Delinquency is a growing vice.
Notes Prior to an Impending Catastrophe
Dr. Awkward is a palindrome. Minus the period and capitol letters.
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A friend got a tattoo of a typewriter on her bicep. The guy who put it on, inked it on, drew it on was named Ty Palotta. No lie. Quite the pun.
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I just came up with my new tattoo. It's gonna say "Cultural Appropriation." But I can't decide whether to put it in Hindi, Chinese, or Spanish. Seguro que no lo pondré en español. Ni pa pensar. Qué miedo.
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Odio el español de aula. En especifico, el español del aula donde enseño en East Texas. Extraño el español callejero (de México pues).
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Another tattoo idea: a row of all the houses where I have lived. Or a row of small maps of all the places.
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My new favorite word: hokey.
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Step 1: Bury the hatchet.
Step 2: It's water under the bridge.
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Come to my new party. A svelte smelt 'n' spelt party.
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The same friend with the new tattoo had a job where she had to call people and notify them that they had been exposed to syphilis or HIV. At the city Health Department. People who tested positive would do a long interview with her about all the people they had slept with. They'd give her lists of names and phone numbers and she would call them all to inform them.
She: I'm calling to inform you that someone you've slept with has syphilis.
Him: Who?
She: I'm sorry, I can't tell you that.
Him: This a joke.
She: Um.
Him: I know this a joke. Some fool playin a joke on me.
She: No sir, I'm an employee of the Health Department.
Him: Wait, wait.
She: Yes?
Him: You white?
She: Yes, I am.
Him: Oh, then I know this for real. I don't have no white friends.
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Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day.
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My friend with the tattoo said people loved to talk about their sex lives in detail with her. Also said gay white men always said no, for privacy reasons. Well, then.
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Pillows pies bed for pequeño. Grapefruit trails though littered puddled gutters. Swept that gutter days ago. And now. Northwest wind blows blustery moments in. Not a poem. Don't write poems. Or much at all.
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Feliz Día de San Giving.
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A friend got a tattoo of a typewriter on her bicep. The guy who put it on, inked it on, drew it on was named Ty Palotta. No lie. Quite the pun.
°
I just came up with my new tattoo. It's gonna say "Cultural Appropriation." But I can't decide whether to put it in Hindi, Chinese, or Spanish. Seguro que no lo pondré en español. Ni pa pensar. Qué miedo.
°
Odio el español de aula. En especifico, el español del aula donde enseño en East Texas. Extraño el español callejero (de México pues).
°
Another tattoo idea: a row of all the houses where I have lived. Or a row of small maps of all the places.
°
My new favorite word: hokey.
°
Step 1: Bury the hatchet.
Step 2: It's water under the bridge.
°
Come to my new party. A svelte smelt 'n' spelt party.
°
The same friend with the new tattoo had a job where she had to call people and notify them that they had been exposed to syphilis or HIV. At the city Health Department. People who tested positive would do a long interview with her about all the people they had slept with. They'd give her lists of names and phone numbers and she would call them all to inform them.
She: I'm calling to inform you that someone you've slept with has syphilis.
Him: Who?
She: I'm sorry, I can't tell you that.
Him: This a joke.
She: Um.
Him: I know this a joke. Some fool playin a joke on me.
She: No sir, I'm an employee of the Health Department.
Him: Wait, wait.
She: Yes?
Him: You white?
She: Yes, I am.
Him: Oh, then I know this for real. I don't have no white friends.
°
Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day.
°
My friend with the tattoo said people loved to talk about their sex lives in detail with her. Also said gay white men always said no, for privacy reasons. Well, then.
°
Pillows pies bed for pequeño. Grapefruit trails though littered puddled gutters. Swept that gutter days ago. And now. Northwest wind blows blustery moments in. Not a poem. Don't write poems. Or much at all.
°
Feliz Día de San Giving.
Right
I'd rather not have this be a general whine about the decline and fall of everything.
- Paraphrase of Stephen Wasserman, former LA Times book review editor and supporter of translation in a speech on Friday at the American Literary Translators' Conference
- Paraphrase of Stephen Wasserman, former LA Times book review editor and supporter of translation in a speech on Friday at the American Literary Translators' Conference
Note to Self
Your first book of prose poetry and pseudostories should be called:
You're So Much Better Than Me
You're So Much Better Than Me
.
Because if you don’t, it’s like you won’t any more. It’s like if you sit under the umbrella once, then that’s it. You have to still know, and you have to do enough … to carry you over. You have to be in there because you don’t want to be just waiting by the edge.
From a story Fishing by Patricia Grace. The entire story is here at the Sweet and Sour issue of the eXchanges Journal of Literary Translation at the U of Iowa. More info on Patricia Grace, an acclaimed writer of Maori lit in English, is here.
.
Because if you don’t, it’s like you won’t any more. It’s like if you sit under the umbrella once, then that’s it. You have to still know, and you have to do enough … to carry you over. You have to be in there because you don’t want to be just waiting by the edge.
From a story Fishing by Patricia Grace. The entire story is here at the Sweet and Sour issue of the eXchanges Journal of Literary Translation at the U of Iowa. More info on Patricia Grace, an acclaimed writer of Maori lit in English, is here.
.
What it is
Your jokes defend and deride Texas at the same time.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Oops
.
Are you Presbyterian?
No, I eat chicken.
PRESBYTERIAN
PESBITERIAN
PESBETERIAN
PESCETERIAN
PESCETARIAN
Are you pescetarian?
No, I'm a Jew.
.
Are you Presbyterian?
No, I eat chicken.
PRESBYTERIAN
PESBITERIAN
PESBETERIAN
PESCETERIAN
PESCETARIAN
Are you pescetarian?
No, I'm a Jew.
.
Francisco Goldman in Houston
The acclaimed writer of fiction and non-fiction, Francisco Goldman, will be in town tomorrow evening reading from his new non-fiction book, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?. He will read at 7pm at the Barnes and Noble at the corner of Westheimer and Voss on the westside. Francisco Goldman's first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Ordinary Seaman, his second novel, was a finalist for the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. Both of his novels were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award and have been translated into nine languages. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellow at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, and he is currently Allan K. Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His fiction and journalism have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, Outside, and many other publications. He lives in New York City and Mexico City.
For more info on Goldman, there is an article from the LA Times here and an interview on Democracy Now! about his most recent book and the Bishop Gerardi murder.
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Let's. Rolled together across interchanges. This will be unknown again. 10:23 on Saturday night. You go home. Me too. I'll take you yes up 59 down 45 down 225. And suddenly through your brakeless years. Your heart had no brakes. Your car neither. All those years in Arizona. Lulled into dust and stone sleep. Arriving to California coast. Startled by leaves and trees. A yearning for regreening. You awoke on the coast. You slept through the night. Earth makes different arenas for. Let's keep going to Pacific rest.
These were the tears neither of us shed. These were the lights we passed.
Thankfully lacking in explosions. Outside or inside. Smell of gasoline and no finery. Exit at the cloudmaker. You said when you were small you called it the cloudmaker. Refinery tower spouts still make clouds. You say you have stories to tell that would stop trains. Yes. Bring plants out of the earth. Rain collects in ditches and gutters. This rain will wash away shame. Past.
Imagine. Your stories will make the clouds made by factories cry.
.
Let's. Rolled together across interchanges. This will be unknown again. 10:23 on Saturday night. You go home. Me too. I'll take you yes up 59 down 45 down 225. And suddenly through your brakeless years. Your heart had no brakes. Your car neither. All those years in Arizona. Lulled into dust and stone sleep. Arriving to California coast. Startled by leaves and trees. A yearning for regreening. You awoke on the coast. You slept through the night. Earth makes different arenas for. Let's keep going to Pacific rest.
These were the tears neither of us shed. These were the lights we passed.
Thankfully lacking in explosions. Outside or inside. Smell of gasoline and no finery. Exit at the cloudmaker. You said when you were small you called it the cloudmaker. Refinery tower spouts still make clouds. You say you have stories to tell that would stop trains. Yes. Bring plants out of the earth. Rain collects in ditches and gutters. This rain will wash away shame. Past.
Imagine. Your stories will make the clouds made by factories cry.
.
Best 25
So remember the New York Times post about the 25 Best Books (American books) since 1981? No, well, look here.
Well, now Fringe Magazine has this Project to decide an Other best 25.
And so go vote on their page of their favorite 25 books since 1981. Even though I spend as much time as I can reading, I have only read like three of them. Shameful. Or something. A reflection of the numerosity of stories published and good ones at that.
All these lists makes me feel like Dave Eggers in this interview with Entertainment Weekly, yes, EW itself:
I don't really urge anything on anybody. It's always kind of embarrassing — I always know there are better books, and better things to do with one's time than to read anything I've written.
At least I read Dave's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genious. Though I couldn't afford a signed copy. Now I wanna read What is the What.
Well, now Fringe Magazine has this Project to decide an Other best 25.
And so go vote on their page of their favorite 25 books since 1981. Even though I spend as much time as I can reading, I have only read like three of them. Shameful. Or something. A reflection of the numerosity of stories published and good ones at that.
All these lists makes me feel like Dave Eggers in this interview with Entertainment Weekly, yes, EW itself:
I don't really urge anything on anybody. It's always kind of embarrassing — I always know there are better books, and better things to do with one's time than to read anything I've written.
At least I read Dave's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genious. Though I couldn't afford a signed copy. Now I wanna read What is the What.
Awaken
.
My dream despite constant chaos is to love you fully.
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My dream despite constant chaos is to love you fully.
.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
This Reading
So most of the people who read this blog either1. 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.
La inquietante (e internacional) semana de las mujeres traducidas
And repping the hombres! (Risa.) Lo más que puedo, que no es mucho. Soy el
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?
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?
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.