Whatever I do, whether it is considered political or paedagogical, if it doesn’t live up to the expectations people have for the spectacle it is supposed to be as an artwork, it remains “minor” literature and a minor art form, to use the parlance of Deleuze. In German, the word for boring is langweilig, “long lasting.” This translation—which is ambivalent and layered—maybe describes my learning and reading projects very accurately. If Duchamp talked about fast, “ready made” things, I talk about things that form over a long time and might therefore be called “hard tryings” or “lasting longs.” 

 - Rainer Ganahl in a conversation with Paul Mattick at the Brooklyn Rail

We live in a moment during which we have internalized surveillance and security cultures to such a degree that perhaps we also assume others can be rendered into their avatars, their tweets or their posts. But I would want to push against the premise that a stranger is knowable from their observable data. How do we recognize evidence of being a person under neoliberal capital? Do you exist in the absence of a selfie, or a tweet? What about all the commitments and histories you can’t account for solely through the digitized self? I am not at all saying selfies and tweets are bad, but I am saying that these are the conditions under which we fund ourselves complicit — and even locate pleasure — in our surveillance, and in surveying others, and upon which access to capital, love and other forms of sociality increasingly depend.

 - Mimi Thi Nguyen, On Unproductivity

"Boomtown" H-town

Under current conditions, as Rob Halpern puts it, avant-gardes must arise, can only arise, within the logic of capital. This predictability is not so much, or only, a weakness of the avant-garde’s historical trajectory as it is an index of the wager capital makes with history, a gamble it loses at every table, which is why it moves from table to table. That is, capital “loses” when it either exhausts the resources at any particular table—the “boomtown” phenomena that inhabits specific cities (Houston in the 1980s) or regions (Silicon Valley)—or when it costs capital too much to continue playing (the destruction of unions as a condition for “saving” jobs or the relocation of industries to underdeveloped regions, cities and countries). Nonetheless, within the field of writing in general, the absorption of every mode of experimentalism into the fold of innovation does not return things to a steady-state homeostasis. The system—even within the institution of higher education—is incrementally, simultaneously, nurtured and poisoned.

- Tyrone Williams at Lana Turner

Solo si me prometes que si te hago enojar o si te ofendo, no te vayas a ir nada más
sin hablarme, sin explicarme por qué te decidiste ir y sin contestar mis múltiples mensajes
pidiéndote explicaciones, pidiéndote que me ayudes a entender por qué finalmente
he llegado a ser tan, pero tan fuera.

Le monde a terriblement besoin de penseurs sans pouvoir, de philosophes affamés et de dormeurs impértinents ("Celui qui dort construit le monde" dit Héraclite) pour continuer a tourner.

- Dany Laferrière, Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer

THE MONGREL COALITION AGAINST GRINGPO

THIS COALITION IS WITH TARGETS. IT EXISTS WITH AIM.

OUR TARGETS ARE:  GAY FLAG-DRAPERS, WHITMANIAN TWINK POETS, WHITE LGBT POETS WHO USE THE TROPHY OF QUEERNESS AS NEGATOR OF RACIAL PRIVILEGE, THERE’S CHUNKS OF EGG ON YOUR FACE, POETS WHO SO NATURALLY APPROPRIATE AND ABIDE BY THE LANGUAGE OF FINANCE, POETS WHO CLAIM THAT POETRY IS RISK TAKING BUT CANNOT LOCATE THE DAMAGE: YOU WRITE FEAR POEMS IN SERVICE OF THE STATE, ASIAN AMERICAN MALE POETS WHO USE THEIR RACIALIZATION TO PROTECT WHITE GATEKEEPERS/WHITE CONNOISSEURS, POETS WHO USE HIP-HOP AS TRINKETS IN THEIR POEMS (WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE), POETS WHO LIVE BY WHITENESS AS PROPERTYBUT IN PERMANENT DENIAL, WHITE POETS AND THEIR ANIMAL STUDIES, MONOLINGUAL BITCHES, MONOREALIST BITCHES, BITCHES WHO WRITE IN ENGLISH BUT REFUSE TO SEE IT (IF YOU WRITE IN ENGLISH, YOU ARE ALREADY IN TRANSLATION), PROVINCIAL COSMOPOLITANS, ALL THOSE WHO SUPPORT WHITE LACK, WHITE MINIMALISM, VANILLA ICE MEDIOCRITY, ALL THOSE WHO SEE THE WHITENESS IN THE PHOTOGRAPH BUT REFUSE TO CALL IT OUT, WHITE FASHIONISTAS, MARJORIE PERLOFF & KENNETH GOLDSMITH THE OVERSEERS OF POETRY AND THEIR OVERSEERS TRAINING PROGRAM IN PLANTATION MARKET POETICS, IF YOU CITE TONY HOAGLAND YOU’RE FUCKING RACIST, WHITE CONCEPTUALISM REPRODUCES WHITENESS--IF YOU CANNOT SEE THIS, YOU’VE BETRAYED MONGREL KIN; YOU’RE RACIST, CONCEPTUALIST WHITE LI(T)E--WE SEE THRU YOU (YOU REPACKAGE WHAT MONGRELS DREAM SPLICED), UNAPOLOGETIC EUROCENTRISTS, ADVOCATES FOR THE MARKET DEVIL, ADVOCATES FOR THE COP DEVIL, ADVOCATES FOR THE RAPIST DEVIL, ADVOCATES FOR THE JIM CROW DEVIL, WE ARE AGAINST POETRY THAT WORKS WITH PRISONS INSTEAD OF LISTENING TO POETS INSIDE THOSE PRISONS,  WE REJECT ATTRACTIVENESS IN POETRY, WHITEPOWER MARXISM AND THEIR LABOR BOSSES, WE REJECT THOSE WHO FIDDLE WITH THE SPECTRUM OF ROTTING AS IF THEY COULD MODULATE IT, POETS WHO DON’T BELIEVE IN ANCESTRY, POETS WHO USE CRITIQUES OF AUTHENTICITY TO PROP UP APPROPRIATION, POETS WHO WRITE “IDENTITY POLITICS ARE BULLSHIT” AND THE PLATFORMS THAT CIRCULATE THIS ARE BULLSHIT, POETS WHO PERFORM THE CRISIS OF EL GRINGO BUT DON’T REALIZE IT, “A FEW ARE ALL DOING UNABASHEDLY POSTMODERN WORK THAT IS FREE WHEELING AND EXACTING IN ITS DEPLOYMENT OF EMOTION” AKA RAISIN TOKENS BLESSED BY FROSTED FLAKES, POC POETS WHO INSIST ON DECORUM, POETS WHO SHIT ON ETHNOPOETICS BUT NEVER THINK ABOUT INDIGENEITY. CARRYING THE TORCH OF VICTIMHOOD IN A VERY PARTICULAR WAY WE ARE UNINTERESTED IN PROTECTING WHITE POODLE FEMINISM. GO AWAY. THIS IS NOT AN OPEN GROUP. MEMBERSHIP IN THE GROUP MEANS A PERMANENT ALLEGIANCE TO THE TARGETING OF OUR TARGETS. WE ARE NOT YOUR RACE TUTORS. WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF EXCLUSIVITY. 

DECOLONIZE OR DIE

There is too much to say
There is too much to see
There is too much networking working too hard & netting nada

- Juan Felipe Herrera
in Angels of the Americlypse, ed. Carmen Giménez-Smith and John Chávez

...............................................I called
for them to arrive I desired them
to take flight and leave the heavens and undo
this wound every wall again until it burns
without edges or spectacles or
charters or proclamations or liberations
star stars walk stroll row flow
                                                     this that this

- Juan Felipe Herrera
in Angels of the Americlypse, ed. Carmen Giménez-Smith and John Chávez



More Spanish is spoken where I live than English is but that is not a desire for a takeover. [...] The idea of actually making [Spanish] part of the performance of the general culture, that's what is scary.

 +

 Vanguardism is not the answer.

 - Gayatri Spivak

los premios, más que reconocimientos, son lápidas

 - Pedro Lemebel

El verso es un camino que puede no tener ningún sentido pero que puede darle sentido a una vida. ¿Captas? Tal vez no lleve a ninguna parte pero es un modo de estar en el mundo.

- de El hada queer de los poemas de Luis Felipe Fabre

The disenfranchised, ostracized youth are an easy target for indoctrinators of all sorts. Their world-view becoming ever more schematic, they endorsed a West Vs Muslim grid that apparently made some of them incapable of recognizing that a newspaper such as Charlie Hebdo, who was standing with Palestine, for ethnic minorities, for equal rights and justice, was on their side – a precious ally: the sole fact that Charlie Hebdo had poked fun at their faith was enough to make them worthy of death.

- from a public letter by Oliver Tonneau