Lost Trust
December 7, 2009
By Bob Samuels

There are two main narratives battling to define the current crisis at the University of California. While the California situation is an extreme example of what is happening to public higher education these days nationally, these dueling narratives can be found in many other states as well.

On the one hand, President Mark Yudof and the Board of Regents want everyone to blame all of the university's problems on the state. According to the administration’s narrative, the simple issue is that the state has defunded higher education, and due to a $1.2 billion cut from the state, the only thing the campuses can do is raise tuition (which we in California call fees), cut courses, lay off workers, increase class size, furlough faculty members, and demand that the state increases the university’s funding by $913 million.

Read entire article here:

Inside Higher Ed

there is a voice in the machine...

Tune in tomorrow (Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009) to KPFK 90.7 FM @ 4 p.m. to listen to some of our very own UCI students talk about the Budget Crisis, Occupations, and the future of the Student Movement in California as they join OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano for an interview.

"When the kicks go that it brings you / You will hanker for an anchor just to cling to..."

- N. Case.

Report from the UCI Liberation Movement:

Irvine, CA. More than 500 students, (perhaps even as many as 900), gathered to protest the 32% fee hike passed on the University of California. Among the chanting calls "Whose University? Our university!" was perhaps the most inspiring as students walked out of lecture halls and were later led to the Aldrich Administration Building demanding an public forum with UCI Chancellor, Michael Drake. But, alas, Chancellor Drake, was not home, and instead the protesters got the police. Two people were maced and one was arrested and is facing charges of "attempted vandalism" and "resisting arrest".

A coalition of students have been selected to seek an audience with Chancellor Drake in order to request his presence at an upcoming Public Forum in which students will be able to express their concerns directly to him.

Also, further actions of protest are programmed. Starting Dec. 4, 2009, the Liberation of Langston Hughes Library will begin. The Liberation will be supported by students, professors, and staff of the University of California system. The purpose of this action is to maintain the library open 24 hours a day during the week of final exams. More than a dozen UCI organizations have gathered together to lead this event and several professors have been contacted to form part of teach-in's and other informational sessions regarding the future of the UC system.

Here is some video from yesterday's rally.

Abraham

Fabio

Occupation of Langson Library - UC Irvine

Alud - Carta de Apoyo a la protesta estudiantil y repudio a la violencia

Twitter - StandUp UCI

Occupy UCI

Video

cuando el doctor me dijo

que ya no podría tener hijos

me eché a la guerra

pensando que si no podía contribuirle

a la vida

sería porque me tocó contribuirle a la muerte.

y mira cuantos corazones no

rompí...

me daba risa la sangre

y los quejidos me los imaginaba

gozosos,

y les podía ver los ojos

llenándoseles de vacío

al entender las palabras de Neruda

que les leía

antes de jalar el gatillo.

every poem is against me

cada canción, cada

renglón de palabras,

cada muerto

y cada fantasma.

dicen que mucha poesía

te podría volver loco,

pero yo pienso

que son las memorias.

a veces despierto

y no hay nadie,

ni barras,

ni paredes,

ni torres de vigilancia...

y camino para llegar

a un árbol

sembrado en el aire

con sus raíces

expuestas...

cuando intento tocarlo

desaparece

y pronto después

desaparezco yo.

hay mucha gente

en esta celda

y un violín de un viejo

que ya no más quizo

desafinar.

si te encuentras tú

en ella, anda y tócalo...

creo que hay algunos

todavía con la esperanza.

el tiempo es el único que vacila:

cuando lo quieres rápido es lento

y vice-versa.

yo te digo fuck you

in your face,

si quiero.

lately i´ve been writing songs

que duran solamente un rato,

holmes. son canciones inspiradas

de momento, quickly pasada.

son canciones que no le temen a

nada, not like those fools from the

north side with their secret

handshakes. mis canciones start

like fire and sometimes like caramelo,

after all, i remember hell very well, it was

like the bullet que me quitó el aire

when i threw that brick in the Safeway,

it was like the mirada of my ruquita

clavada con la boca abierta

en la verga de un pendejo que no sabe

nada, or seeing the ghost of mi abuelita.

mis canciones are, pues, like

the sky: a veces cloudy y

nunca para ti.

el preso número 8

de nada me sirve esconderme...

todos saben donde estoy,

y saben que con la luna

desaparezco.

saben que el humo me llena

como espiral...

y que sabe al amor

de mis desiertos.

mis palabras malinterpretan

y malinterpretadas se sujetan

de sujetos,

al juicio del que encuentra

lo que queda.

algunas apuntan sin balas

esperando que al fin de la descarga

no haya semántica

y que no dependan de la nada.

a veces los presos son seres

automáticos,

o lectores sabios,

reencarnados insectos.

y como yo mis palabras,

aquí...

dos

nacieron dos historias de un sueño

y la mentirosa sigue viva,

la verdadera murió hace mucho tiempo:

del tiempo salió el amor

después de varios muertos.

desierto nocturno

en la granja
había un búho
enorme y blanco
que no se movía

a veces soplaba
el desierto y lo
cubría todo de tierra

los coyotes aullaban
hasta sin luna
y las vacas bramaban
por sus becerros
que no verían
hasta el amanecer

las abejas
perseguían a los niños
hasta los canales

la miel se derritía
por las paredes
mientras los enjambres
se movían

se murió un viejo
de cancer
y hubo una reunión
con comida
y banda entre las
tumbas

a veces se llenaba
la tierra de salitre
y cavaban túneles
las lechuzas

y hacían cazería los hombres
al encontrar un cuero
de víbora

y esta noche
las estrellas
boca arriba

El autobús

Puso el pie derecho en el primer escalón de metal y cerró los ojos. Con algunos dedos se agarró de la barra vertical y al abrirlos ya estaba frente al chofer del autobús que se preocupaba por meter el clotch y echarle los perros a una dama que caminaba por la avenida.

Ella le dirigió la palabra primero.

- Disculpe, ¿me podría dar una chancita de repartir mis hojitas? Vengo a hacer el trabajo de Dios.

El chofer escuchó algunas de las palabras y le dijo que pasara con el movimiento de una mano y sin perder de vista a la muchacha que ya se escabullía por entre la gente de la mañana.

Se detuvo frente a los pasajeros y cerró los ojos de nuevo para recordar los episodios de la noche. Aquél sueño tenía un peso como pesadilla, pues recordaba a ese gigante como si lo hubiera conocido de toda la vida. Ella diminuta, en ese espacio profundo y negro.

- Te los tengo todos asustados. - decía.

Ella se levantó llorando, sintiéndose las sicatrices y los huesos triturados de la mano izquierda con la otra mano.

Ahora la mano sujetaba el verbo reflejado: triturado en citas reorganizadas para detallar una moraleja.

Abrió los ojos y dejó salir un respiro.

- Se lo doy, hermano. Es gratis.

Él le miró la mano primero y después se fijó en su cara y tomó el folleto sin hacer gesto. Disimuló leerlo y después se concentró en las imágenes que pasaban lentamente en la ventanilla.

- Se lo doy, hermana. Es gratis… pero, dígame: ¿tiene usted fe?

- ¡Claro que sí!

Ella también disimuló leer para después voltearse a ver el mundo de afuera.

Repartió quince folletos. Diez de los que los recibieron declararon tener fe. Ocho invocaron el mismo nombre de Cristo. Entre ellos, tres profesaron ser también hermanos.

Se bajó del autobús en la esquina de Brazil y Río Sinaloa. Cruzó la calle a la contraesquina y esperó diez minutos.

Al llegar el autobús se subió y pagó la cuota. Se sentó en el primer asiento vacío y se quedó mirando hacia afuera rumbo a la avenida Justo Sierra.

los aviones

escucho a veces a los jets deslizándose por esos rumbos abriéndose veredas entre las nubes y la métrica de la esfera. a algunas personas les cuento que es por ellos que no quiero ir ya más a los ángeles. pero es mentira.

los aviones, una vez me dijo ella, son cosa de la fantasía. no es lógico que toneladas y toneladas de metal se eleven así nomás.

le quise explicar la física. aquellos años de estudio frente a computadoras que me chupaban los ojos y me torcían los dedos bastaban para darme la razón aunque no supiera en realidad nada en absoluto sobre la propulsión espacial. sin embargo, algo me dio por elegir el silencio mientras la miraba a los ojos.

a ella no le pude mentir.

Breve historia del globalismo

Me siento a ver las filas, prendo el radio y me distraigo. Por un lado pasan columpiándose con el freno, el calor con rechinido, y los vendedores ambulantes entre carros, y entre carros los transeúntes minusválidos arrastrándose como trapos de chapopote y hule de llanta fumándose el tóxico desecho de los amortiguados. Con los pelos en punta, tiesos, y la mirada que atraviesa muros de realidades que no les pertenecen. Por otro lado pasan en fila india, como para despitar sus números detrás de una carroza negra hacia el Jardín de la esperanza a un lado del aeropuerto principal de Mexicali, a enterrar otro cadáver en la frontera.

Así pues, se divide mi casa en la Avenida Argentina, a una calle de aquél país y al borde de éste que se pierde en nubes de polvo y sol. No es el borde ideal de la transnacionalización, más sí la del comercio, la del billete más que nada, y más que nada la del poder de la corrupción tanto como la de la corrupción del poder. Sí se puede, todo va, y una niña chamagosa me hace ojitos con sus brazos colgándose a la puerta del carro. Me extiende la mano automáticamente y me dice que acá la bolsa de valores se nota en el precio de los DVDs piratas. Nueva York está en todas partes, y en algunas huele más a mierda.

Más al sur, los caballos se cuentan cada vez menos, y los caballeros. Los ranchos se transforman en operaciones clandestinas o cubitos de cemento a un lado de maquilas. Cenizas y esmog. Basura, y una cuadra de rejas multicolores.

Según la historia, Flores Magón organizó una revolución anárquica hace años. Lo siguieron unos cuarenta. La mayoría ni se dio cuenta. Hoy hay una calle y un nombre como otro en el cruze de México y Colón, comida china y puestecitos de hot dogs.

-¿Qué trae de México?- Me pregunta.

Y yo le digo,

-Nada.

Carta abierta a Noé Jitrík

Querido Noé,[1]

Cuando primero te conocí, fui tu estudiante, guía turístico, y de vez en cuando, chofer. Eso fue hace diez años, más o menos. Aparte del tiempo, eso también fue hace muchos libros. De los que hemos compartido, recuerdo tres textos que leímos en clase: Sombras suele vestir de José Bianco, Morirás lejos de José Emilio Pacheco, y La vida del ahorcado de Pablo Palacio. Los tres fueron de lo más extraños para mí. Hoy puedo presumir ser propietario de la Obra Completa de Palacio, aunque mi tomo está un poco dañado por un accidente de ex-novia y de lluvia. ¿Tienes algún cuento favorito de ese autor? El mío es “La doble y única mujer”. Es que el personaje me lleva; esa doble mujer, con cuatro brazos y cuatro piernas, con dos cabezas muy a lo Jano, mirando hacia atrás y hacia enfrente o viceversa, o en el tiempo, o viceversa en el tiempo, con dos cerebros y dos historias compartidas en el mismo espacio pero no sentidas de la misma forma, dos memorias grabadas en antipoesía testimonial, siempre en la presencia de la otra, unidas por la columna vertical, y que se enamoran, las pobres, del mismo hombre, hasta no llegar una a conquistar a la otra, me lleva. Pero no te escribo para contarte de mis cuentos favoritos. Te escribo para contarte que si antes no te endendía cuando me hablabas de leer a través del texto, ahora he descubierto, quizás, el motivo.

Me remonto, de principio, a confesar que he leído tus Notas sobre la vanguardia latinoamericana de las cuales he sacado injustas conclusiones, pues temo que las he hecho sin ayuda y sin cuidado alguno, pues me dejé llevar por el espíritu de la vanguardia a inventar formas de entender y de leer, pues te he leído hacia atrás y hacia adelante, cada otra palabra, cada renglón tres veces cada palabra dos, una y otra vez, y, quizás, mucho más injustificablemente aún, sin dejar de lado a Lacan—y algunos dirían que ni a Borges. Pretendo por lo menos prescindir de la incoherencia aunque no de la automaticidad de mi palabra y de pensamiento.

Con esto en mente, te comento, por ejemplo, que me causó mucha curiosidad tu contención “cultural” en cuanto a la vanguardia. Noté, diríamos, sólo por darle nombre a esa “forma”, una cierta dependencia marxista. De la misma manera se podría también concluir que hay cierta tensión con el psicoanálisis que tanto se ha pretendido labrar como trasfondo crítico, por no decir elemental, de varios de los autores, por ende, canonizadores de sus respectivos creacionismos. En tus Notas se puede leer esa intención de creer—¿o crear?—la intencionalidad anarquísticamente política de un arte de ruptura a la misma vez que una abogación por entender al dicho autor de vanguardia, o vanguardista, como el trabajador de vanguardismo. Te preguntas tú, “¿cuál es, históricamente, la relación que existió y existe entre el vanguardismo, en sus diferentes manifestaciones, y la política?” Concluyes que el vanguardismo, a la misma vez que establece un nexo, diríamos, inconsientemente “natural”, también es “manifestación de conciencia” que “posee una época”. Mantienes que ese “cruce entre producción y naturaleza”, ya sea causa o intencionalidad del movimiento de vanguardia, tiene efectos históricos, sin duda, inegables, aunque bien apuntas que hay por ahí algunos vanguardismos que no emergen de una “crisis” sino de la “bonanza” cultural de época.

Los movimientos vanguardistas, entonces, tienen compromisos políticos. Dices tú que “se entiende […] que toda vanguardia se [plantea] una estrategia, palabra con la cual […] más que implicar una disrupción, se quiere señalar que se prepara una planificación con una finalidad, con una disposición de medios, con una evaluación de recursos y un tiempo de empleo”. También mencionas, muy inteligentemente, que todos aquellos movimientos de ruptura llegan, con el tiempo, a formar parte del “stablisment”, o a acoplar un nuevo entendimiento político forjado en la fricción que se produce por la crisis. En ese forcejeo, el lenguaje “sufre dos tipos de operaciones”: la “des-trucción, prosódica, sintáctica y semántica” y el “des-cubrimiento de lo que está tapado, adulterado por la cultura contra la que se lucha”. Hay un juego entre “intuición” y “análisis” pues todo intento de inovación tiene por concreto un lazo con su historia tanto con su lingüística. Por esto, “la ruptura a que se consagra la vanguardia […] no es nunca o casi nunca solamente ruptura de un sistema poético; es más, quizás ni siquiera en los que se proponen tal cosa llegue a romper efectivamente el sistema poético contra el que combaten, pero la decisión de ruptura, que no se deja de formular, va más allá, alcanza a la cultura misma”. Ese lenguaje se remite a “re-des-cubrir núcleos semánticos originales”, a “parodiar” o a “extender” las “funciones” de palabras, pues las palabras siempre “arrastran” y “determinan” su implacable energía semántica” “impidiendo el momento dialéctico de la creación pura”. De esta manera el vanguardista también es revolucionario, pues se dedica a recuperar los sentidos—¿significados?—negados por la cultura. Ese plan, es lo que tú llamas “el problema principal del vanguardismo” o la “ ‘articulación del deseo’ que, a su vez, no puede aparecer como tal sino como metáfora”. A la misma vez, la pluralidad de metáforas, esa “riqueza” vanguardista, manifiesta esa insatisfacción con el propósito mismo de la vanguardia, el deseo de llenar el vacío; el acto poético vanguardista, entonces, es a la vez inovación y vínculo “dialéctico” con el pasado tanto como con el presente.

De allí, nos brincamos al surrealismo, como si este fuera una piscina, y el lenguaje un trampolín. En cuanto a la vanguardia, dices que existe un “conflicto” “entre automatismo verbal—liberado—y control verbal—regulado”. También mencionas, en mi opinión, muy precipitadamente, “que existe en ese movimiento”, tanto como en el psicoanálisis, “una conciencia clara de la existencia del inconsciente cuyas manifestaciones se trata de comprender y expresar y, por añadidura, convertir en materia estética y verdad”. En realidad, no entiendo que tenga que ver todo esto con la “distribución entre lo ‘lírico’ y lo ‘geométrico’”, pero difiero de tu análisis pues no puedo llegar a pensar que el lenguaje tenga esa función “discursiva” que dices se remite a crear una “producción específica y precisa”, pues el lenguaje, por su mera inconsistencia y encarnación inconsciente, aunque aspire a crear—¿o creer?—una verdad, siempre se queda ralo en su intento. El psicoanálisis, por otro lado, nunca trata de crear o descubrir “verdades”, ni siquiera de producir “estética”, sino más bien de entender el lenguaje en el que se comunica cierto trauma tanto como la comunicación que desplaza para entender la sujetividad. Si la poesía no puede “prescindir del discuro”, o sea de la función general del lenguaje, el psicoanálisis no puede prescindir de esa noción de que “la verdad” o “lo verdadero”—si en realidad existe—es el vínculo directo con la estructura del sujeto, y no el sujeto mismo. En Lacan, no hay “regreso” al origen sino a través de la psicosis o el jouissance femenino, pero, tal vez por eso lo dejaste “de lado”.

Si la propuesta misma de literatura automática sujeta o encadena al producto literario a cierto mecanismo—por no decir estructura—de producción, creando a la vez “nuevos significados” o “funciones lingüísticas o gramaticales”, también se presupone que el lenguaje está jugando dentro de una matriz específica del saber—ya sea cultural, económico, político, geográfico, ecológico, psicológico, lingüístico, o “epocalógico” o cualquier otra combinación—que puede conjeturar ideas o formas de nuevos pensamientos, es decir, de nuevas palabras, o entendimientos de ellas. Pero todo el lenguaje es así, el origen, de nuevo, ese primer fonema es inalcanzable. Todo, se podría decir—por lo menos en el lenguaje que produce diálogo y comunicación, tanto como (des)entendimiento y/o (dis)locación—ha sido antes de ser por primera vez en el lenguaje del sujeto. El lenguaje es aún precedido por la necesidad de ello, por lo que Lacan llamaría el “deseo del otro”. No creo, que el discurso marxista se pueda separar del psicoanalítico en esta contienda. La historia, el espacio cultural, político, social, y ecológico contribuyen al lenguaje del entendimiento psicológico del sujeto en su contexto—tanto como en el contexto del analisante.

Pero, después de todo, Lacan es sólo un telescopio apuntando a ciertas regiones del espacio. El leer “a través” es, de esta manera, también un telescopio y la doble y única mujer es la metáfora de la vanguardia.

Con mucho extrañamiento de tus lecturas,

Fabio Chee

Irvine

Marzo, 2008

---

[1] En Austin, un lugar que llegué a conocer desde el interior de la bestia, me enseñó un poeta gordo y barbudo, pero muy buena onda, a decir “querido”, pues “estimado”, decía él, era una forma de huír.

How I Learned to Read or the Life of My Character

I learned from don Quixote to forget about “what they might say”; to become the center of interpretation, because language is always metaphor. Perhaps Cervantes made me believe that I was learning this from the don when I was in fact being instructed by him, but that is precisely the point of the lesson. They wanted me to understand that in language there is no reality, but that which is made in the act of reading, or interpreting metaphor. But they were not alone. Unamuno also dipped his pen into the magic ink to question the levels of authority in story-telling when he presented us with Augusto Pérez, the character who plotted to rebel, and whom, in the end, had to succumb to the fate prescribed him by the author. And later it was Borges, re-instilling in us that the reader is the writer; that reality is what we read-it-as, how we believe in the act of reading; that dying in a fantasy could very well be the real end. In our current literary context we have been prevy to the theories that disregarded the author altogether, only to be countered by postcolonialist’s re-evaluations of histories. Deconstruction vs. Anthropology. Both the Neo-barroque and psychoanalysis have sought to understand how language slides between the whole and the nothing, the Real and the Symbolic, the sun and the empty focus of our eliptical solar roation, to propose that the subject is fragmented, expanding in definition like the forces of the Big Bang. But, they are all just theories in the end, some appealing to the scientific method and empiricism, others to philosophy and the culture of language.

I tell you all of this, because for me, growing-up has been to learn new ways of reading, of making sense of the world and its signs. To tell you who I am would be to describe you how I see everything. But we all know how that hyperbolic absolute is an imposibility as much for the reader as for the writer. The aleph is out of reach. So, instead, I chose to tell you about my teachers: Cervantes, Unamuno, and Borges are but three of many. My grandparents, and my mother are another handful.They have all had their way with my weltaanschaung at one time or another, but to submit their lessons to chronology would be to involucrate you in a false narrative of who I am, because though every lesson had its beginning, some were not completely learned until much later in life in context with other readings and lessons learned.

So, without much further ado, let me begin by telling you that I am not solely who I tell you I am, because I am but a part of me. I believe I learned this lesson before all the literary criticism made it to my reading list, perhaps even before El Quixote was ever written. You see, I am atemporal, because when I learned to read I learned to travel in time. I am but a part of me because how I read has displaced me. It has done so, because reading automatically puts me in contrast with my illiterate grandmother and with my semi-literate grandfather. Although they both encouraged me to go to school, I found it increadibly difficult to share what I learned with them.To say there were no books in the farm where I spent most of my childhood would be misleading, there were some instructional books lying around that belonged to my uncles and aunts before they left the farm, like the 1969 reprinting of Salvador Mundi’s La memoria perfecta: cómo lograrla. El principito, however, was as weird as gringo rock n’ roll to my grandparents. My grandparents’ concept of story-telling revolved around the oral tradition of informing the rest about what happened to Juanito or to Luisito even though they might have already heard the story a couple of times before. Often, it made my grandparents happier to see me come back home with a star stickered on my forehead, than to hear about what I read. So, when I began school I also began to separate from the world I had know as was instilled by my family and to a new one as instilled by the nation. It was then that I began to place time into context beyond night and day, and yesterday, today, and tomorrow, beyond my birthday and Christmas. It was also then, that I took the time to idealize who I was based on a history that according to my textbook dated hundreds of years back before the conquest, to the totonacas and the olmecas.

But histories were split along the path of the reading spirit. In the Fall of 1990, the child that grew up reading about la revolución and los niños héroes dying for the Mexican country was to be confronted with English and Spelling class. When I moved to the U.S. with my mother and brother, control of the new lengua was difficult, and I often found myself pretending I understood what I read out of embarrassment. It was one very long year of E.S.L. with a teacher that the Kennedy gang nicknamed, “la Pelona”. She was good, though. Her approach was to make us read, and read, and read. So I read, and read, and read. When I got to The Island of the Blue Dolphins, the language began to make sense. I remember I was so happy I began buying books that dealt with ocean themes, from castaways to sharks. And so, in the middle of the Imperial Valley desert of California, English came to me book by book, like a wave on my tongue.

If reading Spanish was dislocatory, reading in another language was even more so. One of the first things that I noticed about English is how it, unlike Spanish, had the magic to hide its pronounciation outside the word. To read English was to discover secrets. And they were secrets that only I knew and that my family could never know. Moreover, learning English coincided with my becoming a teenager, and with the stage of grunge and heavy metal. I became a consumer of the new literature, of the quick-stop magazine-stealing-gang, and I read everything they put in front of me. I was now a fan of Curt Kobain, and my mother hated me for it. Ni se le entiende a esa música del demonio, she would say outloud before I would close the door to the room. And althought she tried many times, English was something she could never quite grasp. My new language was cacaphonous and evil.

By the time I left the desert for college, I was quite far from the olmecas. At that time I had also just finished reading El Quixote in my English class. I was beginning to think that I could write, because I had understood the magic of fiction. This was a key moment in my time travels. It was then that fiction began to blur in with reality, it was the time when the sahuaros began to transform into giants holding up the sky and the time when a cigarrette on my lips began to give me the sensation that I had once been a dragon. My mother’s only reprimand was that smoking along with growing my hair and a beard made me look like my father, that shadow of a figure that had been mentioned outloud by my mother only twice before. Unfortunately, the intial homesickness turned into depression and the drinking made the memories of my first year of college blend together. My writing went up in flames along with my grades and my scholarship. The time machine was broken.

In my second year of college I experimented by crossing over to the foreign language departments. I took classes in German, and Spanish, I was desperate to stay in school and wanted to avoid coming home with my tail between my legs. Suddenly everything was making sense again, and what I read was filling me up. In my German courses I read Brecht, Freud, and Kafka, while in the first Spanish course I was introduced to Chicano literature. Nothing would be the same after that.

The summer after my second year in college, I came home with news about a literature that talked about people like us. My grandfather dismissed me at the sound of the word “Chicano”, he said “Chicano” was what the gringos would call all good-for-nothing-Mexicans. My grandmother only said that it was muy interesante, before patting me in the head in front of my cousins as she added, “¡aprendan ustedes!”. My mother feigned interest, and then asked me if I was getting well-fed. I acknowledged I was by looking down at the belly growing underneath my neck and raising my hands to shoulder level as if saying, ¿y tú que crees?

It was then that I realized that reading had displaced me. The more I learned, the less they really understood where I was going. When graduation came, I told them that I would continue school the following Fall in Austin, Texas. This was perplexing news for my grandmother, who had just seen me graduate and did not understand why I wouldn’t find a job right away, “¿más escuela? ¿no te cansas?” When I told my grandmother I was going to graduate school for my doctorate, she thought I was going to be a medical doctor, “entonces podrás curarnos”, she said. I explained to her I would be a doctor of letters, and that just went over her head and merely drew the negative comment, “entonces no vas a curar a nadie.”

No. I was not going to make anyone feel better. Literature didn’t have that particular quality. What literature did do was to let me time travel. Reading took me outside and into space. It let me rediscover me in different times to remember memories lyrically. It helped me escape the concrete and the absolute as I wandered through the libraries of imagination. Every book has been a lesson. Every character a person. I have witnessed history as a reader, and as a creator in the act of reading. And I have lived in fiction. I have been a fly in trendy coffee houses as well as in the jail cells of revolutionaries. And though it has estranged me from family, what I have learned has served me to understand that other-me before the books is still here, because before I learned to read, I learned to imagine.

To this day, my mother has had two opinions on the issue of reading: first, if you read too much you will go blind, and second, you must read the Bible over and over to learn how you too can be saved and see the light. Perhaps physical blindness does equal spiritual foresight. Nevertheless, from her, I learned that one must find peace in contradiction as it is an essential tool for explaining the self. In the same spirit, I propose that you read my displacement through time as a coming together, rather than as a border; to let the narrative become part of an anachronical history of me, to let the text explain me to you, however you may wish to read me in it. Let it be known that the life of a character is such as it is written as how it’s read, that love is communication and that the offspring is a subject given life in words and meaning. In the end, that my grandparents will die not understanding why I read so much about so many doesn’t mean I have lost contact with them, nor that we love each other any less. The same goes for my mother who is contradictoraly wishing me well in my studies and anxiously awaiting the day to tell me “I told you so” when I go the rout of Borges and the less commonly mentioned blindmen. Perhaps, reading has brought me closer to them, by understanding the historical circumstances that have shaped their lives. More than anything, reading has made me aware of how unique my language has become, how it has adapted the ear to be wary of the paths of metaphor. The lessons learned through reading have displaced me because they have shaped my language in a different manner than my family, but it is in the constant movement between statements and understandings that meaning is found. Today, as it always has been and as it always will be, what I am is but a part of me; my language is another, traveling through history, myth, and fiction, communicating at some instances and keeping silent at others in awe and inspiration.

A few days ago I read a report about how the new gas prices will have to be understood as the "new normal". Meaning that they will not come down EVER again. (You could probably look this information up, it isn't fiction for once). I laughed when I read the article, thinking that "normal" is whatever the power source says it is. I also thought about how, dare I say "normal", it was for them to tell this news story in this way: it is not another increase, no, no, no! it is a "new normal", you see? Get used to it!

And then today, I read Dan Rather's report to the National Conference for Media Reform and got reinspired. We, the reader's have the power to tell it like it really is, that is, how it affects us, how it makes us think and react. This is why, as Rather says, the internet must remain free.Because here we connect against them.

The following is Dan Rather's Report:

I am grateful to be here and I am, most of all, gratified by the energy I have seen tonight and at this conference. It will take this kind of energy - and more - to sustain what is good in our news media... to improve what is deficient... and to push back against the forces and the trends that imperil journalism and that - by immediate extension - imperil democracy itself.

The Framers of our Constitution enshrined freedom of the press in the very first Amendment, up at the top of the Bill of Rights, not because they were great fans of journalists - like many politicians, then and now, they were not - but rather because they knew, as Thomas Jefferson put it, that, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be."

And it is because of this Constitutionally-protected role that I still prefer to use the word "press" over the word "media." If nothing else, it serves as a subtle reminder that - along with newspapers - radio, television, and, now, the Internet, carry the same Constitutional rights, mandates, and responsibilities that the founders guaranteed for those who plied their trade solely in print.

So when you hear me talk about the press, please know that I am talking about all the ways that news can be transmitted. And when you hear me criticize and critique the press, please know that I do not exempt myself from these criticisms.

In our efforts to take back the American press for the American people, we are blessed this weekend with the gift of good timing. For anyone who may have been inclined to ask if there really is a problem with the news media, or wonder if the task of media reform is, indeed, an urgent one... recent days have brought an inescapable answer, from a most unlikely source.

A source who decided to tell everyone, quote, "what happened."

I know I can't be the first person this weekend to reference the recent book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, but, having interviewed him this past week, I think there are some very important points to be made from the things he says in his book, and the questions his statements raise.

I'm sure all of you took special notice of what he had to say about the role of the press corps, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. In the government's selling of the war, he said they were - or, I should say, we were "complicit enablers" and "overly deferential."

These are interesting statements, especially considering their source. As one tries to wrap one's mind around them, the phrase "cognitive dissonance" comes to mind.

The first reaction, a visceral one, is: Whatever his motives for saying these things, he's right - and we didn't need Scott McClellan to tell us so.

But the second reaction is: Wait a minute... I do remember at least some reporters, and some news organizations, asking tough questions - asking them of the president, of those in his administration, of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and - oh yes - of Scott McClellan himself, once he took over for Mr. Fleischer a few months after the invasion.

So how do we reconcile these competing reactions? Well, we need to pull back for what we in television call the wide shot.

If we look at the wide shot, we can see, in one corner of our screen, the White House briefing room filled with the White House press corps... and, filling the rest of the screen, the finite but disproportionately powerful universe that has become known as "mainstream media" - the newspapers and news programs, real and alleged, that employ these White House correspondents - the news organizations that are, in turn, owned by a shockingly few, much larger corporations, for which news is but a miniscule part of their overall business interests.

In the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq, these news organizations made a decision - consciously or unconsciously, but unquestionably in a climate of fear - to accept the overall narrative frame given them by the White House, a narrative that went like this: Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator, harbored weapons of mass destruction and, because of his supposed links to al Qaeda, this could not be tolerated in a post-9/11 world.

In the news and on the news, one could, to be sure, find persons and views that did not agree with all or parts of this official narrative. Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, comes to mind as an example. But the burden of proof, implicitly or explicitly, was put on these dissenting views and persons... the burden of proof was not put on an administration that was demonstrably moving towards a large-scale military action that would represent a break with American precedent and stated policy of how, when, and under what circumstances this nation goes to war.

So with this in mind, we look back to the corner of our screen where the White House Press Corps is asking their questions. I have been a White House correspondent myself, and I have worked with some of the best in the business. You have an incentive, when you are in that briefing room, to ask the good, tough questions: If nothing else, that is how you get in the paper, or on the air. There is more to it than that, and things have changed since I was a White House correspondent - something I want to talk about in a minute. But the correspondents - the really good ones - these correspondents ask their tough questions.

And these questions are met with what is now called, euphemistically and much too kindly, what is now called "message discipline."

Well, we used to have a better and more accurate term for "message discipline." We called it "stonewalling." Now, cut back to your evening news, or your daily newspaper... where that White House Correspondent dutifully repeats the question he asked of the president or his press secretary, and dutifully relates the answer he was given - the same non-answer we've already heard dozens of times, which amounts to a pitch for the administration's point of view, whether or NOT the answer had anything to do with the actual question that was asked.

And then: "Thank you Jack. In other news today... ."

And we're off on a whole new story.

In our news media, in our press, those who wield power were, in the lead-up to Iraq, given the opportunity to present their views as a coherent whole, to connect the dots, as they saw the dots and the connections... no matter how much these views may have flown in the face of precedent, established practice - or, indeed, the facts (as we are reminded, yet again, by the just-released Senate report on the administration's use of pre-war intelligence). The powerful are given this opportunity still, in ways big and small, despite what you may hear about the "post-Katrina" press.

But when a tough question is asked and not answered, when reputable people come before the public and say, "wait a minute, something's not right here," the press has treated them like voices crying in the wilderness. These views, though they might be given air time, become lone dots - dots that journalists don't dare connect, even if the connections are obvious, even if people on the Internet and in the independent press are making these very same connections. The mainstream press doesn't connect these dots because someone might then accuse them of editorializing, or of being the, quote, "liberal media."

But connecting these dots - making disparate facts make sense - is a big part of the real work of journalism.

So how does this happen? Why does this happen?

Let me say, by way of answering, that quality news of integrity starts with an owner who has guts.

In a news organization with an owner who has guts, there is an incentive to ask the tough questions, and there is an incentive to pull together the facts - to connect the dots - in a way that makes coherent sense to the news audience.

I mentioned a moment ago that things have changed since I was a White House correspondent. Yes, presidential administrations have become more adept at holding "access" over the heads of reporters - ask too tough a question, or too many of them, so the implicit threat goes, and you're not going to get any more interviews with high-ranking members of the administration, let alone the president. But I was covering Presidents Johnson and Nixon - men not exactly known as pushovers. No, what has changed, even more than the nature of the presidency, is the character of news ownership. I only found out years after the fact, for example, about the pressure that the Nixon White House put on my then-bosses, during Watergate - pressure to cut down my pieces, to call me off the story, and so on... because, back then, my bosses took the heat, so I didn't have to. They did this so the story could get told, and so the public could be informed.

But it is rare, now, to find a major news organization owned by an individual, someone who can say, in effect, "The buck stops here." The more likely motto now is: "The news stops... with making bucks."

America's biggest, most important news organizations have, over the past 25 years, fallen prey to merger after merger, acquisition after acquisition... to the point where they are, now, tiny parts of immeasurably larger corporate entities - entities whose primary business often has nothing to do with news. Entities that may, at any given time, have literally hundreds of regulatory issues before multiple arms of the government concerning a vast array of business interests.

These are entities that, as publicly-held and traded corporations, have as their overall, reigning mandate: Provide a return on shareholder value. Increase profits. And not over time, not over the long haul, but quarterly.

One might ask just where the news fits into this model. And if you really need an answer, you can turn on your television, where you will see the following:

Political analysis reduced to in-studio shouting matches between partisans armed with little more than the day's talking points.

Precious time and resources wasted on so-called human-interest stories, celebrity fluff, sensationalist trials, and gossip.

A proliferation of "news you can use" that amounts to thinly-disguised press releases for the latest consumer products.

And, though this doesn't get said enough, local news, which is where most Americans get their news, that seems not to change no matter what town or what city you're in... so slavish is its adherence to the "happy talk" formula and the dictum that, "If it bleeds, it leads."

I could continue for hours, cataloging journalistic sins of which I know you are all too aware. But, as the time grows late, let me say that almost all of these failings come down to this: In the current model of corporate news ownership, the incentive to produce good and valuable news is simply not there.

Good news, quality news of integrity, requires resources and it requires talent. These things are expensive, these things eat away at the bottom line.

Years ago, in the eighties and the nineties, when the implications of these cost-trimming measures were becoming impossible to ignore, and the quality of the news was clearly threatened, I spoke out against this cutting of news operations to the bone and beyond. Even then, though, I couldn't have imagined that the cost-cutting imperatives would go as far as they have today - deep into the marrow of what was once considered a public trust.

But since the financial resources always seem to be available for entertainment, promotion, and - last but not least - for lobbying... perhaps there is an even more important reason why the incentive to produce quality news is absent, and that is: quality news of integrity, by its very nature, is sure to rock the boat now and then. Good, responsible news worthy of its Constitutional protections will, in that famous phrase, afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted.

And that, when one feels the need to deliver shareholder value above all, means that good news... may not always mean good business - or so goes the fear, a fear that filters down into just about every big newsroom in this country.

Now, I have spent my entire life in for-profit news, and I happen to think that it does not have to be this way. I have worked for news owners who, while they may have regarded their news divisions as an occasional irritant, chose to turn that irritant into a pearl of public trust. But today, sadly, it seems that the conglomerates that have control over some of the biggest pieces of this public trust would just as soon spit that irritant out.

So what does this mean for us tonight, and what is to be done?

It means that we need to be on the alert for where, when, and how our news media bows to undue government influence. And you need to let news organizations know, in no uncertain terms, that you won't stand for it... that you, as news consumers, are capable of exerting pressure of your own.

It means that we need to continue to let our government know that, when it comes to media consolidation, enough is enough. Too few voices are dominating, homogenizing, and marginalizing the news. We need to demand that the American people get something in exchange for the use of airwaves that belong, after all, to the people.

It means that we need to ensure that the Internet, where free speech reigns and where journalism does not have to pass through a corporate filter... remains free.

We need to say, loud and clear, that we don't want big corporations enjoying preferred access to - or government acting as the gatekeeper for - this unique platform for independent journalism.

And it means that we need to hold the government to its mandate to protect the freedom of the press, including independent and non-commercial news media.

The stakes could not possibly be higher. Scott McClellan's book serves as a reminder, and the current election season, not to mention the gathering clouds of conflict with Iran, will both serve as tests of whether lessons have truly been learned from past experience. Ensuring that a free press remains free will require vigilance, and it will require work. Please, take tonight's energy and inspiration home with you. Take it back to your desks and your workplaces, to your colleagues and your fellow citizens. magnify it, multiply it, and spread it. Make it viral. Make it something that cannot be ignored - not by the powers in Washington, not by the owners and executives of media companies. Write these people. Call them. Send them the message that you know your rights, you know that you are entitled to news media as diverse and varied as the American people... and that you deserve a press that provides the raw material of democracy, the good information that Americans need to be full participants in our government of, by, and for the people.

There is energy here, that can be equal to that task, but this energy must be maintained... if the press - if democracy - is to be preserved.

Thank you very much, and good night.

Cinco o al lector:

Hay cuatro formas. Eso pienso.

Antiblog.

Links. Cables y pájaros.

Leer a poetas ya no es divertido.

¿Dije antiblog?

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Hay tres lugares. Ella me lo dijo.

Borges, Chomsky, y Don Quixote.

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Hay dos versiones

de dos versiones

de dos versiones

de dos versiones

Ad infinitum.

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Hay un yo que no ha sido planeado.

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No hay espejos.