Monthly Archives: March 2010

the black tea partier…

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At last year’s Tax Day Rally in New Dorp, Staten Island, I did in fact, meet ONE black Tea Party supporter. I’m not sure if he’s still kickin’ it with them today. He was a curious oddity to me. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember that he was a Cuban immigrant, naturalized American. And after a year of vitriol and obfuscation, I wonder if he is still aligned with this movement. A movement that at its heart invalidates his right to claim America as his home.

UPDATE:
So I got this comment on my rather benign commentary:

This man integrated, joined America – as proven by his being a Tea Partier – and no other Tea Party supporter would gainsay his status as a right and proper American.

Get over your racism and your hatred of all things White and all things truly American and maybe, just maybe, you’ll earn the same privilege.

I won’t hold my breath though.

I can accept critique, but if this commenter were a regular reader of this blog, he’d recognize that my supposed hatred of ‘all things White’ is unfounded. I mean, seriously, who blogs about Procul Harum, Foo Fighters, and Bartleby, the Scrivener??? I don’t even need to unpack all the things wrong with that premise. Perhaps I do? I don’t know. Continue reading →

“On Behalf of My Mother.”

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But today, we are affirming that essential truth -– a truth every generation is called to rediscover for itself –- that we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations.  (Applause.)  We are not a nation that falls prey to doubt or mistrust.  We don’t fall prey to fear.  We are not a nation that does what’s easy.  That’s not who we are.  That’s not how we got here.

We are a nation that faces its challenges and accepts its responsibilities.  We are a nation that does what is hard.  What is necessary.  What is right.  Here, in this country, we shape our own destiny.  That is what we do.  That is who we are.  That is what makes us the United States of America. 

via whitehouse.gov

Health care reform is law now. Not a perfect bill, but still… progress. I think this hopey changey stuff isn’t so bad after all.

I’ve highlighted 44′s money quote for your personal edification.

You’re welcome.

today’s primer.

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Writers get blocked sometimes. That’s only because we’re struggling, grasping to connect ideas and words with precision. The ideas are sometimes bigger than us at the moment we sit to write them. We wrestle with the angel. We spar with the muse. It seldom comes out right the first time. But we still go in, we do battle and somewhere in our wanderings, deleted sentences, and scratch outs, we come to meet some awesome truth hidden from us in plain sight.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Literary Death Match Tonight! #literatithursday

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via literarydeathmatch.com

It ain’t a poetry slam, but it should be a lot of fun. I’m pretty stoked to participate. If you love me, you’ll send out good vibes and deep breaths my way. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see your friendly faces in the crowd.

Here are your deets:

Where: Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery (map)
When: Doors at 7:00, show at 8:05 (sharp)
Cost: $5 preorder; $10 at the door; $5 with a valid student ID

http://www.literarydeathmatch.com/upcoming-events/march-18-2010.html#

I’m reading a new-ish story and I made a playlist to keep me motivated and on theme. Tracks include Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime, Jem’s They, Nas and Hova’s Black Republican, Butterfly Boucher’s Bitter Song, Bitter:Sweet’s Dirty Laundry, and Gomez’s How We Operate. Yeah, maybe I’m sharing way too much but whatevs, playlists help me write fiction.

I’m almost forgot my favorite one:

Happy Hunting.

i got a story to tell.

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I was a senior in college when Biggie died. It was a Sunday. We spent the rest of the night in Steve and El B’s suite in East Campus like we did six months before, the night Pac was murdered. We listened to Big for hours. We talked about hip hop. We talked about guns. We talked about Suge. We talked about innocence. We talked and talked and talked. We were seniors. We were jobless. We were facing a recession. We were first and second generation college kids.  We traded lyrics. We talked about the future without Big and Pac.  We said hip hop died. We said hip hop died again. We asked could hip hop have seven more lives. We talked about what kind people we were becoming. We talked about 80s. We talked about the Stop the Violence campaign. We tried to remember the lyrics to We’re All in the Same Gang. We played Self Destruction.  We grew quiet. We mourned.

What we didn’t expect to happen during the same week was a call from the dean to tell us that campus security found the body of our friend Caryn.  It was a Thursday. She took a bottle of sleeping pills. She left a note. She had been there for days. They said there was a smell. They never told us what the coroner determined was the time of death.

They found her Thursday. Biggie died Sunday.

We mourned. We wondered when was the last time we saw her alive. We retraced every last moment we had with her. We tried to isolate signs. We searched for signals she sent us to tell us something was wrong. We wondered why she didn’t tell us that she was in pain. We wondered if we there was something we could have done to save her. We grew quiet. We wondered when will it stop. We were seniors in college. We were in a recession. We planned a memorial. We packed up her room. We said hip hop had died again. We said our innocence was over. We wondered what kind of people we were becoming.

Union Station Magazine- a new literary mag.

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Dear poets and prosy persons alike. I’m truly happy to announce the arrival of Union Station Magazine. The brand new lit mag from the folks who brought you the louderARTS Project. We’re giddy about the great work in this soft debut issue. Serious thanks are due in particular to our goddess of webtasticity, Emily Kagan Trenchard and to our lead editor, Syreeta McFadden. They’ve both burnt some brain cells on this one and it shows.

The writers and visual artist that we worked with were amazingly generous in ceding to our geek love for their work and we hope that you’ll enjoy them as much as we do. Union Station is a quarterly lit mag we plan to spend the next couple of months honing the next issue which will push the boundaries just a little of what you might imagine a lit mag can do so stay tuned for our interstitial updates and our digital delivery news.

poem/love
Lynne
Union Station Magazine
www.unionstationmag.com

via lynneprocope.posterous.com

Secret project… now unveiled! And it wouldn’t have been possible without the genius support and OCD mellower, Ms. Emily Kagan Trenchard and our indomitable co-editor, Lynne Procope.

We pretty stoked about this new endeavor. We hope you visit us at Union Station often. As we grow, we hope to do some pretty dynamic things, shift some boundaries and introduce you to some fresh voices in poetry, fiction, essay, interview and visual art.

www.unionstationmag.com