A veces veo que la gente empieza nuevos proyectos. O que empiezan a armar proyectos en línea. Que de repente existe algo que no existió el día anterior. Y me pregunto cómo le hacen. O me pregunto muchas cosas y me gusta leerlos en el ciberespacio mientras piensan y mientras contemplo esta manera que tienen las cosas de empezar a existir de un momento a otro, sin previo aviso, es cambio constante. Una suerte de magia, se me hace. Me agrada ver los pensamientos de mis amigos, ver como empiezan a pensar en el momento de sentarse a escribir. Yo que le tengo mucho temor al medio cibernético. O yo que siento un temorcito relacionado con todo lo público, con esto que es publicarse o hacer público algo que antes no era tan público. Ahora estoy sentado en un aeropuerto, un lugar intermedio en la ruta hacía mi casa. Hay un señor que está viendo un video en Youtube y no usa audífonos. No quiero ser el tipo de persona que se moleste cuando las demás personas escuchen su música sin sus audífonos. Paso harto tiempo pensando en el tipo de persona que no quiero llegar a ser.

Cuando veo que la gente empieza nuevos proyectos, me da ganas también de lanzar cosas, pero me dudo constantemente aún así cuando comienzo proyectos: ¿qué nos ha hecho pensar que tenemos algo que decir? ¿Por qué seguimos escribiendo, creando, haciendo, armando, desarmando, olvidando, recordando? ¿Por qué, Janet? Otra vez, estoy pensando en tí y siento que no tengo ningún derecho de hacerlo. Que pienso en todas las razones por las que debería de callarme. Hoy no pude conciliar el sueño. Me duele la cabeza. Estoy durmiéndome en una cama en la que no quisiera estar y empiezo a pensar y los pensamientos se vuelven un huracán y pienso en tu cuerpo, en donde podría estar, pienso en todas las cosas en las que no debería de pensar. Pienso que no, no tengo ningún derecho y estoy pensando y dando vueltas y cansado y no puedo dormir. Pienso que alguien te debe de buscar. Que deberíamos de estarte buscando. Pero es que son tantos los que ya no están. Hay lazos pero debe de haber más. Hay puentes pero debe de haber más. Hay mares y ríos y frente a ellos hay muros y cercas y rejas y los poetas escriben poemas demasiado lindos sobre los mares y los ríos, y los poetas bailan porque el estado dice que deben de bailar y los aplaudimos a esos poetas que declaman poemas frente a un mar totalmente rejado. Un país es un congelador. Un país es una casa sellada herméticamente contra todo lo que le es exterior.

It was not all long lines of connection and utopia.
It was a brackish stream and it went through the field beside our
           house.
But we let into our hearts the brackish parts of it also.
Some of it knowingly.
We let in soda cans and we let in cigarette butts and we let in pink
           tampon applicators and we let in six pack of beer connectors
           and we let in various other pieces of plastic that would travel
           through the stream.
And some of it unknowingly.

I know that I don’t have anything original to say. And I’m not trying to have something original to say. I would like to be able to say, at the end of it all, that there would be moments in which I was actually able to become an instrument. It’s difficult to do that. Betty Carter has this great song called “Ego,” and the punchline of the chorus is, “your ego got in the way.” My ego is constantly getting in the way of my being an instrument. But having something to say is the least of my concerns. To me, poetry begins with the willingness to subordinate whatever the hell it is that you have to say.

- Fred Moten in an interview here

My own sense is that our feminist political hopes rest with over-sensitive students.
Over-sensitive can be translated as: Sensitive to that which is not over.
All of these ways of making students into the problem work to create a picture of professors or academics as the ones who are “really” oppressed by students. 
[...]
We need to support, stand with, and stand by, those students who are fighting to survive hostile institutions.
It is our job.
- Sara Ahmed in Against Students

I Heart Demerits

Even in an academic context that gives lip service to diversity and interdisciplinarity, there is little to no reward—and perhaps even demerit—for learning a language one has not already “mastered” by age 22 in order to become a slightly more attuned citizen of the world. There is little to no reward for bringing under discussion, let alone translating, books hailing from cultures that are not already broadly thought to possess copious amounts of cultural capital. There is suspicion of work in translation, as if the very basis of Western culture had not come down to us at third (or fourth, etc.) hand. A slowly mutating shortlist of foreign authors that one ought to know circulates through polite conversation (sometimes without acknowledgment that they have been translated), but one can pass as culturally literate more fluidly if one doesn’t make interlocutors uncomfortable by invoking foreign authors with unpronounceable names. This provincialism is as much historical as it is cultural.

- Jennifer Scappettone in this Roundtable on Translation


Things I jotted down at an event against the deportations of Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitians in the DR: 

A possessive investment in each others oppression - Junot Diaz

Role of extractive industries on Hispaniola - Quisqueya

Racism without racists - "No somos racistas" campaign in the DR and on social media

Here to be "Hispanic"=white in Miami
No consciousness here about "Hispanic" racialization

This has always been a faith based activity
We seek to increase our capacity to live other peoples oppression
This has always been a small group
We always want more and call for more 
but all strategies can work simultaneously. 
No one strategy will lead us to the promised land.
The thing that seems irrelevant now 
will be the most relevant down the line.

This is so helpful:

[T]hree different criteria [...] can work to create race: lineage, appearance and cultural assimilation.

- Lisa Martín Alcoff

Mom, racially you're human, culturally you're black.

- Rachel Dolezal quoting her son on the Today Show

(And I don't mean to say I support this equation. I find the idea of her son saying this to her, or the idea of her saying on national television that her son told her this, to be so deeply strange, delusional, touchingly off.)



La canción del día empieza a los 48:24:

Si me quieres, dímelo, 
si te gusto, dímelo, 
y si me odias, también dímelo.

¡Quiéreme más, quiéreme más!

No tengo nada 
que decir
y lo estoy posteando 
en mi blog
en español.

Pasará desapercibido
como es mi gusto.

Quebec finds itself too exotic to be easily digested by the Canadian and U.S. market, but not exotic enough to compete with the appeal of something new from Indonesia or Iceland. To North American readers, especially, I think it’s at once too different and too familiar. 

 - Peter McCambridge in this article from the New Yorker on Quebecois lit