Minardi!

"Introducing the first truly mobile office: the Walkstation."

More info here at the Steelcase website.

This image is especially posted for Minardi. Check out Minardi's blog, Gold, Silver and Money. It is sufficiently random and producted-oriented and creepy to be perfect for his blog, . Like the Happy Feet or the Say-A-Blessing.

Yes, Minardi, Technology has improved our lives once again. The good news is you can still have awkward office talk at your new Walkstation. They thought of freakin' everything.

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From the first moment, pulling open the heavy metal gate that seals off the front patio where the cars are parked. A little kid yelling. Walking down the street and then down the hill seeing people the entire way. Eyes glancing, watching, observing. Up the stairs into the Metrorrey. Packed so full of faces, noses, arms, legs, torsos, breasts, thighs and every second more packed. Drowning in flesh and hairstyles and biceps and labels and brandnames and perfumes and ballcaps and cellphone ringtones and neon colors Made in China and the eerie music played over the speakers, the Andean pipe music that creeps people out worldwide. Standing and watching and waiting and forced to examine every last decision of every last person. The old woman in her polka-dotted nylon shirt who pushes her way into the already full train car, elbowing a twentysomething fresa girl and physically moving her out of the way so she can reach around her and grab the pole for balance. Another woman dashing to make it into the train I just left and I stop and watch her, people streaming by me on both sides, just to see if she'll make it.

Entertain thoughts of writing one of these people every day, clearly fiction then, obviously imagining. Walking down the stairs from the Metro above ground platform down to the sidewalk to wait in line to transfer to the bus. Another woman elbows past me down the aisle to grab a pole for balance. As the bus pulls away, the same boy from yesterday with his hair styled back into the mullet-mohawk and a long tuft of frizzy blonde hair sticking out of the back. His fuzz still there blowing behind him as he mutters quietly to himself, looking upset about missing the bus. The next one will be a long wait, see.

It's impossible to know what anyone is thinking by looking at them. Especially when that other person is not even thinking in this language I am using to write. But feelings are not in any language, I guess. Feelings like how the woman in front of me must have felt when the bus rounded a particularly sharp turn and my body, my pelvis slammed into her. Feelings. The bus trundled and rocked along, I wondering if I had a camera if I could look at it like I was looking at the pictures, but with the flash turned off, and secretly snatch a photo of the young man sitting in front of me, his head halfway out the little plastic slide-open window, staring wistfully at something invisible. Barely made it off the bus and hurried across the little cobblestone crosswalk and into the traffic circle. (Crossing a "cobblestone crosswalk" sounds so typical, so traditional, so México Profundo and so far from another true statement: crossing a ten lane highway with six lanes going under and four going over, anchored by a traffic circle.) Two rotund woman, both short of stature, in yellow uniforms swept the side of the road around the traffic circle, sweeping up dust and flowers and leaves.

And I, hurrying off to work, sleepcrusted eyes and worn down and glad not to be driving in a lonely compartment separated from everyone else, equally isolated whether on a twenty-two lane highway or a no-lane side street in my own neighborhood.

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Me puse esta camisa hoy porque me gustan las letras. Dice Metallica en letras grandes inclinadas, esas letras que son como relámpagos. Esas que ya conoces, verdad, con la gran M y la gran A que forman un tipo puente en medio. Espero que la camisa le guste a él también. Siempre se ve más punk que yo. Hoy también. Hoy hasta más, con sus jeans súper apretaditos, sus botas negras. Hoy me dio un panfleto que dice también en letras grandes, también letras que se ven como relámpagos, dice "Hagamos del Punk nuevamente una amenaza" y tiene un tipo vestido igualito tocando su guitarra con violencia. Me dio el panfleto hace tres horas. Vino a mi casa, me lo dio y se fue. Dijo que tenía que ir a la casa de su mamá unas horas, un compromiso pues. Me puse a leer el panfleto anarco-punk. La rebelión, la actitud anti-autoritaria, las nuevas palabras como anti-autoritaria. Decidí que a mí también me gustaría ser una amenaza. Ahora necesito botas negras y jeans más apretaditos se supone. Y pues hace rato, él regresó a la casa y salimos juntos. Vamos a la casa de una amiga. Esa amiga siempre nos da chance de pasar un rato a solas en su cuarto. Es súper buena onda la chava. Pero hoy, realmente no me importa si hacemos algo a no. Antes de subirme al Metro, paseamos por la Macroplaza. A cada mendigo que encuentre en su camino le da por lo menos diez pesos. Lo merecen, dice. Viven mal, dice. Hablamos de los ochenta, de lo que leí en el panfleto, de todo eso, y la plática estuvo chida. Quiero comprarme las botas primero. Lo he pensado, y, sabes qué, estoy cansada y cuando llegamos a la casa de la amiga, me voy a dormir un rato. Nunca dormimos mucho allá. Pero hoy estoy cansada.

(Foto by Abraham Palafox. See Abraham´s fotoblog here.)

(This is a reprint from the Catalogue of Feeling.)

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Entre San Antonio y Cotulla

Good luck y buena suerte

en el camino y on the road

y stuck in Texas y atrapados en Tejas.

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I knew my day was headed downhill when I got the email. She had obviously grown up and was in the process of becoming famous and who can blame her. Before, when she wrote me, it made me want more from myself, challenged me to be better, to make me a better woman. One year, she had gone back to the country where her parents were born on a roots type of trip, one she did often, and she returned with stories about her grandmother, her aunts all the people who loved earthworms and forested mountainsides and growing small plants and weeding. They all seemed like good people, the people who she was from. They made her whole and when she brought the story back we talked together about wholeness, about the men we were living with, about the dreams we'd whispered to each other in high school. That year we had reconnected. She said my multicolored apartment was beautiful, she seemed to envy something about me carving out a space in our town. The slight tinge of envy in her voice made me feel better about my choices in life. It had been ten years since we met. We were those girls no one talked to or cared about, the ones who discovered their rebellion in black nail polish and Converse sneakers. In her email, she talked about London, riding the Tube, about her shock and delight at carousing with famous people and writers who would change my life if I had just ten minutes with. While she was doing that, I was surviving a shitty week; I got drunk more than was recommendable for my already damaged stomach, ended up in bed with a guy I'd sworn I'd never sleep with. Everything seemed to smell like mold all week no matter where I went to. All my sentences end with hanging prepositions. In the email, all her sentences ended perfectly, independent and subordinate clauses hung together like Christmas lights on the tree. Her life had become a Christmastime special, the kind of rags to riches story that warms hearts, and my life had become a series of regrets and mistakes, a long avenue of neon colored strip malls with crap stores selling discounted goods that look flashy and original from a distance, but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be fakes, knock-offs, bad industrial reproductions of something which had begun as a good design and ended up rotten. To be more specific, her email was a list of enviable encounters with famous people, really famous people like Nelson Mandela and Joan Didion and Spielberg. The email was actually a kind of response to a long, drunken tirade about letting go of dreams I had sent her a month before. She had never responded to it and I wondered why after so many weeks of not responding, she'd decided to respond to me at the moment she did. When she was in London, at the top of her game, when she had so much to report. I realized something at that moment. And I got up from my computer, walked across the curtained house, blinds drawn and roller shades pulled down to keep out the infernal summer heat, through the midafternoon shade to the refrigerator and popped open a beer. The window by the kitchen table was still open a little. I'd cracked it in the morning when the air outside wasn't so overwhelmingy hot. I closed the window, pulled the blind shut, and took long sips from my beer. I had no plans for that night, no idea of where I would want to go or who I would want to see. Today seemed so much better yesterday, when it was a tomorrow full of hope.

(Foto by Abraham Palafox. See Abraham´s fotoblog here. Gracias, Abraham.)

(This is a reprint from the Catalogue of Feeling.)

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La historia de hoy

Dos jóvenes de 23 a 24 años

Llevaba sentado en el café desde las diez y media
Esperando que apareciera en cualquier momento.
Habían dado las doce, y seguía esperándolo.
Eran más de la una y media, y el café estaba casi vacío.
Se había cansado de leer los periódicos
mecánicamente. De sus tres solitarios chelines
ya sólo le quedaba uno: en tan larga espera
había gastado los otros en cafés y coñacs.
Había acabado los cigarrillos.
Tanta espera lo estaba consumiendo.
Tras tantas horas solitarias,
había empezado a tener pensamientos inquietantes
sobre la vida inmoral que estaba llevando.

Pero cuando vio entrar a su amigo...
fatiga, aburrimiento y pensamientos desaparecieron a la vez.

Su amigo traía inesperadas noticias:
había ganado sesenta libras a las cartas.

Sus bellos rostros, su exquisita juventud,
el sensible amor que compartían
fueron refrescados, estimulados, vigorizados
por aquellas sesenta libras de la mesa de juego.

Y llenos de alegría, vitalidad, sentimiento y encanto
Fueron –no a las casas de sus respetables familias
(en las que ya no se les aceptaba)–
a una familiar y muy especial
casa de libertinaje, donde pidieron una habitación
y bebidas caras, y volvieron a beber.

Y cuando las bebidas se hubieron acabado
cerca ya de las cuatro de la mañana,
felices, se entregaron al amor.

- Constantino Cafavis, Traducción al español de Cayetano Cantú

Más información sobre Cafavis lo tienen aquí en un ensayo de la querida tamaulipeca, Sara Uribe.  Por cierto, estamos esperando el próximo ensayo de Sara sobre la literatura japonesa contemporánea y el peligro del prejuicio sin fundamento.  Ja.

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The jellyfish dead on the beach washing up to shore stranded on the coast was the first sign of homesickness. Also the refinery towers rusted storage tanks and rocky embankments. A weak blackened stream emerging from a natural canyon or well a ditch or some word that is placed between canyon and ditch. After turning back reencountered footprints rounded voluptuous marks smooth and disparate each one a unique impacting. Elicited a certain sensitivity a tenderness a softness of heart and watching the marks the question whose footprints are those and who has walked this way and imagined a body and the body was smooth and tender as well and a sense of loss permeated from shoulders into elbows and back down to ankles as if this body were submerged repeatedly in water like laundry in a washing tub gently by hands of habitual work. All around the spray of the sea sandy rocks coated by a yellowish orangish algae a wall built to protect the homes in the distance on both sides towers rise up and it seemed yet to be everything the word beautiful was invented to signify. But then again the dead jellyfish refinery towers rusted storage tanks potholed pavement on the way down dusty embankments plants suffocated by dust and the drainage stream I could not cross. Also algae and walls and industrial tourism maybe are not what beauty is. Whatever the case may be the space in this heart reserved for this day will not include what is beautiful. This heart stakes a claim to what was amiss. And all of the wrongness made one pine for home.

(Foto by Abraham Palafox. See Abraham´s fotoblog here. Gracias, Abraham.)

(This is a reprint from the Catalogue of Feeling.)

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A Vocal Witness

I can't recommend enough a great essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a federally certified court interpreter working at the Postville ICE raid in Iowa. The essay has sparked a number of New York Times articles and video and a lot of discussion. It is a principled, ethical response to an incredibly heart breaking job. In one part of the essay, one of the Guatemalan immigrants says to his interpreter, "God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine." Therein lies the injustice and the ethical dilemma of the interpreter who works with ICE, especially in this era of "fast-tracking" and trumped up criminal charges. I think this essay is a model for the good a person can do when faced with that dilemma--be a vocal witness to historical injustice. Here are some quotes:

On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa. The raid ...officials boasted... was "the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history." At that same hour, 26 federally certified interpreters from all over the country were en route to the small neighboring city of Waterloo, Iowa, having no idea what their mission was about.

...

I arrived late that Monday night and missed the 8pm interpreters briefing. I was instructed by phone to meet at 7am in the hotel lobby and carpool to the National Cattle Congress (NCC) where we would begin our work. We arrived at the heavily guarded compound, went through security, and gathered inside the retro "Electric Park Ballroom" where a makeshift court had been set up. The Clerk of Court, who coordinated the interpreters, said: "Have you seen the news? There was an immigration raid yesterday at 10am. They have some 400 detainees here. We'll be working late conducting initial appearances for the next few days." He then gave us a cursory tour of the compound. The NCC is a 60-acre cattle fairground that had been transformed into a sort of concentration camp or detention center.

...

Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound (only a few journalists came to court the following days, notepad in hand). Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10. They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names, some being relatives (various Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajché, Sologüí...), some in tears; others with faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their nationality, which was imposed on their people in the 19th century, they too were Native Americans, in shackles. They stood out in stark racial contrast with the rest of us as they started their slow penguin march across the makeshift court.

To read the entire piece, go to this page at The Sanctuary website.

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Me declaro Bohorquita

Vengo a estarme de luto
porque puedo.
Porque si no lo digo
yo
poeta de mi hora y mi tiempo,
se me vendría abajo el alma, de vergüenza,
por haberme callado.


- Abigael Bohórquez


°°°


I come to mourn
because I can.
Because if I don't say it
I
poet of my hour and my time,
my soul would fall to pieces, out of shame,
for having kept silent.


- Un primer intento desvelado a una traducción.

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Aquí

You could believe what believing could. You could imagine a way out of nowhere and a feeling deep in the heart. This would be the insight. Don't mind this, heart this lack. What is important about place:

1) La falta de realidad y la larga historia de confesiones familiares.

2) Uno puede olvidar cualquier cosa. O por lo menos hacer como si olvidara por un rato.

3) Flowers like none that could be found in the desert or in subtropical swamplands. A profusion of blooms only typical of rebirth. A riot of green and brown and blue and a million colors these daltonic eyes could hardly begin to perceive.

4) Otra vez y se encuentra uno frente a lo desconocido, ahora vuelto costumbre. Luego luego, se le olvida lo duro de la distancia.

***

De alguna manera, si no hablo en español, me doy cuenta que escasean los comentarios, sea que los lectores angloparlantes no dejen comentarios, quien sabe qué les pasa. Yo por mi parte, no sé.

***

On sale. Me vendo barato.

***

How to hide cuando todos los lenguas que conozca uno ya todo el mundo entiende.

***

Se supone que esto es interesante: Hace dos días ya, cociné lentejas. Empecé con ajo y cebolla, le agregué un chile jalapeño picadito. Después le eché calabaza, bien picado. Lavé bien las lentejas, les quité las piedritas (no vaya a quebrarle el diente de uno de los que iban a consumir la sopa). Las puse en la olla con las verduritas. Había hervido unos cuatro chiles de pasilla y los licué. Los agregué a las lentejas y agregué una mezcla de agua de la llave y agua del garrafón. Sal cilantro y ya. A hervirla.

A uno le gustaron mis lentejas mientras el otro andaba de boicót. Dice que no le gustan en general y además sospecho que no le gusta comer nada cuando no haya carne. Qué se puede hacer pues. El primero hasta el día después me felicitó por haber cocinado unas buenas lentejas, mientras el otro esquivó la mirada. Qué buenas lentejas hiciste, dijo el primero.

***

Hay que intensificar la vida para narrarla. Energía, flujo, disciplina.

***

¿A qué viniste? ¿No más a visitarnos?

***

Ahora vive acá usté, ¿verdá?

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Homeland Poetry

I traveled. And at some point some agent of Homeland Security inspected my bag and left a Notice of Baggage Inspection. At the top, the agent wrote:

Junior is in the Basement / unseen

Yes, he even wrote a slash to delineate new poetic line.

*

Tears from a mother herald a new epoch. Another pass through the same doors another way to streets that carry as their name feelings and themes. Walk.

*

Las confesiones de anoche.

*

Mucho criterio, mucho criterio. Yo me inscribo en tu escuela. Y no me iré.

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Instalación de graffiti

de

Jorge Galván

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

28.6.08

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Aztlán Retrabajado

Hace unas semanas, puse un textito en el blog. Aztlán. Ya lo retrabajé, y lo quería poner aquí en su forma nueva. Revisión traducción experimentación.

Aztlán

¿Ón tá Aztlán? ¿Pallá? Sí. Pallá.


Y señalo allá en la distancia brumosa, dominada por las columnas de los rieles del Metrorrey. Lejos se ven las lomas amontonadas a lo largo de los siglos y milenios ondulando en el cielo dejando sus huellas antropomorfas. La naturaleza de los árboles asomándose a unos kilómetros detrás de las carpas y muros de cimiento y techos. Los rayos del sol calan el rodante y no podríamos estar más cerca a lo que antes era a o lo que antes se conocía como la tierra de la garza blanca. Quién diría que un tratado pudiera llegar a definir una tierra de guerreros fantasmas y otros marginales. Niños pequeños aprietan sus caras contra el vidrio para ver el horizonte urbano rascacielos caídos a menos.


Una infinidad de techos abanicos sillas y mesas de metal abandonadas. En el cerro una colonia se levanta cada día más alta. Hay carros por allá arriba. Y tú no ustedes frente a mis ojos con los cinturones blancos mezclillas impecables. Una solitaria rasta que sale de la nuca me distrae. La manera de hablar de caminar de moverse en el espacio. Todos van al paraíso clasemediero. Un ritmo tenebroso del esperar y el mirar. No estoy mirando su juventud ni su vitalidad. Su neón no me paraliza. Se lo prometo.


No te vas a llevar la cartera. Andamos entre el pantano y la sierra y la ubicación es lo único que todavía nos pertenece y nos define. Lo único que se puede nombrar. Lo que falta es la respuesta. Aún si me contestaras con lo más básico. Me bastaría.


La tierra de las garzas está por allá. Sí, Señor. Camínale por allá un ratito. Llegas luego luego.

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Books I Read in June

Una no habla de esto, Sylvia Aguilar Zeleny
La dama sonámbula, Joaquín Hurtado
Incompletario (cuentos descompletos), Gabriela Torres Olivares
Los privilegios del monstruo, Joaquín Hurtado
Gangbang, Oscar Davíd López
Memorias de Adriano, Marguerite Yourcenar
Poesías completas, Konstantino Kavafis
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Los minutos negros, Martín Solares
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Pictures from Brueghel and other poems, William Carlos Williams
Feminismo: Transmisiones y retransmisiones, Marta Lamas

I think that's it. I read Javier's list of books for June and it made me think. What did you read in June?

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