Why the Rabbit?
Why the rabbit? Because it speaks of a world without us. Because it hovers over time. Because it doesn’t hold the ground. Because it could die in the time it takes to say “rabbit.”
The Art of Disruption
"That's why I have said that art is energy. That energy is achieved by disrupting the normative art form, which creates fissures in the form along which the energy travels and along which the audience achieves, accomplishes, perceives it, receives and transforms it... In art, in writing: passion, intelligence, vision, imagination, intuition provide the heat that causes the disruption. New form is revealed." ---From IS by Martin Nakell
On Creativity...
Perhaps the nature of creativity is not vertical but horizontal. Perhaps there are no hierarchies, prescribed orders, or canonical convictions. The tree makes music as beautiful as the snake with its sinusoidal rhythm that sounds as mesmerizing as the storm ripping apart the earth with the cadence of its waves and the pizzicato of rain drops landing on the back of slaves who moan a song as ancient as all the hurt in the world. We are all playing in the field of the gods, creating when the gods are not looking. --The Lesser Violin
What is art?
"That is art, a series of unnoticed miracles." --The lesser violin
Award Winner!
I am happy to announce that THE BOOK OF I was selected as a finalist in the 2015 International Latino Book Awards.
De noche.
Y la noche se abre,
se deja sentir,
y los pasos de los gatos
me marcan,
noctámbulo,
ajeno al día creo
que soy.
Why writing "worse" is writing better.
Julio Cortázar boasted in his later years that he was writing "worse all the time." He meant that in order to express what he longed to express in his stories and novels he was increasingly obliged to search out forms of expression further and further from classic forms, to defy the flow of language and try to impose upon it rhythms, patterns, vocabularies, and distortions in such a way that his prose might more convincingly represent the characters or occurrences he invented. And we are all the better for it.
The wisdom of my characters.
I wish I had the wisdom of my characters. I wish I could source words out of thin air, I wish I could chew on grass and distil wisdom, I wish I could compose a fragrance and die by it, I wish I could speak like a bird, I wish my body could vibrate and sing eternal songs, I wish I could get naked and offer my robe to the hateful, I wish I could walk the nights and talk to the cats, I wish I could paint the face of everyman.
But no, that is not happening.
The violin, an existentialist...
In this moment my silence is absolute. I let my senses explore the darkest questions. How can evil and marvel coexist as one? How can a wish to destroy turn into a wish to love within seconds? How are the sound of human bodies different from the sound of instruments? Can we use the same notes to write the music of abuse and the music of love? In the same pentagram? Can the notes intermingle with each other as if they originated from the same source, as if they elicited the same sensations? How many musics are there? Really, how many musics touch us deep, deeply?
About Beauty...
On a mountain path the Fat Poet posts a dictum. His mules chew on the surrounding pasture and agree with him wholeheartedly.
De-fine, De-note, De-mark... just say it.
"Literature is the question minus the answer." –Roland Barthes
“Life itself is a quotation.” –Borges
“Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence." –Foucault
"Art is the placing of your attention on the periphery of knowing." –Robert Irwin
“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.” –Borges
“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love.” –Kundera
“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.” –Vargas Llosa
“But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously...” –Cortázar
“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.” –Woolf
“The pen is the tongue of the mind.” –Cervantes
"True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful" –Goethe
“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.” –Duras
Why do we need the novel?
The relationship between a reader and a narrator is as intense and emotionally complex as any relationship between that reader and another human being. The slow accumulation of the soul of the other, a satisfying human need, occurs in the turning of pages and the deciphering of life as rendered by prose. The novel provides an intercourse with selves, albeit imagined, but just as real. And as the contemporary self is being obliterated by the continuous fragmentation of attention and time, we need the novel more than ever.
Egon Schiele
When the poem and the novel go to bed together
If one were to look at genre when it comes to fiction, the numerous categories that novels would belong to nowadays would not find a well-known label as “lyrical novel” when it comes to general classifications. The purposes of marketing related to the publishing industry would generally mark novels being classified by their subject matter and the theme of the story -romance, crime, political fiction, thriller, horror, mystery, and so on. And when it comes to classifications based on a more academic orientation novels could be categorized for their relations to theoretical grounds -modernist, postmodernist, post-colonial, Migrant Writing etc. But it appears that when the idea of the “lyrical novel” is approached it marks a distinct basis of formal distinctions being the means by which is it identified. In other words, it is the narrative form that creates the basis on which it may be placed in such a genre over concerns of what the story of the novel is about.
The conventional novel has a set of expectations to fulfill for the reader, when it comes to the aspect of narrative. This "expectation of narrative" as termed so by Freedman is to do with some of the most salient fulfillments such as -plot structure, character exposition and development, successions in time (the chronology factor) as well as certain questions of ethics (perhaps social), which the novel as a work of art would deal with.
When it comes to the identifying of defining qualities of the lyrical novel, Snyder cites Freedman in saying that elements of lyrical poetry combined to create paradoxes in their meanings and created new expanses in "metaphoric suggestiveness" which could not be achieved through "purely narrative means," which one may safely assume is what the conventional novel form would not offer. The technique of weaving a fabric of images therefore is one of the foremost crafts of a lyrical novel. In a way its imagery becomes a sequence of narrative that builds the idea in the subtleness of poetry.
The reader may not find the whole story with all its expectations neatly laid out as in the conventional novel and therefore the fitting together of the “picture” may become a task placed upon the reader in the case of works like lyrical novels.
And I think the spectacle is worth watching. The hybridization of these two mediums of literary expression provides some of the best reading experiences to be had.
Transcending hate with books
It is not about religion, that is the easy way out. It is not about idiocy, for you would need to be almost mentally retarded. It may be about the very essence of the human condition, a malleable mush, a fertile ground. We are children of our time, of our town, and of our ignorance. So how do we transcend? With books, naturally.
Excerpt of my novel in progress: The Lesser Violin
I like to thank Hope Johnson and the good people of SLING Magazine for publishing an excerpt of THE LESSER VIOLIN, my novel in progress.
The Lesser Violin
The Library as Paradise
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” --Jorge Luis Borges
And as I walk through the cities whose people still believe in libraries and bookstores, I feel as if I am walking through Paradise. And for as long as I can, I will suspend my disbelief. I will go on dreaming.
Writing from the unconscious
According to Robert Olen Butler, "the nonartist knows exactly the effect they wish to have on the reader before they write a single word." Of the artist he says: “[T]he artist does not know. She doesn’t know what she knows about the world until she creates the object. For the artist, the writing of a work of art is as much an act of exploration as it is expression, an exploration of images, of moment-to-moment sensual experience. And this exploration comes from the nature of the artistic process.”
Shouldn't we all write that way, from the white center inside?
A woman/man thinks thoughts...
A woman thinks thoughts that barely make sense. A man thinks thoughts that make no sense to anyone. A woman knows not to reveal she knows you’re after her thoughts, that you want to devour her. A man tells you nothing but lays a suspicious look on you. A woman knows not to trust you. This man thinks you are all mighty. You know you’re not but he doesn’t know that. A woman keeps on thinking thoughts that barely make sense to her.
The state of our literary nation is fractured
According to Ezra Pound, [we live] “in a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism.”
So how, then, do we identify good writing? It is now plain that any debate over who is, or is not, a better writer, or what is, or is not, a more legitimate writing is, for the most part, a surrogate social struggle. The more pertinent questions are what is the community being addressed in the writing, how does the writing participate in the constitution of this audience, and is it effective in doing so. The state of our literary nation is fractured.
Foucault on literary genres
According to Foucault, "Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence." It then follows that in literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs. So, can we finally do away with literary genres?