Awaken

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My dream despite constant chaos is to love you fully.





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Too Much

Eating lunch today: huge white girl sitting eating lunch with friends overheard saying:

Just for me like the Confederate flag is it's like the T-shirt says Heritage not Hate. And all my black friends agree.

Then:

Like I was like watching this comedian last night on TeeVee and like he was saying like n*gg*r this and n*gg*r that all the time and like they would bleep it out. But what I wanna know is like why don't they bleep out honky or cracker? That shit is offensive.

Then:

But really like my overall favorite movie ever is "Gone with the Wind."

Luckily I was already done with my food. Packed up and came to this computer to blog. While walking across campus to this computer two things happened:

1) A clean-cut white guy in a tie came up with a clipboard shoved it in front of me and asked, "Are you pro-life?"

2) A clean-cut white guy in camo came up and asked, "Have you supported your country today?"

Need to get out of Huntsville soon. This shit is bad for the soul.

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End of the Line

Need Books by the Yard? Look no further. What a sweet, scary-ass face. Buy em here. My favorite quotes:

Mixed Books. Generally about 85% fiction, 15% non-fiction, these are great when you need books to just look like books. These books are carefully screened for content and contain no multiple copies.

Law Books. These books give any room a distinctive, scholarly and upscale look.

I wish we could buy books by the yard, but still choose them. In the meantime, when I need what looks like books but has been carefully screened for content. I know where to go. Anyway. Funny funny. Todo es simulacro.

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Doris Lessing

Everybody's talking about Doris Lessing and the Nobel. Or at least all the litblogs like here y aquí. This from an interview with Lessing reprinted in Paper Cuts (Lessing is defining political correctness.) :

A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.

Right now, at 3:23pm Central Time, my thoughts on PCness float somewhere between this quote and the one from Goytisolo in the previous post. But I retain my ability to change this opinion constantly. Sorry.

* I may be changing my opinion. The inimitable Harold Bloom has lashed out at Lessing's Nobel win as "pure political correctness." But Lessing is virulently anti-PC (See this Op-Ed from 1992.) A lot to digest. In my mind, Harold Bloom is clearly the one afflicted with an "absolute conviction of [his] own moral superiority" and given to gross "oversimplification in everything."

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Diàlegs sense fronteres - Diálogos sin fronteras - Dialogues without Frontiers

A human being comprises diverse but mutually compatible identities. I can be at once Barcelonan, Parisian, Marrakshi and claim my Cervantine nationality. Write in Spanish and feel at home in Barcelona and not in Madrid. Walk down the Rambla, the Ribera or the Raval and be inspired by the same immediately emotional warmth towards the urban and social landscape that I feel in Tangier, the pink-ochre city of the Atlas where I live or my haunts as an idler and inveterate burner of shoe leather in the deuxième, dixième and dix-huitième arrondissements. I wander, ramble and lose myself in the passageways described by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, now home to Turks, Hindus and Pakistanis. I hear a stimulating variety of languages, enjoy a space in perpetual motion, and pick up the day’s gossip, the contradictions in society. And to write is to accept that these contradictions exist in the writer’s innermost self. One must be, and I try to be so, politically correct in the arena of civic society, in the defense of causes that are ethical and rational: the struggle against injustice, poverty, racial or ethnic discrimination, the struggle for equality for both sexes, legal abortion, a law for de facto couples, gay marriage, etc. But in the area of literature there is no room for any kind of correctness. The creation of poetry and novels—like an individual’s sexual fantasies—cannot be measured with the rod of social or moral correctness, unless one wants it to become an instrument for didacticism and doctrinal therapy. If an essay or newspaper article requires ethical, political criteria and clarity of thought, the novel does not, because it is a product of the rational and irrational whole man, made up of intellect and instincts, a hub of unresolved antagonisms and multiple identities.

From a wonderful and inspiring essay by Juan Goytisolo on the Words without Borders site (Currently featuring literature from Catalunya). Translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush.

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This Reading

So most of the people who read this blog either

1. Live in a faraway U.S. state
2. Boycott readings of all kinds
3. Have their own readings on that night
4. Viven en México
5. Have to attend readings by poets with books on that night
6. Are traveling to México, Los Angeles, New York or Marfa
7. Or have work-related, family-related or sex-related obligations to attend to.

But for all the rest, I have a reading this Thursday at 7pm at the Space 125 Gallery, located at 3201 Allen Parkway en Jiusten. It's called the Literary Salon and it's sponsored by the Houston ArtsAlliance. Vino gratis, comida gratis. Que vengan pues si es que no se les aplica alguna de las razones ya mencionadas.

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La inquietante (e internacional) semana de las mujeres traducidas

And repping the hombres! (Risa.) Lo más que puedo, que no es mucho. Soy el

Traducido #20
de La inquietante (e internacional) semana de las mujeres traducidas

Chéquenlo. Esperan sus colaboraciones.


°°°

Pregunta del día (a los hablantes del Espanish, después de que hayan leído mi colaboración con la semana de las traducidas):


¿Se puede quitar los artículos en el español y todavía quedar con un lenguaje entendible? ¿Qué tan radical es eso de quitar los artículos en el español? En inglés lo hago todo el tiempo, pero al traducirme al español, surgió ese problema. Lo que en inglés suena poetico, reducido, minimalista, en español, ¿a qué suena?

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A Warrior

The LA Times has a piece about Francisco Goldman, his new book The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? and his very personal struggles.

HE'S fearless now, Francisco Goldman says. He's "putting on war paint" and preparing for battle with ax-grinding critics, hostile pundits and those he calls the "deeply murderous clowns" who wield power in Guatemala, his ancestral homeland.

There's no holding back, Goldman believes. After death took the love of his life last summer, after the cosmos came crashing down on his head one seemingly innocuous July day at the beach, why should he be afraid of anything anymore?

Read the rest here.

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Copping-a-feel

Stephen King writes about the state of the short story in the NY Times.

What happens when [the short story writer] realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless, because it’s what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it’s such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that’s good.

What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

Not sure exactly what to make of his essay which you can read all of here. Stephen King is not who I want to be when I grow up. And my goal is not to write like him. Not sure I trust his taste or decisions about literature. But I do agree about the copping-a-feel reading of a lot of journals. Just reading to stake out competition. Which definitely happens. Not so sure. Interested to hear what the rest of you think. In the end, writing is a process of discovery that hopefully the reader can enjoy, learn from, be challenged by. But there are no guarantees. And no simplifying, no dumbing things down, explaining or pandering.

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Voluntad de vivir manifestándose

Ahora me comen.
Ahora siento cómo suben y me tiran de las uñas.
Oigo su roer llegarme hasta los testículos.
Tierra, me echan tierra.
Bailan, bailan sobre este montón de tierra
y piedra
que me cubre.
Me aplastan y vituperan
repitiendo no sé qué aberrante resolución que me atañe.
Me han sepultado.
Han danzado sobre mí.
Han apisonado bien el suelo.
Se han ido, se han ido dejándome bien muerto y enterrado.
Este es mi momento.

Reynaldo Arenas.

(Prisión del morro. La Habana, 1975)

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