Dorian Blue

On February 14, around 80 students and community members gathered in the EMU amphitheater to hold a rally about the situation in Rafah, a city in Palestine. 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering there, as they were told it was a safe zone to evacuate to. Now, even though it was claimed to be a safe area, it’s being heavily bombed by the IDF and there’s an impending ground invasion.

In the modern age, it feels like everything has to be a hybrid, a crossover, or blend. This is true in music, literature, and film. But, it’s just an acknowledgement of the truth. The long-held idea of a literary canon is based on the opinions of the few, mostly white men. These spaces aren’t as exclusionary as they once were, though still have a long way to go. Across the board, the publishing industry is extremely white, with most counts putting the percent of white employees at 75-80%.

The boiling water rises Whistling of the kettle shrill My eye lies on the prize There will be an end to my chill Color blossoms in the mug Sumptuous stripes of steam Quickening the internal tug Put to my lips, a floral dream Soft, cushioned fields of lavender Against the rose’s cutting thorns I can’t turn back the earthly calendar And escape their mounting scorn There’s an urge in me to unwind

The trees show me their bare branches Gnarled, raw The cold bites through my resolve A crow’s caw Sounds in the pale blue above Love like winter Barren and biting But it will never splinter The frost in my chest Will it melt and let me rest? The world outside is so dark The last thing I want is a sense of hostility Instead, vitality In the beginning threads of spring

On October 20th, University of Oregon Student Workers (UOSW) and the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF) held a joint rally outside Johnson Hall to demonstrate their collective power and call for solidarity between undergrad and grad student workers. For GTFF, the rally marked the latest stage of their bargaining process with UO for a new contract. Their main demands are across-the-board salary increases to address unprecedented cost-of-living increases in Eugene, better resources and support for international students and caregivers, and better discrimination protections.

Released in 1971, the Belgian film Daughters of Darkness is an interesting example of queerness in the horror genre. I watched it on recommendation of my dad, a film guy who knows my love of everything lesbian and vampire. From the start, I was intrigued by the spare opening credits, white text on a black background. They are accompanied by a haunting, empty melody plucked out on electric guitar. The combination creates a feeling of emptiness and foreboding.

Photo by Haze Fog streamed around the headstones. Some were intact, others crumbling. Only a few stars managed to bleed through, the rest of the night coal black. The graveyard came to an awkward, jagged stop where the sand dunes began. Just like the city at large, it was always in a battle against the water and dunes. Filling in the bay to make more land was easy enough, but taming the sand was another undertaking entirely.

Content Warning: Racism, Anti unhoused violence, Misogyny

As I begin the final term of my first year in Eugene and am starting my first full term with The Student Insurgent, I feel a good deal of reflection is in order. As I flew away from my life in rural upstate New York, I expected to feel the world open up to me and to be engulfed by an array of new experiences reaching out for me, but the romantic projections of my life after high school were met with the reality of the mundanity of the life I have always lived.

He tapped his fingers against the soft leather of the armchair, staring at his feet. The woman across from him scratched her pen vigorously across the pages of her notebook, enraptured. Her black hair was slicked into an immaculate bun, her eyes dark, yet open. Holly Dao, M.D. “Do you need a moment?” he asked her. She lifted her pen, her gaze and smile flashing back to him. “No, we can move on.

On February 3rd, at around 9pm, a 50-car Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic materials derailed. Tons of vinyl chloride and other harmful chemicals involved in the making of plastics, spilled into the area surrounding the town of East Palestine and the Ohio River. The residents of the town were then evacuated and the EPA and local government began evaluating what kind of cleanup measures needed to be taken. It is an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions, yet all guilty parties have begun the effort to minimize it and deny that such a thing happening was inevitable.

The Interview With The Vampire TV show, an adaption of the 1976 book of the same name, debuted its first season on Oct 2nd. It dives into the fraught relationship between the two leads, Lestat and Louis, and their time living together in the jazz age of New Orleans. It is twisted and devastatingly beautiful, bringing the gothic genre back in full swing. Louis sits in a penthouse in the modern day, recounting the events of the past in a poetic and melancholic narration to a cynical journalist named Daniel Molloy, who had originally interviewed him fifty years before.

On January 17th, the ASUO meeting for NASU’s budget was packed to the gills. The tension was palpable; more and more people squeezed in and the ASUO committee members sat aligned at their table and firmly asked no one in the room to stand behind them, even as space dwindled. As the meeting convened, the NASU members sat across from the ASUO budget leadership. The ASUO Chair outlined that the meeting was closed to public comment and any filming.

Make sure to check out our Rogues Gallery! On February 28th, President Schill sent a campus-wide email, sharing that he had “exciting news to share about the future of the University of Oregon.” Many speculated what it could be about, though most rightly assumed it was hinting at a large donation. The next day, as promised, it was revealed that Steve and Connie Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft and UO trustee respectively, gave around half a billion dollars to start the Ballmer Institute.

“I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said ‘drawn towards her’ but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.” Twenty-six years before Dracula was published, there was Carmilla. The novella, written by French author Sheridan Le Fanu, chronicles the story of a noblewoman named Laura living in Germany who receives a mysterious yet beautiful countess named Carmilla as her guest.

Content Warning: Transphobia

A regular Wednesday guest lecture on campus became an anti-logging protest when a group of activists shut down a talk given by Tyler Freres of Freres Lumber. Freres, a third-generation logger, came to the University of Oregon law school to talk about his company and the benefits of the post-fire logging practices his company employs. Freres and his company hope to salvage the land that was burnt following the 2020 Summer Oregon wildfires, particularly the Holiday Farm Fire.