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Last year, with the launch of Mynah Magazine's fourth and final issue, it seemed a good time to begin stocking select titles for sale at the infoshop. It ended up taking half a year to pick and order a few other books as well as make changes to the space. You can read more about this in an email and Patreon update sent last week to friends, visitors, and supporters. Part of it accounts for those few months of online inactivity as the bulk of this work happened, unseen and entangled in demoralisation, while other portions sketch out plans, threads, hopes, and challenges for the project.
We purchased a few copies with the combined intentions of supporting Mynah, exploring more varied encounters through the infoshop, and creating additional ways of sustaining it. Having also been added to our library, this cosy little space is likely now one of the few places where you could find and read all four issues.
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something incomplete,
something stretch-
ing out, staking time,
space, and desire
to feel and fill out,
becoming…(in / as
loose assemblies)something
ungovernable,
perhaps evoking,
approaching, those
hows and whats in:
commoning,
communing,
communicating,
communising…Against isolation, let’s gather!
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To close out the calendar, a rare proper post featuring this little print flyer from the Institute of Barbarian Books. They had sent a whole bunch over with an order of zines a couple of years back: on the reverse is an illustrated flag also printed in 3 colour riso, and inside the fold, information in English and Japanese on the struggle for liberation and the transnational BDS movement. It’s (been) hard to gather words as demoralisation lingers still, this perennial insulation suffusing over everything on the island fortress, a hostility many have mistaken for safety. How is it that we exist amidst such apparent abundance yet seem so incapable? Or is it precisely the appearance of which that has made us so? An elaborate illusion that has us convinced there will be a slice of pie left to partake in – if only we worked hard enough and win? What explains the hemming and hawing upon orders of silence, all while productivity trudges on, in dense atomised isolation. Crisis normal. But a shared crisis. The terrifying reality of the nation state and extractive interests plays out both in genocide and the everyday curtailment of even the act of imagining a path apart. It must be evident that the call for liberation is necessarily for all – or makes no sense; to be free from these colonial and colonising structures of oppression, those ableist, racist, sexist hierarchies that end life with such ease. If anything has become clearer, it is that everything will have to begin from the interpersonal, how we meet and share our time, energy and care for one another, to fight for and build a life worth living, something shared in common. But there is much to be done.
