I am not considering changing my own name, but I am considering changing this blog title to Flor y Canto or to the Nahuatl original of that phrase, in xóchitl in cuicatl. That is because the Sixth Sun is growing, and we are moving on to a new phase. In xóchitl in cuicatl indicates that … More In Xóchitl In Cuicatl
Today the weather was lovely and I was up early and worked all day, getting a lot done. My job at its best involves drawing pictures and saying things, much like a blog, if more officially serious (although I would say that it is in fact less serious). One narrator in my unfinished novel Madrid … More More on MADRID
Back to Shahrazad IV One such event – one of the few I understand well enough to describe, if not explain – took place in the Bank of Antioquia, where I was waiting to buy dollars. On the first day of the symposium, a secretary had ushered me into her office to sign some papers. … More Shahrazad V
Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds … More Christopher Marlowe
See Siegfried Sassoon’s Survivors, written at Craiglockhart in October, 1917: No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk. Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ — These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk. They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed Subjection to the … More Flag Day
I Another book I would like to reread is Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. I think of it now because I have realized that academic writing is easier than blogging. I started blogging to jump-start academic writing, but their relationship seems to have reversed itself. This might be a sign of success. My scholarly texts would … More Jazz Poem, Voodoo Aesthetics
I am reading a fascinating and also funny essay by a scholar who spent most of her life working on the poet of my book manuscript on hiatus. It recounts the misadventures that work on this poet – who might be a shade, might be a vampire, might be an arsonist or a murderer, or … More The Idea of Order at Key West
Back to Shahrazad III At dinner that night I discovered that the past week’s FARC attack had taken place just outside Pasto. As a left leaning, petit bourgeois intellectual I do not know what to feel, someone said. The FARC are excellent guerrillas, we really like them. Usually nothing happens anyway, the boys just come … More Shahrazad IV
Back to Shahrazad II Tupac drove us to a gated and heavily guarded compound. Inside the white walls were a lawn, a restaurant, and a number of pavilions. This was the club of the Bank of the Republic, where we were to stay. Official and fancy though it was, its nighttime attendant seemed a bit … More Shahrazad III
Back to Shahrazad I About a week after the phone call, or the dream, a fax arrived from the Bank of the Republic of Colombia: we urgently need the title of your lecture. So now I phoned. It seemed I was to cancel my regular classes for a week to participate in a symposium at … More Shahrazad II
