Biography/Backstory | William Anthony Nericcio

Last Updated April 27, 2010 | Recently Updated Friday, May 12, 2017

nota bene: a less wordy, image-saturated alternative to this site is here.

eliable dispatches from elite, clandestine West Coast intelligence agents reveal that Dr. William Anthony Nericcio (aka "Memo," aka "Bill") directs an eclectic and innovative cultural studies graduate program at San Diego State University, aka MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. He also serves as a Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Other stealthy West Coast snoops confirm that he labors at SDSU in various academic disguises including: digital humanities lead faculty, cultural studies scholar, American and Latin American literature prof, Chicana/o Studies devotee, ALA/Choice Award-Winning Film Studies maven, American Studies lackey, and last, but not least, feverish rasquache Tejano acolyte of deconstruction 

(the Jacques Derrida t-shirt always gives it away). Other embedded, shady scouts contend Nericcio's diverse academic pursuits are merely an ivory-tower nested front, a nefarious cover for the Chicano writer's true obsessions: graphic design, web-surfing, Man Ray's photography, Euro/Indy movies, Bill Elder, Remedios Varo, Jacques Derrida, Severo Sarduy, Rosario Castellanos, and Meret Oppenheim (of late, Haruki Murakami, Tara McPherson, and Darren Aronofsky also draw his eye).

Before joining SDSU's crack team of talented, hermeneutic misfits, Nericcio held earlier postings at The University of Connecticut, his first, most infamous English Department posting, and at Cornell University, where, working with taskmaster mentors (Carlos Fuentes, Dominic LaCapra, Edgar Rosenberg, Wolfgang Holdheim, Nelly Furman, Enrico Mario Santí, Gayatri Spivak and Henry Louis Gates Jr.), he completed his doctoral degree in Comparative Literature with a dissertation entitled The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas. 

Our well-paid East Coast gumshoes and informants tell odd, whispered tales regarding Nericcio's time in Ithaca: his enigmatic midnight chats with Vladimir Nabokov's surly ghost in Zeus's cafe, Goldwyn Smith Hall, far above Cayuga's waters; his now epic 2am street-fight with four drunk Cornell gringo frat-rats in a snowstorm near the corner of Court and Tioga; his critical theory lucha libre disputes with Derrida-glosser Jonathan Culler and Culler's curious better-half, Cynthia Chase (a relative of once-funny, SNL-alum Chevy Chase), who deemed Nericcio's hieroglyphic notetaking a mark of incipient moronity (opposite); his legendary tequila-induced, body-sculpture-snow-angel-making with LA playwright Oliver Mayer at the top of the Buffalo St. hill; and lastly, his boisterous conjunto dancing alongside Carlos Fuentes in an Ithaca Union hall. Sadly, our usually reliable 'townie' snitches loitering outside the Haunt have failed to document these claims. 

However, not all is lost, as our diligent Northern Mexican agents, not at all resembling Mikey Vargas (Charlton Heston) from Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, recently discovered that Nericcio, a recovering Catholic school boy from South Texas (seized 1st-grade snapshot to your left), received

his Bachelor's of Arts degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin (1984), this while working part-time at the Texas Tavern (now demolished) and The Cactus Cafe as a barrista/bartender and prowling posh 6th Street cocktail lounges. This was also the time when Nericcio, along with Jay Whitley aspired to 80s, new-wave, music stardom in the indy, third-coast, rock combo, The Dyed Blondes--de rigueur recording studio snapshot to your right.

Now headquartered near the California/Mexico border with SDSU, he serves on the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies, The Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences (MALAS) and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies in addition to his English and CompLit teaching shenanigans. A native son of Laredo, Texas, with assorted ancestors hailing from General Téran (near Monterrey, México), Partanna, Sicily, and (it is silently whispered) the merry ol' island of England, (and maybe even Tunis!) Nericcio tells anyone willing to listen that he is a post-Movimiento Chicano. In this vein, the testimony of well-placed former students is useful, with numerous depositions existing that attest to Nericcio being a 'a Sicilian Tejano' or to him publicly declaiming nostalgic, nationalistic odes to Flaco Jimenez, La Llorona, 'Tejas' and the Rio Grande river. Other witnesses speak of overhearing eloquent soliloquies in San Diego dive bars wherein Nericcio, between sips, confesses his obsessions with Sleestaks, The Get-Away Chase Game, Al Jaffee, Monty Python, Kurt Wiese, Captain Kangaroo, Mannix, The Banana Splits, Medical Center, Wacky Packages, La India María, Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, Land of the Lost, Dean Martin, Los Polivoces, Mil Mascaras, the late Edward Said, Gamera, and H.R. Pufnstuf.

Nericcio has published articles on Orson Welles's proto-Chicano masterpiece Touch of Evil (in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance), Octavio Paz's shrouded schizophrenic political oscillations (Siglo XX/20th Century: Critique & Cultural Discourse, 10:1-2 1992-93), and Jorge Luis Borges's, Eugène Delacroix's, and Jacques Derrida's unlikely textual mènage-á-trois in Susan Daitch's LC. In 1996, Nericcio's "Artif[r]acture: Virulent Pictures, Graphic Narrative, and the Ideology of the Visual" appeared in the pages of Mosaic--the sprawling, illustrated essay was one of the first scholarly pieces to appear on comics in academe. In 1998, his illustrated exposé on Speedy Gonzales, "Autopsy of a Rat: Odd, Sundry Parables of Freddy Lopez, Speedy Gonzales, and Other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual Emporium," was brought kicking and screaming into the world by Camera Obscura, A Journal of Feminism Culture and Media Studies--now distributed by Duke University Press.

2002 saw the appearance of three publications: 1) a revised and expanded essay on Rita Hayworth, electrolysis, and the existential in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State; 2) a gratuitously illustrated meditation on Gilbert Hernandez's illustrated biography of Frida Kahlo in NYU Press's Latino/a Popular Culture; and 3) a short rant on anti-undocumented worker violence, the Marquis de Sade, and California law enforcement for BAD SUBJECTS, UC Berkeley's HOT Lefty rag. Another piece from that era (2004), ten years in the making, for The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies examines the Paul Reubens' masturbation scandal back in the 1990s and is entitled "Watching Critics, Watching Journalists, Watching Sheriffs, Watching Pee-wee Herman Watch: The Extraordinary Case of the Saturday Morning Children's Show Celebrity Who Masturbated"--reliable snitches claim the highlight of the opus is some odd revelation about transvestites, transgendered bodies, Medical Center (The Fourth Sex, 1975), and Robert Reed (opposite), the pater familias on the Brady Bunch. 


Other noteworthy scholarly gigs include Nericcio's London lecture, "In the Storm of the Eye: Pages Torn From a Voyeur Semiotician's Diary During the Plague of Bad Theory"(1998), for Goldsmith College and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) and "Cinematography, Photography and Literature: Robert Frank's Aesthetic Triptych" (2000) for the Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA), San Diego. Nericcio's also has lectured abroad at the Freud Museum in London where he spoke on the 'fertile' connection between Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic work and the Viennese wizard's collection of erotic antiquities--this took place during a Fall 2001 Semester in London where Nericcio worked as a Visiting Senior Lecturer in Literature for the Foundation for Interational Education and SDSU (note the surveillance photo to your right, that's him with the strange expression standing by Freud's infamous couch). Apparently the Freud Museum guards failed to inform London authorities of various improprieties with Herr Sigmund's couch as in San Diego, Spring 2002, this candid shot was taken of Nericcio ranting about Nietzsche at a pacific REVIEW public reading. 2003 opened with Nericcio joining the editorial advisory board of Gobshite Quarterly an independent international literary magazine.

Travel also seemed to be on the agenda with lectures at NEMLA, The University of Connecticut's Department of English, and Brown University's Department of Africana Studies, topped off with a visit to the Netherlands where Nericcio chaired a panel and delivered a lecture at the first Congress of the International Association of American Studies in Leiden. Summer 2003 found him once again leading a group of adventurous SDSU students to London for the 1st annual LONDON CALLING, SDSU Summer Program. He has subsequently led UK-junkets in 2005, 2007, and 2009.

November 2003 saw Nericcio working as the warm-up act (spycam shot opposite) for the Ballet Nacional de Cuba for the La Jolla Music Society. December 2003, Nericcio delivered a harangue for Affirmative Action at the San Diego MLA for its ADE/ADFL enclaves. In February 2004, Nericcio enjoyed his Spring sabbatical--but took a break from

occasional naps by jetting up to the East Coast in February for a cool Gangster Symposia at the SUNY Stony Brook Humanities Research Institute--click young John Gotti's mug to your right for more info.

In Summer 2004, Nericcio, taking a break from the vagaries of the University Lecture Hall, traded chalk for pine tar as he played utility outfielder for the league-leading National City Dukes in the San Diego Adult Baseball League. Fall 2004 he started up with his Sinematic Bodies: Intro to Lit and Film circus (which featured, among other things, a mad dash across campus by mimes (chapeau Antonioni) and started overseeing the production of cultural studies tomes with Harry Polkinhorn for Hyperbole Books--touted by the one and only, notorious and untoward Playboy Magazine as one of the reasons SDSU won best "party school" in 2005. Spring 2005 saw the startup of his Freud's Bastard Children class and the Literature After Derrida lecture series. Fall 2005 saw Nericcio lead a graduate seminar on his fallen guru Jacques Derrida (Chasing Derrida) and teach a comedy seminar (Naked, Loud, & Broken) in honor of his mentor, Richard Simon. 2006 was filled with flights of sinemadness with Michael Powell and Walker Percy; frolics in the imperial bedroom, with James Joyce, Homer and Carlos Fuentes; prowls down the alleyways of film noir and pulp fiction with Orson Welles and Quentin Tarantino; and ended explosively with seductive hallucinations with a 500 student introduction to literature delirium in Wiik Auditorium.

Original cover proposal, Tex[t]-Mex

2007 began with a bang as Nericcio finally finished his 16-years-in-the-making magnum opus for the University of Texas Press, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--it appeared January 15, 2007. Since 2007 and into 2008, the Laredo ex-patriot has been spotted at Oberlin College, Purdue University, USC, Los Angeles's Skylight Books, The Universty of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas, San Antonio, and the University of San Diego hawking his wares and generally trying to invoke academic mischief. In October 2010, Nericcio invaded Ohio State University for a lecture and book-signing; Janurary 2011 found him hanging with donkeys in Santa Monica while March was spent talking about televisual psyches at the University of Michigan and April sped by with Nericcio talking space and Mextasy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Latest rumors center around the existence of some character named Guillermo Nericcio García and an traveling art show named "Mextasy" and "Xicanoholic"--but reliable sources for these shadowy whispers are proving hard to find.

Indulgent visitors to this page waiting for hell to freeze-over can peek at online syllabi from Nericcio's collection of past courses or sample this alternative index of WWWeb-based mischief where many of his essays are available in Adobe's ubiquitous pdf format. Also available are two illustrated fragments from his theoretical memoir on the US/Mexico border: "Re-membering Laredo" and "Almost Like Laredo"; book reviews of Charles Bukowski's finale Pulp, Rudolfo Anaya's new age weeper Jalamanta, and Richard Rodriguez's bizarre smash bestseller Days of Obligation (these pieces originally appeared in World Literature Today);an illustrated transcript of Nericcio's Museum of Photographic Art introduction to Pull my Daisy (a collaborative oddity by Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg); and lastly, a scathing send-up of Ray Bradbury's, Edward James Olmos's and Disney's cine-chimera, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.

Lastly (for the poor, misbegotten soul who has scrolled this far down the page!), do please click below to view the birth of Nericcio's efforts as a Ford Focus Spanish-language voiceover star and would-be commercial actor--directed by Print Magazine superstar Sean Desmond. Or, alternatively, click this link to see a San Diego City Beat story for which Nericcio SWEARS he did not pay or another yellow press wonder that documents the trials and tribulations of teaching 500 student classes at SDSU.

Ford Focus Commercial | Student Film from Mextasy on Vimeo.
Me and Sean Desmond and his crew got together in 2009 to film this student film/commercial. One of the best shoots ever!

Lastly, there's more information, here, from wikipedia.

Also, some links to my published works:

    

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Merry Christmas from the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog!!!! #mextasy

The shades of Margarita Carmen Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, Lupe Velez, Ricardo Montalban, Speedy Gonzales (still alive, I think), join me in wishing all the visitors to the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog the merriest and mexiest of Christmases.

Here are some recent graphic desmadres I dreamed up for the upcoming presentations/exhibitions at Penn, Cornell, Arizona, and Kansas--more on those upcoming gigs here!  Own your own by shopping my Society6 tiendita/shoppe here.

Tons of #Mextasy Gigs on the Horizon (plus a lecture on Breaking Bad and Mad Men in Paris!)... The University of Arizona, Tucson; The University of Kansas, Lawrence; Cornell University, Ithaca; EHESS, Paris

Late 2015 and 2016 are gearing up to be a monster--with Textmex/Mextasy presentation/exhibitions and more on the horizon. Go to my vanity site here for all the links/dates

The History of Weird Tales: The Short Version? They Are Not Weird at All--Merely Compulsively Repeated, Projected Nightmares of Mexicans, Africans, Arabs, Asians, and More Running Off with Gorgeous White Women

It comes as no surprise when the main plot point becomes obvious in Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--that the history of Mexican and Latina/o figuration in the cultural space of the United States is an endless loop of hallucinations, fantasies built around fear of miscegenation, promiscuous female sexual want, etc.  The backstory of xenophobia and nativist pandering from Hitler to Trump is merely a projection of genetic pool anxiety--the caucasian nightmare of swarthy n'ere-do-wells frolicking amidst white women's pudenda!

Weird Tales no doubt fueled these fears--fears that echo loudly with 'birthers' rant about taking back their  country, when anti-miscegenation rage (often fueled just by the sight of a biracial body (thanks Obama) or the sound of a Spanish-language accent) takes center stage. Here's wikipedia (give them some money so they stop acting like PBS around pledge-days) on Weird Tales:

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre. Edwin Baird was the first editor of the monthly, assisted by Farnsworth Wright.[1] The subgenre pioneered by Weird Tales writers has come to be called "weird fiction". The magazine's office were initially at 450 North Michigan Ave, Chicago, but later moved north to 840 North Michigan Ave.[2] {... more} 

Which brings us to a recent posting from the Golden Age Blog--chock full of telling Weird Tales covers; here, the utter fear/desire for S&M-laced sexuality between endangered caucasian lasses and dark-skinned, violent men explodes off the page with pornish regularity.

Watch out Lexington, Kentucky (AKA Mexington, Kentucky), Come April 2015, Something Mexican Your Way Cometh!

First notice here on the good ol' Galleryblog that I have been invited to bring the Mextasy traveling circus to Lexington, and the University of Kentucky, April 2015 for a couple of lectures--I am going to try to sneak in a pop-up version of the Mextasy exhibition as well, though that is still up in the air.

Here's an outline of what I will be up to there!  The series I am speaking in foregrounds notions of the  transnational and social theory:

Chicanosmosis and the Transnational Imaginary (Imaginary)
21st Century Mextasy In and Beyond the Ivory Tower

Dr. William A. Nericcio

In the closing moments of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” of America,  right at the point where all hope was lost, when imagining a progressive space for Latinas/os seems all but impossible, a turn occurs. It is a turn to hope, to a future, to something positive.

Naïve, right? 

For a Derridean (and a rascuache Nietzschean), especially a post-movimiento Tejano who had learned his craft at the feet of Gayatri Spivak, Ramón Saldivar, John Kronik, Wolfgang Holdheim, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jonathan Culler, and Carlos Fuentes, this was not a predictable move.  Theory is negative and imponderable (and insufferable), but I wanted to use it to say something different.

And I did: I coined the neologism Chicanosmosis.  Chicanosmosis or, in the book, Xicanosmosis, is a term that contemplates international intercourse through the semi-permeable fabric of the U.S./Latin American border—a site of transnational intrigue that reeks of hegemony and seduction, imperialism and the voyeuristic turn. In Tex[t]-Mex, the focus was on Frida Kahlo and American writer/artist Gilbert Hernandez, but one could have as easily have focused on El Chavo del Ocho & Pee-wee Herman, or United Fruit/CIA & Narco-cultura en las Americas (this last “narcheology,” as I parsed it in lectures at NYU/SVA in Manhattan last year, is fodder for another colloquia).

So this presentation for Social Theory will represent simultaneously a retrospective and scenes I might be accused of performing something like Nostradamus-like clairvoyance. It is the sum total of my present theoretical adventures based as it is on the writings of Fanon, Said, Sontag, Marx, Foucault, Gallop, Paz, Taussig, Liu, Borges, Virilio and more—and it is my own thing. 

Take the subtitle I have appended to the main title: Imaginary (Imaginary)--the former imaginary, an adjective, common, ubiquitous; the latter imaginary, a noun, the nominalization of the Imaginary, post-Lacan, now de rigueur in the academy. Frenchies were all the rage in the 80s and they still are in a way—this too will probably come up. (In Tex[t]-Mex, I actually created a literary term, la quiebra, in order to break with East Coast Francophiliac jargon-forging—no joke!). 

Readings are to be determined, but they will include works in progress from Eyegiene: Mutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex, Race, and the Smartphone as well as select readings from work by Edmundo Desnoes, Frantz Fanon, Slavoj Žižek, Gayatri Spivak, and others to be implicated shortly.