#3. Entrance to the rodeo where we begin to deteriorate
This week's rodeo features work from Gabriel Dozal and Matthew Zapruder. Plus two contrasting episodes about migrants crossing into the United States.
Everyone is welcome at the Rodeo!
Last night they called to tell me that I was invited to the club. The Wrangling Association one of country’s most prominent clubs of its kind.
Roberta, across the table, talked about some new gadget they bought the other day. My anxiety manifested some nacho cheese on my upper lip. The waiter placed our second round of drinks on the table. My thoughts ruminating on the call from the club president, let’s meet in a couple days to discuss. Just some casual burgers and drinks. Nothing special. I looked at Roberta, but kept stealing glances at the restaurants artwork or staring at the bookshelf behind the bar, except that only records were kept on the shelf. The bartender seemed to be whistling along to the Otis Redding song playing over the stereo system. Roberta and I ate and ate and I was afraid to order another drink. Then Roberta disappeared. She was by the restaurant’s rear entrance, next to the kitchen window where back of house expedited the food. She seemed to signal to me that she’d be back in a minute. The back door ajar. Roberta left it open. A couple familiar friends walked into the bar. They sat down at the bar. They seemed not to notice me.
the border simulation becomes more real as you attempt to cross it
Weekly Link Rodeo
Every Friday, Osmanthus will post a handful of links that resonated with the editors. The weekly link rodeo is concluded with a writing prompt. It is our hope that whether you are a fiction writer, poet, or multi-disciplinary artist that you can take the links and use them as inspiration.
Audio reading by Matthew Zapruder
John Nyman. “Conceptions of White” | Border Crossings
Nyman writes a review of an exhibition held at the Art Museum of the University of Toronto, where Jeremy Bailey’s artwork offers a satirical take on the framing of the age-old Where do White people come from? And where are we now?
Together the pieces reveal—through extensive, fact-rich didactics but also through viewers’ fundamental experiences of looking—that the heart of Whiteness is less a material reality than the subjective force of perceiving difference, difference that has been foisted onto an extremely diverse range of bodies over time.
Freddie deBoer. “Perhaps Taylor Swift Isn't the Defining Political Issue of Our Times” | FdB
In Summer 2023, Modelo supplanted Bud Light. Hating Bud Light is not a political action or ideology. Virtue signalling entered into the vernacular, at least in my memory, in 2020. Perhaps it was earlier as deBoer points out in his example about the Wire or Frank Ocean. Much could be said of a recent article at Slate titled “All Signs that Point to Lesbanism in True Detective: Night Country” where the author attempts to contrive queerness out of show that may or may not be ostensibly about it. In my mind it’s all about creating fodder for water cooler talk, so a viewer can signal to a colleage that they’re on their side, which I guess is not a an all-around bad thing. It’s good to have allies. Perhaps then it’s a waste of time to invest political ideologies to these cultural ephemera.
The problems with wanting artistic and media consumption to be politics are considerable. For one, all kinds of people like all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Tons of conservative people went on drinking Bud Light in small towns across America because they’re very offline and were entirely unaware that there was any controversy at hand. (The blessed of the earth.) If you search around for even a moment, I’m sure you can find people who are avowed conservatives or even straight-up racists who love The Wire.
Yet here we are engulfed in the farce of electoral politics with the sitting president recently mistaking his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron for long dead former French president François Mitterrand. As the 1979 film Being There satirizes the idea that a holy fool could rise to the highest powers, I’m afraid we’ve reached some sort of worst-case scenario:
To effect any material change, which is the reason for politics, people have had the playbook for longtime. Recently the idea of distractions have popped up in discourse cicrcles, but to end with the deBoer article, it’s time to come back to real life:
The world is a sad and broken place and I forgive people for wanting to invest meaningless symbols with great moral valence. I acknowledge that the collapse of meaning has been real and total and that such lofty celebrity can look, to the adolescent brain (literally or metaphorically adolescent) like a good place to park your beliefs, your need, your palpable longing. As with so many other parts of our culture, the question is whether we want to actively encourage perpetual adolescence.
Gabriel Dozal. The Border Simulator: Poems
Audio reading by Gabriel Dozal & Natasha Tiniacos
Dozal’s shapeshifting conceit frees him from documentary realism and journalistic euphemism, those all-too-familiar modes of writing about the US–Mexico border. It’s an unexpected short-cut to technological topics rarely broached in poetry: TikTok, cryptocurrency, data marketplaces. It lets him toy with genre mash-ups, world-building, and characters like Primitivo, a border-crosser; Primitiva, a migrant worker; and Customs, a glossily corporate chorus. Dozal’s a riffer, a one-upping accumulator, aiming brazenly for “A continual reply-all effect.” He can also hopscotch between end-stopped aphorisms, complete in themselves, volatile in combination.
Click for the full review by Christopher Spaide at the Poetry Foundation
If you are in Kansas City this week for AWP, Dozal alongside other friends will be reading as part of an A Dozen Nothing showcase.
Reading at Vulpes Bastille. 1737 Locust St. Kansas City, MO. Friday, February 9 at 5:00pm. See you there.
“Hopping the Border” (part 3 of a 4 part series) | Channel 5
Ever since Andrew Callaghan’s All Gas, No Brakes person-on-the-street interviews, he has captured the spectacle of life. Recently his work has covered bipping in San Francisco, which bleeds into another Channel 5 series that covers drug use, gentrification, and housing topics in Philadelphia.
In this series Callaghan highlights the human aspect of people making the border crossing. Everything from interviewing migrants who have been detained on the U.S. side to those preparing to cross (parts 1 & 2). While part 3 focuses on Callaghan and camera operator Larry Susan’s crossing from the Mexican-side of the Rio Grande. Part 4 will focus on Callaghan and Susan’s detainment and arrest. Crossing illegally into the U.S. is a Federal Felony - Failure to Report. Consider becoming a member to their Patreon.“Chinese migrants are fastest growing group crossing into U.S. from Mexico” | 60 Minutes
This video sells the narrative that migrants are ditching their passports and that all Chinese migrants are bringing in roller-bags for the long-term stay. Highly-politicized. The video attempts to cover it’s cherry-picking tracks by briefly mentioning groups from other nationalities, but focuses solely on China to push a specific narrative. Seen within the first five minutes when the video cuts to marching soldiers of the Peoples’ Liberation Army in a marching formation. Cheap move by 60 Minutes, but honestly wouldn’t expect any less. The video also takes a moment to hammer home the narrative that all migrants are ditching their passports when they arrive. Cheap staging by the editors and producers.
Writing Prompt
Open the dictionary to a random word.
Append that word in your poem’s title.
Repeat the process two more times.
What does the poem’s title say about the future?
What histories are contained in your title?
Write them into a poem.
Revisit the chainlink fence from before.
How does the fence sound now?
Open Call for Submissions
For inclusion in a future Osmanthus quarterly publication, consider submitting to Osmanthus. We are reading year-round for all-genres with a focus on poetry, but a keen interest in digital works and hybrid texts.
Read our submission guidelines here, and visit our work in progress site. I’m still tinkering away with it. My writing mentor once told me that everything is always a work in process.
Submit to editors@osmanthus.tv
More housekeeping: At AWP? We’re open to publish your experience
In a couple weeks, our Tuesday slot will publish long-form essays on cultural, criticism, interviews with editors, travelogue style observations, or anything tangential to the type of stuff we publish here. Really pushing into the meta-discursive space that we’ve been establishing with the Rodeos.
If that fits you, and you’d like to submit a travelogue on a conference talk, reading, or anything else you did in Kansas City, then query our editors. In your email subject line write “AWP ESSAY QUERY” to editors@osmanthus.tv
Even if you are not at AWP, yet you’d like to try your hand at some long form essays. Reach to our editorial team here in the Substack app or to editors@osmanthus.tv
If you know anyone who would enjoy or benefit from EarShrub, please share with them.
May you forever be on your way