CHICANONAUTICA ON DÍAS DE LOS MUERTOS, HALLOWEEN, DEAD DAZE . . .

Chicanonatica is riffs on the October/November holiday traffic jam, at La Bloga.

Of course, some politics get in . . . 

 Some explaining needs to be done . . .

 

Gotta pay our respects to la Catrina:

And get some sugar:

HAVE YOU SEEM ME?

I’ll be deep into road tripping by the time you read this. Moving through a transmogrified world. And of course, I’ll be going through changes of my own. When I get home, I’ll be different, my day-to-day world will be different.

Or is it all a delusion?

Who am I, anyway? The maniac who writes the books and makes that art? Or the nice guy with a job, a wife, a house . . .

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying cyberpunk (does anybody know about the McCarthy Era now that it’s happening again, only worse?). But look me up online and there I am, THE Chicano Cyberpunk!

We don’t get to decide how others perceive us. People keep throwing labels at me, and none of them stick.

Frank Zappa, “Who Are the Brain Police?” (1966): “What do you do when the label comes off / and the plastic’s all melted / and the chrome is too soft?”

I don’t blame them. I’m a rasquache mess of random selections of my unstable environment. Your handful of popular stereotypes just distort me.

 

I was in an Afrofuturist anthology. Now I’m going to a Xicanxfuturist one. It’s something new, yet I’ve been doing it all my life.

And I’ll be seventy years old soon.

I’m also a Chicanonaut and the Father of Chicano Science Fiction.

I like the science fiction label because it’s often used to describe what people don’t understand, which is accurate for me. Imagine if I went around calling myself a surrealist aesthetic terrorist creative blasphemer . . .

But who am I really? That guy in the mirror is always surprising me. What did people do before selfies? All those temporary identities melting and evaporating with documentation.

And where am I? In the breakroom of a library, typing this on my phone? Or on the road as you read this? 

If I need to, I can become a space vato or a ciberbandido.  Maybe I’ll discover a new identity somewhere soon . . .

CHICANONAUTICA GOES TRAVELING WHILE CHICANO IN TRUMPTOPIA 2.0

Getting ready for a road trip in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.

Triggering another Chicano identity crisis:

Which gets complicated:

Who is that vato in the mirror?

And wanna talk about complicated?

JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES THROUGH NEW WAVE BABY EYES

I heard that to read Joyce's Ulysses on a phone was blasphemous, so I had to do it. 

I get it now--the Irish are the Chicanos of Britain. All them linguistic shenanigans. I probably wouldn’t have dreamed of the stuff I pulled in High Aztech and Cortez on Jupiter if it wasn’t for good old James Joyce. Civilization ain't nothing but colliding, fighting, fucking streams of consciousness. Inverting Homer’s Odyssey–inverting the space from outer to inner–is a good way to demonstrate it.

And the obscenity gets shattered with one hot lick for man, one giant, nasty slurp for literature, as it broke the legal obscenity barrier with help of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. 

Why aren’t they included in our celebrations of banned books? Dare I mention the Marquis de Sade? Imagine cute teen hipsters wearing FREE DE SADE T-shirts . .  .

Ah, my kind of fun.

I finished it in the waiting room while my wife was getting a wisdom tooth yanked. While I drove her home she was still high on the drugs and grilled me like a stoned lit professor. That was fun too.

Would it also be blasphemous to say that I got into Joyce by way of science fiction? Some of you are picking their jaws off the floor, but I’m probably not the only one, being a New Wave baby, coming of age in the early Seventies, reading things like Philip José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Richard Lupoff’s With the Bentfin Boomer Boys in Little Old New Alabama in the first two Dangerous Visions volumes. There was also Brain W. Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head, Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy, and probably others that I don’t remember. A whole fricking lost subgenre waiting to be unearthed and explored. 

And in a Feliniesque sequence written before Federico was born, Ulysses actually does get kinda sci-fi:

All you students and academics in need of ideas feel free to plunder. I’m probably not going to do anything with it. I don’t need it. I’m a fountain of ideas.

Fountain of ideas. Stream of consciousness . . .  Slurp . . . Hmm . . . 

Are we blasphemous enough yet?

Back when I was a wage slave for Borders Book Music & Cafe (for you younger folks, it was a big box bookstore, kinda like Barnes & Noble, but more pretension), the phone rang. I answered like a proper corporate android, and a gentleman inquired, “Are you doing anything for Bloomsday?”

“Uh . . . not really,” I answered, knocked back into human mode.

“Harumph. Well, do you know perhaps of a local literary guild that would be doing something?”

Did he know that we were in Phoenix, Arizona? He might as well be asking for a society dedicated to hunting penguins, mermaids, and/or unicorns. 

Poor fellow. I wonder what happened to him? 

What might he think of these musings?

CHICANONAUTICA REPORTS CIBERBANDID@JE IN PARIS

Chicanonautica art manifests in Paris. Read about it at La Bloga.

It triggered a Oaxaqueño flashback:

Ah, Paris:

 

Art:

And protest: