Notes from old notebooks II: From Los límites del lenguaje MTY

maybe lost friendships
         maybe what was never was. it never was. it is for a while but there is no was. It was lost; it was remade. it was a new it is a new/before there was new, there was not. maybe friends lost the is, maybe there was an is then that was no more what isn't was—it's true I came too and didn't advise. I don't care because it is over. what was isn't anymore if it ever was.

The writer who would be ridiculous is not sthg to care. Care? b/c it is the glass crashing and the laughter can't put it back together.

 ---------   UVILOV
4 yrs later, they say the garage is gone. 4 yrs later, the tree is still there. 4 yrs later the trip we took is a memory. 4 yrs later i anger quickly, nerves frayed, tired of a happy face. 4 yrs later, enthused. 4 yrs later, colors surround. 4 yrs later, a yearning for future. Choose the slide—urge the uptake. Caress nostalgia—what was

an accident in the middle—what was a travel ad? What were those beaches flying by yet frozen in a photo of sand and sex. You had it right all along. This is an improvisation, writing this is improv but you don't see it in real time—or is your time more real than mine. Oh we were happy for a moment, yet weighted down at the same time by the force of the fall. There's never another city to turn to. The helicopter fell in the

middle of the park—tiny lights of cars in rows trapped by traffic, trafficked by traps. It was a song—a melancholy one. A great poet once said, don't write when yr sad or angry—write when upenergy uptakes you. Then we'd never write. We are all the us who we've been over the plains—the flat plains of clouds out the window after we burst above the line. Why are there no

checkpoints in the clouds? Marketers in San José are working on a plan to sell us bottled clouds—rainy days in tins like X-mas cookies. How much would we pay for the feelings again? We've said for years we should write down our dreams. She said in her milpa she'd always have two journals, one for dreams and one for life. How to keep the two separate? Her question was in between the

two—in the linkages. The difference is a pause—an alternate possibility, an escape into a deeper recess, an image exploded in the rear view mirror. I don't believe in stream-of-consciousness. How to improvise a memory in its absence? How to piece together a story from photos? For dinner we had Japanese at the place on the corner; it wasn't nearly as pricey as we'd expected. the day after

a riot exploded at the same corner. We stayed upstairs and watched the hordes, not afraid just uninvolved, which happens so often. La distancia entre el aquí y el allá es el espacio que atravesamos para estar juntos—para verse frente a frente y no querer tropezar. El sonido me duele; es demasiado fuerte y me preocupan mis oídos. What was there to connect us? Turn your head / make a lock /

lock this make. Ponle candado al carro. Ponle tus zapatos que está mojado fuera. No hubo lo que pensábamos. No había lo que buscábamos. Igual y aquí todo sigue. Lo que hay en las noticias no concuerda con la experiencia vivida—o ¿será al revés? No transitamos el mismo mundo que antes—ese mundo ya pasó.

Notes from old notebooks I: From viewing of El velador

We wait. That's all we do.
What is there to be seen?
es difícil de aceptar

digitalización/pixelación

How close can we get
    to the violence?
Will you leave if this gets too
     boring?
What does it mean to be left
                                      behind?

muchas cosas
           inexplicados
           inexplicables
------------
    limited by a code of silence
        gestures become important.
               to understand what they think
                   life is about.

not an explanation of
oppression
rather and emotional
reflection of complexity
in an imagined space
-----------------------
a harbinger?

Reading the translations of the Pussy Riot Closing Statements published on N+1:

Thus one of the most important Christian concepts, Humility, is now commonly understood not as a path towards the perception, fortification, and ultimate liberation of Man, but on the contrary as an instrument for his enslavement. To quote [Russian philosopher] Nikolai Berdyaev, one could say that “the ontology of humility is the ontology of the slaves of God, and not the sons of God.” When I was involved with organizing the ecological movement, I became fundamentally convinced of the priority of inner freedom as the foundation for taking action. As well as the importance, the direct importance, of taking action as such.

- Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot

The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers. It was the same with the OBERIU poets, who remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Purged in 1937, Alexander Vvedensky wrote, “The incomprehensible pleases us, the inexplicable is our friend.” According to the official death certificate, Aleksandr Vvedensky died on December 20th, 1941. No one knows the cause of death. It could have been dysentery on the train on the way to the camps; it could have been the bullet of a guard. It occurred somewhere on the railroad between Voronezh and Kazan. Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s students and heirs.

- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot

And check out the translators' statements. Like this one:

I spent May and June this year in Moscow—I arrived just as the protests were re-energized by Putin’s third inauguration. I spent many hours talking to folks in their twenties, and a picture of an ascendant new generation of people who are well-informed, well-read, and not indifferent to the direction of their country started to emerge. The intensity of Moscow still fresh in my mind, I spent the eight days of the Pussy Riot trial getting up at dawn in a different timezone to read live updates from the courtroom, realizing quickly that, just like the protests in Moscow earlier this summer, this was close to something that could be called history in the making. It felt important to pay attention—to the travesty of justice and to the steadfastness of the accused. Some of the defendants are the same age as the students of several courses on Russian culture that I will be teaching this year. It felt important to me as a teacher to make these texts available to my students—both as some of the most important cultural artifacts of today’s Russia, and as examples of civic engagement. 

- Sasha Senderovich

I love translators motivated by solidarity and translation as a product of deep accompaniment.

Introductions: Janice Lee & Anna Joy Springer

I just realized how much I enjoy the form of the "introduction." I like writing them. And reading them. After the reading Monday, Anna Joy requested I post my intros online. So here is the text of both intros:

Welcome to Kaboom Books and to this 3rd edition of an As-Yet-Unnamed-But-Really-Quite-Lovely-Reading-Series on the back patio of Kaboom Books. If you have suggestions on the name, let me know.

Tonight I have the pleasure of using way too many adverbs. To introduce these two startlingly strange, defiantly brilliant women from Los Angeles. Two extravagantly excessive and disarmingly distracting prose innovators. One refreshingly queer, the other comfortingly weird. One a survivor of nineties riot grrrrl, the other a survivor of the CalArts experimental writing MFA.

Both are active contributors to a for-me legendary, yet little acknowledged L.A.-based innovative writing scene that is exploding right now. Based around a wide array of small presses and gallery spaces and bookstores and universities, the scene is a real example of literary culture's potential when it invites dialogue with other arts and all kinds of people.

And they are on a tour of the Northwest and Southwest parts of the US bringing this energy all over the country: they headed out from Los Angeles a few weeks ago and went up north to SF and Oakland and Eugene (where they had a run-in with drunk dude poets declaiming paeans to their penises) to Portland and Seattle and Olympia then on to Boulder, Dallas, Austin to now end up here with us.

So I am thrilled you have all come out to see both of these women read.

First up is Janice Lee and then Anna Joy Springer. I'll do an intro for Janice then later I will intro Anna Joy.

Janice Lee works hard. Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator. I first met her a few years ago in Tijuana, Mexico. In fact, her author photo, the one I see her use the most was taken in the room where we met in Tijuana. Or at least I have imagined that we met in that light blue room. (Janice later corrected me. We met in Monterrey, Mexico in 2008.) Janice has two books now: Kerotakis (Dog Horn Publishing, 2010): and Daughter (Jaded Ibis Press, 2011). Both books have this undercurrent in them, an undercurrent that something is wrong or has gone horribly awry. Oddly, her main character in Kerotakis has a homonym of the same name that Anna Joy uses in her book: G.I.L.L. and [Gil]. As if their respective Gils  brought them together. As I've been reading all of their books to prepare for this evening, the dialogue produced between these two authors has been really fruitful—a dialogue that seems to revolve around writing one's way around histories, both personal and collective. Janice writes: "There is a daughter who is an excavator of dead gods, slapping down a stone path, with a stick in one hand, a mirror in the other, a gatherer of worries and prayers, a jar full of whispers and echoes." Janice's work has a sadness, a sense of loss that pervades. But there is also a persistent exploration, a brave insistence to push outside of the realm of what is known and understandable and into unaccounted-for regions of the brain and of experience. She dwells on the limitations of imagination and thought and writes her way into unexamined spaces: the bends and twists of the cerebral cortex in all its scary interiority. Janice also has a little handmade chapbook that I was lucky enough to get a copy of. It's called Red Trees. Red Trees is a wholely different animal and yet surely of the same species as the other books: a text grounded in Janice's experience of family and family stories and growing up. And yet, in each one of her books, I've been struck by the fact of the continually reappearing desert. The desert as a non-fertile space, as a dangerous expanse. In Kerotakis,  "I have made a nest in the desert. There is so much sand and dirt. Is the dust here the same as the dust there? Is it my own skin that clings to the lens, or has the dust, the dry skin of millions of others followed me here?" In Red Trees, "There are deserts that are waterless. There are deserts flooded with excess." And in Daughter, "The desert, like the abyssal plains of the sea, is far from the monotonous expanse you might imagine. There is a slope of no more than one part in one thousand—completely beyond the ability of the human eye to recognize anything but perfectly flat."

Janice's writing is always in the desert, writing her way through the desert and into the desert, always searching, always on the lookout for water in an oasis always over the next hill. Sometimes finding an octopus or a cyborg, sometimes reporting back, always at the bottom of the sea, wondering what this thing called language and this other thing called the sentence, what these things can do.

Janice Lee.

(Janice Lee reads.) 

So I feel like the least I can do after Janice and Anna Joy have driven all the way across the country in August (!) to be here is to provide thoughtful introductions and readings of their work. It's one of the things that I love about this network of writers who take risks: we read each other and talk to each other about each other. So here goes:

Anna Joy Springer is a prose writer and visual artist who makes grotesques - creating hybrid texts that combine sacred and profane elements to evoke intensely embodied conceptual-emotional experiences in readers. Anna Joy first started out in a series of early-nineties riot grrrl bands: Blatz, The Gr'ups, and Cypher in the Snow. With those bands, she toured the United States and Europe being a wild feminist punk performer, and also toured with the all-women spoken word extravaganza, Sister Spit. The energy of the early nineties and the riot grrl movement is alive and well in her most recent book, hmmmm maybe not "well" but yes "alive." But I'll get back to that point in a second.

Ok, so full disclosure: Anna Joy Springer was my professor in the MFA at UC San Diego, where her bio proclaims, "she truly loves teaching courses in Experimental Writing, Graphic Texts, and Postmodern Feminist Literatures." And I can attest to the fact that Anna Joy brings an energy and an attention to her pedagogical practice that few people manage. One of the gems of my experience in the MFA was taking Anna Joy's workshop in hybrid forms and cross-genre writing. Instead of just hating on the writing workshop or complaining about it, Anna Joy set out to radically transform and reimagine it. Instead of the conservative, prescriptive, suggestion-based approach, she proffers what she calls "Project Attention" because of the unnerving, uncomfortable fact that on a base level each of us writes to get attention and she acknowledges the vulnerable place that puts each of us in when we decide to write. Her workshop creates a space for reading, for experimentation and dialogue, for risk-taking and pleasure. A space where we each reflect back our experience of reading each others texts and where we write through and with each other instead of always at each other. I want to mention this because I think she is really on to something here and I think we all could learn something from it. In fact, this intro is another form of "project attention." Anna Joy has two books: Birdwisher from Birds of Lace and The Vicious Red Relic, Love from the same press as Janice's, the shockingly multidisciplinary Jaded Ibis Press. Both of Anna Joy's books combine illustrations and prose experimentation. I spent a lot of time this past week with Anna Joy's most recent book The Vicious Red Relic, Love and I came away feeling both deeply wounded and also deeply aware of the possibilities of language to re-structure experience, to dwell in the forests of our imagination and our inability to understand or explain. The book, called a "fabulist memoir" on the cover returns to the emotional wreckage of the early nineties and her early twenties, when perhaps she had a relationship with an HIV-positive, seductively self-destructive girlfriend called [Gil] in the book. There are letters from the narrator, here named Nina, to a small tinfoil elephant named Winky, who is also a narrative device, who travels back in time and forward in time, seemingly at will, carrying messages and providing comfort to [Gil] before she shoots a speedball and dies. There are journal entries from the early nineties and feminist re-writings of Babylonian and Sumerian mythology. Oh and then there are the forests: these spaces where meaning degrades or abounds in all its messy symbolism: the Forest of Good Bad Intentions and the Not Fake Parallel Forest and the Forest of Clashing Erotics and the Forest of Mythopoesis. We get lost in the forests and that might be a space for us to, as Anna Joy writes, "to lose yourself in ways that felt divine...to feel relief, that almost remembered state before consciousness, that estatic realm of the freshly post-fetal." But Anna Joy is always aware when she writes sentences like this, aware that, as she says, "I know I'm getting far out here, Winky, I know I sound like a burn-out trying to psycho-babble a teenage girl on mushrooms into his skanky patchouli bed. It's the pitfall of language."

Anna Joy writes a lot about language, about semantic slippage and excessive symbologies, about rape and AIDS and how we find healing through narrative, how we create meaning out of the wreckage. Especially, how women and queers can create fables out of twisted histories.

As we were wandering around Kaboom Books before the reading, Anna Joy pulled a book by Antonin Artaud off the shelf and began to read a page at random. Then she turned and said, one day I would like for someone to use this quote to talk about my work. So here is the quote which I think fits into my intro quite well:

 I do not sytematically cultivate horror. The word "cruelty" must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element.

Anna Joy's writing from the Metaforest is always allegorical, always curving and torquing and never straight and always excessive and rarely restrained. So often in the book, it seems like Riot Grrl never ended, like all the grrls ran off into the forest to find new ways to scream and to explode. This time in words, this time with language in a riot of skin, sex, sweat, blood and butterflies.

Anna Joy Springer.

(Anna Joy reads.)

 (Anna Joy and Janice answer the amazing questions from the crowd.)

 (Now you have attended the reading, just with all the readings excised.)

I thought I would post something clever on Facebook for my birthday. Like some poignant or pithy phrase or text from some poem to talk about this experience of drowning in the Facebook auto-reminder birthday love.

Picked up Adrienne Rich and flipped it open and found:

Raise it up there and it will
loom, the gaunt original thing
gristle and membrane of your life

The page begins like that which I thought was a prescient start. The middle of the page is a bit more meandering off topic, then at the end we get back:

but you have to raise it up there, you
have a brutal thing to do.

But then I think, oh, that's too sad, that's not chipper or upbeat or thankful enough.

So I google Adrienne Rich birthday and a bunch of sites come up but then this odd Google site with "Birthday Poems" that some person "asked everyone to pick a poem they especially enjoy, print it or write it out somehow, and post it anywhere they would like, preferably outdoors!" It's a precious idea. Just precious. And nice somehow. And on there I find a load of poems including first this lovely fragment (or whole poem?) by Anne Carson:

"What is time made of?"
is a question that had
long exercised Geryon.
Everywhere he went he
asked people.
Time is an abstraction--
just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.

But then this ending to a poem by Julian T Brolaski felt better as a way of speaking to my emotions:

spun aground like a human candle
on the 4th of july

 under the guise of cupid
thinking myself a very gay dawg indeed

I love this Birthday Poems site.  I think myself a very gay dawg indeed today. Xo.

Stop Low-Priority Deportations

One story that is not getting out: brave undocumented young people through the National Immigrant Youth Alliance have been infiltrating select detention centers around the country to see what is really happening; they've discovered that the Obama administration is still deporting the same people it promises not to deport. On June 17th, 2011, President Obama, through ICE director John Morton, issued a memorandum outlining his administration's enforcement priorities. These priorities specifically called for the use of discretion in many low-priority deportation cases. Despite this, they have found countless cases of all kinds of people being locked up who Obama said would not be:

—DREAM Act eligible youth;
—Individuals with no criminal record;
—Individuals clearly detained because of racial profiling tactics used by police and border patrol, including the detention of passengers in vehicles;
—Individuals with pending U visa / VAWA applications;
—Individuals with extreme medical conditions.

These brave young people are doing amazing work, putting their lives on the line and they need your support. Read more and sign their petitions here at their DREAM activist site.

These youth are risking their own deportation and standing up to ICE not only to save themselves and other DREAMers but all low-priority deportees. Que valientes, la neta.




Ever rode down the highway and felt that rush of the perfect song on the radio and no traffic ahead of you and the music was perfect and you can die right then and everything would be okay.

Antena

Antena @ Project Row Houses - March-June 2012


Antena is a language justice collaborative founded in 2010 by Jen Hofer and myself. Antena activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. Antena works with organizations, communities and individuals to create dynamic, well-functioning multilingual spaces for small and large groups of people to foster open communication and attentive listening across languages and cultures. We primarily work with Spanish and English but have experience coordinating more diverse language combinations. We also do installation work with various arts spaces and publish a series of handmade books featuring innovative multilingual works.

For more info, please visit our website for Antena.

Jen Hofer and I

So the desire to make a living as a writer is a true perversion in this culture but I think we need our perverts more than ever. I think in the same way that curators and event organizers have to think more widely to mix audiences we writers have to think more systemically about what a writer is, and how one genre opens into another as do readers and audience. We’re making our living as writers in this same new world. How does each piece I write relate to the whole I’m writing, or creating in time. Rather than simply thinking about who’s paying me I have to think of the whole life project. And you need to say no to a lot of stuff. Events and invites in order to make some real time to think the whole big picture through. So you need a lot of courage and imagination and stupidity — and trust — that since the culture needs you it will support you. It must. It’s a crazy notion but I think it’s true and we make it true by acting on it. To be a working writer is a political act.

 - Eileen Myles on The Situation in American Writing on Full Stop

If I had to stick to the facts, the bare truth of things, that would be no use either. It would be thin and strange, as yesterday seems thin and strange, or indeed today.

 - from an essay by Colm Toibin

—Y el caso particular de Mónica Nepote frente a la poesía, ¿ha variado la forma de construir el poema a partir del contacto con estas nuevas plataformas? ¿O sencillamente las acepta, convive con ellas y como desde siempre la página en blanco deberá ser llenada en exclusiva por la imaginación del poeta?

En mi caso detecto un cambio en mis procesos, en mis intereses y lecturas. Poetas que me interesaban hace diez, quince años, ahora me preocupan menos. Me interesan estéticas que antes no conocía. Me interesa, por ejemplo, el arte electrónico, el arte sonoro. Me interesa, en este rubro, el trabajo que hace Benjamín Moreno con sus “concretoons” (concretoons.blogspot.mx) y también el que hace con Minerva Reynosa al crear el colectivo Benerva (benerva.tumblr.com). Me interesa mucho el trabajo de Leslie García, una artista electrónica de Tijuana muy afin o cercana a la poesía. En uno de sus últimos proyectos, llamado “Deep Thought V2” (http://dalab.ws/dtv2), una entidad-máquina emula a un “fortune teller”, la cual está alimentada con frases pedidas ex profeso a escritores y amigos tuiteros. Me interesa también el trabajo de Efraín Velasco, Omar Pimienta, creadores más cercanos a las artes visuales pero que cuestionan desde distintos asideros las posibilidades, los límites del poema. El trabajo de estos artistas/escritores me ha cambiado. Me abre posibilidades de experimentar con estructuras menos rígidas de aquellas con las que trabajaba. Ahora puedo incluir un lenguaje más narrativo en mis poemas, como trabajé en Hechos diversos, al jugar con la idea de la doble plana, usando un lenguaje periodístico, con la nota al pie, con datos duros.

- De una entrevista con Mónica Nepote en línea






Yours a wandering in a given stand of trees,
or poles, pushing up ever higher
in rows. The milky abyss.

Maybe the mistake wasn't yours.
Maybe we wreck the imagined future:
all of us the same: identical.