Just beginning to plant my feet on the ground anew. Ford me over.
Ten years after I moved back to Texas, I find myself moving back to Texas.
Both times I left California, set out from the glistening, gleaming, glinting green-infested coastline and rode over the mountains into the gray harsh lines of the desert, wondering what the hell I was doing. What makes a person go from such a spoiling landscape into such a trying one.
Ten years ago I stopped the car to take pictures as I crossed the line into Texas from New Mexico. A huge stone monument there with a lone star on the top. Then after it a sign of welcome. Today I took the same picture, but this time I didn't stop. I just slowed the car down and snapped the photo at just the right moment. The photo worked:
After crossing, piles of tumbleweeds gathered under a highway overpass on I-10. Three huge piles on each side. Like an intergalactic superhero or TXDOT had raked them into orderly piles awaiting pickup by the highway tumbleweed patrol.
Almost all of the palm trees in El Paso have died. A long freeze this past winter killed most of them off. Barrelling down asphalt, the post-like, previously-palm sentries are another welcome sign to add to the first. This ain't California no more, they say. Winters freeze the leaves off palms. Summers scald their dead fingers into crusty, crackling gray. Extremes. The way things collapse.
Essays have a function. An essay is an invitation to think about a particular something from a different vantage point. An essay argues or expounds or explains or thinks through a particular something. I am always shocked when I hear people read this blog, this old form of communication, this old man's internet game. This isn't a Tumblr or a tweet. Let's write essays that invite people into the game, posts that allow us to explore together, explode old ideas together. Let's write essays that think through things in writing, evidence of my thinking through things in writing. So that you can think through these same things in reading.
Beginning in Arizona, huge smokeclouds rose up from the mountains in the distance. Plumes of white (or green? or brown?) rising up like some kind of strange bomb had gone off on the other side of the blue-brown range. The color of the smoke changed as it floated out and dispersed over the flatlands. Darker, dustier, sandier. Mixing with dust devils. The sky became divided in two: the green, brown chalky grey on one side, Martian and desolate and eerie:
On the other the mountains gold and green and dead-grass yellow set off from the blue, blue sky blue. The highway cutting down the middle.
Colors are a challenge for me. How do I write about colors when I don't even know what each one is called? You have a different name for these colors than I do. My words for colors are bulky and primary, rough and preliminary. I'm constantly unsure of these words I put to color, the names I come up for them. A certain kind of blindness. Steadily wondering if the color I have named is not the one you would pick for it. And you are correct. I am wrong usually.
How do I write about feelings when I don't even know what each one is called? The same thinking-through goes here. I make up names for emotions, yet your happy is not my happy. Your sad isn't my sad. You are correct. I am wrong usually.
These words are bulky and primary, rough and preliminary.
As the Franklin Mountains rose up on the horizon, I knew I'd stumbled back to an intimate space, a familiarity. Sitting on the patio with a hot wind blowing down on me. My lips chapped. My mouth dried out. My I made different by this searing wind.
Maybe ten years from now I will be moving back to Texas again.
(Este es el tipo de post "personal" de blog que me hace sentir sumamente incómodo. Ni modo. Ahí le voy publicando más cosas en este espacio. A veces me vienen unas ganas y qué le puedo hacer.)
Assorted Items of Much Interest
1.
Erica Mena write about choosing only books published in small presses for her new Translation and Art class:
Teachers are in positions of power, too, because we can create a (sometimes minor) demand for certain kinds of texts, and use our assigned books to support independent presses who are more likely to publish works in translation, and works in translation that challenge the market-based norms for translation. So I decided, back in October, that I would only assign books that were published recently by small presses.
So smart this decision. Go here to see the list of incredible books she is teaching at Iowa.
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Need to read this book on Tim Dlugos.
From a review on Bookforum:
It might seem, on opening A Fast Life, that Tim Dlugos was born fully formed from the head of Frank O’Hara. Dlugos was undeniably an original, but his sophistication and finesse—acquired while he was still a student at La Salle College and immersing himself in the work of the New York School poets—showed from the very beginning, when he started writing at the age of twenty in 1970.
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Eliot Weinberger at the Quarterly Conversation talks about translation and wars and writing serial poem-essays hybrids:
Well, that statement was made twenty years ago, during the time of ethnic wars and before the rise of the unimaginable Internet. And, in American poetry, a time when the poets—with the exception of a few old hands like Rothenberg—had more or less stopped translating poetry. As I’ve written elsewhere, translation flourishes when there is a national inferiority complex or national embarrassment, and in the sense of the latter the Bush years saw a boom in translation. (Though shockingly not a boom in political poetry—another topic.) Intellectuals finally became sick of their American selves, and started wondering what other people were thinking.
+++
Counterpath in Denver seems like an awesome place. And awesome model for lit-art space.
And super cool Open Door series on the Harriet blog "showcasing performance, scholarship, and engagement outside the usual boundaries of slams, workshops, and book publications."
+++
Neo-benshi goodness.
Erica Mena write about choosing only books published in small presses for her new Translation and Art class:
Teachers are in positions of power, too, because we can create a (sometimes minor) demand for certain kinds of texts, and use our assigned books to support independent presses who are more likely to publish works in translation, and works in translation that challenge the market-based norms for translation. So I decided, back in October, that I would only assign books that were published recently by small presses.
So smart this decision. Go here to see the list of incredible books she is teaching at Iowa.
+++
Need to read this book on Tim Dlugos.
From a review on Bookforum:
It might seem, on opening A Fast Life, that Tim Dlugos was born fully formed from the head of Frank O’Hara. Dlugos was undeniably an original, but his sophistication and finesse—acquired while he was still a student at La Salle College and immersing himself in the work of the New York School poets—showed from the very beginning, when he started writing at the age of twenty in 1970.
+++
Eliot Weinberger at the Quarterly Conversation talks about translation and wars and writing serial poem-essays hybrids:
Well, that statement was made twenty years ago, during the time of ethnic wars and before the rise of the unimaginable Internet. And, in American poetry, a time when the poets—with the exception of a few old hands like Rothenberg—had more or less stopped translating poetry. As I’ve written elsewhere, translation flourishes when there is a national inferiority complex or national embarrassment, and in the sense of the latter the Bush years saw a boom in translation. (Though shockingly not a boom in political poetry—another topic.) Intellectuals finally became sick of their American selves, and started wondering what other people were thinking.
+++
Counterpath in Denver seems like an awesome place. And awesome model for lit-art space.
And super cool Open Door series on the Harriet blog "showcasing performance, scholarship, and engagement outside the usual boundaries of slams, workshops, and book publications."
+++
Neo-benshi goodness.
The Morning News is Exciting
A review I wrote of The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi just went live at the Quarterly Conversation. This book moved me in so many ways to rethink issues of translation and political engagement and poetics:Translation is at the center of the whole text. It becomes a means of searching for home, of narrating the inability to find a home: “What is truly home? I am here, but I remember there.” For Choi, translation has become an activity inseparable from her own writing; in fact, Choi seems to be questioning this very duality of translation vs “one’s own work.” Her work provokes questions: what is the difference in process between translation and writing based on appropriated text? How does collaboration and miscommunication come to form the basis of a poetics that can no longer distinguish clearly between the original and the derivative? Translation is a necessity to communication, especially due to the continuous repetition of scenes of leaving and returning. In this process, translation is at once mundane (“Translation must remain as ordinary as the bed” in “Petite Manifesto”), but is also not to be trusted—an inscrutable tool of imperialism and colonialism ( it is, in fact, the bed, “where I am likely to die”). In “Diary of Return” Choi boils it down to: “Translation for me is a form of exile and empire.” Choi is able to contain both of these realities of translation in her own writing: translation as liberatory both creatively and politically and also translation as contaminated by imperial conquest and contemporary power imbalances.
Read the whole review here.
Don't cross me. Or at least if you cross me, take pictures. Or at least if you cross me, cross me backwards. Flow upstream into my rank intestines. Snap photos and videos the whole time. This would be the colon. An ultimate expression of dirty, messy privilege. Or is this the rectum. And the fetid stream of dank and dirt. A tidal pool of waste. One of the tourists was one of the crossers and he accidentally dropped a water bottle in the brown liquid and left it there, hurrying off into the culvert. The weather balloon launched to take photos every fifteen minutes from the air, but quickly wrapped around a surveillance tower. No, it wasn't a water bottle, it was a bottle of grape-flavored clear liquid. The Mexican migra pronounced my name correctly. Pluker. Could we respell all words to make them more phonetical in all languages. What would phonetical mean in all languages. When you die, everyone agrees you should head into the light. The light represents the better place, the heaven. The performative moment that captured the imagination of the news stream. We massed in neat lines, organized by the alphabet, ordered by our first names. James, Jen, Jen, Jennifer, John, Josh, Julie. The J's. The discomfort of privilege. The grasping of it. The impossibility of losing it. The constancy with which we mourn privilege. The challenge to it. Feathery cobwebs in the corners. A medium-size carapaced beetle wandering between our feet. Does physicality accomplish anything in the end. How do we dress up the disaster, ready it for the party, fund its every need, nourish its every whim. On the other side, in the light, a tiny campsite. I love you, the teddy bear's stomach says.
La nostalgia se adelantó.
Funny
A photo by Tabea Huth of an urban beach boardwalk development with a mural of a pink tree.
Una foto de Tabea Huth de un malecón urbano y playero con un mural de un árbol color rosa.
A poem by Lester Robles O'Connor in response to the photo.
Un poema de Lester Robles O'Connor como respuesta a la foto.
A translation into Spanish by John Pluecker of the poem.
Una traducción al español por John Pluecker del poema.
Where does originality begin? / ¿Dónde empieza la originalidad?
También leeré textos más recientes que he escrito en los últimos dos años en Tijuana como parte de la maestría que hice en la UC San Diego. (Hombrecitos que caminan de la mano y ríos que crean espacios y juegos peligrosos con el género.)
Proyectaré imágenes de los dos proyectos durante la lectura. Los textos vienen siendo en español e inglés con unos toques de francés y karankawa.
Espero verlos allí.
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Please come out to a reading of texts from a new chapbook, Undone, which is being published as part of the Dusie Kollektiv 2011. The book includes photos and texts from a project-the Catalogue of Feeling-I did in 2008. (Chairs that tumble over and ripping pants and emotional rain.)
I'll also be reading more recent texts I've written in the last two years in Tijuana as part of the MFA I did at UC San Diego. (Little men walking hand in hand and rivers that make spaces and dangerous gender-play.)
I'll be projecting images from both projects during the reading. The texts have ended up being in Spanish and English with some occasional flourishes in French and Karankawa.
I hope you can make it.
but I'm not better without you. I
don't want to be. I don't.
- Dahlia Molloy,
a.k.a. Cherien Rich
played by Minnie Driver
in The Riches
Hay que reconocer:
The Detail Collector puts it well:
in the wake of all-day coming-alive returning-to-self laughter
what i presumed to be mostly dead
turns out
is thriving
on the other side of the border
what i presumed to be mostly dead
turns out
is thriving
on the other side of the border
Amen.
Cerebral + Sexy!
Cerebral in San Diego:
NEW WRITING SERIES PRESENTS
UCSD DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE MFA GRADUATING CLASS OF 2011:
COURTNEY KILIAN, JOHN PLUECKER, and KAITLIN SOLIMINE
Three Readings
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Visual Arts Facility, Performance Space
Free and open to the public
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...y sexy en Tijuana:
¿O será al revés? Or is it the other way around?
¡Vengan! Come!
Porque hay que partir de un principio
esencial, que el mundo en que vivimos es
inventado. No creo que el arte revele la
realidad, al contrario, la inventa, porque la
realidad es intraducible.
esencial, que el mundo en que vivimos es
inventado. No creo que el arte revele la
realidad, al contrario, la inventa, porque la
realidad es intraducible.
- Ferreira Gullar
Every queer kid should have a queer mom.
I remember wandering through a community garden full of flowers, then sitting on a bucket. A community garden. Brushing up against mint and breathing it deep. For the first time it seemed. Or were we sitting on a little bench in the middle of the riotous greens, a place to sit and wait for the feelings to come. Someone to sit me down and listen, to help me to make sense of an increasingly complicated world, growing more and and more tiny and suffocating by the minute. Stuck in the spirals in my own brain, dealing with this different me poking his/her head out.
Suddenly, an older lesbian had invited me to her garden, to walk around, to dig in the dirt, to plant some vegetables and flowers. I still don't really know what exactly was happening to me at that time. (My memories are difficult to access and confused in the best of times, but with the added thickness of trauma, I have little sense of what happened in reality or if reality stopped existing for a while. I think a gap grew between that thing called reality and my brain.)
This woman walked me through the garden and showed me the roses (this is a rose), the peonies (this is a peony), the tulips (this is a tulip), the tiny spring buds (this is a bud). I had forgotten the sky was so large and so blue. I had forgotten the wind was blowing through the trees, that somewhere thousands of feet above the earth cumulus clouds were rearranging and rain was forming to nourish these plants.
For the first time, on that bucket in that garden, crying out of my eyes and nose and mouth, I received the gift of queer intimacy, of queer support and queer love. An elder stepped into the void in my world and the void in my sense of self and community. An elder named what was happening to me. A person gave names to my fears, my worries, my tears and my struggles. A woman helped me to recognize my own softness, my own woundedness and to help me put myself back together again. No, not back together again, she helped me to be all my pieces, beautiful and broken and solid and mushy and green, for the very first time.
This patient lesbian
called a punch a punch.
A rose a rose. A death
threat a death threat.
A blade of grass a blade
of grass. Homelessness
homelessness. Mulch
mulch. Abuse abuse.
Suddenly, I wasn't the insane one or at least the only insane one. Maybe we were all crazy in this fucked up world. And maybe that was okay. But for once, I wasn't the person at fault, the guilty party, the one to blame. She wouldn't let me blame myself anymore for what was happening to me.
For once, I burrowed my hands in the earth, got dirty, allowed myself to breathe again, to forgive myself, to be queer for myself and for her, most deeply, for her, for an us that I was experiencing for the first, earth-shaking time.
I wish every queer kid could have a queer mother to guide him, shelter her, lead xer through the weeds (this is a weed) and the lavender (this is lavender), through the rosemary (this is rosemary) and the irisis (this is an iris). To name the things as they are. To point out the beauty in broken things. To imagine how we might live without being fixed.
Happy Mother's Day, Linda (this is Linda).
A short film for Mother's Day by Ashvin Kini. The end! The spinning at 6:05. Brilliant.
Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions
The first book-length translation of the work of Mexican feminist activist and social critic Marta Lamas is now out. Translated by your truly.The book is the first in a series called Theory in the World edited by Gayatri Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, dedicated to translating, publishing and disseminating theory from the Global South. As the info page about the series states:
Exciting!