Let's go. I'm ready now. You have five minutes to get dressed and then we're leaving. If you don't shut up, I'm gonna walk out and never speak to you again. That dog at my feet is bothering me. Put on my shoes. They're on the floor by the rice paper. My grandmother is waiting. Hurry up. I want to go see my grandmother. And your daddy too. Give me your hand. Like this spread your palm out wide. Hold your hand open. Now grab my hand and I'm getting up. Help me. You're only welcome here because you're my kin and I have to accept you. This is the most attention I've had in years. The lights are off now aren't they. Now hurry up. I didn't ask about the day or the night. Let's go already. We're on the road to Houston. I have to get to the garage apartment. You have five minutes to get ready and you should put on your clothes because if you're not ready I'm leaving anyway. Did someone pick the kids up from school today. I'm ready for blue to be going now. We have to be a ready for the literary party. The railroad was following the musical instrument several months ago because it was raining so much. Who are you. My eyes aren't so good anymore. You are on young people are on their way to being established. I'm ready to leave here. Let's just walk around the bed out there and then into the circle back there. Where are we now. Right I know where we are. Not far. Drive me home. Come on. I wanna go to bed. You don't understand. You children make me nervous. I want one of the boys to take me down to the apartment. Let us go on. Put your nickel in it and start watching the birds. Do you have the keys. I have to get home already. Let's go.

The faggot's gotta be perfectly straight.




El puño de palitos tiene que ser derechito, derechito.

Tamaño Full



Pues entonces me dices que tú crees que sí es verdad que dentro de unos años ya se arreglará todo eso, que pues ya me hacen ciudadano, verdad, o sea que sí no tarda demasiado verdad, una decada o algo.

You gotta turn that beating stick into a walking stick.

Pero pues la verdad es que el chileno ahora ya nos hemos enemistado y pues ya sabes.

You gotta come in on it sometime.

No puedo creer que sea así como tú dices como una ola, pero pues sí como tú dices pues.

I've been looking for a seeinguy dog.

Me dijo que ahora está hasta dando pinches clases del español y pues yo digo que bueno pues es un logro pues.

I found out and like the government, gotta talk with them just so they can open the way and let me buy one a them Guatemala houses.

Sí pues no tiene que ser mañana pero con tal de que un día me caso con una ciudadana y pues a ver que tanto me abren la puerta.

I went to Oaxaca there were teachers in the streets like Fuck you.

La verdad quiere que regrese pero ni modo.

All the Latin countries, like an economic opportunity.

Ni pa tanto guey, como si fuera mucho.


Sanity, Lynching and the Story of Joe Horn

Last month, an Anglo man, Joe Horn, shot two undocumented, Afro-Colombians in their backs, killing them, as they robbed his neighbor's empty home in Pasadena, Texas. Pasadena is an industrial suburb of Houston, full of oil refineries and chemical plants, with a shrinking white population and surging Latino population. According to the census, in the last fifteen years, the town has gone from over 70% Anglo to almost 70% Latino. Well, the white folks are getting restless. Afraid, enraged.


Now we have a one man lynch mob, supported by a chorus of frightened, angry people. To hear what this one-man lynch mob sounds like in action, click here to listen the 911 call as he takes his vigilante (in)justice. I have to warn you the tapes are frightening. Turns out the police were there already when Horn decided to take matters into his own, fallible hands.


And many herald Horn as a hero, worthy of praise. Do we not have a system of justice in this country? Courts and due process? Since when is it every man for himself? Is murder really the appropriate response when no lives are at risk?


It seems pretty simple.


Strike out with rage.




This is what happens.




Violence breeds more of itself. Off-kilter. Madness. Makes sense though deeply. Time to brush up on the history of lynching in Texas. Nothing new here unfortunately.


.

Language as a whole is threatened.






Not only the video but also quotes from an interview with Moroccan poet (writing in Arabic) Mohammed Bennis:


Language as a whole is threatened. Threatened with becoming abbreviated to simple things for political or economic discourse.

*

It is possible for us to notice when we watch the news that all newscasts have the same language, whereas poems do not all have the same language. So, there is the language of profit. The language of poetry, however, is in opposition to this profit, and it does not enter into the logic of the market. For this reason it preserves meaning. And it leaves human experience, through language, as a live experience.


A bio of Bennis is here. The whole interview is here on the website for the journal Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, which is out of London and dedicated to publishing Arabic literature in translation. Here is a link to a bilingual version of a poem of Bennis.

Notes Prior to an Impending Catastrophe

Dr. Awkward is a palindrome. Minus the period and capitol letters.

°

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

.


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.


.

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.

.



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.

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.

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.