the fridge, catching up with Occult Academy/Rizzoli & Isles/The Closer/possibly Uraboku, Loveless rewatch, finishing my giant book post (& resisting the library/B&N as I should not read ALL THE BOOKS while it is still being drafted)...

... and so of course what I am doing right now is putting up linkspam. :P

+ livrelibre has a content notes collection for VVC collated from public posts in spreadsheet form, for those of you who might find it useful. (NB: I am not going to the con and don't have even a pinky toe in vidding fandom. I merely support things that can help attendees to make informed decisions about what they choose to watch.)

+ oyceter is looking for kdrama anecdotes, so, friends who watch kdramas- if you have a moment to comment on your experiences, please pop over!

+ zahrawithaz's review of Covert Affairs 1x01 is bumping the show higher on my consideration list. Alas that I already have many things to watch this weekend! *g*

+ For all two(?) of you who might have missed it- dharmavati's hosting an ATLoK friending/squee post on LJ, and nan's hosting the ATLA/ATLoK friending meme on DW! I'm sticking to the DW meme because I &hearts DW, but whatever floats your boat. :)

Link-basket today, since I cannot think.

+ rawles: a quick note (erasing women from the narrative is never feminist)

+ ephemere: What we remember (on Imelda Marcos; Listen: every time you reduce Imelda to frivolity and excess, you spit on countless unnamed graves.)

+ yeloson: Privilege hates, but doesn't know what hate is

+ fiction_theory: The internet IS real life

+ deepad: On talking and not about Israel and Palestine

+ crossedwires: Red Cliff Part I icons! SO SHINY, omg. *___*

+ damned_colonial: Wiscon vid party playlist

+ nextian: where you got lost, how you got by; Star Trek reversebang; Sulu(/Chekov) is AWESOME. &hearts

+ magnetic_pole: Air Heart; HP; stunning; young McGonagall learns to fly.

+ Book 21 of imaginarybeasts (aka edition: WUXIAAAAAAAAAA) is up! *\o/*

+ Thanks to Mynuet for the lovely remix! &hearts