Unlettered City

2009-10-29T10:43:00.000-04:00

2009-10-25T21:54:00.001-04:00

«I can't afford to ♥ NY» | so says this Northern Joisey Gal, too. . . .

2009-10-24T22:27:00.000-04:00

when pigs fly...

2009-10-19T13:49:00.003-04:00

This rocks! I would be one unabashed screaming fan here for both the Great Moz and Cafe Tacvba, as Morrissey presents CT with an MTV Latin America Premios «Leyenda».

2009-10-19T11:42:00.002-04:00

nice, nice: roque dalto archivo digital.

scenes from the south . . .

2009-10-17T22:20:00.001-04:00

me vale madre |or, . . . my brand spankin' new «i don't give a damn» lovable street-corner drunkard coin bank

2009-10-07T00:04:00.002-04:00

Let's forget, for a moment, that Evian is attempting to colonize our brains and enjoy the creative act summoned here so that we can simply delight in these toddlers' too cool for school urban attitude. I ♥ the chubby legs and diapers. . . .

2009-10-06T20:02:00.002-04:00

egregiously funny . . . existentially compelling

2009-10-05T17:09:00.002-04:00

AWESOME––the title «horchata,» and needless to add, the drink, though I have a high proclivity for the Salvadoran version of this irresistible beverage.

scenes from the south

2009-10-03T23:15:00.003-04:00

i. «burwell family slave, bought freedom.»

ii. miss latina carolina | ncprincess.com

2009-09-23T12:36:00.001-04:00

office hours soundtrack...

2009-09-19T13:27:00.009-04:00

.... Yeah –– something along these lines is what I was alluding to when I posted about my Facebook "friendship" with Emily Dickinson on 14.9: the semiotic life of the literary canon via social networks.

2009-09-18T20:40:00.004-04:00

SATURN.ify Durham! (from the Sun Ra exhibit at the Durham Arts Council)

2009-09-17T12:53:00.004-04:00

... In solidarity with IV, who is delivering an Artist's Lecture this evening for his show, «Exiles,» now on exhibit at the South Texas College Art Gallery, and for which I was honored to submit an essay. Thanks for asking! :-)

2009-09-14T20:24:00.003-04:00

because some Facebook associations deserve to be immortalized...

2009-09-08T19:45:00.003-04:00

It sounds like too mundane a headline––"Labor Day Car Crash"––except I can't mundanely turn the page. Still shaken, but I think I am well. "The car is totaled," the tower guy opined. "Significant front damage to the frame," he told the adjuster today. Unforgiving, air bag explosion––slapping my face, bruising my nose. Smoke. Competing alarms: paramedics, police, firemen. Sore right arm, with reddish marks someone identified as a "chemical burn." Right leg hurts. Back ache. Physically and emotionally drained. But my blood pressure's fine, the EMS guy announced. . . And my surprising, capitalist realization: I actually liked my car. Could it really be that Dora––as I affectionately called her due to the comforting navigation system's Sci Fi female voice––be dead?

2009-09-06T20:38:00.001-04:00

think again, chum!

contact zones

2009-09-04T11:29:00.002-04:00

2009-09-01T11:59:00.005-04:00

What a great geographical beginning to this song: «It's not as if New York City burnt down to the ground once you drove away.»

2009-08-31T10:55:00.002-04:00

«Redemption 5¢»

Poor God, people everywhere
swearing to you all day

2009-08-10T23:38:00.000-04:00

Press Release!

THE NICOLAS GUILLÉN PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE PRIZE 2009 AWARDEE IS EDWIDGE DANTICAT

The Caribbean Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Edwidge Danticat, the famed Haitian novelist and essayist, is the 2009 winner of the Nicolas Guillén Philosophical Literature Prize for philosophical literature. The prize is for “an author whose outstanding contribution to Caribbean thought is through the medium of the novel, poetry, theater, or cinema.”

The Prize will be awarded on August 13, 2009, at 2:00 PM in the Auditorium LC 110 at the University of Miami, coral Gables, Florida, at the 6th annual international meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. (Consult the URL: http://www.temple.edu/isrst/events/CPA.asp or email: caribphil2@gmail.com)

Danticat is an award-winning writer of fiction and prose. For links to her biography and writings, please consult the following URL: http://reach.ucf.edu/~aml3930/danticat/

The awards committee for the Caribbean Philosophical Association praised Danticat for the power of her writing, her ability to bring to reflection and mythic consciousness the plight of dispossessed peoples in the Caribbean and bringing to the wider international community the significance of continued violence wrought by forced servitude. Her work is, according to Paget Henry, one of the members of the committee, a major contribution to the poetics, joyful and tragic, of Caribbean life and the human condition. The rest of the committee agreed, adding that each member of the committee has taught her work and has been inspired by her writings.

Dr. Claudia Milian, Mellon Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and African American Studies at Duke University, will provide a summary presentation of Danticat’s work at the session, which will be open to the public.

2009-08-09T00:43:00.000-04:00

I drive to walk, to make myself loop around (a quadrangle? a circle?) a track, they say = to 1.7 miles. Circularly afoot and alone in this open door gymnasium––promenade––with strange whiffs and other recognizable scents: stranger sweat––after hours legal perspiration, corporeal tune-up supporting each passing back that is wet. Ontologies of running/walking. Mosquitoes sting. Splatters of Spanish. A man neither walks nor runs, but skips throughout his accumulation of mileage. Unpaved trails. A pedestrian t-shirt tells me miracles happen further south: Milagros made in Mexico. Afoot in a city, any city, a larger city, a pedestrian-friendly city = the organization of my thoughts, a codependent alone-ness. Circularly afoot and alone in this city = being inescapably alone, listening to (________), tied to the visual reproduction of trees and classed markers: Domino's, Whole Foods, Dollar General.

2009-07-28T22:31:00.000-04:00

Strange to find myself saying goodbye to the only home I've known––cared, I mean, to qualify as home and even monumentalize in loose leaf, essay form. From now until (whenever), I shall rely on the kindness of strangers for urban familiarity, for a dwelling corner, for a non-discardable plate, for a memory that ties me here (wherever that fleeting here shall momentarily rest––momentarily "be"––in Hudson County). Tonight is the last night "here." I am sheltered across the street, staring at the five-storied building that housed and raised me alongside a host of nameless others who warrant a space, so that I can merely utter, "I have not (forgotten)." Like one of the last remaining monolingual Americans in the building (he kept to himself and hardly spoke with Spanish-speaking Latinos, he was fino, some said in response to his reticence and in/difference); the Chileans with hidden Pit Bulls who stupidly waited for the morning's early hours and hosted a Pit Bull fight in the basement, a scene I had only witnessed in Amores Perros and heard of through Michael Vick's exploitative ventures; an unknown Central American who left public instructions on the front door reading, "Sr. UPS: Plis live the package at the Honduran Café"; the Cuban mom who added Ensure shakes to her daughter's meals "for extra nutrition"; a squirrel so atrevida, it punctured the window screen multiple times, trying to get into apartment #D5 each morning. I unintendedly––yet quite fitting for the occassion––end up taking a stroll through Bergenlive Avenue for this finale: a high school friend and I meet at the KFC in front of Modell's––how inner city can we get, with echoes from a cultural reference that amuses us, the Beastie Boys' "3 the Hard Way"––the sounds of bachatas moving with me, as musical notes flee Toyotas from last millennium's waning days. "Toyotas are the poor folks' Mercedes," my driving instructor had professed. I thought my weight-conscious friend was being ironic, but he kidded not as he ordered and devoured two original KFC thighs. I had water. Nostalgia makes me thirsty. Fast were our lives as we played catch-up, and did you hear, Death claimed so and so last December? Fast was the neon, though slow was the bus, that quickly stuck to my guagua's window. Strange-sounding, palimpsistic capital, signs begging remembrance: Bonita, 99¢, Panda, Taco Bell. A new business name discontinues the flow––I never knew it existed––wish I had known: Pizza Cubana. What else have I missed? (Will I be missed?) I will be delocalized tomorrow, but the Peruvian shoe cobbler localized me today, smiling in commuter recognition as I stepped off the bus.

2009-06-10T14:09:00.003-04:00

CORPOREAL TOPOGRAPHY (OR, SIMPLY, INTOXICATED POETRY) –– This ante meridiem a northern New Jersey drunkard stopped in front of "my" table––my usual spot at a local café––and informed me, fellow addict of another substance (caffeine): "You look like you could be from New York City or Bayonne. Maybe you're from Guttenberg, but I can't see your legs." My (legless, yet migratory) body as ethnoscape.

2009-06-08T16:44:00.003-04:00

I don't know how historically––or even culturally––accurate this entertainer's claim is ("El único chino que canta en español"), but I'm certainly willing to believe this amusing Central American dose of orientalism. (Window display from La Pupusa Loca #1 | West New York, NJ)