Engl 549 Imagination Challenge Numero Dos

Engl 549 Imagination Challenge Numero Dos

What are the scary, unreasonable requirements for your dystopia-laced assignment?

Your essays will run anywhere from 3 to 8 pages (tops); it will be cleverly titled, double-spaced, have 1-inch margins top and sides and be carefully proofread; additionally, it will be chock-full of active verbs and, in general, have syntactic variety so as to avoid the dangers of the IS VIRUS; use MLA or University of Chicago-style works cited pages. Your works of genius are due Monday, April 26, 2010 at noon, outside my door at the end of the hallway, 273 Arts and Letters. Late papers will not be accepted. Early papers, in most cases, will be cherished lovingly. All A-level critical speculations will integrate carefully selected direct quotations from the primary texts and will avoid ALL of the quicksand-like bad habits noted here on the gradesheet to your right--click it to make it readable. gradesheet. They will, additionally, include researched material from THREE separate research resources found in LOVE LIBRARY stacks--YES, the "stacks, " "stacks (storage space in a library consisting of an extensive arrangement of bookshelves where most of the books are stored)." While you are welcome and even encouraged to make use of material from JSTOR or PROJECTMUSE located in the ONLINE VERSION of LOVE LIBRARY, I also expect you to spend sometime spelunking the stacks in search of published scholary materials that either support your argument or, even more exciting, that your utterly disagree with. One last bit of advice, do NOT plagiarize ANY material from the internet; unCITED material = PLAGIARISM; also, if you are going to "quote" a passage from an illustrated text, go to the bother of xeroxing the image and incorporating it INTO your essay.

Where are these prompts that you promised us in class?

Here they are!

Dystopic Prompt Number One:

What is the relationship between humans and machines, what I have called at another time and in another place, the ersatz human? Create a dynamic response to this prompt using TWO or THREE of the following works: DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP; CRASH; WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME; CHILDREN OF MEN.

Dystopic Prompt Number Two:

Alfonso Cuarón and J.G. Ballard author unique visions of our present and our future; contrast the peculiar and particular predilections of these distinctive 20th/21st century storytellers. Don't be afraid to pursue biographical information (properly cited) as you bring CHILDREN OF MEN and CRASH into contact/conflict/crisis.

Dystopic Prompt Number Three:

Salvador Plascencia's PEOPLE OF PAPER introduces us to an iconoclastic fantasyland of invention, pain, and loss--in this vein, Plascencia emerges simultaneously as a bibliophile and a dystopian. Contrast the representation
of literature (of any form of textuality) in PEOPLE OF PAPER with one or two other works we have encountered this semester--do NOT focus on a work you addressed in your Imagination Challenge number one.

Dystopic Prompt Number Four:

Adapt the methology used in Tex[t]-Mex and author an addendum chapter to the book focused on the work of Ballard and/or Cuarón.

Dystopic Prompt Number Five:

Invent your own thesis; email me or present to me in class a written proposal for an independent thesis based on at least two of the works we have encountered since late February (this include Marge Piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME if you did not use it for paper one). This proposal is (at the latest) IN CLASS or AFTER CLASS, Thursday April 15, 2010.

Of Conservative, Catholic, Tex-Mex Archbishops in the News

Devoted Catholic and de Sade scholar, Sam Wood, our newbie correspondent, sends in a link to an LA Times blog posting on Catholic doings north of the OC. Hit the euphoric curate to your left for the skinny.

No Surprise, for those in the know, bilingual folks rock!

Ry Cooder, Xicanosmosis, and an Ice Cream Truck...

A big gracias to regular textmex stooge MICHAEL WYATT HARPER for bringing this cool fusion of car, art, and xicano goodness to our attention--more on Ry Cooder's outstanding Chavez Ravinemusic project is here.

Evolving "Subject" Positions: American Youth on Race

B.A.N.G. Labs Under Attack at UCSD!!!!

Randomesque "Mexican" Google Image Search

Daphne Strassmann writes from Boston and sends in an album of findings that dropped into her lap and onto her eyes as she searched for "Mexican" images via google... In no particular order....

Pondering Caucasian Ontology: WHO IS WHITE in the NYTIMES

Eyegiene Logo Test...

Working hard on Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race my follow-up book to Tex{t}-Mex--between writing and editing sessions, I work on various logos for the book as a form of relaxation.

1994 Was a Very Good Year... Edward James Olmos @ SDSU

16 years fly by way too fast! Rosalinda Nericcio, Edward James Olmos and yours truly at SDSU in 1994--the year Olmos made A Million to Juan and The Burning Season.

Pop Surrealism Vanguardist Mark Ryden via BoingBoing.net

Click the image to your left for an extraordinary video documenting Mark Ryden's art via timelapse photography. Ryden's work, along with Tara McPherson, form part of our required works for English 563, Spring 2010 at SDSU. McPherson's work will loom large in one of the chapters of my new book, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race, coming out next year (hopefully) with The University of Texas Press.

Charles Ramírez Berg on Bandits, Mexican Stereotypes, and More....

and, por supuesto, a heaping serving of cinematic "Mexican" bandit goodness:

Gronk is Up to Art in LA!!!!

There is no good reason to post this...

There is no good reason to post this picture of Adam West as Batman; however, there is no good reason not to.... so.....

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The Gustavo Arellano Show on KPFK! April 1, 2010

Today's show on KPFK.org with the one and only Gustavo Arellano at the helm is already on the internets streaming; give it a listen and leave a comment! Thanks to all the listeners who wrote in to drop a line. As always, there are three ways to listen: podcast (xml), streaming, and direct download.

Text-SEX: Gustavo Arellano Writes in with a Sassy, Salacious Linkaso!

original posting | May 18. 2008 | update below!

Color me a Señor Puri Mother Superior (candid photo below), but I try to keep this blog R-rated "clean"--HBO-level adult, but with nothing too gnarlyporny in case the kiddies get hold of this.

At the old school blog (the first version of this site), I broke this rule once [direct link], but I had to--there is just no R-rated way to deal with the X-rated outrageousness of connotations orbiting the phenomenon of the Dirty Sanchez!

So it is that today, we find ourselves going blue again here with two recent correspondent-authored email-notes to me from regular Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog malcontents (the truly 'regular gang of idiots'!) Gustavo Arellano and Michael Wyatt Harper.

NSFW

Arellano, of Ask-A-Mexican fame, and shortly, the historian laureate of Orange County, writes in with this pithy clever screed:

Sat, 17 May 2008 11:13:48 -07=0
From: Gustavo
Subject: R=: PIRATERIA
To: Memo

Here's a link for the blog:



The chica is Brazzers-worthy, but what kind of costume is that supposed to be.

Arellano's outing himself as one with intimate knowledge of Brazzers (Not Safe, believe me, not safe at all!) websites, can only mean someone's going to be doing some quality time in the heated pits of purgatory!

The very same day, Harper hits my web-box with [beware, NSFW] this curious site [hmm...on second thought, this one is relatively safe for work, just a series of flash or animated gifs of a cavorting Latina subjectivity] [update: "safe for work if you live in a brothel," a thoughtful reader writes in!] with the title Selena's nice a**--no doubt Harper's "research" was intended to solicit some long soliloquy from me on the objectification of the Latina subjectivity or some other sort of monologue, but Rosario Castellanos's critical writings from Mexico in the 60s taught be to always be careful before pulling that schtick too easily.

The dynamic duo of Arellano and Harper need not have bothered befouling my in-box with their filthy missives. I already am on the record in Tex[t]-Mex arguing that in the 20th century and after the glory days of Hollywood Film, Mexicans (and Latinos/as of all stripes--the masses are not universally know for ethnographic sensitivity) become synecdoche for a kind of implicitly, always-already tumescent/moist sexuality.

In the future, Arellano and Harper had best stay out of my in-box! Santa Maria! more innuendo! It's twelve Hail Marys and 7 Our Fathers for this recovering Catholic.

Dios Mio, over and out....


ps: speaking of Rosario Castellanos--I can't believe her amazing Reader is out of print with U.T. Press--here is a poem by the former ambassador to Israel for Mexico and Mexican theorist whose work anticipated and coincided with Frenchie divas Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.


Memorial of Tlatelolco

Rosario Castellanos

And who saw that brief, vivid flash of light?
Who is the one who kills?
Who are the ones who breathe their last; who die?
Who are the ones fleeing without their shoes?
Who are the ones belonging to the deep well of jails?
Who are the ones rotting in hospital?
Who are the ones struck dumb, forever, with horror?
Who? Who are the ones? Nobody. The next morning, nobody.
They found the square was swept clean. The front pages of the newspapers were full of the state of the weather. And on the television, on the radio, in the cinema, there was no change of programming, no special announcement. Not any meaningful silence in the midst of the banquet, because the banquet went on.
Don't look for what isn't there: traces, bodies, it's all been given as an offering to a godess, the Great Devourer of Excrement...
There are no official records.
Yet the fact is I can touch a wound.
In my memory it hurts, therefore it's true.
I remember. We remember.
That's our way of helping the very brave on so many a stained mind...
I remember.
Let's all remember until justice becomes clear among us.

update

Thursday | April 8, 2010

This just in from Guanabee.com--an utterly sucio and disturbing rumor concerning Sandra Bullock, Jesse James, Nazis, Videos, and, of course, the Dirty Sanchez!