Notices by Mordecai Martin (mordecaimartin@rage.love), page 10

It's Cinco De Mayo, which I have been frequently assured by my Mexican friends and family is, outside of the state of Puebla, not a thing. So I'll just say a very merry death to the French empire and get on with it.

"I grasped that it is not wise to merely put together words like a crow collecting and gathering in her nest pebbles and pieces of glass, although she can, without knowing, also pick up a diamond, because, what does a crow know? . . .. . . Only when you have pronounced a complete thought, a proposition or a 'statement', you begin to speak. Until then, the use of words is simply ‘Pidgin Human’”
- Lamed Shapiro, the Writer Goes To School, 1945, trans. by
me, Mordecai Martin

The death of Jordan Neely, killed for having a mental health problem in public, is more than I can bear at the moment. I want to be with my fellow psychiatric survivors, with Mad people, with people who know that they're just a few bad days/weeks/months away from this happening to them. I don't want to be perceived by the sane.

A May day Yiddish children's poem for you.

"Today is brighter - the earth is green
And lovely are the sun and skies,
On this great Workers' holiday,
Be happy, kids, arise!"
- Translation by me! (I preserved the rhyme scheme and moved some words around. Sue me.)

@oya We're having trouble getting any sun here. But I hope whatever you get, you get out in it!

@oya Oh, I try to poke my head in here and there. How are you, besides gloriously gay?

@platypus Yochanan

Time To Make-a the Poetry

@oya Hooray!

@bright_helpings Thanks E.

@wenotfreeyet You're too kind, tj. I'll be okay, I have a good support network and team. It's just a shitty patch. They happen. But thank you all the same. If I think of something, I'll let you know

Recently I've been irritable, brain foggy and I struggle to enjoy activities that are usually quite meaningful and fun for me. But I'm sure it's fine.

The question of “Why translation?” would ideally then be stripped of these layers of distrust, patriotism, national and international politics, and xenophobia. If it was, we may realize that it is a shockingly simple series of questions, guileless and openhearted: Should I read this work, written so far away? Will it have value for me? Will it speak to me as I long for a book to do? Will you help me read it? In the face of these questions, the Translator becomes that most passionate of zealots, one who has read a book and believes you would like it too. So perhaps that is one answer to “Why Translation?” Because the book, any book, is just that good.

@CaribenxMarciaX great photo

I finally found my weinreich’s modern Yiddish English dictionary! It’s over for you hos!

@Pixley Very cute!

Bright eyed and bushy tailed in the morning!

Pretty fucked up to write fiction about a boat, if you think about it

I was gonna count all the whales the Pequod kills from the beginning until the end . . .

But then I got high

If you’ve played Mario Kart, you can understand a significant portion of the action in chapter 81 of Moby Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville