I’m going to Tulane and I will read this old book by Sara Castro-Klarén. Everyone was interested in the Latin American subject back then, and Borges is much better at thinking about these things than people give him credit for. I will find out what I was thinking, what I might have thought. I would … More Escritura, sujeto y transgresión
Decarceration / prison abolition is a key piece of the revolution to come. (We HAVE to have revolution according to the Afro-Pessimists, you know, and they would probably say we need the prison system to create the not quite human category of people that are the black ones/black death, and so on). I want to … More The next prison paper
Go to campus and deal with mail. Fill out a W-9 form for AP. Reserve a rental car. See about acupuncture. See if I have overpaid Best Buy. AND: It appears I could fly one way to Reno on American, early enough in the morning and stopping only once. I would then not have to … More I will
HAS Unlicensed handguns Drinks to go Frequent boil water warnings Unlimited reelection of governors Expanding homeless population (and it is illegal to be homeless in a public place) Californian tech exodus offering 50% above asking on every house DOES NOT HAVE Voting rights Abortion rights History education (it is illegal to teach about race, or … More Texas
Literature now isn’t just post-national, it’s national and post-national at once. (I read this in Hispamérica). The AEIOU strategy (IWW): agitate, educate, inoculate, organize, unionize. Unionization comes last not first, and the organizers are workers, not staffers for big unions. I learned more things, too. Axé.
Benefits of being old and of having seen things already. So I went to meet the student worker’s fiancé. I had not met him before, only heard. Based upon that, I was positively disposed. Still. I get there and find him in the doorway trembling for two reasons. He wants to impress me, but he … More Beneficios
“Post-fiction,” pos-ficción. Volpi’s novela criminal. The novels Línea negra and Partitura para una mujer muerta. Mines, sugar, oil. Novels about these products. These products as characters. Racismo y capitalismo racial. Most importantly: Open Post Academics. Axé.
Some of my notes (I’ve got to dig up the abstract): On the topic of faculty governance, or shared governance, I’ve noticed the following phenomena as universities have gone to the entrepreneurial or “market” model: no departmental meetings (decisions made by chairs in consultation with administration, or by ad hoc, sometimes secret committees) no departmental … More MLA presentation for AAUP
In 2008, a high school friend of my father’s who was living in Paris, sent him the Le Monde obituary of Milton Wolff, author of Another Hill. Wolff had just died in Berkeley. The following year Robert Colodny, another Lincoln Brigade veteran Wolff surely knew, and who had rented a room from my grandmother during … More Milton Wolff
Photocopy purge of the day, doing it and not looking back: a whole binder full of hard-won photocopies from the 1990s, before JSTOR, including LPM, Paradoxes of literary nationalism in Latin America. It seemed so key to me then but I can recite the arguments now, do not need the book. Politics: Tulane’s library is … More Leyla Perrone-Moisés
El reino de este mundo will be the first and oldest text. Everything else will be short, but interesting, from a different country. That is the foundation, and everything else is later; I should do something actually Afro-Latin to go with REM. Other texts I am thinking about having, for narrative, are Pedro Páramo, Crónica … More Spanish American Literature in Translation? Or Latin American? Including Brazil, or not?
