bumblebeetle:CDC scheduled to release guidelines thi

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bumblebeetle https://bumblebeetle.tumblr.com/post/645857136845471744:

CDC scheduled to release guidelines this week for “kissing everyone on the mouth”.

Dr Fauci is cited as saying “you weren’t this kind of person before and youll never be this person. stopping acting weird.” also “no tongue until august, probably” (Your picture was not posted)

Our Autofiction Fixation

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Our Autofiction Fixation https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/books/review/autofiction-my-dark-vanessa-american-dirt-the-need-kate-elizabeth-russell-jeanine-cummins-helen-phillips.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesbooks:

tobermoriansass https://tobermoriansass.tumblr.com/post/646034017082277888/our-autofiction-fixation :

“Write what you know” has been the novelist’s imperative at least since Charles Dickens retooled fragments of an abandoned memoir for “David Copperfield,” and reached a logical extreme with the autofiction boom of the last decade. The belief that every novel is a self-accounting is timeworn, too: Some early readers of “Lolita” suspected that only someone with the mentality of a child predator could have conjured the depraved Humbert Humbert. Publishers, meanwhile, often appear to want readers to see books as thinly veiled autobiography, and their publicity campaigns typically emphasize authors’ personal connections to their work. This can backfire, as with the P.R. blitz for Jeanine Cummins’s border-crisis blockbuster “American Dirt,” which exaggerated the author’s Latina heritage and suggested that her husband is an undocumented Central American immigrant https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/books/american-dirt-oprah-book-club-apple-tv.html?searchResultPosition=3 (he’s from Ireland).

The expectation that fiction is autobiographical is understandable for the simple reason that so much of it is. When that expectation becomes prescriptive, however, critical reading can devolve into a tiresome kind of fact-checking. In a tepid review of “The Need,” a writer for The London Review of Books used Phillips’s acknowledgments section as a bizarre gotcha, saying it “testifies against her vision of motherhood as embattled isolation, thanking 10 family members from three generations for help.” A reviewer for Kirkus, the trade publication, took a similar approach, though to opposite effect, in a rave for “Shuggie Bain,” writing, “Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down — then read the first sentence of the acknowledgments and lose it.”

There is something backhanded about using authors’ personal statements as a Captcha tool for verifying the emotional resonance of their work. This tendency reached a nadir with the conversation around Kate Elizabeth Russell’s “My Dark Vanessa https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/books/review/my-dark-vanessa-kate-elizabeth-russell.html?searchResultPosition=3,” in which the author, facing unfounded allegations of plagiarism, felt compelled to restate publicly that she, like her protagonist, was a survivor of sexual abuse https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/my-dark-vanessa-book-controversy-explained-american-dirt.html. An author working in good faith can’t win at this game. If she is forced to confirm that her material is autobiographical, then she risks forfeiting both the privacy and the power of transfiguration that fiction promises. If she denies it, then she surrenders a badge of authenticity that she may never have wished to claim in the first place, and lays herself open to accusations that she is appropriating the pain of others.

Whether or how much a book draws from real life isn’t strictly quantifiable. In his essay collection “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/books/review/alexander-chee-how-to-write-an-autobiographical-novel.html?searchResultPosition=1,” Alexander Chee posits a kind of epistemological mystery: A reader may see himself accurately reflected in such a novel, but the writer may not. Of his debut, “Edinburgh,” Chee writes: “I wish I could show you the roomful of people who’ve told me the novel is the story of their lives. … I still don’t know if I’d be in that room.” Part of this mystery is due to the chaotic consciousness native to the novel-writing process, which requires a degree of possession. Nobody is asking you to do what you are doing. There are more than enough novels in the world, and nobody is more painfully aware of that than the person attempting to write one. To dig a book out of the ground can be backbreaking, hand-tearing work; you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from or who will recognize it as belonging to them, too. And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you. (Your picture was not posted)

girderednerve:I’ve seen that post going around abo

stimulus check, information

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girderednerve https://girderednerve.tumblr.com/post/646199549021569024:

I’ve seen that post going around about how to access a stimulus payment if you did not receive yours due to homelessness or other difficulty filing (remember, some incarcerated people do qualify), and I think it’s a little bit confusing so I want to clarify, just in case. The stimulus payments are refundable tax credits, which for our purposes just means that you have to file taxes to get them, and if you did get them, they won’t be taxed.

If you do not usually file taxes because you are below the income threshold for filing, you still need to file taxes to get your stimulus payment (and you may qualify for other credits depending on your situation). This year, you’ll claim the Recovery Rebate Credit to receive your stimulus money.

The deadline to file 2020 federal income taxes has been extended until May 17, 2021, so you have plenty of time to file, but it may be desirable to do it now so you can access whatever money the government owes you as quickly as possible.

Filing your taxes for most people in this situation is straightforward. You can do it on paper or with an online form, and request your payment as a direct deposit or as a mailed prepaid debit card. The debit card may take several months to arrive, and you can have it sent to a PO box rather than a residential address.

There are free tax preparation centers to offer assistance to people filing taxes; they have a limited number of in-person offerings this year, but may still be helpful in your area. Here is the IRS’s local lookup page https://irs.treasury.gov/freetaxprep/ for VITA and TCE centers.

AARP also offers tax help in various forms; their policies are inconsistent this year, but they will help anyone (you do not need to be a senior). Here’s their page https://taxaide.aarpfoundation.org/ to find assistance near you.

There are also online forms you can use: the IRS’s Free File page https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/ will direct you to the various third-party tax prep sites, so you just need to have your documents (dependents’ information, W-2s, etc.). You can use any of them to file a basic federal income tax return, completely free of charge. Your local public library may offer access to computers or WiFi to help you file, and many also have paper copies of the 1040 (basic income tax return) if you prefer to file on paper.

Taxes are always troublesome, but if you’re looking for help you have options! (Your picture was not posted)