In all actuality it began in late June 2019, when at a church camp I had come craving for some great spiritual awakening or change in my life, only to be gently persecuted for the metal that I was listening to and walk away from that week having gained nothing. Then, I was forced to return to the world with my sexist, homophobic, conservative, youthpastor shoving his ideologies down my throat. ...

Why do I feel scared of everything? Its a question I've been asking myself a lot over the last seven months, and one I thought about a lot at the start of lockdown. There's been so much to deal with in that time. Who would have thought the human race would be trying to survive a global pandemic on January 1st 2020?I've had a lot of fear in me this year, and that is normal. Fear is a normal emot...

ALEXANDER  KAN AN  INVISIBLE  ISLAND The Korean Diaspora of the CIS of 21-th century: An essay on the artistic mastering of a marginal consciousness (Translated by Steven Lee, Stanford University, USA) A great rejection               As one still remembers: a plastic being of the Soviet man was always in the fact that he clasped in his own hands something very narrow, limited in dimension...

Alexander KAN. Lasting Call: My Return to North Korea     Dedicated to my daughter Katya (Translated by Yoon Kan, Berkeley University of California)   View from the burial hill in the city of Hamhung   Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin with a passage from my first short story, “The Rules of the Game.” Written in 1987, this story defined the meaning and direction of my subsequent work. “An...

Confession of a 42-Year-Old Writer: From a Literature of Frustration to the Literature of Overcoming    Alexandr Kan As with people, objects oftentimes become sources that arouse particular memory of one’s past. Strangely, though, objects seem to hold still the past, present, and future of a person, unlike memory of people which is subject to constant change. I tend to treat all my personal b...

A THIRD HAMLET (World Diasporas of the 21st Century: The Experience of the Literary Formation of a Marginal Hero) Alexander Kan (Translated by Steven Sunwoo Lee, Stanford Universiry) Our topic requires a quick overview of the problem.  Therefore allow me to begin my paper on the literature of Koreans of the CIS with an excerpt from one of my own essays, “The Origin of the Phantom” (1995). T...

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My name is Lilly Day and I am a visual artist / writer based in Los Angeles, CA. My newest publication is a zine compiled of my poetry, essays, and photographs from 2020. My work explores themes of sexuality, nature in concrete, concrete in nature, addiction, and resilience.    

Indian society and culture largely still hold patriarchal roots. Though this is changing withtime, the progress is rather measured and moderate when it comes to mainstream Indiancinema. The most popular and recognised cinema in India and internationally, is the‘Bollywood’ or Hindi Film Industry. The portrayal of women and female led stories in thisindustry has mainly been regressive and dated,...

 Blue is for boys. Pink is for girls. Boys should play with cars, planes and trains and girls should play with Barbies, makeup and dressup. Why are boys and girls taught and raised so differently? Why were we taught that women take care of the family and the man provides for it? What do the words Femininity and Masculinity really represent? If they are just words why do they hold so much power,...

         Seen above is humankind's closest attempt to mirroring divinity.  The imitating subject is Ellen O’Neal, a pioneer in her element yet a ragdoll to gravity—wings spanning absolutes, directing her body toe-first into the unknown. She may as well be teetering on the ledge of a cliff.   Motionless around rolling desert hills, her eyes remain fixated beyond the blurry abyss in search of he...

This essay was inspired by the album “Everywhere at the end of time” by The Caretaker. I listened to the album while writing this and I got most of my information from multiple reviews and commentary channels that went over this album. I do not take credit for any of this information; I simply put it into an essay.     Dementia is one of the most terrifying diseases out in the world. It can ta...

Three men and I are struggling with a key. Our foe, a crescent door on a Tudor house, will not budge. “Bloody hel...

According to Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in American lives. That’s probably true, unless you’re bigger than America. Kanye’s career has gone through so many ducks, pivots and sensational conclusions, we can’t help but look on as the next step could be the last, as rapt as we were almost 20 years ago. The first half of my quest to understand the man through his music brought us to 2010...