Stingy Kids

Less and less, I have

Less and less, I have not learned to accept death...I remain uneducable about the wisdom of learning to die.

I hope death came peacefully to Jacques Derrida. "No fear, no pain." Zikhrono le-vracha.

Nobel 2004

Announced today: Reclusive Austrian author, Elfriede Jelinek, has won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." Jelinek is the author of The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 1983), which was made into a movie starring Isabelle Huppert. Many found the movie difficult to watch—not too surprising, considering that it was based on a novel many found difficult to read. One reviewer of the novel observed that "she has the ability to conjure up some of the most disgusting images I have ever read! Yet in the context of story and message they simply astound and delight this reader." I'm glad to see the Nobel go to such an author.

Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, delivered the announcement in five languages: Swedish, German, English, French, and Russian. Russian, however, was not included among the announcements on the Nobel website. Let me try to come up with a theory for that omission.

Pravda notes that Jelinek is one of nine women to win the Nobel Literature prize. Who will be next?

Taco Shop Poetry

Channel 13 is currently airing "Visiones," a six-part series on Latino culture and art. Each episode is a half-hour long and comprises of a two or three related feature stories. Unfortunately, this format does not allow for a lot of depth but it does provide a solid introduction to various forms of contemporary Latino creative expression. Episode 5, which aired last night, featured the Taco Shop Poets who perform poetry, as their name suggests, in taco shops:

Tacos and poetry? Why not?

You have to agree that there is something wonderfully loco about it. Let me explain.

A group of Chicano poets here in San Diego have been meeting since 1994 and reading their free-form odes in taco shops from here to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, New York and back.

Why read poetry in taco shops, you ask? Simple, says Adolfo Guzmán López, one of the Taco Shop Poets founding members.

"Taco shops are the most democratic of institutions, where your standing in life—whether you're rich or poor, black or white or brown—doesn't matter," Guzmán says. "Taqueros (taco makers) treat everyone the same and serve everyone the same." [Taco Shop Poets by Fernando Romero]

The TSP distinguish themselves from coffeeshop and bookstore poets in their commitment to deliver their work "to an audience not usually exposed to the spoken word and taking the usually jaded spoken word audience to a new environment for poetry." Taco shops, unlike bookstores or coffeeshops, they argue, attract a more varied local audience. This is a great idea but the producers of the show failed to show how it actually works in context. Little footage of the locals who frequent these spaces made its way into the episode; this alone would be my major quibble with a program that emphasizes community outreach (the glaring absence of audience was also true for the other features).

Of course the artists themselves and their funders think that these projects are amazing. But how does an "audience not usually exposed to the spoken word" react when Adrián Arancibia breaks into "another brother died today" in the middle of their taco lunch break?

Links:

* An interesting review of TSP's "Chorizo Tonguefire" (CD, 1999)

* Prof. Fransisco Lomelí (UCSB) interviews TSP and asks some tough questions particularly concerning audience reactions to their work—great conversation results!

* Voz Alta Project ("a Chicana/o nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and social change through cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary art forms") emerged out of TSP to "open a downtown door to cultural and artistic freedom."