Lily Hoang
https://literature.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/lhoang.html
Lily Hoang has published some books and won some awards. She is Director of the MFA in Writing at UC San Diego.
An Interview with Dan Chodorkoff
Meet Dan Chodorkoff.
He’s not the typical writer we would promote here. He’s got a head full of silverfox hair and an unironically killer moustache, and his writing is unabashedly political. His first novel, Loisaida, is a Bildungsroman, following the development of a young anarchist, Cathy, as she fights “the man” from her squat. A viciously honest rendition of the naïve privilege of many young anarchists, Cathy learns the nuances of activism and politics. Part history lesson, part political guidebook, Loisaida is a book for anyone who’s carried a protest sign, shouted chants, felt the camaraderie of mass demonstrations, and had it all matter for shit.
So, meet Dan. Meet his book. Meet his politics.
LH: Your novel appears to demonstrate an ambivalent relationship towards anarchism. What does anarchism mean to you? Do you consider yourself an anarchist? In what ways does your relationship to anarchism color your portrayal of anarchists?
DC: Anarchism is the most misunderstood and maligned philosophy in existence, and, that misunderstanding may be a bi-product of anarchism itself. Noam Chomsky, in his forward to Daniel Guerin’s fine book “Anarchism: from Theory to Practice”, quotes an unnamed 19th century French writer: “Anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything” including those who’s acts are such that “a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better.” The rubric of anarchism encompasses a wide range of thoughts and actions some that I find silly and useless, a few that I deplore, and others that I find extremely admirable. READ MORE >
A dream that leads to something real that I made up
I had a dream last night that today was National Prose Poetry Day. I just looked it up. Today is not National Prose Poetry Day. In fact, surprise surprise, there is no such thing as National Prose Poetry Day. That does not deter me. I, nobody Lily Hoang, declare today National Prose Poetry Day. In celebration, here is a prose poem by Mary Miller, published in Rose Metal Press’s awesome collection of flash fiction chapbooks, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves. READ MORE >
Are you ready, or what?
All signs point to the apocalypse tomorrow. Have you heard?
Fuck: what if they’re right? (They’re not, but who would get the last laugh?)
What are you doing in preparation and/or celebration?
linen lines, or, a meaningless line of letters
Etymologically, the word text means a textile and the word line a linen thread. But texts are unfinished textiles: they consist of lines (the woof) and are not held in place by vertical threads (the warp) as a finished textile would be. Literature (the universe of texts) is half finished. It seeks completion. Literature is directed toward a receiver, from whom it demands completion. The writer weaves threads that are to be picked up the receiver to be woven in. Only then does the text achieve a meaning. A text has as many meanings as it has readers.
The well-known phrase habent [sua] fata libelli (books have destinies) gives only a rough idea of what is meant here. It is not that the writer transmits powers to his texts so that the text can put those powers into play according to its particular dynamics; it is that the text goes out to be completed. So the text does not have a destiny; it is a destiny. In other words, the text is meaningful, and this fullness can only be exploited (explained) by each of its readers in a particular way. The greater the number of ways a text can be read, the more meaningful it is. Aristotelian texts are meaningful because they have meant something to Alexandrian readers different from what they meant to Thomas Aquinas, Hegel, Galileo, or twentieth-century historians. A text meets its fate (the message that it is) in its receiver. Texts without receivers, unread texts, are meaningless lines of letters that take on meaning only when they are read.
On journaling, ego, and Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine
Back in the day when I started to write fiction, I took a class called Gender & Writing. I must’ve been 21 or so. We read a lot of things, but what’s pertinent to this post is Virginia Woolf. The professor told us about her journals. We read some excerpts. They blew me away. And instantly, because of the egoist in me, I started to worry about people finding my old journals, how stupid I would seem, banal and delusional. Then, I felt moronic and delusional (again) for thinking I’d be so important that future scholars would be rifling through my old journals. Regardless, I stopped journaling by hand, not that I did much of it anyway, but reading through those journals today, I cringe at my youth and the way I made melodramas out of nothing.
Obviously, no one has bothered going through my journals, but my greatest fear manifested when I started reading Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine. Part journal, part delusional dream, Scheerbart’s beautiful little book narrates his toiled process of inventing the world’s first perpetual motion machine.
Let me back up, if you don’t know the name Paul Scheerbart, that’s ok. I didn’t either, but he was a proto-Dadaist, a novelist, playwright, poet, and his discussions of glass architecture played a role in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. But back in January 1908, he was poor writer dreaming of money, fame, and glory. In many ways, I applaud how he understood that he would not attain these goals through his writing, so he found another way: invention!
5 Comments
May 5th, 2011 / 10:49 am
May 5th, 2011 / 10:49 am
A Fear of Weather
Spring is coming. Spring is here. It’s raining and the grass is once again buoyant. Speaking of rain: weather scares me.
Growing up, my parents taught me that if I get rain on my head and I don’t immediately shower to clean it off, I’ll get sick.
This makes very little sense. Rain ought to be clean. It ought to be a pure – if not the purest – form of water. Certainly, it ought to be cleaner than the water I get from my green showerhead, which is still city-treated water, gone through further treatments via the showerhead.
In search of lost internet time
This is not an accomplishment: Yesterday, I woke up at 6:30am and went to sleep at 11:30pm, roughly. I spent under an hour on the internet.
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but this is the least amount of time I’ve spent on the internet while being in town (that is, not out of town, e.g. on campus visits, giving readings, or – dare I say it? – vacation) in years.
René’s Flesh, or, the pleasure of flesh, or, the masochist’s wetdream: A Letter to You
[Note: I changed the picture because so many people got pissed off about it. Here is a nicer photo to look at.]
Dear HTML Giant Universe,
Have you heard of René’s Flesh by Virgilio Piñera? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad. I only heard about it a few days ago. Then, I read it. And I am obsessed. Piñera was a huge Cuban writer, among the likes of Reinaldo Arenas, Jose Lézama Lima, and Alejo Carpentier. And yet, I’d never heard of Piñera. If I had an iron memory, I’d know that he was a character in Before Night Falls, but I don’t have an iron memory.
A few days ago, a friend of mine put René’s Flesh in my hands, an exchange because I’d told him about 2666. He said, If you like Bolaño, you’ll love this book. Despite having my ever-growing stack of books-to-read-and-review, I put my trust in this friend. I read the book in 24 hours. I took five baths, snuggling in the warmth of water and the titillation of this book.
This book: a fairy tale without magic. There is no magic, but in its absence: pain. Lots of it. The pleasure of pain, the torture of pain, it gave me nightmares from which I hoped to never wake.
52 Comments
April 25th, 2011 / 12:59 pm
April 25th, 2011 / 12:59 pm
Daniel Borzutzky’s The Book of Interfering Bodies
Daniel Borzutzky’s The Book of Interfering Bodies opens with a quote from the 9/11 commission report:
It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.
This is how the book begins. This book: a powerful parable about the routinization and bureaucratization of the exercise of imagination. This book: so strongly influenced by Zurita’s poetic and painful experiences. This book: a grostesque fairy tale about poetry and books, where the Poet is small and lethal and Books that contain all the world’s secrets waste away in a wasteland pile of shit.
7 Comments
April 21st, 2011 / 12:47 pm
April 21st, 2011 / 12:47 pm
What’s wrong with liking what other people like?
Recently, I’ve been listening to the radio.
Pop music.
God, it is soooo good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaPW5le3cug&feature=player_embedded#!
I mean, Rihanna’s Only Girl has a beat you (read: I) can’t help bopping my head to. I’ll admit it: I love pop music. And not in an ironic-I-like-this-but-only-to-show-how-much-better-I-am-than-it (or, hipster) kind of way. No, I really like it. But I’m embarrassed that I like it. As in: when I’m walking down the street listening to Lady Gaga on my iPod and I pass a cool looking person, I have this intense urge to turn it down so he/she doesn’t hear it (and thereby judge me), or, I want to take out my earbuds and convince them how I mostly listen to indie music and this is just my running mix or some stupid excuse like that. But why? Why should anyone be embarrassed about liking what other people (read: a lot of Americans) like?