citations and notes

Here citation is invited in as a practice of deep lineage storytelling that centers knowledge production as a dynamic, interspecies and interdisciplinary process, (via Kameelah Janan Rasheed) and is ever-in-progress, like the rest of what's shared here.

* learner

as in learning as an orientation of openness; as an approach of seeking, coming across, extending attention to; as an evolving practice of discernment and integration; as attuning to personal and collective paths of attraction and momentum (after KJR)

* bag carrier

as in the bag as the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel, as in narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle [...] holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. the carrier bag as opposed to the hero's journey—we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news. And yet old. (Ursula K. LeGuin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction).

* mimic

as in mimicry offers a different model of not just authorship but personhood: the mimic is a person infected by the foreign. The mimic doesn’t master the “spirit” of an artwork; they are mastered by the effect of the artwork. They become a site of vulnerability, like how a foreign language and literature might influence the US status quo. The mimic generates excess, inflation, change. The mimic is a figure of excitement and incitement, a figure thriving on fluctuation. (Johannes Göransson's In Defense of Mimicry: On translation, the body, and excess)

* surprise

as in we are not here just to know our history, we are here to transform it. We are not here to honor our ancestors, we are here to surprise them, to repudiate them, to remember what they forgot or dream up what they couldn't imagine and then to pass the baton. Because one day those ancestors are going to be us. (Elaine Castillo's keynote, Filipino American International Book Festival 2024)

** constraint

as in The blank page is debilitating. A terrifyingly open sea. So I prefer my notebooks with graph paper, each square a unit of distance. Or dotted grid paper, a cartographic interface studded with potential moorings. Everything gets mapped onto a relational scale. // I’ve learned to seek out structure, which is to say, constraint. But I want to choose it, whether I step into it or allow it to close in on me. I want to build something inside, and see if it holds.

** narrative

as in the space of narrative is where our events happen, where we pull our events out to view them; it’s where memory happens, in syntax, in a building of sentences. So what better way to explore all the complexities of making structures of experience and memory—whether real or imagined—than to do so within a structure that proposes that that type of articulation is possible. (Renee Gladman)

** archival research

as in making multiple ways through systems of organized information, i.e., via extracurricular methodologies; as in a practice of it, from which varied projects may emerge; as in trawling jstor, hathitrust, etc., then traveling to michigan, chicago, seville, etc.; as in critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman); as in formative obsessions with Ghostwriter, codes, and cryptology

** handmaking

as in paying close attention, as in committing to memory, as in bonefolders and html, clay under my nails, using my senses and listening to the material and adjusting as i go, as in the long way, the slow way, meandering, and at times accidental

** translation

as in as in versions and experiments, co- and self- and doubles, multiples, excess; as in breaking and rebuilding everything via, as in errant, as in say it as art (Sawako Nakayasu); as in homophonic, as in the closest read; as in fraught intimacies (AA, BC, CJO, DA) and translanguaging as resistance (KL, VV), doing it moving and rejecting the notion of mastery

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