Next project

I think the title of my next project is going to be "Infiltration Nation." It's not going to be a piece of creative writing, however, but an aural art exhibit or a short documentary in the short term.

In the long-term it will be research for a "novel," where of course one of my characters is either a lawyer or an "artist" and one of the things he wants to do is ahum ... a detention center.

Well, this is his chance to either do it or at least work with others to help them do it, so why the hell not take the opportunity?

I was thinking the other day about those WWJD bracelets, and of course being in a so-called "Christian Nation," you have to ask what would Jesus do about those detention centers if he were alive today and indeed the son of God?

I believe that he would infiltrate those detention centers in order to be there with you and help you tend to those wounds.

Not that we have to get a whole messiah complex about it but we really do have to wonder, what would you do if someone you loved was locked up in one of those places for some random infraction and not just "crossing the border"?

Perhaps the thing to do is expand this notion of who is worthy of our love and our efforts.

Maybe that is "what Jesus would do." 

Another split brewing?

It seems like the immigrant rights movement is about to split yet again (and I don't bemoan this--it may be necessary), between those who will choose and attempt to go as artists into the mainstream of things, and those who, having no mainstreamable talent to exploit, will continue to labor on in not only poverty like the artists (except for the rare few that will become "profitable" at it) but also in relative obscurity, unless our mainstream media ever does a better job of covering and becoming interested in them. May these activists find the people and groups who will continue to nurture them despite this and regardless of what happens with mainstream media practices, may we continue to find the wisdom to nurture both our artists and activists without forcing them to be exactly the same thing.

Speak the wound

The poet can speak the wound. The poet is wounded just like the rest of us. He or she is just not wounded into speechlessness. - Hoagland

Art what good are you to me?

The stick by which you measure

Will be used to measure you instead.

I wonder how many citizens would lose their citizenship if we were to apply the basic DACA requirements to them.

I mean, unless you were naturalized, you didn't do anything to deserve your citizenship, so it's not a huge stretch to ask the question. How "good" of a citizen have you been?

You risked your life for this country? Okay, but do you have a DUI tambien? No matter. Vas pa fuera de todos modos.

That was a long time ago? You've changed?

No matter, we don't believe in second chances in this country, not anymore, not in this economy.

I'm just saying, the stick by which you measure, should be used to measure you instead.

Breathe right...

Now how come we can't rile people up to work with this kid? Does he look too black, too ghetto, too gang life? All I wanna know is does he know how to breathe right? Does his heart know how to beat right, does it bleed right? Or maybe it doesn't. Might he die with "one thousand masterpieces hanging only from his mind," or maybe just one, two, or three. Or fuck that shit, maybe it will just be a few good memories, a few small dreams, a pair of low-rider rims. That's all I need to care about him. That's all I need to fight for him. Let's stop cleaning up our ghetto kids. Let's start loving them instead.

Por eso cuando yo vuelo

"No vuelo en una paloma si no en un buho." - Tayamu Denku

Y cuando lloro no lloro muy de noche.

Y cuando toco el suelo no se me inchan los pies si no los ojos.

Dust

This is one of my favorite arguments for the importance of poetry as told through fiction:

"I spend a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water.

These conversations I had in mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I'd really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying, 'I guess so.'

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?"

'No, what?' I would say.

'A piece of dust.'

Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say. 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you are curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together."

And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep." (The Bell Jar, pg. 62.)

I have to admit, I'm a little embarrassed about posting something like this all openly on Facebook because it's all angsty, but I definitely did go through my angsty phase a little recently.

I'm still going through it maybe, or maybe just more of an angry teen-ager sort of phase. There must be a sort of angry teen-ager in there right now, still processing what the fuck has just happened to me, what the fuck, I have just gone through. I have been experiencing a lot of anger recently.

Anyway, I wonder how my friend will react to the snippets I sent her. I hope she will not think I'm crazy, or if she really does think that, that she'll be able to see how I'm working with it.

The reason I read the Bell Jar is because I wanted to understand sadness and depression a little bit better, and because I wanted to see how you write a roman-a-clef, and also how you write from the perspective of the crazy voices in your head. 

I guess i am still searching for a voice for this memoir-novel, roman-a-clef, and I need some encouragement from other writers, living or dead, that it can be done and that drawing from real life and experiences is not inherently boring.

I think after going through an MFA program in fiction, which I admit, may not have been the smartest thing to do, you start to come out with that sort of impression, as Phillip Lopate says, that your life is far too boring for anyone to ever get interested in it, and in fact, if you let yourself get just a little too interested in it, that you may as well just become a big fat narcissist and get it over with.

I think those charges are unfair. I don;t think being interested in telling a story that is based on your own experiences is necessarily narcissistic. And besides, fiction writers, if you are so unwilling to judge any one else, why are you so quick to judge those of us who draw from personal experience as somehow inferior or less imaginative, or at worst, self-indulgent writers.

There is this string in the fiction-world of veiled do-gooderism that you should only be interested in the experience of others, "get out of your own head." Well, if Dostoevsky had followed that advice, would he have ever produced "the underground man"? No! For those of us who have a hard time "getting out of our head," maybe the answer isn't isn't to get out of it at all, but to quit being so damn embarrassed about it, and listening to those voices that will try to chastise you for it, and to just dive in.

For us, it is those crazy voices that everybody else always just tries to escape that are the very source of our fiction or maybe even our roman-a-clefs, if we are ever going to truly write anything.

That at least, is the way it is for me, and there is a long tradition of it, even if it is not all that glamourous, and there are plenty of horrible tragedies and unsavory behavior in all of it, which I won't get into right now, but some of you may know what I'm talking about.

I am perfectly willing to join the club of the crazies, and to join hands with the crazy voices in my head. That is ultimately what works for me. That is what makes my work just a little less "boring."

Some thoughts on organizing.

This isn't just a game. I'm trying to come up with a justification, a psychological underpinning for the emotional health or curative powers, or psychological reasons for coming out as "undocumented." I've been obsessed with this all my life. Now I finally have someone to play with.

I'm an innovator and perhaps it's time to own that. I just don't see myself as a radical because I tend to be so conciliatory, and yet in the current political climate I'm radical. Malcolm X and Emiliano Zapata would laugh at us. Radical you? Mis dedos.

If university teaching involves...

People management and petty politics anyway. Then fuck that shit, I'd rather just run an organization.
Maybe I went into it out of fear and laziness, the fear that I just couldn't do it, that I lacked the social skills, or that it would just take too much work, and take me away from the library.

I do like to read. I do like to read and discover things, and there is a loner inside of me, but for the past several years, I have given him free reign.

Now there is another part of me, and this will sound crazy, but oh well, the one I call the rocket boy, that really just wants to go out and play. I've kept him locked in.

And he's tired of being so constrained just because I feared what would happen if I started to get too involved again. The truth is I was never all that involved; I was always letting academia and now more recently this jealous wife called writing, determine my priorities, and well, it is time to start correcting that shit.

As sweet woman once said, "Ain't nobody got time, Ain't nobody got time, ain't nobody got time for that."