A New Year, A New Semester

First week of class

The other day I was telling a colleague that I had only been at Rutgers-Newark since the fall of 2012, and he expressed surprise, because, he told me, it seemed to him that I'd been on the faculty for much longer. But it really has only been a year and a half, and I now enter my fourth full teaching semester, summers and the winter breaks not included, which is to say, my second year. Since arriving I have not taught the same course twice; I have taught undergraduate and graduate literature and creative writing courses; I have taught courses geared primarily towards English, African American and African Studies, and creative writing students; and I have taught courses that bridged these various disciplines. Each of these classes has included its share of challenges, some intellectual, some pedagogical, but all have turned out to be quite enjoyable, and one of the greatest benefits of each one has been the students I have had the good fortune to work with. Thus far I have not supervised or work with teaching assistant, and my smallest classes have totaled 12 students (graduate) and 15 or so (undergraduate), while my largest class, last spring, had 40 students (which was, nevertheless, a manageable number).

This spring my courses are Writers at Newark II and History and Myth in Contemporary African Diasporic Fiction. The former is a graduate course that entails reading, discussing and writing about the work of writers who will be visiting and reading in Rutgers-Newark's MFA annual literary series. This spring semester's visitors include two program colleagues, Rachel Hadas (poet, nonfiction writer and scholar) and Jim Goodman (historian and nonfiction writer), as well as Richard Blanco (the inaugural poet), Andew Solomon (the nonfiction writer), Natasha Trethewey (US Poet Laureate), Edward P. Jones (the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer), Matthea Harvey (poet), and George Saunders (fiction writer). I have taught the work of several of these writers before, and appreciate the mix of genres, which mirrors the mix of interests the MFA students bring to the program. We just finished lively discussions of Rachel's The Golden Road: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2012) and Jim's But Where Is the Lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac (Schocken, 2013). Next we will be discussing Richard Blanco's Looking for the Gulf Motel (Pittsburgh, 2012) and Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2013). Both writers will be on campus later this month, and I'm looking forward to meeting and hearing both of them.

My second course is a new version of an undergraduate English course I taught several times at Northwestern, though I have updated it with different texts, trimmed away a lot of what I realized was somewhat unwieldy theoretical material, and recalibrated it so that it better meets the needs of my current students. It officially falls under the rubric of Studies in African and Caribbean Literatures, and is crosslisted both in English and AAAS, though it is more than any thing a Comparative Literature class. Whereas in the past I would sometimes shoehorn as many as 10 books into a term's reading, along with a bookshelf's worth of background and theoretical articles (on the quarter system, no less!--what was I thinking?--my former students in that course and others all certainly deserved medals for endurance and fortitude), I have pared that number down to 7 novels, with a number of short stories mixed in. The writers we're reading include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Ana Maurine Lara, Alain Mabanckou, Zakes Mda, ZZ Packer, Ishmael Reed, Yvonne Denis Rosario, and Jean Wyllys, as well as one of my own brief stories, with short theoretical articles by Natalie Zemon Davis, Robin D. G. Kelley, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Colin Palmer. So far the course is going well, and several new students have signed in, so it should be an intellectually enriching experience for them (I hope) and me.

The Snowstorm (Thundarsnortex)

Cold I was expecting. For the last few days the weather forecasters were predicting temperatures in the mid-20s and lower for this upcoming week, the first of the new spring semester, so I have made sure to have longjohns, ski gloves and cap, a heavy wool scarf, and other Chicago-level weather essentials ready. Then, yesterday, I think C and I caught an evening news broadcast that announced a major storm would be blowing through, beginning in the afternoon. Major it is, but the thundersnow arrived in Jersey City this morning.  Snow has steadily fallen, horizontally, and by noon I received an email alerting me that after 3 pm all Rutgers campuses would close for the day.

The university is supposed to open tomorrow at 10 am. We'll see. If the still-falling snow and polar vortex conditions--thundarsnortex, I think Gothamist labeled it--continue, I may not teach my first class until Thursday. A snowplow has visited our street twice so far, a very good sign, but this afternoon I took the light rail, which was running without a hitch, to downtown, to make sure it was running in preparation for tomorrow, hit the post office, and get out and about. The main streets also appear to be ploughed but outside those, here downtown, some of the streets remain untouched. The snowfall is so thick that it's enfolding the tops of our local skyscrapers and lower a curtain such that you cannot even see a yard across the Hudson. Somehow, though, the seabirds, soaring in undulating lines across the water's shirring surface, know where they're heading.


The Hudson River, with its head of snow (Manhattan, usually visible, is straight ahead)
Exchange Place, looking toward the ferry terminal to Manhattan
The parking lot near Harsimus cove
 
Near Exchange Place
 
The light rail platform and tracks

Two Events in Chicago: New Translation & Red Rover Series Vulnerable Rumble Performance

UPDATED: See: corrected "Codes of Vulnerability."

January, to those in the literary studies and related fields, means the annual conference of the Modern Language Association (MLA). This year's gathering took place in Chicago, but instead of heading to give a paper, sit on a hiring committee or interview for a job, I headed to attend two off-site events, one focused on translation and organized by Patrick Durgin, a poet and publisher of Kenning Editions on January 10, the second an experimental reading that the Red Rover Series organized at the Outer Space Studios in Wicker Park on January 11. Given the bad run of weather in the Midwest and more than a decade of familiarity with sudden snowstorms and treacherously icy runways, I was concerned about whether I would even get there by the time of my evening event, and my concern was not misplaced, because the first leg of my connecting flight, from Newark to Philadelphia, was delayed by 1 1/2 hours, which meant that I had to run--literally, sprint, with my bad knees--to my departing gate, which in Philadelphia's airport requires transport via a winding, slow bus! I barely made the flight (by minutes), landed in Chicago, picked up my rental car, and then spent 2 1/2 hours in driving iced rain, in part because I hopped on the expressway and a fire on a CTA train (on which my cousin's husband was riding to his job at the airport!) necessitated a partial shutdown of the highway, which meant that after being stuck in gluelike traffic I had to divert via local roads to my hotel, gliding across sheets of ice, past mountains of snow (Chicago had gotten 9 inches in its last snowfalls) and amidst crazy driving....I arrived at my first scheduled event a bit out of harried, but thankfully, in one piece, and on time (7:30 pm).

The translation event, pithily titled New Translation, was held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Sharp Building on Friday. The translators included Nathanaël (speaking, with her usual cogency and grace, about translating Hervé Guibert from French), Anna Deeny (speaking about translating several different Hispanophone writers, including Alejandra Pizarnik and Raúl Zurita from Spanish), Daniel Borzutzky (speaking about translating Zurita and Gabriel Soto Román from Spanish), Urayoán Noel (speaking about translating Amanda Berenguer's "concrete poetry," which he defined in relation to the usual connotations of this term, from Spanish), Jonathan Stalling (speaking about several different authors from Chinese and his creation of a "phonotactic" structure to do so), Jennifer Scappettone (speaking about translating F. T. Marinetti's "aerofiction" and "aeropoetry" from Italian), Joshua Clover (speaking about translating--which he called the "last gasp of close reading"--Jean-Marie Gleize from French), and I. Translator Johannes Göransson was unable to attend. 

The event unfolded without a moderator; we were to time ourselves, reading a small amount of our translations and speaking about the process and anything else related to the topic, theoretic, critical, scholarly, or otherwise. With 8 translators, however, things went long, though everyone offered up insightful comments about their practice and the texts they were translating. Daniel Borzutzky in particular offered one of the most clarifying presentations, linking our presence in Chicago to the Chicago School of Economics, which used Chile, Raúl Zurita's and Daniel's native country, then under the control of a military dictatorship, as its testing ground, with sometimes disastrous, often problematic results (its Social Security program, its huge inequality gap several decades ago, etc.), and was now using turning those same neoliberal policies back on the US, in particular Chicago, under the tenure of "liberal" Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel. Another really interesting point he made, echoed by others, was how transgressive Zurita's writing about nature was, in light of the Pinochet dictatorship and its severe censorial constraints.

I ended up going last, and so restricted my comments to the minimum, instead reading a few sections of Hilst as well as a little of her Portuguese to convey the rhythmic and sonic challenges her work posed even for Lusophones reading it aloud. I also noted how she played with the idea contained in the word "oco" (hollow, hole) throughout, telling the reader that Stamatius, both through her use of words echoing this one ("coco," "trouco," "toco," "pouco"--all of which contain the sound of "oco," or "OH-koo") and by having one of the protagonists, Stamatius/Tiu, tell the readers he was going into his own "hollow," and then titling the final section of the novel "De outros ocos" ("Of Other Hollows"). I also answered a question about Hilst's use of a pornographic linguistic register and discourse, to which Nathanaël, who with Rachel Gontijo Araújo collaboratively translated Hilst's The Obscene Madame D, added important information. It was an excellent event, and afterwards most of us headed a few doors down for dinner and drinks, and multilingual conversation.

A snapshot of the panel (© Jennifer Scappettone)

Poet, critic and Cal Arts professor Christine Wertheim,
before the event began

The translators, from left: Urayoán Noel, Daniel Borzutzky,
Anna Deeny, looking down, Nathanaël, and assorted attendees
(Joshua Corey is wearing glasses)

More of the attendees (translator Steven Teref sits
next to Christine Wertheim at right)

Patrick Durgin, organizer

Joshua Clover, Jonathan Stalling, Urayoán Noel

***

The second event that brought me to Chicago was "The Vulnerable Rumble," a reading-performance organized by local poets and activists Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, along with Laura Mullen in from Louisiana, as part of their Red Rover Series. Established back in 2005 by Jennifer and Amina Cain, the Red Rover Series has insistently fostered innovative poetic practice and performance or, as the series subtitle states, "[readings that play with reading]." During my decade in Chicago I was fortunate to catch a number of their events and participate in several of them; we even partnered together on May 2011's "Poetry for Labor" event at Haymarket Square downtown. Saturday's gathering, held at the Outer Space Studio, the upstairs artist-run performance space in the Wicker Park neighborhood, was #71, and staged as a special event for (and in response to?) the MLA's theme of "Vulnerable Times," or, in MLA President Marianne Hirsch's words

Vulnerable Times addresses vulnerabilities of life, the planet, and our professional disciplines, in our own time and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate acts of imagination and forms of solidarity and resistance that promote social change."

As always, Jen, Laura and Laura thought carefully and creatively about this theme, and devised an open, aleatory program that, as I told Carla Harryman (one of the liveliest and most daring participants, whom I'd read for years but never met until this event), felt akin to what one might have encountered decades (the 1960s-1980s) ago, before poetry readings turned into tidy, academic-friendly affairs. Or, as I thought to myself, somewhat like the vibrant performances that Thomas Sayers Ellis thought up from time to time for the Dark Room Writers Collective. 

Some two dozen-plus poets--Kazim Ali, Amaranth Borsuk, Amy Catanzano, B. K. Fischer, Chris Glomski, Alan Golding, Rob Halpern, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Douglas Kearney, Philip Metres, Laura Moriarty, Ladan Osman, Danielle Pafunda, Lily Robert-Foley, Kenyatta Rogers, Heta Rundren, Jennifer Scappettone, Evie Shockley, Jonathan Stalling, Divya Victor, Barrett Watten, Christine Wertheim, Keith Wilson, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Kate Zambreno, as well as Jen, Laura and Laura--were scheduled to perform. Whether all of us did I cannot say; the poets I know from the list above all did make appearances, but several of I know but never met I cannot say for sure read. At any rate, while Red Rover has more than once presented readings that break the usual form of reading, I could not remember one I'd attended--and none I'd ever participated in--that included so many poets and with such a free-form approach. 

Laura, Jennifer and Laura imaginatively theorized and wrote the event's aims and approach in their "a vulnerable manifesto," which they read from at the evening's start, pointing out "often an order that allows one voice at a time to be heard, or one voice, the automatic discomfort at interruption- the exposure of muted layers that slide up against brains not programmed with patience." And: "if i hold you off for a minute before i must succumb, will i experience the rare sensation of my voice as presence? it's all i can think of in this moment but maybe you will think of more. i think more can happen that we haven't thought of yet, i'm sure." More specifically, all of the participants received a list of nine loose guidelines, or "Codes of Vulnerability," which were also posted around the studio space. 

1. The curators announce the beginning and end of the performance.

2. Readers self-determine the order by choosing when to appear onstage.

3. The evening proceeds by readers interrupting each other to take turns onstage. 

4. Readers can choose to stand in silence, as a signal that they will soon begin.

5. If a reader does not wish to be interrupted, shake head or make a stop signal with hand.

6. Readers can halt or disable their own live readings. 

7. Duets and choral readings are divine, welcome co-readers by waving hands forward.

8. Readers can reappear and read more than once.

9. Strategies are encouraged to respect each reader’s time and space for the work to be heard. 

10. Failure is also encouraged.  See Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure,

“Work together. Revel in difference. Fight exploitation. Decode ideology. Invest in resistance.” 

Indication by raising the hand or shaking one's head. Duets and choral readings. Self-halting and disabling. Strategies to encourage reader time. Failure. What principles, and I say that without irony. Oh, if only more poets would internalize many of these! What became clear as the evening proceeded was that many of us did, and rather quickly; there were some who read briefly, some who leapt in and then out, some who paired up more than once but never too long, some who added a theatrical or performative element to change the reading dynamics, and a few who seemed to step right back into the usual holding-of-the-floor at length, as if any other approach would not do. But, as Jennifer said and underlined, even failure at these "codes" was acceptable, so anything went.

One other interesting and important element was the presence of a stool featuring the works of Amiri Baraka, who'd passed away only days before. In a note to participants, Jen Karmin called attention to Baraka's death, and several of us decided that, if we could, we'd honor him by reading his work. To facilitate this for everyone, Jen provided several Baraka texts, including Dutchman, which factored in several times later on, and, I think--though I could have this wrong--The Amiri Baraka Reader. I made a point of creating a .pdf featuring several Baraka poems, as well as my own, and determined that before I read anything I'd written, I'd bring him into the space with me, and for all of us.

There were many highlights, but the event launched with performances that set the tone for what might follow. First, Christine Wertheim, crouched in the front left corner of the room, took one of Jen Karmin's hands (I believe it was Jen's) and began a cry-wail that turned into a series of repeating lines, after which Lily Robert-Foley and Heta Rundren, emerging from their seats along the right wall's floor, rose and began an antiphonal song-chant that instantly shifted the tone and atmosphere. In an order I cannot recall, Kazim Ali moved into the front of the space, and shortly thereafter Doug Kearney glided through the packed crowd reading Amiri Baraka's "Ka'Ba." Someone from Robert Halpern's Music for Porn before Halpern did, reminding me of Halpern's reading last year at Poets House in NYC, and later Halpern himself read from the text himself--or did someone else also read from it? Yes: Lily Robert-Foley.

Amy Catanzano read a long, funny piece that riffed off net-speech. Jonathan Stalling sat and read/sang softly, intently in Chinese. Doug, Ronaldo V. Wilson and Amaranth Borsuk read in tandem, and Lyn Hejinian read twice with others: once with Barrett Watten, and once, towards the night's end, with Jennifer Scappettone, partially to the accompaniment of "Planet Rock" (I think), played by Ronaldo on his computer. Phil Metres, who was sitting beside me, read while on his hands and knees, and tore up and handed out pages from one of his books. I got one and erased some of the words, but I did not read them. His "The Blues of Charles Graner," exploring the horrors of the participants in Abu Ghraib, became:

The Blues

the Christian

knows

but the corrections

officer can't

help love

a grown man

piss him

Later on, B. K. Fischer (I think) read, as Jen Karmin and Evie Shockley pulled at opposite ends of the rope, and then Evie, the floor hers alone, read a powerful poem, playing artfully with repetition, recursion and subtraction. Ronaldo ended the evening wearing a black mask, a paisley scarf wrapped around his head, on his side, as Jen (and Laura G.?) intervened by removing chairs. It was over. We all applauded.

(I should also note that I finally met a poet I'd first heard about when I was 18 years old, from her son,  who was one of the first people I met in my freshman year of college: Lyn Hejinian. A very good friend, Dorothy Wang, who attended the event, had mentioned meeting up with Lyn Hejinian the day before, and said she would be reading at this event, which I almost could not believe--after all these years, after quoting her in my first book, after reading and following her work for decades, I would actually meet this extraordinary poet in the flesh! I finally did meet her, and she was as lovely and gracious as I imagined. So that was another highlight of the evening for me.)

At some point early on, Carla Harryman--celebrating her birthday!--rose and inspected a plastic pot featuring various implements (a jump rope, a cone hat, a kazoo with streamers), and then, with Baraka's Dutchman, interrupted someone reading. There was a chair (visible in the photos below), and when things slowed a bit, I rose, suppressing my anxiety about interrupting anyone and just inserting myself into the proceedings, and, with Baraka's "An Agony. As Now," one of my favorites of his early poems, she and and I went back and forth, she reading Lula's lines from Dutchman, and I channeling Baraka. We performed the exchange, which seemed fitting given the format and the texts. I even felt like Clay/Baraka declaiming! I decided to practice a bit of self-curtailment and near the end of the poem I stopped. Maybe I even uttered this. I think it just felt too strange simply to walk off, though that is what I did. Did someone else join Carla Harryman? Did she stop too? Did anyone raise her or his hand? Did anyone nod a head to bring others up? I want to think someone did. Interruption was less frequent than patience and politeness mixed with volition about taking the floor. It worked.

Later Christine began reading from Dutchman. I thought about another Baraka poem, "SOS." Or "Letter to E. Franklin Frazier," which cuts me to the bone, to read with her. Or the poem I worked on listening to others. Or one of the ones I'd purposefully brought. But I stayed in my seat because some inner mechanism said, you have had your turn, and let others have the floor. So I sat and listened and watched and wrote. But I was utterly in the moment. It was thrilling, in the true sense of that word, and wonderful--full of wonder--in the deep sense of that word too. Like: I wonder if people are also finding this as fun as I am. I wonder if mixed in with the fun is a kind of anxiety about what might come next. I wonder when the poets I know who haven't gone will get up and should I act in some way to ensure they get a chance? I wonder how people are responding to this resetting of power, and authority, and exchange? I wonder if the men will respect the codes? They (we) did, and I thought it a remarkable event. Afterwards others concurred, or that's what I thought I heard. I want to do it again. And in the break I heartily thank Jen, Laura and Laura, and all the other participants as well as everyone else present, in the audience, for making it such a marvelous experience. Because that's what it was. An experience, with the emphasis on the root of that word that links to experiment. As the Red Rover Series has succeeded in pulling off, for nearly ten years.

A few photos (I aimed the lens at the light sources so some of the photos are a bit dark.)

Jennifer Scappettone and Christine Wertheim

Kate Zambreno holding forth

Carla Harryman

Alan Golding

Barrett Watten and Lyn Hejinian
(with Evie Shockley, Danielle Pafunda
and Christine in back)

Amaranth Borsuk, Douglas Kearney
and Ronaldo Wilson

B. K. Fischer, Phil Metres (kneeling)
and Jen Karmin

Some of the performance

Ronaldo V. Wilson

Ronaldo, at the evening's
conclusion

The door to the wonderful

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from "The Impasse in Racial Relations," from The Trumpet of Conscience, San Francisco: Harper & Row, Co., 1968.

Update: You can listen a newly released audio version of an address Rev. Dr. King Jr. gave in 1962 to the New York State Civil War Centennial Commission at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City. He spoke to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (issued on January 1, 1863), enumerating the history of human rights in the US, and criticizing the nation for not living up the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or Lincoln's proclamation. The New York State Museum has now made the address available.

Amiri Baraka's Homegoing Celebration

Here are some photos from Amiri Baraka's (1935-2014) homegoing ceremony at the Symphony Hall on Broad Street in Newark. It was a remarkable affair, as much celebration as memorial, and drew major figures from across the Black artistic, cultural and political spectrum, including Amina Baraka, all of Baraka's children, Asha Bandele (who acknowledged Baraka's children by Hettie Cohen Jones, who were there with Jones, and Baraka's daughter with Diane DiPrima), Michael Eric Dyson, Danny Glover, Savion Glover, Haki Madhubuti, Tony Medina, Jessica Care Moore, Sonia Sanchez, Sister Souljah, Glyn Turman, Cornel West, and Saul Williams. Baraka's son, mayoral hopeful Ras Baraka, delivered an elegy for his late father that was, hyperbole excused, soul-stirring. 

I went in part because though I have not always agreed with--and have even outright rejected them--Baraka's positions and rhetoric, I can say without hesitation that he was and remains one of the most influential and important Black--American--writers of the 20th century, a towering figure whose stature, based on his creative and cultural work, will only grow. His poetry, his essays, his plays, his fiction, his central role in the development of the Black Arts Movement, his position as a founder of landmark institutions, his teaching and mentoring, and his long and sustained activism and resistance are all worthy of the highest consideration. I had the opportunity to hear and spend time with him several times during his life, including a car ride from Newark to NYU that nearly cost me my job (though he did what he could to ensure I kept it, as our delay was not my fault), and each time he demonstrated why he was the commanding figure people know him to be. 

May his soul rest in peace, poetry and power, and may the best of his words, the ones that offer visions of a better tomorrow, live as long as words live in and with us.

You can read my eulogy for Amiri Baraka, posted a week ago, here.

You may read others reflections on his life and work at First of the Month.

Publication Updates + Reading @ Word, Jersey City (w/ Vincent Czyz)

In a previous post, I mentioned several forthcoming publications, and I now have the links. First, a snippet of my translation of Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer is now live at The White Review: excerpt from "Letters from a Seducer." I recommend browsing all the new posted links, which include Humphrey Davies' translation of an excerpt from Lebanese-Ottoman writer Ahmad Faris al-Shidaq's Leg Over Leg, self-translations of new poems by South African writer Antjie Krog, a snippet of Chinese writer Can Xue's Vertical Motion by Karen Gernant and Chen Zipeng, and an essay, entitled "Afterword: The Death of the Translator," by George Szirtes, poet and translator of Lászlo Krasnahórkai, which should part of the ongoing conversations in translation studies and comparative literature. (If you can find one in a nearby bookstore, I also highly recommend The White Review's Issue No. 9, which includes an interview with Russia's pathbreaking writer Vladimir Sorokin, and visual work by the late experimental filmmaker, poet and artist--and no relation!--Jeff Keen--no relation).

Also, one of the shorter (very brief) stories from my collection Counternarratives is now live at the venerable TriQuarterly, which is now a publication of the Northwestern University MFA Program in Creative Writing. "Mannahatta" imagines the moment in which João Rodrigues (Juan Rodriguez), thought to be the first non-native settler of Manhattan island (and thus New York), makes his decision not to return to the Dutch ship on which he works. I was particularly happy that this story, which I wrote last fall in the midst of teaching and administrating, has been published, and that TriQuarterly, which I have read and admired for many years, is the periodical doing so. Many thanks to them, and the piece includes a brief paragraph about Rodrigues in case you do not know who he is (and we all should).

***

Last night, at the invitation of poet and Culture Society publisher Zach Barocas, author and Rutgers-Newark alumnus Vincent Czyz and I read at Word Bookstore's new Jersey City branch, which Zach manages. Although the series aims to feature local poets reading poetry, both Vincent and I write prose as well, so we mixed things up a bit, making sure, however, to keep the "lyric" in play. Vincent read first and began with a beautiful prose poem, then read an excerpt of the first story in his collection Adrift in a Vanishing City, which I urge you to check out (and which Samuel R. Delany has praised in an essay on Vincent's work). 

I followed with a brief invocation of Amiri Baraka, then read two short excerpts from the Hilst, including the opening section published in The White Review. I concluded with a brand new poem, "Power," which I partially wrote during the wild, aleatory Red Rover Series reading, "The Vulnerable Rumble," organized and curated by Jennifer Karmin, Laura Goldstein and Laura Mullen at Outer Space Studio in Chicago as a special event for the Modern Language Association's annual conference. 

We fielded several questions from the good-sized midweek crowd--it's always heartening when people turn out for a reading on a Wednesday evening--and then chatted with attendees afterwards. One young man was seeking to find out ways of using technology to transcribe interviews and espousing ideas about the death of originality, so that when I suggested to him that he check out the work of Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, two names that came immediately to mind, it turned out that he had Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2011) in his pocket! 

Below are a few pictures of Zach and Vincent, and of Word, a store Jersey City and the surrounding area badly needs. Stop in, since it's accessible from all over New Jersey and New York City (it's just steps away from the PATH train stop at Grove Street), catch some of their events, but by all means, please buy some books there and support them if you can.

Zach Barocas, introducing the reading

Vincent Czyz, reading his work

And here are a few pictures from a couple weeks back, I think, shortly after the store's opening in December.

The café section of Word

Books! 

A browser 

Another booklover 

The well-stocked shelves

Two Poems: Juan Gelman (RIP)

Juan Gelman, the politically committed and supremely inventive and talented Argentinian poet and winner of the Cervantes Prize, one of the highest for Spanish-language literature, passed away yesterday in Mexico City at the age of 83. Here are two poems by him, the first in translation, the second in Spanish and, according to the Spanish newspaper El país, the last poem he wrote. RIP.

Juan Gelman (from Coffee and
Saturday: Cultura y arte)

SAINT THERESA

and with many birds and their songs in the /
highest part of the mind or head / and rumblings
in it like the sea / or laments /
or winds or movements / suns

that clash / go out / then burn again / or powers
like thousands of animals that track        
up the suburbs of the soul / suffering
terrible ordeals i mean / even so

the soul goes on whole in its quiet state /
or desire / or clear light untouched
by sorrow / scorn / misery /
suffering or ruin / so

what is this peace without vengeance / or memory
of a future heaven / or tenderness
coming down from your hands / spring water
where birds in the highest part of the mind

rally to drink / sing sweetly / or are silent
like light issuing from you / wing
flying softly above war and fatigue
like the flight of passion itself?

Copyright © "Saint Theresa" by Juan Gelman (2014), translated by Hardie St. Martin, from Exquisite Corpse, 2014. All rights reserved.

and

according to Coffee and Saturday: Cultura y arte, the last poem Gelman wrote, by hand:

VERDAD ES

Cada día
me acerco más a mi esqueleto.
Se está asomando con razón.
Lo metí en buenas y en feas sin preguntarle nada,
él siempre preguntándome, sin ver
cómo era la dicha o la desdicha,
sin quejarse, sin
distancias efímeras de mí.

Copyright © Juan Gelman, 2014. All rights reserved.

Yayoi Kusama's I Who Have Arrived In Heaven (or the "Impossibility Room") @ David Zwirner

I tried. Four times. Four times. To see Yayoi Kusama's "Infinity Mirrored Room" at David Zwirner Gallery. It was one part of her show "I Who Have Arrived in Heaven." I apparently never came early enough or waited long enough (3 hours was my maximum) online to get into that little slice of heaven. Instead, I experienced a tiny sliver of hell, standing on what felt like non-moving, infinite queues. It was like being in Vladimir Sorokin's novel, but without the charmingly bizarre conversations. 

Except that I nearly got in one time, on the day captured in the photographs below, making my way first directly to the paintings, for which there was no line whatsoever, and slipping ungracefully into the area where a line had curved around itself like an ourobouros, taking my place at the end of it, until a docent and one of the gallery's staff spotted me like a brown bear in a snowy field, and told me that I had to leave. Two young men in front of me had also sneaked in and were told to skedaddle. They split, verbalizing their upset. 

I went back to looking at the paintings, which, though very interesting, were nowhere near as enthralling as the brief glimpse I got of the "Infinity Mirrored Room"--an "Impossibility Room" given the lines, the peeved Zwirner staff, the near maelstrom that filled W. 17th Street one of the days I showed up, as there were not enough cordons or staff to order the lines, and a young woman strode out into the street and began screaming at all of us to go home, to leave, that we would not see the "Infinity Room" today, no possibility, an impossibility, which simply made the people around me ask each other--or me, or the air--if she had lost her mind, because she was offering no other information, she would not even answer questions, as an evidently perturbed young man later did (everyone under 40 is "young" to me now), telling us about the screw-up with the cordons, sawhorses, whatever was meant to keep order. No, she approached, screamed, never letting go of her coffee cup, screamed some more, "You might as well go home because you will not get in," and then disappeared back into the gallery. Maybe she vanished into the "Infinity Mirrored Room." It was like an unannounced performance, but it was not the "Infinity Mirrored Room," so neither I nor many others standing around me budged. At least for another half-hour.

So, the paintings. I'll say only that they were consolation of a sort. But I hope--want, demand--that David Zwirner or someone bring that damned "Infinity Mirrored Room" back. Charge for it. Charge a premium--well, not more than $25, or else it'll be a plaything of the elites, as so much in New York has become. And run it for as long as you can make money. Because you will make money, a lot of it. Or invite someone affiliated with Kusama do so. There are warehouses in Jersey City she could rent. You could make a lot of money. Even Christian Marclay's The Clock, with its limited entrance protocols, appeared in different, staggered editions. Let's do so with that "Infinity Mirrored Room." Maybe I should write a letter to the mayor. Of Jersey City, and New York. That glimpse was bliss. We need more.

The line, wrapping down 10th Ave.,
to see the Yayoi Kusama
"Infinity Room"

The monstrous line (which
punched out into the street)

And now some of Kusama's paintings. I admit, it's really trifling not to have written down the names of paintings, their dates, anything. This feels more like a Tumblr post than a Blogger one. But I was in a state of petulance and having yet again not gotten into that "Infinity Room," so please cut me some slack. The paintings, all in acrylic, all in vibrant colors (a few were more muted and emphasized negative space and color), all with vivid brushwork, all with titles suggesting playful profundity, were BEAUTIFUL, though, and to my untrained eye reminded me a bit of Australian Aboriginal art.

Update: Okay, in my annoyance and laziness when beginning this blog post I did not initially glance at Zwirner's site, which shows images and names for all of the pictures I photographed.

Searching for Love, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

My Heart Soaring in the Sunset, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

All the Love Overflowing, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

Dance Party Night, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

A detail from Dance Party Night

Pensive Night, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

Morning Has Come, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

Green Solitude, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

A Woman with Pink Hair, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

Praying for Peace in the World, 2013, Acrylic on canvas

Brilliance of Life, 2013, and
Standing at the Flower Bed, 2013,
both acrylic on canvas