crowd photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Az_Erzs%C3%A9bet_h%C3%ADd_avat%C3%A1s%C3%A1ra_v%C3%A1rakoz%C3%B3k._Fortepan_58550.jpg - photo comes from FOTO:FORTEPAN / Nagy Gyula, licensed under the CC-by-SA-3.0 license.
there is a war, and there is not a war.
"The Radio Screaming Run Run Run" is a line from Ocean Vuong's 'Aubade With Burning City'. I strongly suggest potential ghostwriters for Iris read it; it's chillingly excellent take on a city at war, photographed by the pen, as it were, through Fall's "little points of light". (Vuong's other stuff is fantastic too)
"Mother They Have Cut Out My Tongue" is from a famous apocryphal story about the Second World War, concerning a soldier who scrawls this message under a postage stamp on a letter back home, attempting to bypass his captors' censors.
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