This piece was originally commissioned by an editor at The Guardian, who asked me to write about the wave of retaliation and censorship of political expression in solidarity with Palestinians that we’ve seen in the past two weeks. Amid my work as an attorney on some of the resulting cases, I carved out some time to write the following. Minutes before it was supposed to be published, the head of the opinion desk wrote me an email that they were unable to run the piece. When I called her for an explanation she had none, and blamed an unnamed higher-up. That a piece on censorship would get killed in this way—without explanation, but plainly in the interest of political suppression—is, beyond the irony of the matter, a grave indictment of the media response to this critical moment in history. —Dylan Saba
A map of the depopulated Palestinian village of Jimzu جمزو (ancient Gimzo) hand-drawn from the memory of native Ahmad Ibrahim after its destruction in 1948. Ibrahim labels the names of streets and individual neighbours where they once were.
shakespeare characters having weird reactions to deaths: macbeth / hamlet / julius caesar
sorry to be pedantic outside of the tags but i love these as exhibits a b and c of why the “shakespeare is meant to be performed” cliche is real; on the page they look wild but actors know how to read the embedded stage directions
two of these examples can’t be shared lines of iambic pentameter (both gertrude’s line and brutus’ are already rushed and irregular at eleven syllables, so laertes and cassius both get their full ten beats for two or three words) and one of them doesn’t have to be (macduff and malcolm’s lines add up to ten beats indicating that it’s shared but no one will call the scansion cops on you if you split it into two and divvy up the extra ten syllables between them, which imo is the more playable option)
remember that verse is symphonic and that those extra syllables are notes in the orchestration of the scene— they have to go somewhere, either into beats of rest or sound. there’s a lot of ways to score any of these moments but one possibile notation for the first is
MACD: your royal father’s murdered.
(rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/)
MAL: oh.
(rest / rest / rest/ rest/ rest/) ...
by whom?
all that silence affords the director a moment to let a lightning-fast scene (the entire cast pouring onstage in ones and twos, yelling over each other at varying levels of authenticity) come to a screeching halt, and the severity of the situation set in. for the actor it’s playable as all hell, and ultimately very human: the kind of raw shock that makes you ask stupid questions. you get the same thing with laertes. tbh i’ve always found “drowned? (rest / rest /) oh. (rest / rest / rest / rest/ rest /) .....where?” to be utterly goddamn devastating in how realistic it is, bc what else can you say to that? if someone told you with no warning that your sister drowned, what else would come out of your mouth in the moment but something stupid and mundane? oh. ..........where did it happen?
the other notable similarity in these three moments is the use of un-words: two ‘o’s and a ‘ha’ (they aren’t meant to be pronounced exactly like “Oh” or “Ha”; traditionally shakespearean un-words are performed as unarticulated sounds, sighs, groans, exhalations etc). un-words leap out to the actor because it is a character rendered speechless. i made a post a few weeks ago about how big of a deal it is when people written by william shakespeare dont have words for what they’re experiencing/when the pain is so big that even in a metanarrative universe where you are only the words you speak you are forced to admit that something is unspeakable, and every “o” or “ha” or “ah” etc is a moment of this horror, this defeat at the hands of your own medium
it’s a rich moment for actors because in classical text it’s frowned upon to act “outside” of the line (to waste vocal qualities on things that aren’t words, ie to take a pause from speaking your richly layered monologue to let out a pained exhale. “act on the line” says your director, smacking you on the knuckles with a copy of freeing shakespeare’s voice), it’s diva-y and amateurish to take more syllables than you’re given. but when you’re given the space of ten beats for “ha portia”, who will dare call you a scene hog for stretching that “ha” into five notes of agonized, wordless noise?
in the same way that lear’s “howl howl howl” is very much not just the word ‘howl’ said three times these moments demand full, shattering vulnerability from the actor, a dive into the place in the body where pain lives. maybe laertes and malcolm really do say “oh.”, quiet and childlike, or maybe that ‘o’ is a stand-in for the all-air sound that shakes out of you when you get punched in the lungs and try to talk through it, or for that deep animal groan you heard that made you think what was that before you realized it was coming out of your own throat
anyway you get what i mean. you wouldn’t look at a blueprint and say you saw the house, you wouldn’t read the sheet music and say you heard the symphony, etc
people who can't pass credit checks still need housing. people who don't have credit at all still need housing. people who can't pass criminal background checks still need housing. people who have been evicted before still need housing. people with past unpaid rent still need housing. people who can't take out loans still need housing. people who can't pay off their mountains of debt still need housing. people who don't or can't work still deserve housing. housing is not an "investment". housing is not the act of "borrowing" property from someone else.
housing is necessary for human survival, no matter how poor, disabled, addicted, insane, or bad with money someone is. every single person on this planet requires housing. everyone. money does not belong in the affairs of housing. housing does not wait for money to come. housing is a human right, that EVERY human deserves, regardless of how much money they make, if any.
Chapter 7-34
Tori Spring 💖
More info/buy the books: https://aliceoseman.com/
Heartstopper updates three times a month, on the 1st, 11th, and 21st at 11am UK time.
Ramsey Nasr explains what’s going right now in Palestine to a Dutch audience. It’s powerful.
Matilda (movie) remake where Trunchbull looks like one of those hyper feminine bleach blonde Republican women you see on talk shows as the token girl/eye candy. And then Miss Honey is a soft-hearted, handy, tie-wearing Butch.
It is so so important that Miss Honey is also fat.