Reading

Went to see Thomas Sayers Ellis read at BU yesterday, in a small auditorium on a 5th floor off Comm Ave. He read mainly from The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press, 2005) in expressive whispers, twists and tune-filled voice. Excellent attention to line breaks & pauses, filtering language into muse (music). He began with a poem from an unpublished manuscript called The Return of Colored Only. It was a fantastic and energizing reading, good all the way through. He read "All Their Stanzas Look Alike" with ghost-like (almost a low growl at the refrain) whispers or near groans.

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A translated fragment from Jacinta Escudos, A-B-Sudario:

"[...] / but the neighbors will respect you, after all, the distant noise of a typewriter will make them think you're working, which is always better than making them think you're whoring yourself / yes, but it'll be like what Roque Dalton says: "the nocturnal cruelty of the motorcyclists who launch rude stones at the angel of dreams" / in this case it'll be the nocturnal cruelty of the writers-scribes-scriveners-insomniacs-life translators who don't let their neighbors or their roommates sleep / don't get so philosophical / the neighbors will merely think you're completing an urgent task that's behind schedule for the University or some other strange place where people transcribe documents in a typewriter, they don't have enough imagination to think that if a typewriter is heard tapping frenetically at eleven-thirty at night, then it must be a solitary Cayetana who's trying to write a book / and keep singing the same tune / they don't even imagine the neighbor's a writer / or wants to be one / when she grows up / [...]" (252)

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Now reading Cristina Rivera Garza, La cresta de Ilón (Tusquets Editores, 2002).