Normal Americans and Understanding Gertrude Stein

You're coming to the United States to lecture Ms. Stein, that implies there are many people who are going to be able to comprehend your ideas.

Look here, being intelligible is not what it seems. You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have a habit of talking, putting it in other words but I mean by understanding is enjoyment. If you enjoy it, you understand it and lots of people have enjoyed it so lots of people have understood it.

...

Well that's rather hard for us normal Americans to see.

What is a normal American? There are lots of quite normal who do see and how, but after all you must enjoy my writing and if you enjoy it you understand it. If you did not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it. There is the real answer.

Click here to listen to this too brief interview with Ms. Stein.



I recommend skipping to about 6:00 when Monica de la Torre starts reading.

No creo que ningún escritor joven se proponga escribir libros como los míos, y por cierto que no se lo deseo. En cambio, sí me gustaría llegar a ser un buen ejemplo de vocación, de compromiso con la literatura, y de empeño en la busca de libertad.

- César Aira

The other day I was driving down the highway and having a moment of flight. A moment when the car lifts up off of the rails of the highway and merges out into the stratosphere. I was clanging from one side of the lane to the other. Invisible metallic barriers containing the vehicle. I looked to my left and to my right. There were two cars on each side. One was a metallic green beetle with a blue and red stripe down the middle part of it. A large fake plastic sunflower installed by the company in the dashboard. The girl driving the car was strange looking, a fringe of dyed black hair hanging over her forehead and covering her eyes ever so slightly. A shitzu was sitting on her lap. The shitzu looked up and said, “The back of my throat aches. I have the flu.” She was flying too. Her beetle. On the other side, a bearded thirty-something man with brownish skin was driving an old Honda Accord. His beard was not trimmed. The hairs crawled down his neck and combined with his chest hairs, an exposed rug emerging from his V-neck T-shirt. The man leered at me and pointed at his laptop on his knees. He seemed to want me to look at the computer. I looked over and saw there was an email there on the screen. It said, “The back of my throat aches. I have not taken care of it properly.” I had no idea what to tell them. What medication should I recommend. Who should I send them to. And at that I lowered myself down to the ground. Pulled off the highway and into a stripmall to rest and gather my thoughts. A woman approached my car obviously insane ranting about a night of misfortune being at her door. I looked left and right attempted to ignore her. I wondered what pill she could take. I hustled into the store and bought a sandwich and drank a glass of free water that tasted of lemonade. The woman outside moved on to other victims.

Trees


This is a tree.
Not a tree that grows from the ground.
I made it.
But it has leaves.
Upside down.
Who will turn it rightsideup.
Which way is up.
Which way is down.
How does one know when anything began or ended.
How does anything come around.
In Korea, the trees look like this:


Don't Participate in the Death of the Subjunctive

The English language has but three moods, and one of them—the subjunctive—is dying. Unlike their abused and misunderstood sister, the indicative and the imperative live lives of luxury, basking in the certainty that they will never be without work, as humans will always need either to be doing something or to be ordering someone else to do it for them.

But not so for the lowly subjunctive, that Cinderella of moods: trampled, despised, ignored, and yet imbued with such fragile beauty that even the most unregenerate misogrammatist would pause if he knew how near his carelessness was bringing her to the brink of oblivion.

So to cross the US Mexico land border now, supposedly all US citizens need a passport. But it seems like if you are a citizen at least you can still make it without one. This post at Across the Border talks about it. It's also my experience. Just FYI.

Hay cuatro partes del video en Youtube. Vale la pena ver toda la entrevista. Es un encanto el Dani. Y me encantan sus libros favoritos: todos los libros de Aira y Mujeres que aman demasiado. A huevo.

Work is not a shame. Wealth is not a shame. Lying is.

- Eileen Myles


I hear this song a few weeks ago for the first time on 107.5 Tejano radio in San Anto. All the gente calling in to say how good it is. I swear they're playing it every hour on the hour. Then this viejito calls in and says, "He sings alright, yknow, he sings alright, but you know what he oughta stick to what's his. They got their music y'know, they should sing it. Not try to sing our music." The old man is getting upset. And the Tejano DJ's try to calm him down, tell him it's okay, that toda la gente's digging the song. The old man saysGeorge Strait doesn't roll his R's right and he says Strait corta sus palabras en español. Que a él no le gusta que la gente corte las palabras. The DJ's say a lot of Tejanos cortan their words too, y'know? But the viejito doesn't care. He just keeps saying, "We got our stuff. They got theirs. It oughta stay that way."

Let's write like we were in the thick. That gray mass of space and air bamboo and dust. We can't float long no we crash into the mist. I wouldn't have ever made the team. La madre y su hija hoy en la mañana las vi frente al Family Dollar. Estaban llorando. The mom obviously struck a nerve. When we all went spinning out to the margins. Estás tan lleno de emoción que you're gonna burst. I saw you there at the bus stop or where it used to be before they took out the bench and left two square holes where the posts used to be. Me aburro tanto cuando se duerman los niños. The girl's favorite star is Johnny Depp but all the homies she ever gets with don't live up to her high standards. Those guys couldn't swashbuckle, just crybabies. At the corner at the taquería we go there to pig out on Sundays when mom's not trying to cook. Johnny likes his chicken nuggets with syrup. Stop. The crickets idle on bubble gum wrappers. The dog's weights depresses the porch's foundation. The weeds grow up in the edges where the cars can't park. We wandered through like kids again, wondering about babies and burrs.

This would be somewhere between I-10 and Nogalitos. Roll highway roll on all sides of the little house. Outside the light glinting off of windshields and paper. As the day emerges before the heat rolls through. Dogs linger on bent wooden porches and contribute to decay and sinking. Each step pushes the earth lower. Flea-bitten bodies invade the boundaries burrow in the soil unroot plants and futures. Despiértate. Ya viene el sol por la ventanilla. Ya es el momento. Stepping out a relief from the heightening sun. A minute to gather one's thoughts en la mecedora before the everyday flood of words and obligations. Stretching legs out to sit ponder basil and ironworks. How little knowledge there is about dusty streets and early morning construction work. And even with so little room for stragglers. Twinkling of metal hummingbirds and a far off drone of weedwackers. A churning before the launch of day.