When I thought about the red-circle slash, which is meant to signify that something is off limits, my first thought was of its journey to the popular lexicon. It is a very simple sign, but it is also distinct from putting a red X on top of something, as one might have seen in the past.
So I looked around, and realized I had a problem: This is such a well-known, broadly used symbol that it can be hard to describe by the layperson. And because so few people think of such things, I only found a few people pondering what we should actually call this thing.
Diana de Avila was in her pool one day in 2017 when she was suddenly “dropped on the moon.” She had just gotten home from the hospital, where she had been treated for optic neuritis and vertigo, and she was trying to relax in the calm water. Suddenly, bright colors and shapes began to appear in front of her. Yellow took the form of a triangle; orange was shaped like a rectangle. She felt as if she could reach out and touch them. Most strongly, she felt a desire to create. “It felt like lightning,” de Avila says. “Like something turned on in a second. It was a mystery to me.”
She immediately began painting. She had no training in art. But her hands just knew what to do. “It was fulfilling to connect line and form. I let things be guided by intuition,” she says. Two hours later, the canvas was covered in splotches of teal, brown, and orange. She titled her first piece “Blobs and Boomerangs.”
“After Annie” is the quietest kind of story about everyone trying to figure out what they had and who they are now. What’s left when the center drops out? What do those spokes add up to with the hub gone? Maybe it’s something that is, against all odds, still rolling forward.
Ayana Mathis’s important new novel, The Unsettled (2023), bears within its title the affective work that it accomplishes. Through entanglements of generational memory, placemaking, loss, nostalgia, family, community, and social dissolution, the reader is dislodged from the comfort of neat resolution.
But despite its eerie neo-gothic setting, “The Variations” has a charm and warmth that echo its intentions: Langley aspires to make the power of music tactile, to explore why it has such a pull on us. Central to his explorations is the Agnes’s most famous alumna, Selda Heddle, a late-20th-century cause célèbre in the classical world — a rare female composer to achieve such heights. She has recently been found dead in a blizzard near her manse in rural England. Soon after, her grandson, Wolf, arrives at the hospice in a panic, before lapsing into a coma. There’s some understandable worry that earworms have a body count.
The Revolution Will Be Hilarious emphasises the power of comedy as a force for social justice and provides practical insights into its integration with activism. She effectively shows how collaboration between the two has the power to start meaningful conversations around racism, climate change, economic disenfranchisement, addiction and more. Borum’s work serves as a valuable guide for media and communication theorists, entertainment industry professionals, social activists, and comedians, showcasing the potential of collaboration between comedy and activism in sparking meaningful conversations on various societal issues.
At its best, the book asks readers to reconsider the instinct of rejecting the monstrous and to look harder, read closer.