The days I don't check email or Facebook until the afternoon are always my happiest.

Even happier though are the days when I don't check email or Facebook at all.

Maybe that's a sign of something.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

- Ray Bradbury

(Also robbed from Lola's blog)

En esta ciudad "hacer nada" es pecado, entonces, parafraseando a Aaron Kunin: el mayor esfuerzo es aparentar el esfuerzo. La gente se gasta aparentando no tener tiempo para nada. Rigoberta Menchú, una vez que la entrevisto el poeta Alan Mills, dijo "Bueno, como usted sabe, uno es el que construye el tiempo". Uno también construye la falta de tiempo. ¿Quién nos programó para vivir como unas máquinas y después divertirnos como salvajes? todo eufóricos, todo de prisa. La vida para mí es mejor despacio. Cuando uso un reloj, lo arruino. Así que, una o dos horas de mi tiempo procuro vivirlas como si fuera un animal o una fruta: lentamente.

- Dolores Dorantes en su blog

En el DF II

The rain just started. Just like every day here. It starts at this hour or around this hour every day: 3pm-ish. The day starts off sunny and bright and always ends drenched in rain, cloudy and with an encroaching chill in the air. Here.

Here is a strange word, charged with meanings and yet meaningless until you know which here is being referenced. Here in this case is 2000 meters above sea level.

Yesterday evening at the Casa Vecina, I saw a movie of the same name: 2000 mil metros (sobre el nivel del mar). A psychodrama in which a wealthy owner of a beautiful Roma-esque apartment in Mexico City subtly manipulates and degrades a cast of three lost characters, as he provides them with a free place to live. The film's writer and director and producer, Marcelo Tobar, who self-financed the whole project, said he was interested in unlikeable characters.

Peña Nieto is an unlikeable character. Calderón too.

We'd planned this trip to Mexico City long in advance. Long before I realized we would be here at the same moment as the elections. The idea was to bring my partner's mother and grandmother to Mexico City.

I have an urge to post a picture of all three of them in front of the Basilica de Guadalupe or maybe (less iconically) just sitting on a small wall next to a sidewalk on Reforma. But honestly, I don't even want to post their pictures here. It would feel like an invasion of their privacy. Or an appropriation of their experiences here. Somehow posting photos on the blog feels that way. But on Facebook no. Odd.

When is it ethical to appropriate? When it is ugly? When does appropriation cross the line? When is it a good idea to cross the line?

Today a friend informed me that the French often refer to erasure in writing (like Jen Bervin's Nets or Hugo García Manriquez's Anti-Humboldt) as détournement. I wanted to Like the air around her head at that moment.

It seems like several times a day here (and at least that many times in the US), I get asked a variant of what feels to me like the same question: "Where are you from?" and then "So you are Mexican?" and then "No, but one of your parents or grandparents was Mexican?" And then, once I've laid out that yes, yes I am a gringo, gabacho, estadounidense anglo de antepasados alemanes, the question is "Why do you speak Spanish?" This makes me feel tired.


Obama called Peña Nieto on Monday to congratulate him on his fraudulent victory. This was long long before the Mexican federal voting institution had even released the vote count! This was a serious mistake. How can Obama claim to support democracy if he is making congratulatory calls before the official results are even announced?

On Sunday, I marched down Reforma with the Mega-Marcha called nationwide against the fraud, the vote-buying, the return of the PRI. Here are two photos:



I don't have any ethical issues about posting these photos. I do think a lot about how to speak about what is happening around me and how to think about what my involvement in it is.

If you are looking for writing in English about the situation right now in Mexico, I recommend Rubén Martínez and Daniel Hernández. Both on the ground here in Mexico City now. Both Latinos from SoCal. Analysis. Explanation. Contextualization.

Today I leave Mexico City for another city I love. My suitcase is full of books. Mainly from a slew of amazing DF-based publishing projects like Sur + and Alias and Mangos de Hacha and Acapulco. My head is swirling.

Chto Delat



A quote from Chto Delat:

Our friendships are constructed on the basis of conflict, on encounters with the Other... Who's our radical Other? Well, for an example, you and I are radical Others; we are radically different people. Why are we radically different, if we have so many things in common? Everyone agrees in some what that there is a closeness between people that aren't reproducing knowledge or ideology, but are actually searching for something new... At the same time, we have this need, I don't know where it came from... It's a part of the work-process, in which the most productive moment arises through conflict. Conflicts show what actually holds people together, what makes them overcome whatever. It's easy to say "Why don't you all go fuck yourselves" but later, you'll come back, and you can ask yourself: "Why exactly did I return?"

And the whole video:

I think of trans writing in two different veins. One is based on content, and in that way there is tons of trans writing. And this work is so important. This was the stuff I was devouring in Tennessee and when I moved to Arizona. Then there is something else that isn’t necessarily content but form. I guess that’s where poetry comes in. In what ways do trans / genderqueer authors use syntax? Or lyric? Or narrative? How do we experiment with white space? With voice? These are the questions that drove me to the poetry anthology. I’ve always turned to experimental poetry to help me understand how I can live. As if the page is a tiny body, a place to practice being alive. And so I’m so curious, still and always, how do trans / genderqueer writers create their textual bodies? How do they live on and off the page?

- From an interview with TC Tolbert at Bodies of Work.

The interview ends with a recommended list of trans/genderqueer writers and artists we need to know. Click here and go to the end. As usual TC rocks.

This post is for Raj:

ZF It’s difficult to raise and disentangle these identity-based questions, but how do you think your “otherworldly” identity—a black lesbian poet—relates to your interest in the sentence, its confusions and disorientations? Are there dominant ideas about language you want to call into question?

RG Bhanu Kapil and I were talking about this just yesterday. Experimentation, we were saying, is an ideal mode of engagement for marginalized people, and we couldn’t understand, we continued to say, why so many people still believe that the “transparency” of conventional storytelling somehow allows one to capture what it is to exist in the world more authentically. Of course, this question has been debated within the arts for decades now, but it is no less pertinent and divisive today. As a “black lesbian poet” you enter language from a place of disorientation. Your grasp of the authority of the subject is slippery. You feel deviant. You feel the need to fuck with things. As you gaze into words, into their relation, you see things that are not there to people who have never had to prove that they should be counted among the living. You see jungle spaces, geometric spaces inside which it is possible to point, to unfold something about the silences, the loneliness of being in the world. Really though, this opportunity exists for anyone who looks deeply into language and the moment of utterance with his mouth or body all open.

Here is the rest of the interview with Renée Gladman on BOMBLOG.

Reason #453 of Why I Love Cecilia Vicuña

Si no recupera el tejido ella podría vivir como el pavo real, aceptando el rol designado para los artistas en la sociedad capitalista: hacer y participar en exposiciones, revistas, libros, etc., en otras palabras, escalar posiciones dentro de estructuras perfectamente establecidas, llenando el molde esperado, convirtiéndose en un ser impotente como todos los demás en ese tipo de sociedad.

From Cecilia Vicuña's SABORAMI

And in Felipe Ehrenberg's untranslation into English:

 If she does not recapture the thread, she may lead the life of the peacock (which is the artist's life as conceived in capitalist society: exhibitions, mags, books, etc; in other words to accept a role within perfectly established structures, filling exactly into the place allotted to her and thus becoming a powerless creature like everyone else in this kind of society).

A library is more like a palace than it is like a bookstore
                                                                                               a bookstore is more
like a hotel
                   a hotel is only something like a library
                                                                                    but a great deal like a
department store
                               while the department store and the high palace are one




- From Spring Georgic by Joshua Clover (one of the Davis Dozen)

Loving a new interview with Julie Carr of Counterpath at The Volta.  Here is a bit of it:

“A city must remain open to what it knows about what it doesn’t yet know about what it will be” 


 This is the last sentence of the quote from Derrida that we have on the Counterpath website. It’s meaningful to us in a number of ways. First is the metaphor we are implying: a press is like a city because it is a confluence of people, paths, constructions, voices, and ideas which sometimes come into a kind of harmony, or seem to (“Everything suddenly honks: it’s 12:40 of a Thursday”) and sometimes seem to be in a kind of beautiful discord. But this quote also reminds us that we started the press in order to be surprised by where it might take us, in order, in a sense, to learn from the authors we publish something about what seems necessary to do. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we are passive or without judgment or plan. But it does mean that at every moment, especially when we are deciding about a manuscript, we try to drop our preconceptions about who we are as a press (therefore as readers, as people) in order to see who we might become.

Thinking About Yestergay

Reading around Obama's declaration of support for gay marriage yesterday. 

Sarah Schulman on prettyqueer makes an indignant call for the rise of a new liberationist movement:

Now that gay people are fitting themselves into a dysfunctional box in order to win approval, our futures will surely be as strewn with disappointment, legal battles and failure to conform that heterosexuals endure, even with their constant advocacy by film and television, and the profound privileges given to them by their families. In this way we are living in the gay version of the 1950′s. But the 1960′s are just around the corner. Inevitably these conservatizing trends will again explode into a new sexual revolution, collective living, and a desire for liberatory feminism. I just hope I live long enough to see it.

Listening to Tony Kushner's joy on Democracy Now:

I don’t think that the absolute apotheosis of—I mean, the most radical implications of LGBT liberation are not the right to serve openly in the military and to marry, but I guess I’ve become more of an evolutionary than revolutionary leftist over the course of the last 20 or so years. The powerlessness of the left, our inability to actually do things like stop the bombing of Baghdad, to really begin to do work, to—serious work, difficult work, to actually do something to stop the terrifying pace of climate change, and to advance our own interests—it’s become, you know, sort of unbearable to me.

And Dr. William J. Barber, a black preacher in North Carolina, speaking out against the recently passed Amendment 1 in the state:





And as always, the future comes from the South. In this case, Argentina, where the society and government leads us in the U.S. by decades: 

 Adults who want sex-change surgery or hormone therapy in Argentina will be able to get it as part of their public or private health care plans under a gender rights law approved Wednesday. The measure also gives people the right to specify how their gender is listed at the civil registry when their physical characteristics don't match how they see themselves. 

Now that's beautiful.

Let the Ponies Have Plenty of Room



¡Copy Pasters! 
a.k.a. The Jam-masters 
 a.k.a. So Now Collectively 
a.k.a. The Lit Car Wash 
a.k.a. Patrick Dougherty, David Feil, Michael Henderson, Dawn Pendergast, John Pluecker, Harbeer Sandhu, Stalina Villarreal 

present 

Let the Ponies Have Plenty of Room 

a collaborative writing explosion and a new collectively-written and produced chapbook of the same title 

at Kaboom Books 3116 Houston Avenue 
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 
7:30 - 9pm 

 In the Fall of 2011, we, a group of seven intrepid writers/artists/poets/baristas united to play with contemporary generative practices of experimental writing. This workgroup was called ¡Copy Paste! and we met at Project Row Houses. The members of the workgroup were enthused by collaborative writing practices. We decided to keep meeting in 2012. We have met until now. We Google Doc’d. We cut and pasted. We Photoshopped and Photoshared. We debated the intricacies of meaning-making and aesthetic chaos. We lingered. We made a book, which happily became an ephemeral bit under the aegis of the Little Red Leaves Textile Series. We invite you to come and partake in the madness, the wine and the play.