on Anzaldua's Borderlands

a moment of thoughtfulness on a linguistically dense text...

http://walnutshellwarrior.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/i-was-once-told-writing-never-needs-a-disclaimer/

EMU Creative Writing

The Blog seems to be up and running:

http://cw.emuenglish.org/

it is nighttime i am bothered i am sorry to bother you it is this hour at this hour it is nighttime and i am still, here, in this state. can you be bothered to rearrange or to dismantle or to create a new language entirely for this. i am sorry to put you to this test. this request. it is morning it is nighttime and i was dreaming of sloths in costa rica and pad plumbing or plumbers or the man who won't stop talking over my voice. so sorry to rearrange your world for this but can i bother you, the plumber, any amount of sewage or retaliatory life lesson. in the nighttime i am dreaming and there is another country and there are bombs and there is a movie. but we don't watch the movie we are the movie and you are rearranging the furniture the couch over here no the couch over here no i think the couch over here. in the morning i think i was dreaming but the couch is gone and the sewage is piled in corners and it smells like lavender excrement and forestalled love (i wrote you 1000 love letters). in the morning i think i was reading and imagined your fictional process. i was bothered and feared you were rearranged but your words are the same, on the page, though the sounds drift through my head and i remember when it was nighttime, in the mountains, and there was an optimism a language a lesson in indigenous flowers and local vegetation, the fresh night air, and morning.

can you hear me dance. like I haven't danced before. The ringing of incantation the music in my ears the sound of life going on about. It might be said that I have been singing along all this time. There is some optimism somewhere along the road and it is written on music paper. The sound of the text. The resonance of an alternative existence. I have no hope that we will survive the environmental apocalypse that we have already begun. But I do believe in the power of subversion. Other kinds of thinking and practice. Renegade lifestyles. Innovative outlets for creativity and thinking and existing in the world. While corporations and packaging engineers are causing the collapse of the world around us we sing and proliferate DIY entertainment. Music festivals in the woods. Handmade socks. Canned tomatoes. I just made some jam, wrote a non-narrative poem, painted my car chartreuse, took a low-pay job with flexible hours so I could spend more time making beautiful pictures. We are saving cities and riding bikes and creating communities. We are saving our butts and saving our lives. Driving off road staying off expressways moving out of cubicles. We don't have health insurance but we eat organic, set up free libraries in our yards, volunteer, listen to stories of abuse, fight institutional neglect and exploitation, maintain a work ethic in the face of apathy and ignorance, focus on the students and try to keep out the ramblings of institutional b.s., nevermind the lack of resources the lack of respect the lack of concern for quality and thoughtful pedagogy. We are making our way and creating new pathways, opening possibilities and giving hope, continuously thinking about other ways to go about this. If the sun is heating up and the rain is dying down, or the forests are becoming deserts and we are having hurricanes in the midwest at least we can say that we tried are trying want to try to be more human better human to make these moments count for more than counting profits.

Born this Way

Lady Gaga won’t be wearing any meat this year to the music awards. No poultry. No Vegetables. This year, “We’re going more with textiles.” Let’s make our flaws famous. Wear a bra around town. Gain 25 pounds. Lose it. Wear safety pins. A wig. Another wig. A weave, extensions, short, long, two-tone. Paint your face. Show off your “curvy figure” your “curvy figure” your “curvy figure” their way of saying you are getting fat or is that just another outfit. It’s a style. You can wear a helmet of flowers around your whole head or you can be fat. Does anyone even know you’re fat if the captions dodn’t mention it under every picture? If you were thin before 25lbs isn’t fat. You don’t look fat. But curvy is code. Tall shoes short shoes black dress brown hair blonde bouffant spikey pink and streaked you are fat because fat is unusual. Let’s make our flaws famous. Take off the makeup get fat don’t brush your hair wear yellow underwear. You were born this way. Bullies were born this way too. Be kind. Be different. Be yourself. Wear what you want. Eat meat. Or don’t. Have a dog that looks like a baby bear. Dress like a man from the 1950s. Be a woman and be a man be both or neither or alternate between as your mood changes. Create a color scheme for each emotional moment. Use geometric design. Wear hats. Make your hat speak out loud. Encourage the youth. You are a spokesperson for people to go beyond or go over or go under. Be loud or quiet but do it in your own way. Wear pants. Or don’t. The trick is to learn to exist “halfway between fantasy and reality all of the time.” She completely turns the page on the last decade’s era of bimbodom, taking back the limelight from women who made their careers by admitting that they had nothing to say…She closes a strange era in female pop stardom…She’s riveting in any language, with lyrics that compose their own Esperanto…she’s effortlessly global. She wants to promote images of as many sexual combinations as are possible on this Earth…she’s a girl who likes boys who look like girls…she’s a girl who likes to look like a boy herself—a drag queen, a boy pretending to be a girl…little gives her more pleasure than the persistent rumor that she is a hermaphrodite…That’s not Madonna. Madonna wouldn’t pretend she has a penis. She is pop art, creative design color style experimentation. Creativity is stupid imaginary free space open to ideas and the outlandish which is only outlandish because it is unexpected, outside of some mainstream norm which comes from nowhere in particular or comes from resignation or an easy total lack of creativity. Splashes of color, swatches of fabric, complex engineering. She is an art project in process. The art student set free from the boundaries of the institution. Music color shape shadow nuance re-presentation, the abstract surreal realist avant-garde installation art in 3D walking through town shopping on stage talking with Ellen and the asshole Howard Stern. For Warhol, stardom was its own art form, empty imagistic vividness one of the most important forces. Become the performance. Art is life. Leave the love behind. Embody the artistic vision. Become androgyny. Become a drag queen. (Friends say that she has not been in love since, and the ritualistic killing of male lovers in her last three videos is related to this breakup.)…It’s an unlikely rise, and an unlikely name, and a totally unreal image. But what’s reality? Or maybe it’s a better version of reality or a more open one. This real is pushed to the margins, or it's homogenized, sanitized, softened making a center into which everyone aspires. Until they realize what they’ve lost and can’t get back. More real exists on the margins. More kids are bullied. More art students believe in creative possibilities…until they leave art school and are out in the world. Little kids write poems and paint pictures and play dress-up until they are adults conforming in khakis and conservatism. Women give up on dreams leave their intuition behind let go of imagination unless it is mainstream-sanctioned motherhood activities like arts and crafts at the kitchen table. Art is for non-professional non-adults who have no responsibilities and little ambition. Until someone wears a shiny red plastic dress and red glitter face paint to meet the Queen of England and the rest of us turn our un-hatted heads and consider there may be a different way of doing things. Just maybe the status is not in quo.

quotes and italics from random People Magazine web pages on Lady Gaga and from “Growing Up Gaga: The self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose New York creation of the world’s biggest pop star.”  New York Magazine. By Vanessa Grigoriadis, Published Mar 28, 2010

GZ: Superhero

It's like a movie. You get fed up. You blow something up. Or you fall down and cry. Or you shoot. Or you become paranoid. Or maybe paranoid happens over time. A slow boil. A rumbling toward a breaking point. Or many breaking points. Only eventually one break is one too many. What do you do in your spare time. I mean your other spare time. When you're not paranoid or obsessed with what's outside your window.  What are you looking at inside? Not inside yourself, that might make you a different person, less paranoid less rationalizing of the irrational. I mean inside your house. How many movies have you watched? How many movies with good guys and bad guys and action and explosions and shooting? How many movies with a scary bad guy sneaking around hiding in the shadows ducking out of the way until the good guy looks down for just a second? The bad guy comes out of nowhere. Hits the good guy in the face. "What you want? Why you watching me? I'm gonna kill you motherfucker." You know in the movies, when the bad guy circles the good guy's car staring menacingly in through the rolled up windows. The good guy notices the bad guy has a hand in his waistband hiding a gun or a knife. The bad guy disappears and the good guy gets out to follow (because otherwise the plot would stall the action would never move to the conflict and fight scene). The good guy follows but can't see the bad guy. The good guy has 911 on the phone but then says the bad guy is gone. Hangs up. Starts walking away. Feels nervous. Looks for his phone but this time he can't find it (which pocket? oh crap which pocket?). Caught unaware he is hit in the nose (because bad guys like evil nemeses can appear without sound in a flash and catch the bad guys off guard... that's why we cheer for the good guys, they come from behind to triumph win over evil) staggers gets knocked to the ground. Bad guy "you got a problem?" Good guy: "no." Bad guy: "you do now." And before he knows it the good guy is down head on cement bleeding can't get up. Bad guy holds him down. Good guy: "help!" Bad guy: "shut the fuck up." Bad guy slams good guy's head into cement. Bad guy: "you're gonna die tonight motherfucker." Bad guy reaches for good guy's gun holstered at good guy's waist. Good guy gets a surge of adrenaline. Suddenly pushes back. Grabs his gun first. Good guy puts the gun to bad guy's chest and pulls the trigger. Bad guy: "you got me." Bad guy sits up sways a little. Good guy pushes him off down to the ground face down gets on top of him spreads his arms out to the sides to keep him at bay. While the bad guy dies. This is the screenplay for GZ: Superhero. It's already half written. You wrote it. In your own words. GZ neighborhood protector. GZ local hero watching out for dangerous potholes and piles of trash. Calling 911 on kids playing in the street, kids playing basketball, dogs wandering aimlessly. GZ calling 911 on suspicious black men wearing tank tops, leather jackets, sweatshirts. GZ has studied the law. GZ wants to be a police officer. GZ can protect the people take down criminals has a gun goes on patrol wants to be a judge one day. GZ is ready to kill the bad guy. In the non-movie version the bad guy is a kid barely verging on adulthood. The bad guy is not a bad guy but a kid walking home from the store. The kid who is mistaken for a bad guy has candy in his pocket no criminal record no record of violence walks home in the rain talking to his friend on the phone. The kid  weighs 80lbs less than you GZ. In the silent version unwritten the kid tried to run away instead got caught on a movie set shot dead with not-fake blood.

Foucault to Deleuze on Power and Exploitation

FOUCAULT: Isn't this difficulty of finding adequate forms of struggle a result of the fact that we continue to ignore the problem of power? After all, we had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that Marx and Freud cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible and invisible, present and hidden, ubiquitous. Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their mechanisms certainly don't exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it functions. The question of power re- mains a total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the "ruling class" has never received an adequate formulation, and neither have other terms, such as "to dominate ... .. to rule ... .. to govern," etc. These notions are far too fluid and require analysis. We should also investigate the limits imposed on the exercise of power-the relays through which it operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy and the forms of control, surveillance, prohibition, and constraint. Everywhere that power exists, it is being exercised. No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power; and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power. If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schisophrenia (8) has been essential for me, it is because they seem to go very far in exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are "bidden," "repressed," and "unsaid"; and they permit the cheap "psychoanalysis" of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that "writing gives rise to repressed elements" and that "writing is necessarily a subversive activity," seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be severely denounced.

from http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze

You Think We are Not Tall Enough to See

We who are multiples create a theorem of expression, a soft articulation of voices. We claim space(s) and surround our intentions with the brisk flattery of political agitation. We rub against skin and taint the status quo. We wish to inform that yours is not the way. Instead, signs point to every direction. Softness multiplies. We calculate and create in bold colors, using a thesaurus of words, dictionary of language as power.

You who shatter into discord and genital conflagration, you have embodied a misconception. You who blaspheme and blather spit nonsense out of your ass. Or was it only love, as you say, a passion of value and concern. Noted. And in turn I tell you, take your signs and helpful pamphlets and shove them in your ears so you can’t hear what we say next, for your own safety and moral boundaries. You will be (a)shamed.

We who throw sticks, eat stones, and feel like walls cluttered with roses, painted, peeling, the repetition of waving and loss. We eat our stones regardless of your nonsense and beliefs. We have beliefs which involve choosing and respect. Choosing how one conducts oneself. We are not asking for your advice or assistance. Stay out of my fucking choice. Stay out of our minority status as your excuse for disheveled corruption, blatant violence.

What we mean is that wealth accumulates like limbs, slick and slippery. We believe in the erosion of the monotonous, that is to say, history as it repeats in ignorance. We read history. We use new words to write history and present. We believe in Frederick Douglass, starting with the letter “a” working toward “z” and using the word intellect, the word embolden, the many words for empowered. We are multiplied by too many fingers to count.

This is to say that meaning resides at the edge of the city. On the edges which is really the main event. The majority of everything. The world’s population. The biggest percent. The biggest loser(s). Some of us still have more to lose. All of us want to give some of it back. We are done giving it to you. We accumulate, we brush and stroke this emergency of correspondence, we ride this tidal wave of concrete sentiment. Head out.

dear Finn,

I am so sad to hear your story. Well I don't know much about the story except that you had an addiction problem, you went to rehab, you came out of rehab, and you overdosed and died. Some kind of heroin and alcohol toxic mixing. Were you with Brittany on that night? Sorry that is not funny. I guess you are not Finn now that you are dead. Maybe things are more clear, beyond the addiction. We wonder why someone with everything overdoses and dies. You were 31 and got to play a teenager on TV. At the best fantasy high school one could imagine where football players can also sing and dance and have endless support and where the Spanish and singing teacher is willing to fight with the nutcase athletic director who hates singing, expression, and anything artistic. But football players have inner music too. Hit you over the head with messages about gender bending, teaching us how ignorant homophobia is, make us feel like we were not the only awkward weirdo kids in high school but even the popular athletes and cheerleaders are total weirdos too. Oh, heavy on the messages and over the top musical scenes. But the point is some people seem to have it all (fame success) and still are haunted by demons or something, have to rely on ways to get by (Janice, Jimmy). Or some have way too much going on like playing dark and disturbing roles in movies that keep them from sleeping that cause other medical issues that result in prescriptions to fix the multiple problems that might be fixed instead with a vacation but instead the delirious joker takes too many of the wrong combination of pills at the wrong moment and he is dead too. But you didn't have the pressure on like Jimmy or Janice in an intense musical industry not always friendly to black folks and women in the 60s and 70s. Your character on TV was the opposite of Ledger's Joker, both of whom spiraled into depths of disorientation from which there was no coming back. You, a grown up adult, got to play the heartthrob football player star singer who was always the favorite because of his genuine kindness and seeming disregard for the fame and attitude of revered high school athletes. Your character queered the high school experience for viewers everywhere breaking through stereotypes about boys and sports and art and even religion (dating the Jewish girl with 2 dads). You got to do high school again in the best way: playing football and singing like a Broadway star both on stage and in the intimate and supportive group therapy sessions that were the after-school glee club meetings. Maybe the disparity between this fictional high school do-over and your real life situations was too great. Though no one can say why some people can overcome addiction and some cannot. Well maybe there are some experts who can say more about that. The point is like Forest Whitaker playing Charlie Parker or Bette Midler playing a Janice-like character we find out there is no particular way the habits work. Whatever the initial tendency, eventually the outer context and the inner need turn in to a cycle that takes on a life of its own. And just because you want to stop doesn't mean you can. When did your addiction begin and why couldn't you stop it before it was too late? That's not a real question. Why do these things happen is another question. Were Jimmy and Janice and Heath and Charlie amazing and did they die too soon too young what a loss? Yes, and so did many amazing talented people who never got famous. You were great on Glee and like some regular high school kids you died too young. Would there were more we could do.

resonance

you remain loudly in every silence. a rhythm a knock a single tone under the slippery layer of awareness. you are me and not me, an edging an anxiety a brittle fabric a thin covering of confidence. I am this and something else merge and sway layers of distraction and engagement. a turning or twist, focus and disband, the ringing intones the caution of cares to the wind. your subtle straightforwardness sometimes lost in the haze of continuous present tenses. your verging articulation imprecise in pastel shades. there is no contradiction but the abstract smearing of color shades of individual and collective chronic movement of detail synthesis reflection. and in the eyes leaning elsewhere muted reverberations mingle and rationally, a quick second sigh.

I don't know if you are doing it on purpose because it's acceptable or if you are making fun of others who do it and that is a critique. If it is a critique it's not a very well thought out critique since most people who pay attention to you don't get it. Even the more thoughtful people who pay attention to you do not get the critique angle and say that you are doing it on purpose. That doesn't mean you believe it. But it does mean that you know it's acceptable and the less thoughtful people who pay attention to you will not even know they should be upset about it. Maybe some of them are glad that it is still acceptable because they wouldn't know what to say or how to be otherwise. And if they think it's not acceptable in this newer more progressive and thoughtful moment then they will be chastised for not going along with what is just "entertainment" just "music" just "fun and it sounds good" and you know you can do it because pop culture has no power music does not influence not every kid who listens to heavy metal goes out and eats bats and breaks things and beats people up. Of course not. Everyone who pays attention to you is not going to belittle or control or rape or hate women but women are not bats and heavy metal music is about expressing personal pain instead of directing hate out at half of the population. I say that but I have no idea. I don't listen to Marilyn Manson but I am going to look up some lyrics to find out. The critique is that there is no critique. People who pay attention to you just think it sounds good. And you do make a good sound. Lots of things sound good, work well, seem to move along just nicely on the backs of women... or because women have been put on their backs. Exploiting the acceptance of rape and disengaged sexualization of women or just their bodies for marketing purposes, for audiences, because you can, to perpetuate a totally uninteresting trend that is not a trend but a persistent historical and continuously contemporary thing. You are so popular you don't have to be thoughtful or progressive or better than the cliche. It's boring. You are boring. I thought you would be willing to use your smarts in more innovative ways. Instead it is the same old crap.

...and PS Kanye pop culture does have power.

Social panic or random acts of kindness what is on trial here is our very sense of ourselves the integration of social into fabric the intelligent cooperation between one and another. A kind of solitary confinement I admit does little to progress a sense of companionable intelligence, intimate or otherwise. We have lost our humanities our fields of study in regard to insight and philosophical growth our notions toward any value driven future. The economics of non-humanism do little to encourage our survival. Earn money now ignore the collateral damage that lingers into later. Oil profits poison food exploited low paid workers industrial production tax breaks. I do not want to eat arsenic in my chicken petroleum products in my bread chemicals on apples petroleum everything environmental damage is cheaper than regulation real workers cannot afford to eat organic I still do not have any health insurance. Too many degrees and not enough business savvy. Sell develop expand buy more crap. There is not enough money in the world to live a decent life one cannot get all the stuff accumulate grow want need and ignore. Don't sell the art let the children starve close the schools abandon literacy education the chance to develop skills. Take out the walking paths dismantle the neighborhoods build your highways for the wealthy to pass through the masses without vision. There is no where else to go. Every place is here this global economic situation the catastrophic experience that is this defining moment. We can talk about local relationships individuals doing good compassion present tense moments of organizing building parks and planting gardens puling weeds feeding hungry kids tutoring and mentoring developing community groups and doing grassroots good. These are all true. We can fix our own neighborhoods maybe our cities and world. Or maybe grass roots are contained by glass ceilings and walls given space but not too much space given encouragement that can only reach simple distances into capital into the future. I can shop local live in a hut talk to my dog tutor kids plant flowers teach people how to write sentences and read paragraphs. But I can't escape the feeling that something has been planted in my brain sparking shocking the tissue pressing down tightening with subtle pressure every time I dream of revolt.

Video Essays

video essay introduction: http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v9n1/gallery/ve-bresland_j/ve-origin_page.shtml

http://bresland.com/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plutarch/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montaigne/

http://claudiarankine.com/

plus: mullen vimeo: http://vimeo.com/18552888

downtown, like the song

at the expense of
whole collections of art
body parts
clippings (newspaper, toenails, unwanted hair, lawn...)
a refrain, verse, or a new favorite
singer, dancing backstage
with a bottle

acid reflux

apple juice like brandy
wine the occasional traffic incident
work related antithesis
broken plastic flowers
planted in intervals

calm yourself

one painting at a time
sculptures reserved for
fruition (tuition, interest hikes)
and the city circles
like it's both predator and
hoping for a miracle
of time, nuance

the intuitive sense that
lawn furniture is little more than
a gruesome display of
fiscal repression and blatent
mismanagement

how many projects

sunday is a metaphor for summer climbing
against a railing made of socks
the scent of sage, a fine mist against my neck, a splinter
in the bushes a cat wrangles, squawking
lemon candies against my tongue melt like
the sound of orange, melodic but campy
Gerald points toward Detroit and I disagree about the socks
they are made of cotton like candy, fluorescent shades
or maybe they were pastel, muted tones of sugar
crystallizing, god damn sugar molecules
clogging my pores

this is not summer
this is a monday and the clash of visual
detail pertains especially
to a kind of counter logic
what remains after rain on the sides of buildings

she said, "hey girl" and I replied, "sexy" and
"anonymous film making might somehow include us all."

the flamboyantly shaded treasure of hope, against all odds
surfaces like a dead body weighted with rocks
I will sing you this lyric with the back of my throat, if you listen
call me ish and I pursue
what will come to include a variation in texture
a predilection for carnivorous limbs, a bout of national
security amplified, and the giraffe
(or was it an elephant) will speak
promising a stratefied logic on film, like a weekend at the movies

of and off the page

1.

to understand fluorescence the right way to say

or speak

what the body cannot like a scent
at the peak violence, or predilection, an influence

or management system

organized in the way that spring flowers grow

on urban plots. some specific, cultivated some

like weeds, leftover from previous owners,

remembering landscape

2.

in the ocean

molecules a song geologic history

Ingrid I tell you, voices

resonating like waves

draw lines

sand founders

bubbles disperse, survive

as words on rock

pressed against an aging tide, a poem,

letters imprinted on a tree

pacify the rush.

a bluff a sinking

melody across minutes or

millennia

this sentiment livid

like heat across August

blood like screams

held back and distant

scattered like beach glass

and drowning

in cancer memento

a pre-historic era

3.

Ophelia I heard you in the train, your tangles, your roses lament and screech into and out of the station. Blood of insufficiency or rain, a misread sigh, curse of detail, anatomy, politics. I have decided it fits like a metaphor. A glove a leaf a melody. Clarity nuanced like distant sound from every direction.

“a sharp silver glint of rail”

across exterior vibration limbs cross or break

veering according to narrative inclination,

having left you behind, all this time.

4.

an extrication, layering in timely arrangements of speech.

Insert replacement words here.

5.

a story untold, versions

fallen syllables out of scheme

too soon for history

the train in the distance

rain, dissonance

I hear you, imagining

stories out of sort and out of mind

mathematics of failure

what falls

between the gaps