Frida Kahlo and Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race

Original posting, May 2009...

As I move forward pulling together the final elements of my new manuscript, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race, a follow-up volume to Tex[t]-Mex, I have decided to include a chapter on seeing in the work of Remedios Varo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Frida Kahlo--to be truthful, it is a revision and update of a conference paper I delivered 17 years ago, "Surreptitiously Watching the Voyeur’s Mirror: Fragmented Notes on Eye/I Addiction Culled From the Autobiographical Works of Jorge Luis Borges, Frida Kahlo, Jacques Derrida and Remedios Varo" for the Addiction and Culture Conference (Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California, March 1996). A book was birthed out of that conference but I never got my act together in time to submit anything for it--check it out here. In any event, as a placemarker, I wanted to share the plates from The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait that will provide the focus of my chapter--the uncanny, funny, and dynamic "ojosaurus" sketches:
I will try to come back later and sketch out my own thoughts on this striking composition. You can peek inside the Kahlo diary here.

Cool Pynchon T-Shirt via Etsy.com

...i just bought the Borges refrigerator magnets and spied this cool shirt! Viva Pynchon--The Crying of Lot 49 and Woman on the Edge of Time (by Marge Piercy) are the two best Chicano/a novels ever written by non-Chicanos! Xicanosmosis City!

Chris Ware, Cameras, and the Psyche

Just a quick link to the Obscene Machine Blog, where Chris Ware shows what happens when cameras start messing with the psyche! The Tex[t]-Mex project is nothing more and nothing less than a sustained (some might say obsessed) interrogation of what happens when words and images are simultaneously deployed in the interest of telling a story--in the case of this book, the "seductive hallucinations" and ethnic mannequins that pass for "Mexicans" in America. What one gets is a semantic, semiotic, ontological ménage-à-trois that tests the wits of all--as if the various and sundry superpowers of a literary critic, art historian, visual theory maven, and existentialist philosopher had to be brought to bear in an instant (someone call a psychoanalyst quick!). Ware's work calls our attention as it is an example of an art that forces our aforementioned mix of simultaneously deployed critical methodologies and it advances said quad-cluster of skills at the same time--imagine a cocktail of Remedios Varos [2] and Jacques Derrida, some odd cloned fusion or Man Ray and Roland Barthes and you begin to, wait for it.... , get the picture. These issues are at the heart of, or, to hone the metaphor, infect the retina of Eyegiene--my follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex.