.

2003-04-03T01:17:00.000-08:00

this blog is over.

2003-03-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

TJ ANTI-WAR PROTESTS

We are organizing some anti-war protests. That's the reason I haven't been posting stuff lately. Below the info according to Yahoo News. Not very accurate. They invented those songs. And it was a lot more tense then what this note suggests. At one point, several agents from the Immigration Service came right on the spot where MX and US divide and tried to took from American flags from protesters. At least one was burned. Some English was used on the mic. The agentes didn't like that. Some of the English signs said things like "Oil for Food, Sincerely Bu$h", "We don't have a war, we have a Nafta", "Iraq was emBUSHed by a nazi", etc. The note says TJ has a million people. It has 2 million. The census doesn't show all of them, in order for the government not to give TJ all the money it should. Everybody knows that. This last protest was being held at the crossing point, where cars (40 thousand daily) go into the U.S. Most of this last protest was very peacefull, but the anti-war movement is growing rapidly in Mexico, even though the border regions tends to be more silent about, because of fear to lose their American visas or things like that. The American agents took video of all of us, and of course that makes people nervous. Anyway, here's the Yahoo info.

Students, rights activists march for peace on U.S.-Mexican border city

Sat Mar 29, 6:03 PM ET

TIJUANA, Mexico - Wearing black ribbons and singing songs critical of the war, hundreds of young people marched through this teeming border city Saturday to protest the military conflict in Iraq (news - web sites).

Human rights activists, religious groups and students from various schools led the protests, which began in Tijuana center and ended simultaneously at the San Ysidro bridge spanning the U.S.-Mexican border and at the theater of a local university.

"Look, just around the corner, here comes (U.S. President George W.) Bush, bombing," they sang. "With the world watching and clothed in lies, he says that they are winning. And where there are other tyrants, he barges in to replace them, possessed by the oil devil."

Saturday's demonstration was the fourth anti-war march held in this city of nearly 1 million people across from San Diego, California, since the Iraq war began on March 19.

Some of the demonstrations have taken place in front of the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana.

Recent polls have shown that as many as 80 percent of Mexicans are against the war, along with President Vicente Fox (news - web sites), who held firm against pressure to support the U.S. and British military campaign in Iraq.

Small groups of anti-war protesters have set up permanent camp in front of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and are conducting fasts at the Independence Monument nearby.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030329/ap_wo_en_ge/la_gen_mexico_war_protests_1

2003-03-24T03:44:00.000-08:00

MEXICO HAS TOO A BUCK FUSH NAFTACAN T-SHIRT!

In Mexico our "president" (Vicente Fox) and Bush are so identified (The Two Cowboys) (Fox is Proud of Using Boots) as one power model that one of my best friends invented the phrase Fush = Box.

2003-03-24T03:32:00.000-08:00

PROTESTS

Those NY and SF and other big protests that got into our Media helped people outside the U.S. (and I imagine it obviously did the same for people inside) to reinforce the idea that Americans do think and do act sometimes, and do understand they need to stop its really stupid and (am)vicious goverment.

2003-03-24T03:26:00.000-08:00

WE LIKE NON-FICTION

I don’t think Frida is a great movie. There’s a better Mexican film on the life of Kahlo. And I too think the Oscars stink. A lot of people kissing each other’s ass, a man trying to be so-so-funny, the “Academy”, etc. B2.

“B2” being the metaphor for BasicallyBullshit.

But I am happy some O(scar)-people spoke out against the war. Left some people something to discuss about.

Millions of people see the O(scars). This ceremony helps define what “American culture” “means”. "Popular Culture" "Massive Entertainment" (differents quotes).

Even though I think those [HollyEDwood] artists don’t really understand what art is, seeing in TV the out spoken ones I though that was something which seems to me respectful. Having some courage and finding a way to increase the opposition to the war.

That’s what we need to do: increase the number of people against the war in any way possible—make war unpopular.

So I was saying I don’t like Gael García. He is “Too-Good-Looking”—to quote Being and Time by Heidegger.

[In Mexico, Heidegger's book translation has a translation which makes the book twice impossible to understand. People in Mexico were freaked out by Heidegger].

The 0-Ceremony tried to make the “artists” feel so Proud of being part of this “Art / Movies” elite (the host’s routine was design to be a comment on how funny-and-wonderful (“I’m crying!”) “Hollywood” is—but at moments somebody said something that make a little bit more sense than all that 95% B2 happening in the O-Ceremony.

Some of the participants and The O-C and The Actors were worry they would seem as a Frivolous Million Dollar People in a time when an American war against a country was happening.

The first one was this young MX actor who I truly hate [Heidegger again]. Somebody had commented earlier in the O-C something on peace but this MX actor who I hate said it more clearly. He said that if Frida Kahlo would be alive right now, she would be against the war. And I thought that was fine.

As a presentator he wasn’t supposed to talk on the war. Before him, somebody that won an Oscar and was part of the Frida crew, said something on the political art of Mexico. A “celebration” of that. (Trying to make Mexican feel loved by the U.S.! “O Frida I Love You”—the sticker).

So I guess I should be happy that the political some how appeared on this Hollywood ceremony in a context were the sign “Frida” had appeared.

Even though I tend to believe most Americans appreciated Lila Downs for the wrong reasons—she is a “Mexican” and Looks like Frida!"

Oh What a cute little girl that sexy Salma is! The Beautiful Mexican! The Exxo-N-ticos!

(Hollywood Goes Nafta!)

I don’t like when people try to be Mexican-friendly (Naftacans) (Nafta-Americans) (Nafta-mexicanosa) (Nafta= )

I don’t even like Frida Kahlo anymore. She is part of the art MX older people like. My grandma used to be a Frida fan. But now "Frida" is nothing but an Exportable Female Cool Leftist Andy Warhol, a Model Of The Hybrid Look.

But the question of the political appearing in this popular culture event is an interesting Media event.

The Media knows its role in the recent years has been increasingly pro-government, pro-“globalization” (movies are part of the hegemonic ideology—propaganda). And that was part of why some of the less stupid actors said something critical on the structure of the O-C and/or against “Bush”.

After the MX Actor a second speech against the war took place. The filmmaker Michael Moore started saying “We like non-fiction”.

‘I like documentaries, because I like non-fiction... In a country where an election is a fiction… fictitious president... and is going to war for fictitious reasons... We opposed this war… shame on you Mr. President.. your time is up!’

Part of the actors didn’t like the political anti-war anti-Bush speech he gave. The routine-comedian (Funny Dady) later tried to lessen the meaning of that statement by Michael Moore saying something on how Michael Moore was helped by the teamsters to get in his limousine. How funny! "Language is so fun!"

Then a few others said something against the war. But more “emotionally”.

Others talk about Family (and the TV adds were terribly conservative, and most of the O(scars) were about the Oscars! What does it mean to be a O(scar) people! An Artist! TV! The Movies! The History of Us! The Great Ones!"

That Non-Fiction thing was the good thing on that event.

Even though I do like Pedro Almodovar. But he wasn’t so clearly political. He “read”.

So We like Non-Fiction is now one of my ten thousand slogans.

I would like to think Frida Kahlo’s spirit (being political) had something to do with O-artists letting themselves speak out against a stupid government.

That O-C was 5% fun.

Do "artists" (the O(scars)) ("intellectuals") really mean something when they write or speak about ideas like “art is important” or say something on “the transforming power of art”?

2003-03-23T15:46:00.000-08:00

EMBEDDED

The embedded journalists remain "free" and "objective" even though they were trained by the Army and survive thanks to them. They are part of the American army and part of the American propaganda of war.

I wonder if there are embedded writers in the U.S.

2003-03-23T15:38:00.000-08:00

POWS

Why is the American gvmt now invoking the Geneva Convention (not to show POW's in TV) but nothing like this was even mentioned when these prior days the American media shown images of POW's on their knees, following orders from American soldiers and being detained by them?

What's the difference. The U.S. gvmt is using bigger propaganda.

2003-03-22T01:57:00.000-08:00

A MOVIE!

They are quickly changing the name-of-the-war with "titles" like Day A: Shock and Owe to make TV-Audience have the same "feeling" TV-Audience has toward Hollywood/movies.

The Same Feeling of Joy (Away from Work) (The Family) (The Kids!) and "The Same Feeling of Everything Is Going to End Up Very Well

Happy Ending.

2003-03-22T00:29:00.000-08:00

Check this out: http://nowar.julez-edward.be/

2003-03-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

POLLS

ABC says polls show "most Americans agree with George Bush and see no alternative to war". ("72% aprove the war; 53% strongly").

If those "polls" are accurate "most Americans" are misinformed.

2003-03-21T20:25:00.000-08:00

2 ENGLISH WORDS THAT ARE BEING USED BY THE U.S. GOVMT IN A WAY THAT THEIR MEANING HAS BEEN ERASED

“Freedom”.
“Liberation”.

2003-03-21T20:19:00.001-08:00

NATIONS

Nations still exist. The U.S. government behaves like nations don’t exist or should not exist.

Bad idea.

2003-03-21T20:19:00.000-08:00

MEXICO CITY PROTESTS

The American Embassy in Mexico City is now being the site of flag burning, protests and chanting against Bush. Aprox. 500-800 people there. Most of the participants come from UNAM and are ideologically from the left (that university has a strong marxist background).

Early today I saw on a CNN affiliate a report on the Mexico City protest; the American commentator said he wasn’t sure if the majorities of Mexicans felt like that. The curious thing was that he didn’t said anything when other cities around the world were shown doing basically the same type of protests. He didn't like Mexican doing the same. Germans can do it. The French can do it. "But Mexicans?"

I wonder what would the reaction of American society and its government be if at one point Mexico become notoriously “anti-American”.

2003-03-21T13:35:00.000-08:00

SF PROTEST

Yedda Morrison writes in an email:

I'm not sure how well the press is covering regional anti-war demonstrations (I suspect not well) but I wanted to give a peak into what is going on here. I spent the greater part of the afternoon and evening in the streets of downtown san francisco where thousands of protestors and hundreds of police officers in riot gear have been facing off all day. The strategy for the protestors seems to be to disrupt "business as usual", particularly in/near the federal building and the financial district. The result was probably the worst 12-hour traffic jam in San Francisco history- hopefully, that’s not all it was. When criticized by frustrated motorists and the occasional pro-war
citizen, the most common response I heard was "yeah, well war is inconvenient."

Starting at 6:30am and continuing throughout the day, protestors moved from intersection to intersection sometimes following and other times being followed by the police. While many drivers (especially cab drivers trying to earn a living) were clearly outraged, many motorists turned off their cars, waving and honking in encouragement. For the most part the demonstrations were peaceful although a group throwing bottles and such wounded several cops. I also saw several protestors (mostly very young women and men) struck by billyclubs and dragged to police vehicles after they were handcuffed. Many retail stores put up their metal gates but as far as I could see no looting occurred. The police seemed particularly vigilant when the demonstrations neared the high-end retail stores in and around Union Square. The last count I heard was over 1,300 protestors arrested.

In the early morning, and again around 5pm, the crowd moved onto several freeway on-ramps to the Bay Bridge. Roughly 500 officers in full riot gear (on foot, on motorcycles and in cars) blocked us off, attempting to surround the demonstrators. It was amazing to be in the middle of literally hundreds and hundreds of people lying down or sitting in the middle of the freeway chanting "no war," "no blood for oil." At this point another 30 or so arrests were made.

The protestors seem to be from every socioeconomic background, from sixties liberals, to labor organizers, to young business types, to families-- many with children and dogs in tow. One man with his two very young sons was criticized by several police officers for exposing his children to danger. "My children" he roared, "what about the children of Iraq."

I got on BART around 9pm at which time there seemed to be more cops than protestors in the streets. It's clear however, that more civil disobedience is planned for the morning commute and many protestors were gathering to hold candlelight vigils at various locations throughout the night.

Whether you agree with these tactics or not (it seems the so called puke-in at the federal building is getting some press), its encouraging to see so many people gather together with the singular desire to speak out against war. The administration may not pay a bit of attention, but at the very least we can take some comfort in the knowledge that theirs is not the only voice- that this is not a time of complete passivity, or crippling apathy- that the peace movement (as fractured, disorganized and ineffective as it may be)- is still very much alive.

Love, Yedda PS. for more SF info and photos go to www.indybay.org

2003-03-21T02:49:00.000-08:00

THE TECHNOLOGY!

There cannot exist anything as "Smart Weapons". Weapons are the dissappearance of intelligence. No Smart Weapons possible. Just smart ways of twisting language.

The K-Mart Age of Propaganda.

2003-03-21T02:38:00.000-08:00

NOT ENOUGH

Poetry is not enough.

Still discussing HOW complex the Text (iT!) should be?

Literary discussions.

“The anthologies!”

The goal is becoming the cleverest of all?

Look elsewhere —the pizza delivery service said on the phone.

To write away from the norm, of course.

But if writing against the war is not enough, writing away from the norm is not enough either.

Writing in an island is not a process.

The role of poetry is not just to question the norms imposed-implied by/in ($) the (normative) hegemonic language, but to explore the ways this questioning may change the practice-construction of language through out all of society—not only influencing the writings of intellectual who discuss what the role of poetry is not.

What’s is going to be the role of writing in this century?

Let’s not care about its role in Humanity (the Aesthetic!), let’s just focused in this new century. In this decade. This war. Let’s trust future writers find their own solution in the future. What’s the role of writing in our world? Now.

Writing Against Norms? “Experimentalism”?

Is “experimentalism” our social role as writers?

That?

A process achieves. And then continues—leaving behind whatever it achieved. Process doesn’t need to worry about the result it produces. A “result” is always going to “appear” as long as process happens in company of others (reception).

Process becomes a result (an It) (Something) (a Product!) when it is consumed by the “Other”.

Process is not an abstraction.

No matter how complex and ambiguous writing is, it becomes an It.

Digested.

Translated Into—

But luckily the nature of self-reflection is to arrive and then loose whatever it formed.

Process doesn’t not end with the IT it socially becomes.

Process results in points of departure for more processes. We don’t need to choose either/or process/result.

Process advances.

The text is not the issue in itself. But what is its place in society.

What critical language achieves along its never-ending process.

Achieves historically.

Process advances.

If the bridge between writing and society was “still” there, then the issue would be how complex the writing must be in order to continue challenging and being an alternative to normative-authorities-fixed structures.

But there’s no bridge. (Now:) A writer: An island.

No process there.

The bridge.

Continuing experimentalism, yes, of course but not for the sake of having this So-Much-Complex discourse than that of the government and/or normative social languistic practices.

Bridges are needed to have some interaction between the advanced writing of an epoch and the total social complex. To build a more complex language and to not use it against the King is to behave like the King.

Alienation is never a process.

No bridge now. Writing in these circumstances is not enough.

2003-03-21T02:37:00.001-08:00

AFRAID OF THE IMAGO

American experimental writers are afraid of becoming intellectuals.

Participating in the public debate.

The imago of the “intellectuals” brings to their mind the role of the preacher, the “shaman” (via counterculture), the populist language technician (sloppy mainstream intellectual figures), the demagogue and the failed Modern intellectual.

They don’t want to become the Imago. They feel critically safe from becoming the Imago remaining teachers-academics-readers-authors.

That’s looks like the reason they turn away from effectively opposing normative language exactly in the moment they need to engage in the effort of bringing normative language into public debate.

Americans seem to feel using writing or their knowledge outside their already-conquered-domain (experimentalism) is going to lower their complexity. Damage the History of—

The Imago controls them.

The Imago keeps them afraid of the Imago.

But the Imago isn’t real.

2003-03-21T02:37:00.000-08:00

MY TOP TEN!

Ten People I would call Experimental Writer

1. A non-mainstream writer making some mainstream media invite him-her to a program and saying there something rarely said in mainstream Radio or TV.
2. An experimental writer having a radio or TV program that deals with language and power in very complex and concrete ways.
3. A writer launching a campaign to remove a Senator from his chair.
4. A poet screaming to the President he’s a creep.
5. A writer sabotaging macro-technology.
6. A writer whose writings the police doesn’t understand and hence cannot use against him-her when she-he gets arrested.
7. A writer that prevents or destroys a specific institutionalization of globalization. A McDonalds.
8. A writers who forces her-his government to force him-her into exile.
9. A writer that gets elected into office.
10. A writer that does something never before done by a writer.

2003-03-21T02:15:00.000-08:00

LINXXXS

Interesting comments by Kent Johnson and Bill Marsh on the Bernstein Enough!

2003-03-21T01:49:00.000-08:00

PAN’S ILLITERACY

PAN is very right wing. Almost as bad as the Republicans. PAN is run by empresarios pendejos (stupid businessman) who are just very illiterate, and have no respect for intellectual life (nor feel they even need to give the impression of respecting writing) in a country where respect for language is very high.

3 examples (real ones I swear) of recent PAN rulers showing their love and knowledge for literature!

1
The MX President calling Borges in a speech "Borgues". The "u" changing completely the pronunciation and almost transforming Borges (considered one of the highest manifestations of Latin American culture) either into a Burgués (bourgeois) or a Hamburger.

2
The (Mexican) national director of Conaculta—equivalent let's say to the (American) National Endowment for the Arts—when asked if she had ever read "El Dinosaurio" (a short story) by Augusto Monterroso (Central American writer) said she had already bought the book but still was in the process of finishing it.

“When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there”. (That’s how long the dinosaur is) (“El Dinosaurio” is a famous micro-short-story. Declared by Italo Calvino the shortest one of all.

3
The Labor Secretary made her daughter’s high school expelled the Literature professor (a young woman studying drama in UNAM) because she read at class Aura by Carlos Fuentes, an “immoral” nouvelle where a couple fucks in the presence of the little black crucifix every Mexican bedroom wall has.

4
When several writers protested when the PAN tried to make tax on books higher and wanted to remove the tax breaks writers and artist had, the most important PAN Senator and former presidential candidate declared to the Media he couldn’t understand why people listen to writers, those “fellows who have no decent way of living”.

…

The moment PAN came into power, the MX intellectual became under attack. PAN wants to turn them socially irrelevant.

But neutralizing MX intellectuals is not going to be so easy. Since the PRI, some intellectuals had a place on the media, and others dominated certain universities and national newspapers, something which even increased with the same “democratization” process that put Fox in power in 2000. Another factor that strengthening the consciousness of some intellectual circles in Mexico was the Zapatista uprising (1994), a process that resuscitated the Left (the return of the leftist intellectual, involved with social movements). The increase of Americanization also politicized intellectuals. Social apathy between intellectuals (young and mature) started to not be so hip after all.

So, erasing the role of the intellectual is not going to be as easy as the PAN would want. PAN wants to turn Mexican intellectuals into “American” ones. Symbolical figures. Merely aesthetic references. Laugh-at eccentric minorities.

The PRI is not going to return. No way. But PAN is not either going to last much. Too “American”.

2003-03-21T01:48:00.000-08:00

THE MX INTELLECTUAL IN THE 20TH CENTURY (A SHORT BIO)

Through out the 20th Century writers who became leaders of their fields in writing could become respected as public figures. This happened because intellectuals (like José Vasconcelos or the muralistas) played a big role on the ideological construction of the post-Revolutionary period (beginning in the 20’s). That was the moment, the Mexican intellectual had its moment of victory: making writing and art a structure that could directly influence politics.

Have a good level of participation inside public debate.

But when the Left went into credibility or effectiveness bankruptcy (from the 70’s to the 90’s), writers in Mexico started to feel the role the intellectual was fulfilling was nothing but playing with fire with the State. Getting to closed or seduced by it.

Nihilism spread. Being apolitical became cool between the younger generations.

I, for example, was formed when that atmosphere was well established. Paz disciples weren’t so political as him. They were nothing but rich kids that had read Marxism but had decided to quit because they felt Marx was passé.

And other groups (younger ones who had no relation to the 68) (the student massacre that divided Mexican history into two) just didn’t feel they should play a social role. They were the children of complete disenchantment. They still behave like Houllebecq in France.

The Mexican intellectual is in a crisis because of four reasons:

1. The new party of power wants to get rid of intellectuals in the process of their globalization project they’re very clearly pursuing.

2. The Intellectuals loosed credibility during the second half of the Century. And the remaining ones are now old, dying.

3. The new intellectuals wanted to take no place in this corruption of the intellectual role and were literary conservative, non class/gender/race conscious. That’s the reason for example feminism still has no being popular.

4. As an effort of wining them over, Salinas and even before him constructed a system of grants, prices and jobs for writers and artists, and so making established and young writers-artists feel as dependant on government money or favors. And thus making, in the one hand, the intellectuals lazier and conformist or even corrupt, and on the other hand, making the rest feel they wouldn’t have no credibility to criticize the government after receiving money from it.

But now, beginning of the 21th Century this is starting to change and before the MX Intellectuals becomes dead the attitude is changing. The roles the intellectual has gained on the media, the government and civil society are historical triumphs we cannot see disappear.

Not know when radical activism and transforming the media, the government and society is crucial to the survival of our culture.

2003-03-20T23:48:00.000-08:00

THE NEW WAR ORDER

The U.S., a Crazy Democracy.

2003-03-20T19:20:00.000-08:00

Camille Roy

Camille Roy's blog has been updated. Take a look: here.

2003-03-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

DEAD WOMEN IN JUÁREZ

Juarez and Tijuana are Mexican border towns that were born too late to be part of the Mexican National Project (aka Mexico City) and, at the same time, arrived too soon to the New World Order.

Nafta was the day the Mexican and the American governments decided to turn all of Mexico either into Juárez or Tijuana.

You choose!

That's why that same day the Zapatista Army in Chiapas announced their war to the Mexican government and its alliance with foreign interests.

In the last ten years, Juárez has lived a social disaster. The Mexican corruption and the spreading of poverty, along with the globalization’s processes have turned Juárez as the example of the hybrid experiment gone wrong.

In the ten last years 300 women have being sexually abused and then killed and disposed outside the city, the Chihuahua dessert or outside the maquilas.

Some say the real numbers is up to 500-800.

Absolute impunity. ABSOLUTE. Not even the U.S. government operates in this manner.

These women have this in common: they were poor (25% worked in the maquila), had no car, were young and lived in the outskirts of the city.

Those zones which were produced by the Mexican government’s lack of will to end poverty.

Who’s killing them?

People say that the killers are drug-dealers, the Mexican police, young-rich-men ("juniors"), American serial killers (and copy-cats), satanic sects, maybe snuff, gangs, non-identified groups. Every body.

Killing women. A sport.

There’s not only one type of organization or serial killers operating, but many. The Mexican government is behind them. Authorities.

The drug cartels must be behind this too. Juarez has one of the three major drug cartels in Mexico (along with the Tijuana Cartel and the one from the Gulf). But saying “drug-dealers” means the Mexican police and the system of American ties (from consumers to American dealers) these organizations have.

The maquilas don’t care either, they not only have profited by poverty (paying their employees salaries of less than 50 dollars a week, for example) but also by helping creating Juárez urban (anti)map—immigration provoked by the maquila system has reshaped the city in a disasterous way (same in Tijuana)—no public transportation—women walking to their homes after the work day ended, from half to 2 hours—the buses from the factories leave them far from they live.

Juárez is depressing. Machismo rules there. Mexican and American man benefit from this situation created by both cultures.

Maquilas in Juárez have just not provided any real protection for their female employees.

I worked on a TJ maquila (Verbatim Co.) to help pay mi university tuition, and believe me, for these companies, their workers are nothing but cheap labor ad human shit.

The Juárez killing field is going to continue. The Mexican government refuses to take the case from the state government of Chihuahua (which it is trying to deny the killing are continuing today) and the media is hiding everything.

The MX TV is controlled by two pro-government families-companies). (Reality shows (mainly Big Brother), gossip from the entertainment business, and stupid soap operas is what dominates TV. So the dead women from Juárez are rarely an issue on the mainstream media.

The government and the media don’t want to do anything, not only because they are themselves the killers, but also because the existence of this social disaster brings to the table a bigger political context.

The forces behind this crimes are the result of Machismo + Globalization.

And just today some independent papers announced it looks like the killing are spreading in other states along the MX-US border. Now some bodies (same pattern) have appeared in Tamaulipas.

The only thing everybody knows for sure in this series of feminicides is that they’re going to grow.

Machismo, impunity, poverty, globalization are not going to go away.

So, we are just in the tenth year since the bodies started to be officially counted. The future seems fine, doesn’t it?

Forgat to say something. At least 300 dead women have being found.

But there are 4000 reported missing.

2003-03-11T19:25:00.000-08:00

aphorism (a genre on silence)

When a critic-reader discovers the method(s) and meaning(s) of poets / fiction writers, these start to use silence as part of their new method.

Silence stinks.

2003-03-11T18:48:00.000-08:00

the new new

Kool Aid.

2003-03-11T18:17:00.000-08:00

118 %

1

And in his hands the newborn held a pro-abortion sign.

The soul only lives 9 months.

(A solution to the Ioke).

(Jeopardy running poetry).

2

Marxism. A luxury!

I adore Adorno!

Te adoro Adorno!

(Spanish)

A deorodant.

Teen Spirit.

Yes, Nirvana!

3

We are the Line Fan Club!

(Viet Nam)

4

Every time I hear someone who wants to find the truth (what’s really happening”), I think he is jealous.

(A Quote)

5

What I like most about blogs is that no matter what you write here, it doesn’t look too intelligent.

Blog templates are generic and dumb.

Anything you put here looks childish (the worst one is that old robot) and simplistic.

We look like the fifties. Blogs are the cartoon Era of visual e-writing.

Anything you write in them looks like something directly written in the do-it-yourself yellow pages of the right wing.

No matter what html improvements you do to your blog, it’s still going to look primitive. And if you have a cool blog, you’re just not a real blogger.

(Embrace this context. You’re just a writer. You don’t deserve anything better).

Blogs look like the Third World of the prose “universe”.

(You know, aphorisms… they are so… so… so…. you know!

close the )

Not even the universities look so old. Every blog template looks like a bad trip.

(

Let’s face it: blogs are a perfect way to say good bye to your credibility.

(Authority. Wasn’t it nice to have one?)

The perfect way to say good bye to the the remaining credibility you had after deciding to become a poet.

A poet.

A poor E. T.

6

Why are blogs that include poems so boring?

Because poems are boring!

Poems want to Remain!

(Oh I deserve Italics!)

(My dog knows me because he quotes me!)

A blog post is a draft which is published.

(The Return)

Poems are more “serious”.

They even like to get printed.

Poems even reinforced prose in order to become the object of admiration and analysis.

Poetry is part of high culture —an orgasm.

Poetry is always a nostalgia.

“How language should be use”.

What grandma tells us.

7

A trailer.

2003-03-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

BLOGS

I like SDPG (Bill Marsh). Have you read it? Check it out: SDPG

2003-03-05T06:10:00.000-08:00

CREEPS, ICEBERGS, BEYONDERS:
THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING

I wasn’t in Tijuana when Silliman wrote on his blog about Brian Kim Stefans definition of a “Creep” (Radiohead dixit) group/generation/archipelago of poets in the post-langpo attitude/contexts/agencies. But just return and read those blogs, I and lost my sleep. Far too engaging. So I re-read Stefans’ original essay and then re-read K. Silem Mohammad’s piece (“Creeping it Real”) on Tripwire-6 and then his Lime Tree Blog on that also.

I like people disagreeing. That’s the only reason I visit my family often.

And this Creep-y-ology is I think a decisive discussion.

I been studying American poetics for some years now, from the Avant-Garde to the Counterpoetics and the LangPoe and more recently the after-stuff.

And this Creep’s discussion feels to me—as an outsider reader—just like those pieces that in the past have started the rethinking and the re-articulation of poetics in the U.S.

BKS responds to Silliman with a WeB-maiLOG:

«I try not to respond to writing about my writing to avoid the “echo chamber” effect and also to curtail any elevated sense of self-consideration about what I am doing, since, after all, like everyone else I probably think a bit too much about what I am doing, what people think I am doing, etc. Better to pretend it's not happening, like in that Roy Lichtenstein painting of that woman drowning, and the thought bubble saying “This is not happening.” »

But I don’t think the Lichtenstein reference is right, because it feels like this Creep difference is really happening.

As another Radiohead song goes (“Idioteque”):

We're not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening
We're not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening

KSM by his own side says Silliman’s response is somewhat resistant to accept a separation is happening in the experimental generational system:

« I can't help but be amused at the consistency with which Ron grabs every opportunity to point out that these younger poets may be talented and all, but they sure don't have the political rigor and integrity of their generational big brothers and sisters. He does it again today in talking about Kristin Prevallet and Jules Boykoff. I dunno, maybe there's something critically healthy about it, and I do admire his blog most of the time, but it just seems ... kind of anxious. »

I admire Silliman’s blog a lot too. If in Mexico we had a Silliman I would buy him Corona beer every Friday. That’s how much I love his work (especially The New Sentence collection).

But I too feel his response to the Creep possibility/difference/breaking a part from LangPo, is somewhat anxious, yes.

They need to let go of their authority, leadership or whatever we may called the role LangPoe has in the U.S. and even abroad.

I mean even in Mexico we know the LangPoets have this role, so this is the time to let go of it and create new differences—unless they want to become this canon or tradition which keeps not recognizing other younger writers are searching ways to not become this big ice block.

I mean, at one point or another LangPoets are going to be challenged in a serious way by the younger experimental writers. They cannot be their disciples forever or writers who-just-don’t-succeed to have another proposal to understanding the poetic community, their new relation to culture, the role of writing, new means. (Please, the Internet is now here). That’s enough sign something is happening.

Ice age coming
Ice age coming
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both

I’ve been hearing both sides and I tend to agree with the second one. Those who think there has already been a separation.

LangPoets are one of my favorite reading, I think I have said that many times here, but I also see a tendency there to deny the possibility of something beyond them.

We don’t need to play the Oedipal game any more, but not playing it means also no fathers there denying

The first of the children
The first of the children
The first of the children

Or the first of their not-children, the first of their not-daughters and not-sons.

I am remembering now the OEI 2001 number on the After LangPoets, which to me read as a series of younger writers having mixed feelings about abandoning or declaring a radical rupture with the older experimental writers.

That’s a whole different issue too.

But it’s very clear that the possibility of finding a series of differences is becoming more and more evident, and that the work of people like Darren Wershler-Henry, Rodrigo Toscano, Rod Smith, Jen Hofer, Edwin Torres, Lytle Shaw, Brian Kim Stefans, Bill Marsh, to name some of the writers whose work I’m somewhat familiar with, do have some new proposals not only in form but most importantly in how writing and writers relate to each other, their elders, other cultures, and the role of “poetry” in this new society.

At some point there’s going to be a clear rupture with LangPoe, and I mean a clear rupture coming from the experimental scenes—and maybe that’s already has happened and I just don’t not about.

I need money to buy this whole bunch of chapbooks and books.

Take the money run
Take the money run
Take the money

Or please send them to my P.O. Box!

But it is also curious to me, how this rupture is not so evident even by the part of other Creeps or whatever they want to be called or not be called.

But I can be totally wrong. But to me it looks like some of them are being too friendly with their teachers.

Who's in a bunker?
Who's in a bunker?
I have seen too much
I haven't seen enough
You haven't seen enough

This is why I like BKS approach. And precisely why I like Silliman’s response. There’s a tension there.

As an outsider I feel the breaking of the new writers should come from a mixture of this situations:

—Finishing “poetry” as this line-based structure. Finishing the prose-line distinction that international poetry still respects. Going beyond all genres. Ending poetry as the history of Line, and keeping it separate from novel, short-story, essay, aphorism, you name it. Poets are people who convinced themselves they must primordially must write “poetry”.

—Going beyond “voice”.

—Making the History of Literature not so relevant in the future development of writing. Literature is not the source.

—Reconstructing the Poetic Subject after the critique of the Lyrical I by LangPoe, Antipoetry (in LatinAmerica for example). Inventing new ways to explore the self, the I, @uto-bio=graphy, etc.

—Getting the American experimental poet out of the Academia and into more aggressively political time-spaces. LangPoe helped us to become totally aware how political the text was, but that’s not enough. Bush is outside. And we need to address how writing is going to become a more direct political activist force; and how the writer can even go beyond writing in order to stop the bad aspects of globalization.

—Diminishing the role of the book in the power exchange circuit of every national literature.

—Getting writings in the post-American Writing era, because to this point American writers descend from other American writers. This even can include a post-English situation.

—Defining what is the meaning of being an “American” in the world.

What’s really clear is that LangPoe is not the last “avant-garde” meaning the ultimate realization of poetics in our era.

There must be a separation (even a violent one) at some point. An that feels as something going to happen soon.

But if that separation is text-based, that would be a failure. If the differences are “found” or provoked only in the structure of the text (the way the use humor, style, etc) and not in the way writing relates to society in a totally new ways, that would be a failure.

Not Make It New—“It” being the text—But Make Them New. The Writers. Changing what a “writer” means.

Throw him in the fire
Throw him in the fire

Not how our new culture influences our new writing skills, but how a new writing can influence (in a new way) these new glocal cultures.

Older or younger we all are affected by culture, so the separation cannot happen there. The difference must come from the way we decide how to affect that same culture, the different strategies, the different concepts and praxis on how the writers need to act in the world and not only in readings, universities or on the page.

And by the part of the LangPoe and other older writers changing how they resist the difference that is arising, and how to abandon this father role they’re still employing, how an older writers sees itself as the judge of when something “new” is really happening or not.

BTW, LangPoets need to be post-LangPoets too.

And the younger ones, recognize they are all post-LangPoe even if they don’t want to, so better do it more radically.

Icebergs can happen.

And now I need to return to Spanish.

2003-03-05T02:56:00.000-08:00

MY FILE

I hate being a writer. Feeling this desire to have "my" own work. The moment writers turn into translators (solely into translators) I am going to believe in their desire to destroy the "I" they talk so much against.

But not even the "I" is the real issue here. The "I" is just the means to have another thing...

Hate this drive to have a "My".

2003-03-05T01:59:00.000-08:00

FROM MY POSTMODERNISM SEMINAR TJ CLASS

—The Avant Garde was nothing but this bunch of people who liked to get disconnected from History. “Let’s imagine ourselves as machines” and they called themselves The Futurists. “Lets jump around, wear Indian masks and… and! And let’s be totally freaky and crazy and… and… and…” and they called themselves the Dadaists. “Let’s forget European Christian-Rationalist Values” and they called themselves the Surrealists. Every Avant Garde decided an extravaganza —the first student says. He didn’t read the whole Habermas essay that was assigned, so that’s the reason why he starts so aggressively.

—The Avant Garde was the moment when the Modern Man learned how to go beyond History. The moment we learned how to leave History behind and have new worlds inhabited by intelligent visionary minorities —the girl in the first row says.

—And then we all learned how to do that —her boyfriend adds.

—But that’s stupid. History is not a car you can get out of to wander outside of it —her ex boyfriend replies.

—The Avant Garde is to blame. That’s the moment intellectuals discovered how to be outside of society. To disengage from reality supposedly to find alternatives, but they only turned out to be the forerunners of hiperreality —the Baudrillard fan blasts.

—And now everybody lives outside of Society and History —we all think.

—And when somebody wants to return to Society and History (The Big Return) the rest laughs —who said that?

—So, even now the Avant Garderns keep doing that. “Let’s be post-post-post-everything” and they call themselves Post-Post-Post-Whateva.

—So what’s the role of the intellectual now? —the professor finally asks.

—To get everybody back in the “car” and to let people know and make intellectuals understand to wander outside of History is Fun but nothing else. Outside of History there’s nothing except this bunch of High I.Q. people imagining stuff. Walking and having Cool Dreams. Are they on Peyote or What?

—No, they get high reading books.

And the last class of this night ends.

And most likely nobody wants to take the bus. It’s too late and the bus arrives to the University stop in one hour, so we are all asking for a ride.

Every Avant Garde. A ride. A ride with the Cool people, those who take their own way to wander around. Those who have their own car.

History. The Public Transportation intellectuals despise.

That old Bus Americans sold to the city of Tijuana and now is being used to take workers from their homes to the maquiladora plant.

Welcome back.

2003-03-03T23:35:00.000-08:00

PETITION

We need to sign this emergency petition to the U.N. Security Council: http://www.moveon.org/emergency/

I don't like petitions, but this is not a time to have literary taste or genre preferences hehe. Any effort is good to let the U:S. goverment know this war would be nothing but a crime.

2003-02-21T17:47:00.000-08:00

READING IN NYC

This Tuesday Feb 25 I’m reading, along with Kim Rosenfield and Rodrigo Toscano, at the Drawing Center in New York City. 6:30 pm.

I’m reading some sections from a 30 pages piece written in (sic) English. I hope this piece is nothing similar to poetry, but I guess it has something to do with that. It’s a piece on power. A bad comedy about readings, silence, politics. I hope it's something like Latin Am anti-poetry meets 9-11.

Don’t know yet what section I’m going to read.

Anyway, in case anybody wants to go, the Drawing Center is in Soho, below Houston Street—at 35 Wooster Street between Grand and Broome.

I'm reading. So, don't forget the tomatoes.

2003-02-21T15:45:00.000-08:00

CIRCULARS

These ideas on poetry/politics/anti-war mvmnt and comments are very intelligent. Take a look: Circulars

2003-02-18T16:25:00.000-08:00

ON THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST BLOGS

I’m aware of the American arguments against blogs. Foucault and Co.—even though I think blogs can be a post-mediatic strategy (Guattari).

Viva le Blogs!

Blogs are dangerous. Blogs can make us return to Self. Authority. Privacy. (“So Long the E-List!”).

But there’s clearly a need to reinvent autobiography. Blogs can be one door for that.

Hopefully another door out of it. And E-Lists shouldn’t be a monopoly.

And the Blogocracy needs, of course, the e-list and whatever is more collective.

From my side of the bed, I can tell you this: in Mexico, blogs have helped balanced who is published, who is considered a writer, what can be said, reviewed or what new agents appear.

That used to be a decision taken by a man in a Mexico City office. Now anybody can publish (even several times a day whatever she-he wants). And people get readers. An then readers turn into new writers. Some good ones have appeared—the left out by the State presses for “Young Literature”.

Mexico City controls almost all the magazines, publishing houses, national newspapers literary supplements. In my particular case, my blog in Spanish has been key to attack the literary politics of Mexico City. Blogs are being used here to put in risk literary authority figures and institutions, like Paper—“Literature”, the “Tradition”, Mexico City Scenes.

I’m been looking at the reactions many have in the U.S. against blogs.

I can understand those arguments when I look at the situation there. But I feel you’re not seeing the whole panorama.

American blogs are not just part of American poelitics, but of a rising international network.

If you want to be read by some people in Latin America, open a blog.

And know you’re going to be part of that very well known Bourdieu idea of being used in another production-reception field-context for foreign power struggles.

Of course, in the way we decide.

It’s pretty simple. American books can't get to Mexico. Not even think of Argentina. Just a very limited few ($) can have access to them. But thanks to the Poetics List, Blogs, Ubu, etc, material-ideas have the potential to circulate in our fields of re-action.

At the moment they are created. And not 20 years later or through the translator in Spain.

American arguments against blogs should consider the role blogs can play in the whole Internet, not just the American one.

American blogs help your ideas to have new readers—but also new re-writing of those ideas, new opposition to those ideas, new challenges to them.

And from what I can see from here (I’m aware I lack knowledge of the power struggles and the way poelitics works in the U.S.), blogs are an opportunity to change power in specifics scenes.

If you’re not part of reading series (a very important American institution), the mags, little presses, the disciple of the Big Daddies, etc. just open a fucking blog and mess around with the established power, practices and ideas.

You don’t have to be Anybody to open one.

Since the beginning of 2002, in Mexico blogs have helped to throw borders on how age, prior status, geography, gender, academic background, literary “style”, etc, affects literary “role playing”.

Mexican blogs from the North of the country mainly have popularized ideas against figures like Paz (our Robert Frost hehe), publishing houses, magazines, our so-called Republic of Letters and whatever one wants to argue.

I’m writing this I couldn’t even think of getting published into a book or magazine. I’ve become a terrorist thanks to this shit.

Americans should open blogs in big numbers not only to laugh at this Neo-Formalism or “Mainstream” thing, but also criticized and re-write the LangPoe and the different PostLangPoe’s.

I admire these authors, but if I were an American I would be arguing with them.

(I plan to do that, once I get the whole picture of what’s happening, once I understand better what these ideas and practices mean in the U.S. context itself).

Blogs should essentially be anti-authoritarian.

Numbers are the key. So many blogs that no map (canon) can be constructed. So many agents writing, respecting just a few of them becomes stupid. Don’t leave blogs for the already few, the identifiable ones.

Silliman is one of my favorites writers. But stop emailing Silliman and waiting for him to copy-paste you. Open a blog.

Blogs are a resource to create more agents, writers, more discussions.

Less authorities.

2003-02-17T00:49:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER APHORISM ON "SILENCE"

My aim in philosophy is to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle just to quote Wittgenstein.

--And refute the Tractatus!

2003-02-16T21:09:00.000-08:00

THIS PAGE HAS NO RESPECT FOR ITSELF!

The first rule of a Tijuana Bible is to have no respect for itself.

Today this Tijuana Bible will include 1 quoted cartoon! (completely free for You!)

("Authors are so Generous! —Sartre assured me").

A forward!

1:

"We've established a clear link!"

alQaeda.

iraQ.

2003-02-16T15:46:00.000-08:00

ARRESTED FOR BEING AWAKE

"It turns out that the people arrested for taping up the pictures were Lytle Shaw and Emilie Clark. While taping a piture to a lamppost in Soho that had many other signs - moving van, apts, etc. - taped to it, two undercover police who had been sitting there in a cab came up to her and asked if she was putting up signs about the protest, and if she was going to the protest on saturday...then they told them they were under arrest. she told them she was 7 months pregnant and they had the nerve to say that she should have thought about that when she decided to put the pictures up! and that she should think about that saturday at the protest (!!) - (as if bombing doesn't endanger childrens lives, but...). when they were brought in all the police at the station were saying 'the liberals are here" - (Lytle held back from saying: hey! that's an insult! you guys are the liberals!)- they were kept in jail (complete with human feces) for 7 hours".

From Marianne Shaneen's blog Froth.

2003-02-15T20:37:00.000-08:00

LETTER TO YOU, THE U.S.

I've having problems writing in English these days.

I think a great number of Mexicans are becoming basically anti-American State and if this new series of wars is conducted further, the United States needs to know this is going to damage greatly the relationship between our two cultures.

This war has no reason. This war is part of the system to make America richer, and dominant over the rest of the world. Bush is no more good than Saddam. He's just your Bin Laden.

The American government looks like a serial killer to us.

I come from a great series of cultures, and even though we have been sleeping for some time, now we are awake. And even this stupid blog is part of a campaign from our culture to try to communicate with you before language has no meaning left.

Is this war going to really happen? And then what other war is the United States government going to create next?

You're cloning yourselves all over the world. It appears like the United States wants to erase the Other, and wants to take resources from other cultures to continue your way of life. Your government and our corrupt politicians are uniting to turn Mexico, for example, into a slum. How can you help our interior enemies to destroy Mexico? This cannot continue.

The alliance between these two corrupt governments is turning the Mexican people into enemies of both, and now sees them as one force whose purpose is to destroy our freedom.

The American government and American companies are making money out of our future. The signs of a social disaster are everywhere. And a big part of the problem is the role of the U.S. in our economical, social and political life.

The U.S. is part of the present threat against our language and existence. We are starting a revolt against our government because we want to put an end to our racism and social injustice (40% of Mexicans live in extreme poverty because 90% of the wealth is property of less than 10% of the population, the TV system is erasing the real issues, and is part of the government, drug dealing is widespread and is, of course, part of the government).

We need to transform ourselves to fix the political life of our culture—and that involves the United States, because this government is corrupting even more our political life and is making us poorer and poorer.

And now we see how the American government is going into one more of its international lies, at the same time that is ruining our economy. The Irak war (the sequal!) is part of the same pattern that promotes the transformation of Mexico and Latin America into the employees of American interests.

The United States has been the leader of implementing a nuclear orden, a continuous war. The United States, because of that, is solely responsabile of stopping its blindness. First this new war, and then the total order your politicians and companies run.

You are headed to a disaster. This kind of world cannot go on more than two or three decades. Change before your population is subject of all kinds of attacks, from terrorism to world wide hate.

This is one of the most dark times of American History. Get out of it.

Do you know, for example, that burning American flags is becoming an increasing activity in Mexican life? Each day that goes by Antiamericanism grows in Mexico. I'm sure this is not something which your media let's you know, but this is happening here.

The feeling in Mexico is 9/11 happened because the U.S. asked for it. Spreading violence and inequality all over the world brings you this kind of karma. Every time I meet with my students, friends or talk with any people, the U.S. is strongly criticized.

We don't like violence. Can you explain to me why do you believe so much in it?

This has been happening all over the 20th Century, but now we have reached a point in which the Mexican national project is collapsing. This is a moment in which Mexican history is about to change drastically. Different groups are preparing to go to war against poverty, and popular culture is imagining a third quest for justice, after the first two in 1810 and 1910. Too many things have happened in the last decades and now the country is in a daily state of discontent.

The U.S. is criticized strongly here, radically. First the government, for behaving like a butcher, and then regular Americans, who appear to be powerless or lacking any desire to see what your country represents in the world.

You appear to have no respect for spirituality and others. You appear to be the leaders of destroying the Earth.

I would not say this to you, if I didn't know for sure this is not just me talking, but a whole culture. This is what is being discussed here. You.

You need to realize you must stop your government. It is destroying not only our cultures but also your own culture. You are a country with a great number of cultures, and you have created great things (like your different literatures and musics) but now you're turning into this monster which even your neighbors fear and are now preparing to resist.

You may say, "What is this young Mexic@n intellectual talking about? This e-dude must be crazy, exaggerating, have nothing to do". But believe me, your government and your silence is damaging the way we see, feel and think about the United States. Mexico is becoming basically anti-American.

You must take responsability for stopping Bush, the CIA and the companies that are runing the war. You're risking to live Vietnam again.

But this time all the world is going to be Vietnam.

The last time three American intellectuals (friends of mine) came to Tijuana, I was afraid we could encounter anti-American reactions. And it kind of happen. We were sitting in a dowtown bar, drinking a beer, and then a man came, directed his talk to my friends, and used the bottles to explain us in the table how he felt the U.S. is opressing Mexico and other countries, and then he asked if we had any work for him because he had no job thanks to both governments.

It was a completely miserable situation. Here I was sitting with American writers I admire, and here I was also hearing a Mexican poor man, with no future. Two worlds in a strange encounter. None of us knowing what to say or do.

Just last night somebody remembered to me, that the Indian uprising in Chiapas started the same day that Nafta oficially began working. It was the first war against the Mexican-U.S. goverments alliance. It was a war against what president Carlos Salinas represented: the poverty and opression of the Indian population in Mexico, the continuation of the PRI (which was the party who ruled Mexico, thanks to violence and fraud, for the last seventy years) and the strenghtening of the American influence in our daily life.

The Mexican 1910 Revolution started in a similar way. For similar causes.

And now after the PRI was beaten in an election we all prevented from becoming another electoral fraud, this new party arrived, PAN. We got out of the PRI perfect dictatorship (as it was called some years ago by Vargas Llosa, one of the most important writers in Latin America) but entered into this new way of functioning, less visibly corrupt but far more effective in widening the difference among the classes.

PAN is a party from the right wing. And guess what? The head of our first "democratic goverment" is a former president of Coca Cola.

(Literally. This is not a joke).

Mexico headed by a Coca Cola ex-president? This is simple humillating to what our culture means. Mexicans are people who dedicate a great part of their energy to understand our relationship with language, knowledge, the place we live in, and now, suddenly a bunch of crooks are humillating us with this Coca Cola Clown?

This will not stand. Americans need to understand you cannot play this role in Mexican life.

We are going to reconstruct the relationship with ourselves, because it has been damaged greatly due to our corruption and Mexicans selling our country to the best client. We are going to take care of ourselves, but you need to stop your companies and politicians.

They are going to fail.

So do what you have to do before they throw you into this non-sensical situation they are creating. Your culture is strong, it doesn't need this kind of generals, senators, ceo's and fools damaging it.

The Mexican population is thinking how to act on the threat of us becoming Americanized.

Even though our media and our government don't appear to be anti-American State, regular people are becoming that in great great numbers.

We used to be the country represented by maize, but know we buy corn from the U.S.

Mexico is realizing following the American way is destroying our culture.

I am telling you this because you need to know this is happening in the South. A couple of days ago, the most important newspaper (leftstist and anti-PAN-PRI) from Mexico City reported the poets stance against the war (click here). Guess why this makes front news in Mexico?

It looks to us as if the people of the United States, its politicians, intellectuals, don't care enough about the killings and injustice your government is spreading. That's why any news about resistence inside the U.S. is welcome.

To the Mexican mind, an American (a "gringo") is somebody who is a macho, doesn't understand his relationship with this planet, and wants to make more money, and would do anything to accomplish this, even organizing wars or trying to control other countries. This is the image your sending.

I'm convinced this is a moment you're going to regret if you don't act. This is a moment similar to that before and during the nazi regime. People knew what was being done to the jews, but many didn't do anything to stop the nazi government. Your government is behaving like a serial killer, like a sniper (the sniper from Washington), your government is the leading terrorist State, don't you see how this is turning the world against you?

Do you want to become a culture who is going to be blamed for the murder of many thousands, even millions of people, in two or three decades or even in a few years?

All of this is why, when I've tried to write in English these days, something happens in my hands. A discomfort.

2003-02-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

POETRY IS OLD. LET'S DRINK COKE!

I can’t stop thinking poetry in general has become outdated, as painting and other language structures.

Poetry. God. Poetry got rid of rhyme, most metric formulas, “music”—or doing them is simply retro. Or that New Formula writing. It seems line has now exhausted itself. Its main reason to exist is believing in “rhythm”.

But what’s rhythm?
Something we must get rid of.

And, what’s line?
An idea that loves to be read in slow motion.
An idea that couldn’t make it to the end of the page.

So, what’s poetry?
A left margin thing.

The longer I think on the issues involving poetry, it looks to me as if the most interesting track we can take is to stop wanting to be “poets” (liners), and just did what visual artist did through out the 20th Century: abandon painting, the traditional structure of visual language.

Poetry is as traditional as painting was. But poetry remains in power. Poetry is something even the Bush family considers a good event to held before going to war.

Bush, he is such a butcher.

Writing lines implies one believes language is surround by silence. That’s why poetry prefers short lines. They need “breath”. That trick to make silence possible. “Rhythm”. That scapegoat.

Verse. An Absolute that became obsolete.

Another reason why poetry uses line is to make the “other” participate, filling the blanks.

Isn’t that lame? That’s why Readers are so fucking lame. Poets invented them.

I hate poetry. It bores me more and more every year. I even turn the TV on in order to stand the poetry I’m reading that evening. Or I put some electronic music, and imagine what I am reading is not that bad after all.

Lyrics is what poetry aimed at. All those ideas poets developed in the past have become true in pop. So, let’s put “poetics” to rest. Let Cristina Aguilera handle them.

When the extraterrestrials come I hope they don’t show us their poems. I hate anthologies.

If the extraterrestrials come and want to read to us something similar to poetry (before killing us, or taking oil or water away from us) let’s direct them first to slam poetry events.

And then laugh at them.

A simple trick to not fall into that left-margin-thing: instead of starting thinking about lines, we could think of paragraph as the structure to work with.

Let’s face it. We’ve already destroyed poetry. Let’s know destroy prose.

Prose. A more complex writing technology. Poetry. Nothing but Pepsi.

2003-02-04T01:22:00.000-08:00

SPANISH ACCORDING TO VANITY FAIR

Just received this letter from an American friend:

"If you haven't seen the cover of this month's Vanity Fair magazine (Feb. 2003), you`ll be pleasantly surprised to see Salma Hayek on the cover, but that`s where the niceties end. In an advice column entitled "Ask Dame Edna", the drag queen author/comedian, Ms. Dame herself, replies to a letter with some of the most shameful racist remarks I`ve ever read in a magazine of this caliber. We thought you might be interested in reading what Drag Queen Dame thinks of Latinos and what the editors and Vanity Fair allowed to be published, so here you go:

"Dear Dame Edna,

"I would very much like to learn a foreign language, preferably French or Italian, but every time I ! mention this, people tell me to learn Spanish instead. They say, "Everyone is going to be speaking Spanish in 10 years. George W. Bush speaks Spanish." Could this be true? Are we all going to have to speak Spanish?" -Torn Romantic, Palm Beach

"Dear Torn,

"Forget Spanish. There`s nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named Garcia Lorca, but I`d leave him on the intellectual back burner if I were you. As for everyone`s speaking it, what waddle! Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you`re American, try English."

We want you to use your power in numbers to tell Vanity Fair what you think of this columnist and her words.! Send your letters to the editors at: vfmail@vf.com

* * *

This reminded me of the incident some days ago when Richard Grenell was heard saying "He should hurry up... who cares what Mexico says?", when the Mexican embassador to the U.N. was giving the Mexican position on one of the issues involving the American attack against Irak.

2003-02-01T04:34:00.000-08:00

POETRY, JUST A SCARF

With Bush as president, Americans sure look stupid.

2003-02-01T04:10:00.000-08:00

GERIATRICS (1.2.03)

(Literature | A Swap Meet).

Writing poetry is like doing painting.

This is not the time to do that.

2003-01-30T05:39:00.000-08:00

THE POLITICS OF ReREADING THE ACTIVE READER THEORY

In Latin America the role of the reader has been a fundamental discussion, almost to the point of total exhaustion. Umberto Eco’s ideas on the open work became greatly popular and the novel Hopscotch by cult figure Julio Cortázar (a sixties meta-novel that gave different possibilities of sequence-reading) helped made this issue a central one. (Cortázar was very explicit on the kind of readers he wanted). (He was later accused of sexist because the called the passive reader a "lector hembra"—female reader—which he later changed to "passive reader").

I was just reading Alan Gilbert’s “re: Reading the Active Reader Theory” included in Tripwire latest number (6). Great magazine. Great piece.

Gilbert is totally right when he states: “Claims for experimental texts become elitist and supercilious when it’s assumed that readers are only activated when they come into contact with the formal devices employed by the avant-garde text”.

But even though Hejinian’s position (commented in the essay) and Gilbert’s are very interesting, they are still somewhat trapped in the alleged difference between a passive reading and an active one.

“Readers and audiences are active with all kinds of texts” (Gilbert). So how can we get rid of the passive-active dichotomy that founded this discussion?

There’s definitively levels of reading, so we got to make distinctions but starting from the consensus that indicates that reading is always active.

Reading, activity. So never again to imagine a passive audience. There's no closed language. So Cortázar and Eco were wrong. And the theorists before and after them that still have some use for "closed" work and similar concepts. "Closed" works don't exist.

The real difference is that some readings produce a another-text (a material one), and others just produce an imaginary text, a psychological and intimate one. This last one leaves no mark on the social visible sphere. It's an activity in which the relationship between subject (reader-audience) and the text is kept private.

The first kind of re-writing (or “reading”) is socially available to others. We may call this kind of text-activity productive reading.

Productive reading produces text-for-others. Leaves a visible mark. It' an activity in which the relationship between subject (reader-audience) and the text is made public.

The other kind of re-writing (reading) is an activity that produces no verifiable/available text to the others. An add on the subway or a book is read, but that reader only produces a private text, a text-for-himself, instead of writing on the add or recombining the signs of the book in a second-one.

This second kind of reader practices consumer-reading. It doesn’t produce a text. It only imagines it.

ShE only consumes texts but makes no effort to socially transform them so others can re-write this re-writing.

The re-writing that happened in this second type of active-reading is only available to others through the changes that the first text provoked on the social behavior (including speech) of the consumer-reader.

Consumer-reading produces a sort of private-text. Even though a "private-text" cannot truly exist, because its leaks to the outside world in many ways. A consumer-reader is contradictory. Her-his activity is not going to remain private.

Once the active-passive reading dichotomy is dead, and we build a second one on the basis of the essential active role of every reader we can start to better understand what kind of readers are we in every instance.

Ones that make our texts (our re-writings) directly available to others—so they can re-produce them

Or

Ones that promote the private-property paradigm of reading, consuming texts but not making those re-writings available to others. Not going public.

Productive-reading makes linguistic private property ultimately absurd. Consumer-reading is capitalistic.

At the end we are both productive-readers of some texts and consumer-texts of others.

But we need to be truly clear on what texts are we just consumer-readers, and what re-writings we decide to disclose for anybody who wants to re-write it (or at least consume it).

We are both kinds of active readers. Deciding when are we one kind or the other is a choice called Politics.

2003-01-25T04:17:00.000-08:00

WRITING & THE OTHER

Writing on another writer means friendly fire.

2003-01-25T04:10:00.000-08:00

BLOGS AND THE POST-MEDIATIC

Blogs are post-mediatic. They use the Internet to make critical thinking and rewriting in general faster and faster.

Guattari would be a blogger now. This is--I think--from this last writing before the U.F.O took him:

"To think through this complexity, to renounce, in particular, the reductive approach of scientism when a questioning of its prejudices and short-term interests is required: such is the necessary perspective for entry into an era that I have qualified as "post-media", as all great contemporary upheavals, positive or negative, are currently judged on the basis of information filtered trough the massmedia industry, which retains only a description of events [le petit cote evenementiel] and never problematizes what is at stake, in its full amplitude.

"It is true that it is difficult to bring individuals out of themselves, to disengage themselves from their immediate preoccupations, in order to reflect on the present and the future of the world. They lack collective incitements to do so. Most older methods of communication, reflection and dialogue have dissolved in favor of an individualism and a solitude that are often synonymous with anxiety and neurosis. It is for this reason, that I advocate -- under the aegis of a new conjunction of environmental ecology, social ecology and mental ecology - the invention of new collective assemblages of enunciation concerning the couple, the family, the school, the neighborhood, etc.

"The functioning of current *mass media*, and television in particular, runs counter to such a perspective. The tele-spectator remains passive in front of a screen, prisoner of quasi-hypnotic relation, cut off from the other, stripped of any awareness of responsibility.

"Nevertheless, this situation is not made to last indefinetly. Technological evolution will introduce new possibilities for interaction between the medium and its user, and between users themselves. The junction of the audiovisual screen, the telematic screen and the computer screen could lead to a real reactivation of a collective sensibility and intelligence. The current equation (media=passivity) will perhaps disappear more quickly than one would think. Obviously, we cannot expect a miracle from these technologies: it will all depend, ultimately, on the capacity of groups of people to take hold of them, and apply them to appropriate ends.

I think the appropriate ends are building an international discussion non-organize web of spaces where writing is happening and ideas mutate day to day until many ways of applying them are used in the Politics of Everything.

So, as authors let's die soon and become the next thing we need to become.

Post-literature is the goal. Writing not as a fancy field of culture, but as an element that participes in the reshaping of culture. Just as speech does. Literature needs to imitate speech, not in its style (colloquialism) but in the structure of its movement between individuals.

I hate writing.

Writing is almost socially useless.

In the transformation of writers into something else, Americans are closer to it simply because they are so many. The problem is that you behave like writers who don't know you're supposed to be agents, it seems you're not aware either of your responsability in this late age of capitalism.

But if you already fucked up the world, please feel free to ruin literature too. Rewriting needs to let go its history of identifiable figures. It must become so massive that there's no need to turn writers into activists, but a situation in which everybody is discussing language and getting radical about (that's what a poet is: a radical on language).

[Radical nerds].

An intellectual is a scientist, artist or writer that participes in the public debate. American writers don't exist in the media, nor in the other debate national space I am aware 'America' has, so American writers are not intellectuals.

The United States is a country whose literature produces no intellectuals.

(México produces intellectuals) (I hated Octavio Paz, but at least his ideas on politics counted in the public debate, even though they were the wrong ones) (But now the right wing party that rules wants to diminish the role of the intellectual on our political life). (The want to have to reform the relationship between intellectuals and the State, and achieve a model like the American one).

American intellectuals are Maddonna, Kurt Cobain and now Eminem. They produce more intellectual changes in people than any scientist, artist or writer working now in the U.S.

At least Cobain made nihilism popular among the young.

American writers change only the upper class. High-educated readers. But that's it. They don't appear to care about the the other social classes. They seem to have forgotten Walter Benjamin. ("True literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework–this is, rather, he habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between action and writing").

The post-mediatic is maybe the last opportunity to have something like 'intellectuals' in the United States.

Experimentalism needs to be applied to politics, to rewrite itself along politics. That's the next step. If American critical thinking in all its forms (including LangPoe and PostLangPoe) doesn't mutate into something that helps shaping the political life (from technology to the elections) it failed.

It fails. What must come next is turning experimental writing and social action indivisible. Poetry becoming an ideology people use all through out their social life.

(The spreading of rewriting or, at least, the invention of intellectuals).

What follows LongPoe is the writing of the post-mediatic world.

2003-01-25T02:45:00.000-08:00

ON MY BLOGGER HYPOCRISY

"'Scene' is just a nasty word for 'vibrant community'. Party over here! Party over there! I guess I'm a sociophile" (Nada G.)

I have different opinions in my two blogs. In the one in Spanish I encourage scene forming but in this one I'm critical of scenes because I think American poetics is too scene-driven as I said before. To much power exchange. (Bill Marsh from San Diego is basically right on this I think).

Scenes behave like a drug cartel, and they want to make History.

But maybe the real reason of my oppossition is that I'am too fucking tired of the too-many parties we have in Tijuana between bloggers.

I too am a sociophile.

In Tijuana we even resucited a literary bar (called El Turistico) because of the blog boom here. Every weekend we have a party someplace to get totally drunk (or high), talk too much, hear Mexican bar songs or dance electronic music, and see people cheat and then finding the lies the next day in their personal blogs.

So I guess for me 'Scene' is just a nice word for 'party animal community'. Party over here! Party over there! I guess I'm an alcoholic.

2003-01-25T02:20:00.000-08:00

THE LINKS LISTS

A blog without links to other weblogs is a dead-end.

I hate the Back button. Blogs should let us continue jumping from one site to another.

The bigger the better. As big as we can.

Link lists should not be a list of favorites or friends, they should't be an expression of our own interests but as something to let others escape from us.

2003-01-23T12:35:00.000-08:00

ON THE ACCELERATION OF REWRITING AND THE END OF THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE

In we get a system in which there are too many writers out there, “figures” and recognized authors will eventually disappear. Discourse would be constructed in this chaotic overflow of other-people-words, and the lineage of literature would fade away.

In this post-literature stag, writing will no longer have as its purpose the building of Authors, but just the spreading of writing.

(In the history of the spreading of writing, the invention of emails, messenger and chats are far more important than the invention of books)

A reader which just reads and does not write, is just a mother-fucker consumer.

A reader which just reads and does not write believes writing is important and that’s why he doesn’t do it himself.

Reading is kissing somebody else’s ass. Having favorite authors is such a stupid thing.

I personally know that. I even worship some of them. Readers have too much respect for certain figures.

That’s why I hate this kind of readers even more than authors.

We should all become or consider ourselves writereaders, re-writers, active readers.

Authors think they do it themselves. And want to become widely know thanks to it.

Rewriting is, as we all know, the essence of writing. Writing is knowing you’re rewriting and knowing (and this is even more important but less known) you’re going to be re-written.

But this historic rewriting process (The History of Literature) has been slow.

If X, Y, Z are a book, an author of a group of them, as even Bloom knows: X rewrites Y and Y is rewritten by Z.

How slow and boring.

To this moment the History of Literature has been accomplished using burros.

(Books are slow & readings are small).

But with collective (and eventually massive) rewriting resources as e-lists or weblogs, we can accelerate this process.

X publishes something today and makes it available to whoever wants to read it, even if it is unfinished (blogs in the future should let us see how the writer is typing) (and the Internet should let us get into everybody’s computer files), and when X does that, the soon (or even before he has finished somebody!) Z will re-produce that (immediately).

That way somebody’s else writing will not be changed in a book but in day.

People are hiding the process of the actual writing. That’s one of the ways we protect the notion of Author. Hiding our writing until it's finished.

But the Internet should let us end that.

The Internet should even let me know write in somebody else space, interrupt his-her writing with my own, of even copy-paste it from him-her, and leaving him-her without the words she-he was putting together just a moment ago.

(Mentioning names or sources or directly quoting should be prohibited. Only plagiarism should be allowed).

I want to write in a world where right now words by people who I don’t know appear on my monitor-page helping me to write every piece, and as soon as I write a paragraph it has been already modified by two or three people (of software) out there.

If we rewrite as fast as we read and this is done by great numbers, soon nobody will know or care who did what and when did it happened.

Blogs and emails, btw, are unfinished writings asking somebody else to give them new form and engage them in a series of rewritings, “responses”.

But we should have no personal responses, we shoul abolish all causality in writing, all recognizable causality.

She should rewrite what’s appearing on monitors, for example (things by somebody else) so when he-she will put that in those turtles called books, it’s too late: what she-he said first in an open system of reading (like the Internet) it has already been rewriting by many.

Rewriting needs to get faster and faster and faster.

So why the hell is everybody just reading? Do you want the History of Literature to continue or what?

Readers are the reason Authors exist. Blame them.

**

If my English has some mistakes or typos, correct them, and if you want it take this text and consider it your own.

Or if somebody wants to translate into Spanish, take it too and publish it somewhere.

--But please don’t mention my name.

2003-01-20T07:14:00.000-08:00

THEORY's TASK

Theory's task is to make current practices impossible.

2003-01-20T04:54:00.000-08:00

ISSUES DIE SOON, THE UNEMPLOYED BARNEY WARNED

Scenes are organized communications channels & departments. Salesmen. Consumers. They can communicate. That’s the Secret. Making Communication Possible. (Brides, bribes and breeding can be part of the story) (Good News for the Left-Out).

The problem is The United States arrived to a stage where the dissolution of the literary system had to happen back in the 70’s.

(Even Disco did it. Disco dissapeared. Poetry got coward).

(Communication is part of the past. We need more disorganized forms of language exchange). (A not-knowing-what's-happening-writing-stage).

Scenes have make Literature continue in the U.S. They are the Grannies that keep Poetry Safe.

Each having its own group. The careers. The car. The Ear.

Writing spread. Now millions are using it.

Overpopulation not of writers, but of general writing in chats, emails, blogs, sites. Even porno is writing a lot.

Writers are loosing the little power they had.

(What hat? The cat asked).

The Hat every body uses to Identify with Others. The Names of the Scenes. The Legos of the Big Ego, the Machine Behind the opinionated keyboard, the concepts that set the discussion.

The leaderships. The chip potatoes they prefer.

All of these still exist. “But the numbers don’t lie”: so many now write that continuing the normal literary exchange would be to not recognize at the proper moment the time when we need to shift from one paradigm to another.

Let's disorganized--the Workman proposed when asking for the strike.

(Pancho Villa would help us with the Huelga. He would bring the margaritas).

Scenes should disappear precisely because they are elites. That’s so clear, even without glasses we can see that.

The Sun rises every day and the scenes wake up with him.

I hope blogs don’t become a scene, because a scene is an elite, a participation system where communication (thanks to the relatively small numbers of members) can happen. Communication: the trick which leads to the exchange of power among intellectuals--building individual works which have a relation to each other and gaining recongnition which gives them power.

Communication among intellectuals lead to circles.

That’s why a scene is obscene, the lady murmured. (Pancho Villa behaved that day like a real gentleman). (He didn't use any of his Latin Lover Pick Up Lines with the New York Times nor with L.A.)

(The Journalist wrote the whole story. He became popular between the disadvantaged intellectuals according to one source).

There's so many poets in the world, why bother to write poetry at all? We can ask. But the objective is non other than to destroy scene-building--

The Future (oh! now the recipe:) The Future is (oh!) (oh!) (oh!) enjoying the impossibility of managing the amount of writers.

Because no poet will be able to read it all, a new way of building texts would happen. Far more complex forms of exchange would occur.

The divas would disappeared. The anthologies. The narrow markets.

The New Frame, finally.

The coming-out of writers after the disappearance of Poets.

That way no body would have to agree with anything some "one" said.

Now my dog "barks". That's part of my bio-Graphy.

2003-01-18T19:32:00.000-08:00

ON BIOGRAPHY

Let’s replace the term “I” for “Biography”. I has too much metaphysics in it. BioGRAPHY has the advantage of making clear from the beginning that soul/life/personality/author is another written instance (and not the instance that writes the others). Bio-graphy is the act of being already written by language—and the need to read how we were already culturally-socially written by language in order to rewrite the relation between “ourselves” and society.

Bio(graphy) leaves clear we are a sign of a soul, not the soul itself.

I like the word BioGraphy become it’s a mixture of “Nature”/”Life” and "Culture"/"Language". Not coming back to neither of them.

Biography is already the impossibility of falling into a dualism based on the I vs. Society opposition. In Biography a merge has occurred.

I died.

I hate the Lyrical. But Bio-graphic writing is something I like. It let’s you see the specific circumstances (personal-social) that produce a certain text.

A text which is not biographical (in this broader sense of the word) is a text which tries to abstract the concrete agency that is written by it.

Non bio-graphy sucks.

2003-01-15T01:50:00.000-08:00

ABOUT BLOGS

If blogs turn into a scene it would be an unfortunate situation. I think that American poetry is too scene-driven.

Scenister.

I can only speculate on the reason why that happened. It obviously has relation to the quantities of authors out there—"communication" only being possible building relatively small communities. It has also something to do, if I'm right, with the caesuras that took place in the History of American poetics, it’s division into Mainstream/Avant-Garde--which btw doesn’t happen in Mexico. And, of course, it’s directly linked to the cross-cultural background of the American population and the different languages operating in the U.S. Scene here, scene there. Done that, Seen that.

Blogs shouldn’t become a scene. That’s too boring. Scenes are identifiable. Manageable.

We should think the development of blogs not as a scene but simply as a web.

A series of terminals to other terminals to other terminals.

Dialogue is too simple. At this stage we need a more disordered exchange of signs.

I like the poetics list but it’s too centralized. It works as a Mexican public plaza, and that’s great. But I don’t see why talking can be only conducted in the plaza. No need for such a monopoly. Blogs and e-list can live and combine--and wait for the invention of new technologies that increase the complexity of exchange.

Blogs are mostly individual (which gives them that danger of being an instrument to return to the most basic view on the Writing-I), they are mostly individual but if they are use as a mechanism to travel to other writing-spaces the primitive individual aspect gets lost.

A Blog is a bio-graphy that lets me read how it writes itself and how it writes itself in relation to other bio-graphies (emails, books, magazines, readings, comments, blogs, media) and even writes itself thanks to those just looking.

And in the very practical terrain, Blogs give me for example more context to understand what’s happening in the U.S. Lit Complex. They give me the national-social-personal-local context of different sign producers.

Bio-graphy is one of the pieces that constitutes writing. So I don mind it.

(But if somebody is using the blog as it would use a print-page, something wrong. He-she doesn't understand the blog).

Blogs are a new discussion media.

And blogs are also a new lit event.

“What has X (this specific Url-I/Bio-Graphy) managed to write today?”.

Reading a blog is an event you go into. An event in which author and its work are united in front of others in a specific time-place. Reading a blog es an event you go into.

Just like a reading.

Blogs are space-time entities where a writing takes place. Just like readings do.

A reading. You go there to hear(-here) a BiOral-Graphy.

Well you go to the E-List, you go to the blog, to read a writing that has happen.

So Love the Blog.

Blog.

2003-01-13T03:45:00.000-08:00

A SKETCH ON GLOBALIZATION & ETHNOPOETICS

Ethnopoetics as: theory-praxis related to crossing the conventional borders between the theory-praxis of our culture and the theory-praxis of other cultures.

Ethnopoetics as: putting into question the way in which our culture became “our culture”, and putting into question how other cultures became “other cultures”.

Ethnopoetics as: thinking about the risks of building an International (paranational) Poetics, when such enterprise could become a tool to make global homogenization easier.

Ethnopoetics as: keeping away from the danger of conceiving the “Past” as another opportunity to extend our extreme consumerism even to where-when we couldn’t. Ethnopoetics cannot become the intellectual branch of the Retro spirit.

Ethnopoetics as: the challenge to acquire a glocal point of view without falling in LiteraTourism.

Ethnopoetics as: the thinking of the language practices of the “Third World”, the “Primitive” and the “Marginal-Alternative”.

Ethnopoetics as: the thinking of our categories as something we inherited and so, something we always need to put into quotation marks (denaturalize language).

Ethnopoetics as: an on-going revision of the past through the point of the present (J. Rothenberg).

Ethnopoetics as: the serious development of an imaginary contemporary ficto-ethnopoetics (A. Schwerner, S. Sarduy, M. Bellatin).

Ethnopoetics as: the self-consciousness of ethnopoetics; a constant destruction of the theory-praxis of ethnopoetics in the past.

Ethnopoetics as: escaping the temptation of looking outside “Western” literature or the “Mainstream” simply because “our” own practices have become exhausted, boring or less attractive.

Ethnopoetics as: preventing that “our/their” practices are not misused by the “West” simply because the “West” is exhausted, bored or in market-driven-decay.

Ethnopoetics as: criticism against the use of other-poetic-practices as a resource to revitalize a dominant (but tired) tradition. As if poetics from other cultures could be use in the same pattern as oil or any “natural” or “cultural” resource from other cultures used for its own good.

Ethnopoetics as: helping to make traditions maintain a real diversity, with or with out the building of common ground (axis).

Ethnopoetics as: the belief that traditions around the world must be different, polar, or even incompatible.

Ethnopoetics as: politics referring to the conservation of “nature” or “city” that made/makes possible the existence of specific poetics practices in certain communities.

Ethnopoetics as: politics referring to the conservation of the languages that make possible the existence of specific poetic practices in certain communities.

Ethnopoetics as: the impossibility of dividing general poetics from specific politics.

Ethnopoetics as: a reflection on the concept of hybridization, cross-breeding, etc. in the areas related to languages and language in general (in general?)

Ethnopoetics as: anthropology + philosophy + Cultural Studies + Literature + Another

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the poetic practices of “minorities” by “majorities”.

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the poetics practices of “majorities” by “minorities”.

Ethnopoetics as: Counter-conquest (Lezama Lima).

Ethnopoetics as: Anti-translation (Nathaniel Tarn).

Ethnopoetics as: The End of “Orientalism” (Edward Said).

Ethnopoetics as: a radical critique of any attempt to “understand” (dominate?) the discourse and works of other cultures without building an effective dialogue in which the “others” can directly reply to interpretations.

Ethnopoetics as: a study and experimentation of individual or communal language-combinations such as Frenglish, Portunhol, Spanglish, etc or the presence of various languages in a poetic space.

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the combination of several cultures that “share” “one” language, or use traditionally separated strata from that “one” language, resulting in a cross-cultural (ethnopoetic) work “without” having to go “outside” “one” “culture” (i.e, the work of José Kozer as using the different Spanish languages around Spain, the U.S. and Latin America, or the use of different levels/vocabularies/social classes of English by Bruce Andrews in the U.S.).

Ethnopoetics as: an exercise of using other (cultures-)languages (away from Mother Tongue) as an alternative to becoming “Translated” or “Translating”.

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the shifts in cultural paradigms on the poetic subject since the explorations of contemporary ethnopoetics (from the poet as “shaman” to “rockstar” to “D.J.”).

Ethnopoetics as: a strategy to leave behind “ethnopoetics” as a curious branch (60’s related) of literature and make it inseparable of poetics, until the term is useless for being so obvious and fancy,

Ethnopoetics as: the analysis of the international/global/intercultural field open by technology.

Ethnopoetics as: a radical exploration of the Internet as an experiment on ethnopoetics.

Ethnopoetics as: an experiment away from paragraph & line. If ethnopoetics has deepened the exploration of orality, the pictoric, other-forms-of-writing, non-page-formats, etc, as available resources for our own purposes, it’s necessary to see all those explorations as a first stage to finally leave paragraph and line behind.

Ethnopoetics as: “ethno” as the permanent prefix of every poetics. “Ethnopoetics” not just applying to the poetics of the “Other”.

Ethnopoetics as: the radical search beyond the End of Translation.

2003-01-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

MASK POETICS!

Every poem should be a crossword or a puzzle. Reading is just not enough anymore.

At least, it should be universally understood that poets always leave some deliberate mistakes in the poem so others can find them.

(Or even better: any poem should be constructed with lines exclusively made up of ‘mistakes’ so not even a Great poem is considered a good poem).

And if poems were always crosswords or puzzles, the reader would never be completely sure the 'original poem' is really as her-his solution is.

Poetry would be not the act of writing, but letting other do the factual writing. That’s what ‘reading’ needs to go.

Poets would be anonymous figures, btw. (The Abduction of the Author).

Poets should wear masks, as Mexican wrestlers do.

And if they give a bad reading, their mask should be removed and their faces revealed so their career becomes virtually over.

Over. Finished!

2003-01-07T18:57:00.000-08:00

STATISTICS SHOW

The History of Art is in danger. Even our kids have turned out to be artists.

2003-01-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

SILENCE WAS INVENTED TO CONTINUE DUALISM. TO HAVE A SOUL FOR THE LANGUAGE DICHOTOMY ("SOUND"/"WORDS", NEEDED A GHOST TO EXIST ALONG WITH THEM)

"Silence", a retro experience.

2003-01-05T07:55:00.000-08:00

WWM
(A POOR MAN POETICS. A POOR ETHICS.)

To not deal with a blank page but with a page (a screen) full of earlier words, of somebody else’s materials. (Several one’s). Writing = waste management.

Everything that is going to be read, must be read on the screen.
And then we should recycle.

(The famous sign on the box). (The white one). (The Rabbit).

Never again a page that cannot be easily copy-paste. (A Mandate).

“We don’t have much time left” (Star Trek). “So we should write only for the screen or save writing in files and send them to everybody else” (click Forward).

“There is no more time left to write” (the Captain).

"This is time to put into practice all that crap about the Big L."

( I’m tired of It. The “L”! )

2003-01-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

DEAR EX-READER,

What you do in front of the monitor is not "reading". (Duality ended). (Subject to Subject didn't exist. So, "reading" never really happened). (It was all a mistake: A misunderstanding). (Language is really sorry, really sorry, for the loss of the "two of you").

Who cares about the Death of the Author? That's an old issue. Barthes is boring and Fuck Foucault. The Death of the Reader is what's happening now. (You're dying). (Hyperlinks did it, the abscense of a material book representing the body of the Other, did it also. The self-consciousness of being the real supporter of meaning did it. Etc.)

(C'mmon! Can somebody please fully develop this theory?) I could do it. But I need time to write in Spanish and live in Tijuana. (My English breaks a lot). (A lot).

What happens in the monitor is not reading anymore. (I hated the Reader, anyway). (sHe was or pretended to be nothing but a client, a consumer of texts).

So, you're not a reader anymore.

Go.

2003-01-04T17:24:00.000-08:00

GERTRUDE STEIN'S MEXICO

1
When Gertrude Stein wrote Mexico. A Play (1922) she was thinking of Spain. "We believe in Mexico". Sometime I do too. Sometimes I do. But "don't please me with Mexico". "Do you like repetion. Yes I like repetion".

Gertrude Stein was the first Western writer to clone, not write. To clone writing. That's why.

1.1
The other day I heard an American politician say in the news (to promote the banning of every type of cloning): "Cloning is cloning is cloning is cloning".

He didn't realize he was cloning in a double way: first cloning Gertrude Stein's phrase and even improving her (cloning clonation is superior than cloning a rose--even if a rose is a rose is a rose, after all a rose is just a rose), and then making the sign "cloning" clone itself to infinity...

So his anti-cloning phrase turned out to be the best definition, defense and example of what cloning is.

Cloning is cloning is cloning is cloning...

2003-01-03T17:27:00.000-08:00

THE FAILURE OF THE AMERICAN POET

The failure of the American Poet is to arrive to the 21th Century and to not have any real relevance in the order of its own society. America is about to commit (again) murder but even the leading American poets cannot do anything to prevent that or to publicly denounce war in an effective way.

I read many of the magazines, the famous Buffalo E-list, the books, I follow the sites, the history of the development of the different avant-garde scenes, and my question is: what’s the specific social purpose of such display of marvelous intelligence?

Was defeating the Official Verse Culture all their purpose? They did it. They even took more risks than the first waves of counterpoetics. So, was what all they wanted to do? I mean, that's remarkable. That inscribed them in the History of Literature without no doubt.

But what about reality? Do they fear loosing their jobs at the universities? Are they not inclined to social action? Are they Republicans? I don’t know. I don’t know them. I just read them as an outsider, as a Mexican observer. Maybe the left has no meaning in the U.S. I think that might be the cause. They just might be happy.

Language poets are far superior than the beats, but the beats at least served as social figures, as icons or something. Language poets! I hate them—I mean I keep reading their books, and they are wonderful, almost as great as Borges or European philosophers like Baudrillard or Virilio, for example. But do they care about the specific life of the political city? They have the right ideas, they are brilliant, they have some power, so? They should take the next step. But I don’t think they are going to do that... so we are going to continue to read them forever. Well, I cannot deny that seems a very nice situation for me. I enjoy their books. They give me intellectual pleasure.

But the problem remains: at the beginning of the 21th Century even the best American poets have no social role in the world. This is the central failure of the American avant-garde.

What went wrong?

2003-01-02T05:09:00.000-08:00

TRANSLATING LANGUAGE POETS

Of all the Language poets Michael Palmer is the most translatable one into Spanish. He is almost a Huidobro. He would be a hit once translated and distributed widely in Latin America.

I think as a poet he is wonderful, but somehow he is the least interesting to me. I mean, he is lyrically powerful, but doesn’t deliver that same odd feeling the Language poets do.

60% of Hejinian, 35% of Andrews, 40% of Silliman, 33% Bernstein, 45% of Perelman is translatable into Spanish.

I enjoy them precisely because of that.

In Spanish they wouldn’t make any sense. In Spanish they would sound(-mean) as terrible poets.

That’s why they are Language poets.

2002-12-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

AMERICAN TECHNOLOGIES ARE BEING CLONED

False or true, it is no accident that the announcement of the first human cloning was done in a sort of Broken English.

American technologies are going to start to compete with America. Or to criticize it or to win over American culture.

American technologies (like English, Media, Airplanes, American Technologies of the Self-Foucault)—are being cloned in other places for other purposes. America is to blame. America gave the idea that the world needed to reproduce the American way—but that’s getting out of control.

A world full of “Americans” is nothing but a nightmare. Mutations.

2002-12-24T15:18:00.000-08:00

HUGE DIFFERENCE

Joyce’s Ulysses was not a work built after Homer’s Odyssey but after Virgil’s Aeneid.

Joyce followed Virgil in constructing a work using Homer’s book as model.

Joyce imitated Virgil not Homer.

2002-12-16T03:30:00.000-08:00

FERLINGHETTI IN MEXICO CITY

Last Thursday Ferlinghetti read in Mexico City, in a place called Bellas Artes--reading there means the Canon Welcomes You.

Generación (a Mexican counter cultural magazine) had a number dedicated to Ferlinghetti. I was invited to write something but I decide to skip this one. (Don't wanna be confused with a new beat lover--I mean I respect beat poetry but...).

The Mexican main translators of American poetry participated in Ferlinghetti's event: José Vicente Anaya, Alberto Blanco, Sergio Mondragón. They also had some jazz.

Ferlinghetti read 11 poems, including one titled "History of an airplane" (on 9-11). When asked what were his feeling that morning, Ferlinghetti said to a Mexico City newspaper: "I felt it was the beginning of the Third World War... The war against the Third World".

This comment, of course, is going to make him popular in Mexico, because since 9-11 anti-American feeling has come to new levels, something which I think American don't know.

When asked what was the best thing about the beats, he responded "The development of a very open universal consciousness, capable or revealing the message of what came to be the hippie generation. In a way, the beats were the hippies of the Stone Age"--

"And the worst part?"--to which he replied--"The worst? That they died too soon"

Is it true?

2002-12-16T03:29:00.000-08:00

MEXICO AFTER 9-11 AND SOME REASONS WHY PERFORMANCE POETRY IS NOT RESPECTED SOUTH OF THE BORDER

After 9-11 a possible deal in immigration issues between Mexico and the U.S. was put to rest by the Republican party, economy in the border came into a new recession and racial tensions grew--immigration officers now threat you like dirt all the time--crossing the border has become a nightmare (before 9-11 one could cross in 15 minutes, but now you can wait in line up to 3 hours because of heightened “security measures”). All of that has created even more contempt against Americans.

Vicente Fox' telephone call to Fidel Castro before attending a summit in Mexico some months ago (April 2002)—a summit in Monterrey where Bush was also coming--had a lot to do with this rise of Anti-Americanism also--Fox was recorded by Castro and then the tape was released to the Media.

So we all heard our president asking Fidel to leave our country before Bush came, to make things easy for Mexico--not have problems with the American president, who might get angry, according to Fox, if Castro stayed here--so that recording was perceived as the first proof that our government receives direct orders from Washington.

(After that call, by the way, the Cuban and the Mexican governments, have come close to ending diplomatic relations).

The day we all heard our president lying in the Media (telling he never asked Castro to leave), and then heard the recording, I knew we had sunk to a new level of anti-gringuismo...

--And because of the horrendous tradition of Mexican politicians using voice to hide truth, that day I also knew the use of voice in Mexican poetry wasn’t going to get better.

Here any person who uses voice to deliver a text is seen as a demagogue.

In Mexico, Voice is not trusted.

2002-12-16T03:28:00.000-08:00

THE C.I.A. AND MEXICAN LITERATURE

This last November the biggest book fair in the Country, the one held in Guadalajara was dedicated to Cuban literature. We had several scandals dealing with who was and who was not invited—some say the Mexican Government used the fair to improve relations with Cuba, and that the Cuban government has too involved with what writers were chosen to represent Cuban Literature in Mexico—for example not having too many writers from the Cuban exile.

The book fair became a circus. The day that the main Mexican lit-magazine (called Letras Libres, a magazine which derived from the Octavio Paz school) was presented there because of it’s especial number on Cuba, a big group of leftist activists interrupted the reading, stopped it and accused that magazine of being funded by the C.I.A.

Which is a silly accusation from the Left, but tells a lot about how Mexican literature works, right?

Yes, Right.

2002-12-10T23:29:00.000-08:00

1. THE DISCONTINUITY OF POETIC COMPOSITION

A friend wrote yesterday in her site about the next stage of weblob-writing. Once weblogs have shortened the traditional intervals between production/publishing/distribution, she feels the next step has to be the total eradication of the difference between writing and publishing—both need to be simultaneous, which means the Net viewer could see on the monitor how the writer is constructing its text right there, word by word, letter by letter, changing its order, correcting—rewriting.

[No copy-paste allowed]

That would not only teach us a couple of style tricks, but also would show how writing is a slow and/or erratic construction—as opposed to that romantic notion of spontaneity as the primordial rule of the game.
  The jazz player or the shaman are no more the paradigms of poetic composition. Now the DJ paradigm seems to rule: composition through the mix and remix of fragmentarium. Language not as a natural flux, but as a reconstructed sequence that creates (like films or electronic music) the illusion of undivided movement.

| A deposit.

Kerouac-Ginsberg’s notions of spontaneous overflow, JazZen-like-poetics, does not hold anymore after the obvious discovery of language as a recycling system of quotations. There can be no flow where something is made out of parts |

—This mechanical view of language would be shown by live-Internet-transmission of the development (however fast) of writings—the replacement, mistake and drafting system through which a text is produced. They would be publicly observe the construction of writings just as we observe in the streets how skycrapers are built.

              [Reality (Word) Shows]

| Writing | is | always | discrete | . |

2. WEBCAMS ARE MORE THAN ENOUGH
TO FINALLY OVERTHROW THE NOTION OF AUTHOR

If we see in the near future the face and body of the writers right there on our monitors—see them at the exact moment they are creating their essays, poems or novels—thanks to webcams (for example)—

we would then realize their faces—their labor—does not ever correspond to that romantic imagery we have of the writer when creating—we would come to realize how incompatible some of the meanings portrayed in the text are with the ‘person’ constructing them.
  The face does not match the page.
     (Borges was wrong).

—after seeing that incompatibility we would never again believe a text reflects or expresses the individual “behind” it—

on the monitor we would just see somebody working—impersonally—arranging words on a keyboard.
      Nothing else.

2002-12-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

THE LEADERS OF EXPERIMENTALISM

American poets from the LangPoe and the beyond-scenes are one of the most experimental contemporary constellation of writers

But..! :

1. They are still writing.
2. They are still writing in their mother tongue--thus enjoying the last remaining benefits of absorption, speech based grammar, and the rest of the luxuries that “naturally” come with Mommy Tongue.
3. Most of the time they write using paragraphs or lines.

And they call themselves the experimental?

Lang-and-Post-Lang-Poets should write in Spanish, Portuguese or at least in German.
Then I would call them, the true leaders.

2002-12-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

A MODEST PROPOSAL TO ABOLISH TRANSLATION

One of the reasons I like Jonathan Mayhew’s weblog is that he takes the risk of translating American poetry into his Spanish. He, btw, does a good job.

Translating a second language into one native tongue has been an act of Domination. I now have in mind Nathaniel Tarn’s ideas on antitraslation (resisting translation to prevent imperialism) and, of course, Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Translators should permanently work the other way around they normally do. Not to continue using their knowledge of another language and culture to completely change them into their own linguistic and cultural codes.

[And doing that making a translated culture unrecognizable to itself! Isn't it paradoxical? And a sufficient argument to abolish Translation?]

Translators should worked more translating their mother tongue into second languages—languages they are never going to fully dominate. That would take care of most of the hidden agendas involved in translation activity.

You wanna learn another language? Write in it—instead of just using second languages to keep your original language sharp and well fed. You're never going to learn another language. That's the beauty: to never forget other cultures are different from us, and we can never, and should never overpower them.

If translators would start to translate their literature into second languages [or even translate second literatures into third languages], the resulting text would be almost all of the time fallible—a text which the other language and culture could laugh at—slick down—a text in which they can act upon, instead of just suffering an unilateral transformation—a text that shows to the other culture the misunderstandings foreigners have of their language and world—a text the other culture would have to rewrite—a translator that would be a translator of himself and his culture—a translation that would have to be re-translated by the other culture—a complete translation process.

This is far more interesting than what we do all the time. "Translation" sucks.

2002-12-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

THE MENACE OF THE MÉNAGE A TROIS!

The Spanish-English relationship always ends up in a threesome.

But neither likes Spanglish [the uninvited third party].-

That’s why the two (three!) of them rarely have any good sex.

2002-12-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

ANYONE?

I don’t understand why Armand Shwerner isn’t a bigger reference in contemporary American poetics. Was he a creep or what? He basically made fun of regular ethnopoetics-or “translation”--with the Tablets. And as the Cantos, Stein or Olson, contributed some resources to make the page a more self-reflexive verbal space.

Schwerner should be more (visibly) popular. He should even have some boring disciples.

2002-12-09T15:33:00.000-08:00

WEBLOG WRITING

Weblog writing is always an E-Go! Construction Site. It may turn out to be the Electronic Return to the Lyrical I.

(An Authority one needs to follow closer. ¿Daily? An e-list by itself!)

But beware: Weblog writing is always recruiting.

2002-12-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD

Thanks to websites (including weblogs) readers are now considered nothing but traffic, visitors or hits.

This is something that makes me happy. As a reader and as a writer (and as an intermediary between those two monkeys--as a translator), I'm of the opinion that the Reader has been overrated. So to see the Reader transformed into "traffic" is more than ok.

Is this rank reduction of the Reader a revenge by the Dead Authors Society?

2002-12-08T08:48:00.000-08:00

"AMERICAN POETRY" AS LOWER CLASS

There's one Mexican lit-prejudice against American poets. To a Mexican intellectual or reader, an American poet is always a potential "beatnik".

I wrote a small book on American counterpoetics from Olson (and some notes on Stein, Pound, Hughes, etc) to the period before LangPoe. And every time somebody comments my book to me, American poets in general are regarded as "beatniks". As if this was a lapsus Mexican readers don't want to leave behind. Some of the magazines have even commited that mistake in print.

("Beatnik" meaning that in the unconscious of the Mexican Intelligentsia, an American is almost every time a poet of lower class ideas, has a tendency to consume drugs and is somewhat or completely gay. Ah! and He Uses a Lot the Microphone and is Exotic!).

One of the few times Octavio Paz made a reference to Ginsberg was when he was laughing of what he called the "Peruvian Ginsbergs"--meaning that paying attention to American counterpoetics could transform you into a llama, or into an even slower and less intelligent beast--the donkey or "burro" as it is described in Mexican English. Reading American literature is bad for our National Tradition.

(Let's called that the Taco Bell Reading Degree).

To Mexican Mainstream intellectuals, American poets are of less importance than European ones. There's a big sterotype--produced by the Left's dislike of everything American (including their poets); the European model that shapes the Mexican intellectual (A French is always a Friend but an American is almost by sure a Gringo), the language barrior (of course) and that the Mexican groups that have come close to American literature in general (fiction included) have not been the "Right Ones" (according to the Mexican Republic of Letters Endorsement System): Mexican dirty realism, feminists, national beatniketas--etc. So the silent idea is: Something Wrong Happens When Mexican Lit Get`s Too Close to American Authors--Don't Do It Compadre!

When I wrote that book (an introduction on American counterpoetics) I even invented one American poet--knowing almost no reader would notice that joke on the history of our binational lit-relation.

The stupid prejudice about what is/are the American avant-garde writing scene(s), of course, is not going to change. Mexican translators are not that interested, and Mexican readers think authors like Bukowski, Burroughs, Carver and Kerouac are either a blessing or an insult coming from Spaniard presses. (LangPoe has no relevance yet).

So American poetry is even a thing related to the conquistadores and the Old World.

Another important reason American poetics have not been interesting to the great majority of Mexican writers is that American writers don't know a word of Spanish.