Orwell, George, Animal Farm. I wanted to reread this, although it is very depressing. Perhaps I didn’t like the format of this edition, the pages were quite narrow. But mostly I cannot reread this because I cannot handle animal stories, they are always too sad.
Granados, Pedro, Inkarrí. All right, I had bought this to be polite. There’s something almost-good in Pedro’s work, I wish he would push it a step further. I wish he had put his academic work in journals and with better paper and copy-editing, it deserves this and I don’t know if he realizes that.
Bernheimer, Charles, Attack of the Difficult Poems. I bought it once hoping for inspiration, did not read it, and am sorry to see it go. It does have, on pp. 65-72, an essay called “Our Americas: New Worlds Still In Progress,” with epigraphs from Martí and both Andrades. It was first published in Spanish in S/N: New World Poetics 1 (2010). The poem of the Americas does not exist, it says, for “the Americas is an imaginary cultural space whose mutant and multiform manifestations are as evanescent as the last breaths of a dying tongue.”
Bernheimer continues: American poets tell and do not show, because we are a people in transition. Rothenberg, like Martí and others, suggested studying indigenous rather than European epics, and otherwise trying to get us out of Anglonormativity. And Olson went to the Yucatan in 19561, helping ujs to move toward a poetics of the Americas and “rejecting the trap of what Robin Blaser … calls ‘The Western Box.'”
In Ül: Four Mapuche Poets, Cecilia Vicuña quotes Jorge Teillier, who said his weapon against the world is another vision of it. Poetry has conceptual power (cf. Blake’s “Mental Fight,” Martí’s trincheras de ideas). And no issue has dogged poetry so much in the 1990-2010 period as identity, which is always plural, syncretic, braided and self-cannibalizing. Here comes the importance of Oswald: antropofagia means self-creation outside the Western box. We must be local but in the form of raw material for export, and global but not in the WTO sense. And note: poetry doesn’t safeguard, but generates cultural identity.
Also: a poetics of the Americas wouldn’t be about themes and narratives, but about language practices. We’re a collage, and we’re multilingual. And we disrupt refinement and assimilation, as opposed to make these our goals. Bernheimer, and Roland Greene, are interested in New World Studies. Literature doesn’t develop from origins (in the way philology traditionally has it do, but in cross-fertilization and cannibalization.
Arrabal, Fernando, ¡Pintapollos Trotskistas! I bought this ambitiously, but did not read it. Perhaps I should check it out of a library next time … or I can buy it again.
I am glad about the flood, in a way, I read something of the Bernheimer and I read the preface and afterword of Animal Farm before recycling the destroyed pages of all of this. I liked the Bernheimer quite a lot and this will be the first of all these books I reacquire, or check out from somewhere.
*
I have been in a funk, lacking motivation, or suffering from allergies and an incipient cataract, or more likely, drained by drudgery. My department is a black hole that sucks energy, and the state AAUP conference has been as well. This last situation is too bad since I like the people as people, but it feels as though I have to carry them on my shoulders like dead weight, while also dragging my department on a sledge attached to my waist. It means I lose energy and focus for creative things, and doubt myself. I need a lighter atmosphere, with brighter people, who are interested in contributing and also capable of taking care of themselves. My own university’s AAUP chapter is more like that, fortunately, and my professional organizations are like that, but the energy suck of my department isn’t to be ignored. I tend to blame myself, say I do not have enough energy or I am “procrastinating,” but recognizing the situation for what it is makes me see what to do: I need rest, I need to allow myself to do creative things, I need to follow my instincts. Otherwise I always think more discipline and more regimentation are the answer, and that then causes my eyes to glaze over.
*
There was a piece of paper in one of the books. It refrerences that article “Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe.” It says racial mixing before Vasconcelos was seen as impurity. People of African descent were marked for destruction. In Latin America and Latin American literature, racial conflict is massively present, yet it is made invisible. How can we present Africanity in Latin American literature? It has been disappeared in plain sight.
I love research and I get depressed without it, and I perk up with it.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 