The State of K

M. is in Haiti. She brought three enormous bulging bags of food. She seems to have managed something to get them off the street, into a kind of a house.  That is something really big, as it is now the rainy season, and it's raining.  During the wind-and-rain storm here, I kept thinking about this, and were they, of course.  It's astonishing M has any fingers left.  She's chewed her nails right off.  Until the earthquake and the death of all her daughter's caregivers (K is only 6), I've never seen M. bite her nails.  M, went fully prepared psychically to live on the streets where K was living, to protect, defend, care for her, until the endless tangle of papers can be executed, so K can come to the U.S. (which is why she wasn't here in the first place ... U.S. immigration does everything it can to keep yet one more Haitian coming here).

It seems confirmed, what M and Mz were so afraid was the case, the man with whom K was staying was beating her.

A brick had fallen on one of K's big toes. It hasn't been healing in the dirt and the wet. The nail is gone. "It looks awful," M says, but Mz doesn't know exactly what this means, but it does seem infected.

K is eating and eating and eating.

Mz sent along a pink bear back pack for K that he bought for $10 in Chinatown. K adores it.

In the meantime Mz is both distraught and depressed, with both his wife and steo-daughter in this dangerous situation.

Also, many thanks to our other friends who keep twittering, like Richard Morris, and our grad students, who provided so many other kinds of assistance, and keep us up to date daily with news straight from Port au Prince and other parts of this striken nation, filled with such beautiful people.

All thanks to our friends who have contributed to Rescue K effort.

The effort continues, and all contributions are welcome.

The Texas Board of Education Strikes Again Against Education

We can expect that Texas high schools won't be taking the Postmamboist approach to history anytime soon.


Among the many counter-historical factual implementations of The Texas Board of Education as to what can and cannot be in their state's textbooks, they also forbade inclusion of Spanish-speaking people and the histories of them -- and presumably how they came to be a part of the U.S. population in the first place -- from history textbooks. One of the minority opposing members of the board had to leave the process over this, she was so disturbed because, to paraphrase her, "They want the history of the U.S. to be all white people, all English speakin, only."

The Texas Board of Education also hates Jefferson because he was anti-capitalist.  It's cognitive dissonance to the max, sharing a Jefferson hate with people I despise. My reasons for the hatred are very different -- for the reasons they probably approve of Jefferson -- it's because he did approve of inter and intra state slave trade, among other reasons.

This reminds all over again why Texas was never an option as a place to base myself when younger.

In the meantime, at UCLA, Himself the Vaquero's there because of the English - Comp Lit Graduate Dept., which is sponsoring this symposium, Ports of Call -- Cultures of Exchange.

He's giving a keynote address at noon today, California time, on the history of Cadiz and the New World ports of Havana and New Orleans -- the Spanish connection, and all that means, including the African.

The Dept. Chair is of Tunisian background, and the whole grad dept. slants strongly to Middle eastern literature. But if you're kid growing up in Texas you won't even know this nation has loads of voters whose relatives came from these other countries. They may well not know these other countries even exist -- the Middle East is Israel, Palestine and 'Arabs.' Soon even Iraq and Afghanistan will fall off the primary media radar too, as the situations there drag ever on.

It sux evermore to be U.S., doesn't it?

At least tomorrow an amiga and I will go to Church uptown and hear some great music.

In the meantime it storms wind and rain.

This Is Why Academia Needs Postmamboism

Someone needs to inform Brian Reed, MA/Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, of Postmamboism. It could cheer him immensely, providing a whole new perspective for scholarly work post Postmodernism.

(3) The theory canon seems to have closed, a little like the opera canon, or Scripture. I finished my Ph.D. in 2000, the same year that Hardt and Negri's Empire was published. Since then, judging at least by these 520 files, no new name has emerged that has rock star-like charisma or widely-worshipped intellectual oomph. You hear a great deal about Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Gloria Anzaldua, and other thinkers who were already staples of "Introductions to Literary Theory" courses back in the mid-1990s. Otherwise, the name dropping has become quite field specific. Insofar as one can identify any new profession-wide theoretical trends, they tend to position themselves at the intersections between literary study and psychology or the natural sciences. Arriba trauma studies, affect studies, ecocriticism, and cognitive poetics! Oh, image-text relations are also huge. Generally as a pretext for analyzing The Watchmen, Maus, or Neil Gaiman's Sandman comix. Or to talk about World of Warcraft.

(4) A surprisingly large number of students and professors maintain that we have moved into a new literary period, variously called post-postmodern, post-9/11, or post-ironic. There also appears to be a truly remarkable degree of agreement concerning the Great Books of the present day: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Blood Meridian, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Thomas Pynchon, too, is cited over and over as the harbinger and presiding genius of the New Period. I've read these books (including all of Pynchon's novels), but I never expected the emergence of such a matter-of-fact way of narrating the present moment in US literature, and I certainly would never have selected such a narrow, narrow cast of characters to represent the 21st century. Heck, this list doesn't even include David Eggers or William Vollman, neither of whom, despite their obvious points of contact with Wallace et al, were mentioned by a single applicant. If advocates of a diverse curriculum don't want to end up fighting old battles all over again, they might want to hurry up and generate a counter- or alternative narrative PDQ. Please! I don't want to have to read twenty more ecofeminist critiques of The Road next year, too.

UCLA gets its first shot of post-Braudelian, Postmamboist perspective tomorrow.

Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back

Vaquero got re-routed to Denver on his way to LA. A passenger seemed to be having a heart attack, but he doesn't know. Thus when he called again, once set down at LAX, this guy who ate a little sandwich at JFK about 4:30 this AM our time, hasn't had anything to eat since and it was 7:30 PM our time. The person picking him up couldn't do it, since he then had a class to teach.


Class  had to go it without V. today.  When I got out of the subway a young urban male handed me a promotional card outside of a CD store front start-up -- "All CDs 3 for $28 -- Get 20% Off ALL DVDs All Blu-Ray's -- BEAT THE DOWNLOAD"

After almost a week of spring-like, sunny weather, the temps dropped and it's supposed to rain throughout the weekend. Still, the squirrels were frolicking like mad creatures -- chasing each other, rasslin' with each other, tumbling down the embankment all tangled up, and generally having a high old time. The birds are beyond noisy. Last Friday I saw the first teensie shoots of snowdrops and so on.

Since then, last Friday, at least four more stores have closed in my general neighborhood. All of them sold either inexpensive products or provided essential services like food that were a bit less expensive than everything else around them. The man-pedi places just are not doing the business either. More hair stylist places close down every quarter too.

Made dinner out of this fabulous left over soup based on inspiration provided by a soup made by Premium T's mom.  I added orzo pasta.  Additionally crusty bread, plus cheese, and red wine.
O, and I trapped a mouse dead. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

ETA: The odious downstairs neighbor who was killing us with her cigarettes, quit smoking when we left for New Orleans, and she hasn't had a cigarette since. Digits xxxxx xxxxx ed that this is a permanent thing. That would be several, large steps ahead!

Los Angeles -- Here He Comes

March 11-13, Los Angeles: UCLA "Ports of Call -- Cultures of Exchange" conference.

Vaquero's keynote is Saturday (the 13th) at noon.  He'll speak about his longtime favorite subject, the dancing girls of Cádiz, in the context of postmamboist Braudelianism.

Conference schedule at http://s1.webstarts.com/portsofcall/uploads/Ports_of_Call--Program2_copy.pdf

I get to stay home. 

Today Was About Dr. Joseph Roach

Joseph Roach, Yale University: “ The Return of the Last of the Pequots: Disappearance as Performance” (cosponsored by Atlantic Studies, Center for the Humanities).

It was at the CUNY Graduate Center, sponsored by the English Dept. and the Atlantic Studies Dept.  V. was the discussant, 4 PM. free, and open to the public.

Joseph Roach is a performance studies pioneer. Among his books is Cities of the Dead, the splendid study of the street theater of New Orleans: Mardi Gras Indians, second lines, jazz funerals, parades and carnival. Joe's a Postmamboist, also.

It was so interesting.  Dinner and company afterwards was even more so.  An excellent time was had by all.

You know, it's indescribably rich, to be on the faculty of any school here in NYC.  You can walk a few blocks, jump on the subway, and be at any of these forums and conferences and discussions that are held at all these colleges and universities all semester, meeting your peers, talking, getting scholarship and instruction that might take an entire year distilled into a couple of hours or a weekend, and still sleep in your own bed.  Sometimes I become so acutely aware of the cultural value of this city in which I live that I can hardly bear it.

Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles edited by L. Timmel Duchamp

Aqueduct Press (03/15/2010).

I want this book.

Adults, as a rule, also like to hear the same stories, although they prefer that the stories have some differences – the human brain loves to detect differences. The popularity of familiar stories that reinforce the status quo is not limited to television and popular literature: historians repeat themselves.

Horatio-Alger stories thus become the narrative for male public figures who rise to success from poverty; for women, the story is more problematic, because female public figures are anomalous. In either case, the politics of the narrator inform the story being told. In narratives about women, as Joanna Russ has pointed out in her classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing, the narrator may simply deny that the woman actually accomplished anything worth noting. —from Eileen Gunn's introduction* to Narrative Power __

It is commonly said that history is written by the victors: the narrator chooses the events that will be part of the story, and the narrative explains their meaning. In fiction, narrative conventions and clichés make writing and reading familiar stories easier, but also impede writers’ efforts to tell unfamiliar stories. This volume asks: Is narrative inherently dangerous? Empowering? Or even liberating? A mix of established and new writers join several scholars in considering the politics of narrative manifested in fiction, history, and science.

Table of Contents
1. Going to Narrative: Introduction by Eileen Gunn
Part I. Narrative and History
2. Carolyn Ives Gilman, “Telling Reality: Why Narrative Fails Us”
3. L. Timmel Duchamp, “Lost in the Archives: A Shattered Romance”
4. Ellen E. Kittell, “Patriarchal Imperialism and the Narrative of Women’s History”
5. Rebecca Wanzo, “The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event”
Part II. Narrative Politics
6. Lesley A. Hall, “Beyond Madame Curie? The Invisibility of Women’s Narratives in Science”
7. Wendy Walker, “Imagination and Prison”
8. Lance Olsen, “Against Accessibility: Renewing the Difficult Imagination”
9. Alan DeNiro, “Reading The Best of A.E. Van Vogt”
10. Andrea Hairston, “Stories Are More Important Than Facts: Imagination as Resistance in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth”
11. Susan Palwick, “Suspending Disbelief: Story as a Political Catalyst”
12. Rebecca Wanzo, “Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable of Postmodern Sentimentality”
Part III. Narrative and Writing Fiction
13. Samuel R. Delany, “The Life of/and Writing”
14. Nicola Griffith, “Living Fiction and Storybook Lives”
15. Eleanor Arnason, “Narrative and Class”
16. Rachel Swirksy, “Why We Tell the Story”
17. Claire Light, “Girl in Landscape: How to Fall into a Politically Useless Narrative Rut and Notions of How to Get Back Out”

This book sounds essential, as well as fascinating. I've been thinking particularly, lately, of the area of narratives and women as discussed in the TOC #6, "Beyond Madame Curie? The Invisibility of Women’s Narratives in Science.”

This has been provoked by reading Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009).* Among the figures given a great deal of text in what the author himself declares a 'narrative' history, is Caroline Herschel, the 'comet sweeper,' sister of one of the founders of modern astronomy, William Herschel.

Caroline's early story, in the bosom of a denying, cold family, who, with the exception this brother, evidently chose her to be the in-house slave and scrub, makes one's heart sore. Particularly, considering how many Caroline Herschels there had to have been, who didn't have the eventual comfort and rescue by a loving brother.
________________________________

* Which is a most fortunate fiction - non-fiction pairing with my endless audio book listening that is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. O'Brian wrote a well-received biography of the 18th century natural philosophy and botonist, Joseph Banks, who is also featured in Holmes's The Age of Wonder -- Joseph Banks: A Life (1987).