hybridy-bitty / eye2eye
new audio and text at THE SICKLY SEASON:
1.NGUGI WA THIONG'O AND SESSHU FOSTER (5 november 2006)
Ngugi and Foster give a reading/Q&A at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, LA.
LINK TO AUDIO:
http://sicklyseason.com/dialogo/ngugi-and-sesshu.htm
2.BREAKING DOWN THE HEART OF WHITENESS (15 november 2006)
In the face of a hostile response from their professor, local English 1A city college students in a class I work with take on white privilege, race, and racism, and break it all down with a group presentation.
LINK TO AUDIO/TEXT:
http://sicklyseason.com/dialogo/heartofwhiteness.htm
.............................................................................
woke up this morning to lots of love from friends delivered via various digital media. it's strange, weeks will go by when I don't hear from anyone, emails are left unreturned, I get stood up, etc, and then all of a sudden everyone is nice to me all at once.
the magnetism between people, the vibes we put out there, the ebb and flow of karma, shared, invisible cycles.
I am supposed to speak to Sesshu Foster's writing class at Cal Arts tomorrow about hybrid genres. This seems to me like one of those concepts that could be very useful but also very slippery and easy to employ in the process of academic pomo neutralization. Hybridity as a concept is useless unless it is based on a fundamental, radical hybrid of the personal and the political. If we gotta get all academic n shit, I like Gloria Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness better. Also, Chela Sandoval's differential consciousness—love as a political force for personal and social transformation: that's hybridity. Mary Pardo's studies of women in East L.A. and how they bridge the spaces of home and neighborhood, private and public, through their woman-centered activism, education, and community building—that's hybridity.
Fortunately, if anybody can make these kinds of personal/political connections in an exploration of hybridity, it's Sesshu. Case in point: The class tomorrow will be discussing Joe Sacco's brilliant comic book, Palestine, which details the torture and state terrorism inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation. The book includes an introduction by Edward Said, whose ground-breaking text Orientalism I happen to have just read a few weeks ago, so I am looking forward to the discussion of Sacco's book.
I was thinking about all of this earlier this morning as I made myself an egg scramble of nopalitos and chopped-up tofu dogs, with a side of homemade beans smothered in panela cheese, and three flour tortillas, and a cup of coffee.
There is a part in Egyptian Nobel-winner Naguib Mahfouz' (December 11, 1911 — August 30, 2006) epic Cairo trilogy in which one of the main male characters, one of the patriarch's sons, falls in love with a woman who flirts with him over a period of time, and then once he has fallen in love, she goes away, disappears—which of course makes him fall even more desperately in love, intent on marrying her at any cost in order to bring her back. It's a small, throwaway comment, but years later, it's one of the things I remember most about those three thick novels: Mahfouz points out that the woman had played the oldest trick of all on him, the disappearing act (it's all in the timing), and he fell for it.
Sometimes it's so beautiful and funny and silly and sad and all fucked up, all the crazy stupid funny things we little monkeys do, knowingly, unknowingly, how the world spins, and we just sort of stick on to the side of it and hang on as best we can with our grimy little opposable digits—
(from Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha:
“I’d hold my arms out straight till they ached and I’d spin. I could feel the air against my arms, trying to stop them from going so fast, like dragging them through water.... Round and round; it was better with my eyes open, trying to get my eyes to hang onto one thing and stop it from turning.... I didn’t know why I did it; it was terrible—maybe that was why. It was good getting there—spinning. Stopping was the bad bit, and after. It had to come; I couldn’t spin forever. Recovering. Stuck to the ground. I could feel the world turning. Gravity sticking me down, holding me, my shoulders... The world was round and Ireland was stuck on the side; I knew that when I was spinning—falling off the world” (173).)
A friend recently sent me an anonymous photocopy of a poem by the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, along with a photocopy of the book cover the poem came from, with a mysterious P.O. box return address in East L.A. It's a beautiful poem. At the time I didn't know who had sent it, but I loved the mystery (Sesshu—maybe this is (one of) the purpose(s) of mystery?—loqueras, library liaisons, lowrider bicycles). I found out later who had sent it, and by that time, I had requested the book from the L.A. Public Library. When I went to pick it up, I thumbed through Ojos para otro mirar/Eyes to See Otherwise, and found the poem that had been sent to me, marked with a small, square, orange post-it note, sticking, hanging on, page 95, the note blank, microscopic traces of flesh, oils, scents, transit through urban space, ELAC, LL3, meta-poem, hybrid genre, giant steps, my favorite things, hybridity as the mystery of that fuzzy contact-overlap between life / death, past / future, intimacy / anonymity, myspace, emails, cel phone text messages, digitally recorded voice messages, the Braille of another's flesh early in the morning limbs intertwined as closed eyes still skitter over a mestizaje of half-awake physical desires and half-asleep R.E.M. dreams that weave reality/non-reality back and forth across the spaces between you—the sounds here, the tastes, the smells: muffled, musty, sour, sweet, pungent, all of it mxing, intermingling, to begin the task of building the day together.
1.NGUGI WA THIONG'O AND SESSHU FOSTER (5 november 2006)
Ngugi and Foster give a reading/Q&A at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, LA.
LINK TO AUDIO:
http://sicklyseason.com/dialogo/ngugi-and-sesshu.htm
2.BREAKING DOWN THE HEART OF WHITENESS (15 november 2006)
In the face of a hostile response from their professor, local English 1A city college students in a class I work with take on white privilege, race, and racism, and break it all down with a group presentation.
LINK TO AUDIO/TEXT:
http://sicklyseason.com/dialogo/heartofwhiteness.htm
.............................................................................
woke up this morning to lots of love from friends delivered via various digital media. it's strange, weeks will go by when I don't hear from anyone, emails are left unreturned, I get stood up, etc, and then all of a sudden everyone is nice to me all at once.
the magnetism between people, the vibes we put out there, the ebb and flow of karma, shared, invisible cycles.
I am supposed to speak to Sesshu Foster's writing class at Cal Arts tomorrow about hybrid genres. This seems to me like one of those concepts that could be very useful but also very slippery and easy to employ in the process of academic pomo neutralization. Hybridity as a concept is useless unless it is based on a fundamental, radical hybrid of the personal and the political. If we gotta get all academic n shit, I like Gloria Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness better. Also, Chela Sandoval's differential consciousness—love as a political force for personal and social transformation: that's hybridity. Mary Pardo's studies of women in East L.A. and how they bridge the spaces of home and neighborhood, private and public, through their woman-centered activism, education, and community building—that's hybridity.
Fortunately, if anybody can make these kinds of personal/political connections in an exploration of hybridity, it's Sesshu. Case in point: The class tomorrow will be discussing Joe Sacco's brilliant comic book, Palestine, which details the torture and state terrorism inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation. The book includes an introduction by Edward Said, whose ground-breaking text Orientalism I happen to have just read a few weeks ago, so I am looking forward to the discussion of Sacco's book.
I was thinking about all of this earlier this morning as I made myself an egg scramble of nopalitos and chopped-up tofu dogs, with a side of homemade beans smothered in panela cheese, and three flour tortillas, and a cup of coffee.
There is a part in Egyptian Nobel-winner Naguib Mahfouz' (December 11, 1911 — August 30, 2006) epic Cairo trilogy in which one of the main male characters, one of the patriarch's sons, falls in love with a woman who flirts with him over a period of time, and then once he has fallen in love, she goes away, disappears—which of course makes him fall even more desperately in love, intent on marrying her at any cost in order to bring her back. It's a small, throwaway comment, but years later, it's one of the things I remember most about those three thick novels: Mahfouz points out that the woman had played the oldest trick of all on him, the disappearing act (it's all in the timing), and he fell for it.
Sometimes it's so beautiful and funny and silly and sad and all fucked up, all the crazy stupid funny things we little monkeys do, knowingly, unknowingly, how the world spins, and we just sort of stick on to the side of it and hang on as best we can with our grimy little opposable digits—
(from Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha:
“I’d hold my arms out straight till they ached and I’d spin. I could feel the air against my arms, trying to stop them from going so fast, like dragging them through water.... Round and round; it was better with my eyes open, trying to get my eyes to hang onto one thing and stop it from turning.... I didn’t know why I did it; it was terrible—maybe that was why. It was good getting there—spinning. Stopping was the bad bit, and after. It had to come; I couldn’t spin forever. Recovering. Stuck to the ground. I could feel the world turning. Gravity sticking me down, holding me, my shoulders... The world was round and Ireland was stuck on the side; I knew that when I was spinning—falling off the world” (173).)
A friend recently sent me an anonymous photocopy of a poem by the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, along with a photocopy of the book cover the poem came from, with a mysterious P.O. box return address in East L.A. It's a beautiful poem. At the time I didn't know who had sent it, but I loved the mystery (Sesshu—maybe this is (one of) the purpose(s) of mystery?—loqueras, library liaisons, lowrider bicycles). I found out later who had sent it, and by that time, I had requested the book from the L.A. Public Library. When I went to pick it up, I thumbed through Ojos para otro mirar/Eyes to See Otherwise, and found the poem that had been sent to me, marked with a small, square, orange post-it note, sticking, hanging on, page 95, the note blank, microscopic traces of flesh, oils, scents, transit through urban space, ELAC, LL3, meta-poem, hybrid genre, giant steps, my favorite things, hybridity as the mystery of that fuzzy contact-overlap between life / death, past / future, intimacy / anonymity, myspace, emails, cel phone text messages, digitally recorded voice messages, the Braille of another's flesh early in the morning limbs intertwined as closed eyes still skitter over a mestizaje of half-awake physical desires and half-asleep R.E.M. dreams that weave reality/non-reality back and forth across the spaces between you—the sounds here, the tastes, the smells: muffled, musty, sour, sweet, pungent, all of it mxing, intermingling, to begin the task of building the day together.
posted by kualyque at 11:14
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