On Generosity

Been thinking a lot about practical ways to build literary community. How to make literary work and life engaging and fun and meaningful and not endlessly ambitious or ego-driven. Barbara Jane Reyes gives some great advice on the Harriet blog about generosity and literary activism. Here's her advice in a shortened form:

1) Don't be shy or reticent about putting your ideas out there. We’re schooled (formally or informally) in poetry and poetics, so we should be able to articulate our thoughts on specific works and movements. So how about this: write articles, papers, essays, interviews, reviews of books written by members of your many and expanding community/ies. Seek publication for these (what good are they, sitting in your hard drive?).

2) Publicize and attend literary events that are not your own, encourage others to as well. Write about these events (not what you wore to the event, not what you ate before the event), and post videos and/or photos from these events on your blog, FB, on Flickr and YouTube.

3) Curate and host events that do not feature you. Feature folks other than your friends. Give emerging writers the opportunity to read alongside established ones.

4) Edit publications featuring writers who are not you, and instead, actively go after those whose works interest and/or challenge you. Again, take a chance and include emerging writers, and feature them alongside established ones.

5) Lead/conduct/teach local, affordable community writing workshops.

I want to do all of these things more and more and more. I found similar advice from another poet, Hoa Nguyen in an interview on Bookslut:

I think it would have helped [when I was young and starting out] to hear that poetry is about engagement, not fame, not recognition. That it is most often defined by how you engage with the conversation of poetry with your contemporaries -- and with the dead -- and to do so from a position of generosity.

Today I am scared. And enraged. 145 bodies have now been found in San Fernando, Tamaulipas in mass graves.

All reports indicate people are being taken off buses between Matamoros and the rest of Tamaulipas by drug cartel members, slaughtered and thrown into mass graves. Hundreds of suitcases are stranded in Matamoros, the belongings of people who didn't make it to their destinations. The worst thing is that none of the bus companies even reported the kidnappings and assaults on their buses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some reports are saying police officers themselves were partially responsible. Now bus companies are canceling routes. My guess is some companies were covering it up and also distrustful of local authorities and their power to resolve the crimes.

I've seen the "Bienvenidos a San Fernando" sign on many, many occasions. I've personally driven this route or taken buses on this road countless times riding between Houston and Tampico. In fact, buses leave every day to travel this route from my neighborhood in the East End. I don't think I will ever be able to look at this welcome sign in San Fernando again without cringing. I love the land though in this part of the Gulf Coast: flat and full of scrub brush. In the distance, low mountains. An unpretentious, human-sized landscape. And the fact that I and my loved ones have spent so much time on these roads means the violence hits home. It could have been me or a friend or a loved one in those mass graves. But something tells me if it was me with my white skin and U.S. national privileges, there would have been a lot more reporting on my disappearance. The media wouldn't have waited until bodies were found to begin their reporting.

Today, I'm angry and scared and deeply saddened by this news. I just needed to say something in the face of this continuing, daily violence. Even if my words are entirely insufficient to deal with the complexity and horror of this violence.

Last night I went to see artist Ken Gonzales-Day talk at the UC San Diego Art Gallery about his Erased Lynching project. He spoke about his research into the lynchings of Mexican-Americans and other ethnic groups in the Southwest, in California, Texas and along the border. He was able to document hundreds of lynchings and other findings in the book, Lynchings in the West 1830-1935. His artistic project consists of erasing images of lynched bodies but leaving the trees, the audience, the public, the land. The images are haunting and troubling, forcing the viewer to see in an entirely different way, aware of the erasure at the heart of the photo. Gonzales-Day said he didn't want to show to the bodies of lynched people because he wasn't interested either in re-victimizing them or in being known as an artist who exploited images of suffering. Rather, his goal was to make them present in their absence, critiquing the erasure of lynchings in the history of the Southwest.

After listening to him last night and now reading about the San Fernando mass graves, I go back to similar questions. What bodies do we see? Images of the dead in the previous San Fernando mass graves holding 72 Central and South American bodies flooded the media a few months ago. The images of the alleged Zeta perpetrators of the more recent killings are now being circulated.

I have to ask: Which images and bodies are erased? Which are remembered? What do we really see? What do we lose track of? What memories are held in the landscape? What bodies are under the ground beneath our feet, unremembered?

Long Live the Black Minutes!

The Black Minutes has made the Longlist for the 2011 Independent Booksellers Choice Awards.

“We had a last minute rush of votes and it got pretty exciting,” explained Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson. “It was so close that we wound up extending the list to 36 titles from 29 different independent presses.” Johnson said votes came in from many of the country’s most prestigious bookstores, including St. Marks Book Shop and Word in New York, 57th Street Books in Chicago, City Lights and Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, and Book Soup and Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

Read more here.

(A suggestion: Might be a good idea to mention the translators of books on the Longlist. Just sayin'.)

All of my written life in 355.9 MB.







Sometimes my own smallness scares me.

Turista Libre Goes to the CECUT

In the last year and a half I've spent in Tijuana, I haven't said very much about the city or about the political situation here. There never seems to be a shortage of people willing to expound at length about the city: its strange cultural mix, its violence and its sharp contradictions of First and Third World clashing in one locale. Inevitably all the clichés come out: from postmodern laboratory to den of vice, from beautiful Baja (the happiest place on Earth) to scary TJ (the most violent place on Earth next to Juárez).

In the last year though, I've watched Turista Libre and its tours of Tijuana, lead by Tijuana resident gringo Derrick Chinn. By its own definition, it's a "series of atypical international day tours in Tijuana, Mexico, a caravan that trounces around the city in search of the overlooked and underrated." The mission is simple: "To get foreigners into Tijuana but away from Revolucion. To introduce them the side of the city their local counterparts live on a daily basis. To live for a day as a local in a city that was built for tourists." Definitely an interesting project and one worth watching.

Last weekend, Turista Libre organized a tour of the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT) and its new exhibition, Obra Negra. I wasn't sure how to respond to this decision prior to the tour, but I've spent some time thinking about it and now I have some ideas.

I thought I'd share some information for everyone who went on the Turista Libre tour or is thinking of going to check out the CECUT: I think everyone should be aware that many Tijuana artists have observed a boycott of the CECUT for almost the last two years. Leading artists and human rights activists originally called for the boycott for a number of reasons. The current director of the CECUT, Virgilio Muñoz, was previously arrested for accepting bribes from human smugglers when he was the head of the Institute of Migration in Tijuana. As human rights activists have noted, Muñoz was never tried on these charges due to a web of connections that allowed him to escape scot free. When faced with demands to step down as director last year, Muñoz lashed out at his critics, calling them "more students than artists" and insulting them as inhabitants of "small worlds" while saying that he moved in larger worlds. Perhaps most unfortunately, there has been no response to the demands of the people calling for Muñoz's resignation, no dialogue, no open discussion and little media attention to the issue. In other words, no democratic process at all.

Recently, a number of artists have also criticized the way the Obra Negra exhibition was organized and curated as it does not include the entirety of the artistic communities of Tijuana, since a large number of Tijuana artists are currently boycotting the CECUT. In addition, a number of artists' names have been used to promote the exhibit after having made explicit requests not to be included in the exhibit.

Unfortunately, these issues have not been well-reported by the
media either in Tijuana or in San Diego. I wonder if any of this was discussed on Turista Libre's tour. I hope someone brought it up and I hope there was some discussion of these issues. In my opinion, if we, as gringos, are going to come to Tijuana and involve ourselves with its communities, we have a responsibility to inform ourselves of the complex situation on the ground here, as difficult or contested as it may be.

(All photos are from the Turista Libre Facebook page.)



My review of the new Norton Anthology of Latino Literature is on-line at the Literal reviews blog:

The new Norton Anthology of Latino Literature has already unleashed and will undoubtably continue to provoke signigicant debate, brow-beating, anger, emotion, territorial defense, criticism, passionate displays of righteousness, tears, boredom, gossip, scrutiny, love and enlightenment (among other things). This process of upheaval is positive. A Norton anthology has a certain weight to it, both physical (2,600+ onion-skin pages in this case) and intellectual (as a tool of canon-formation). While there have been other solid, rigorous anthologies of U.S. Latino literature by respected critics, Norton anthologies have always held a special place in American literary in-fighting, perdón, discussion.

Check out the whole review here.

You never ever, no matter what you accomplish in life, you never become larger than the people who help you to get there.



Un dibujo de Jean Louis Berlandier.

Lo amo.

La leyenda al pie de la foto dice

Eso dice: "Barra del Rio de Panuco con el fortin q hicieron los españoles en 1829"


Como dije, lo amo.





PD Les dedico esta imagen a todos mis queridos que residen en el antiguo Nuevo Santander, especialmente los del puerto más reconocido de la ya inexistente provincia.

TF: Is nonaction an art? A technique? A practice? Maybe it’s simply more of a discipline, in the ethical sense. Can I allow my work to emerge without overinterfering with it, fabricating my ideas about it, growing attached to outcome, the very future of it? Can I let it become what it is, despite the fragments, nonsense, new-sense, noise? It’s simple: don’t force things. Don’t have a Big Idea. In life as well as in writing, can I minimize unnecessary interference, unnecessary aggression? Can I open myself up beyond my own comfort? Can I abide with allowance and impartiality, two disciplines of nonaction?

- Thalia Field, more here.


Really? No one from the Consulate speaks better in Spanish? ¡Por favor!

(Este video, se lo dedico a todos los que me han mandado o que me han platicado de los videos de López Dóriga. La bronca es binacional.)

Some Quotes from Pages of the Notanda of Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip

192

there are two poems — the one i want to write and the one writing itself

195

Within the boundaries established by the words and their meanings there are silences; within each silence is the poem, which is revealed only when the text is fragmented and mutilated,

the ancients walk within us.

196

the metamorphosis occurs when the lower case "silence" of the colonised becomes the fertile Silence of the Traveler, a Silence that arises from a rooting in tradition and a knowing of what the colonial script was all about.

197

The language...promulgated the non-being of African peoples and I distrust its order, which hides disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its rationality, which is simultaneously irrational.

In...disorder and illogic is the non-telling of the story that must be told.

198

Int he present case I use the text of the legal report almost as a painter uses paint or a sculptor stone — the material with which I work being preselected and limited. Henry Moore observed that his manner of working was to remove all extraneous material to allow the figure that was "locked" in the stone to reveal itself.

199

I want poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem so as to release the story that cannot be told, but which, through not-telling, will tell itself.

The story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally. I resist the temptation of trying to cleanse it through ordering techniques and practices, for the story must tell itself, even if it is a partial story; it must be allowed to be and not be. The half-tellings, and un-tellings force me to enter the zone of contamination to complete it; in so doing I risk being contaminated by the prescribed language of the law — by language in fact.

Scatterthoughts on one by Jen Hofer

if a wall is a river

a bit of interference

flowing past the checkpoint

makes the image accurate


How can blockage or obstruction communicate more, or more effectively than clarity? In one, Jen Hofer posits: how can a wall be a river? I suppose the reverse would be more clear, more obvious: the question of a river being a wall. This is something the media talks about ad nauseum: how a river, for example, the Río Bravo/Río Grande becomes literally a wall, a border, a division. But I think postulating the opposite here brings up this pertinent question: how can a wall be a river? How can we take apart a wall and make it a river? What does this thinking or languaging do to the wall itself? And so then if a wall is a river, then a bit of interference could actually flow through the wall, past the checkpoint and Jen is letting us know that the image could be more accurate then, with this interference flowing through it and preventing it from being altogether clear.

Jen is thinking a lot about what the city feels like in wartime, how the days have "gone lax with likes with unrequited ease as there is in this metropolis such a dizzy bungalow sense of radiating spokes with no center to sing of." There is a horror in this distance from the war, a horror in the distance from the suffering upon which our days of ease are based.

The lines are often interrupted, broken, sometimes by dashes or white space or parentheses, and also by challenging paratactic leaps from one conglomeration of words to the next. There is so much beauty in the leaps, in the dispersive moments when (as if a bomb has gone off) the words scatter across the page and then (un)expectedly reunite at the close of a section into a tight stanza that seems to re-stab in forceful and gut-wrenching ways.

Loved it.

Dusie!

Check out the Dusie Kollektiv profile in Openned Poetry Zine. A few snippets:

The Dusie Kollektiv, founded in 2005 by Susana Gardner of Zurich, Switzerland, an extension of her online poetry journal Dusie and the imprint Dusie Books, focuses on the work of innovative writers both established and emerging. The Dusie Kollektiv Projekt marries several attentions of its founder: the hand-made book, the development of a poetry community, and the gift-economy ... Each member of the collective produces two versions of a chapbook: a limited edition of hand- crafted chapbooks sent out to every other member of the collective, with free digital pdf chapbooks available via the Dusie website: dusie.org.

Read the whole article here.

Thrilled to be participating this year, even though unfortunately it's the last year of the Kollektiv exchange. Planning out my book-object-artist-author-found-gift-thing now.

3,217 new students from the U.S. attending Tijuana schools. Either they were deported themselves or followed parents who were deported back to Mexico. Article in Spanish here.