Giannina Braschi - Yo-Yo Boing!

— It’s not envy. It’s annoyance. They don’t appreciate your poetry.

— Come here.

— Me?

— I want to congratulate you on your reading. You have a mellifluous voice, curiously deep and melodic. By no means am I suggesting that you could make it as a singer or an actress, but you do read well.

— I think of myself as an actor and a singer. If I had the chance, if someone discovered me.

— Dialogues come easy to you. You should write plays.

— Screenplays, a psychic told me my next work would be made into a film.

— Transformed maybe, but I don’t see you as a screen-writer. Go for the Obies not the Oscars. I suggest you frame the dialogues with stage directions to usher the voices. Who is speaking? I am speaking. Then name the speaker.

— Why? How does a conversation go? Do I say: Suzana: and then Suzana speaks. Is this a classroom?

— For clarity’s sake so that it will hold up on the page.

— This is a musical composition.

— You don’t need an editor. You need a director. I’m going to introduce you to a friend of mine. Sam, Sam Shepard.

— Paris, Texas . I love him and Wim Wenders too.

— And me. Do you love me?

— You’re one of my favorites — of course I love you. Why is everything nice and great and shining blue in the sky? Why did I have to tell him I love Sam Shepherd and Wim Wenders, and why did he ask me if I loved him? And why did I answer — of course, you’re one of my favorites. I want to puke this whole party. I want to vomit 57th Street and all its commerce. I want to retch 1,000 coins, worth nothing, because even if I bought all the silks and satins and disguised myself — I’m still not made of the stuff dreams are made of. My soul, where among the brand-name attributes of hot tamales — where is my soul, wounded like a deer, wounded, not dead although I myself have tried to disclose it and close it — I have tried to become like them or at least go with the flow — stick out my tongue — drop myself at their feet — feel at ease. For what, for Hecuba, for fiction, for frivolity?

— Social climber. Look at her. It’s sickening. Machista. Did you see that? Did you hear that? Wasn’t it disgusting how she melts with Scorsese? But did you see how brazen she was to the other poet? Name a living female poet that she likes — forget likes, how about acknowledges? Name one.

— Dickinson and Sor Juana.

— Living, I said, writing today, herself excluded.

— Wind up the mechanical monkey and watch it dance.

— You think there are more than three great poets per language in any given century? Let’s see Vallejo, Neruda, Darío, Lorca, Jiménez, Machado. Very few.

— It depends what you are looking for.

— I’m looking for the creators. If you want to accept the masters, then you include: Huidobro, Cernuda, Alberti, Alexandre, Salinas, Guillén. Yes, they are masters, but not creators.

— You’re too narrow.

— The Gates of Parnassus are narrow, not me. Alexandre may be a better poet than Lorca, but he is not greater. Lorca is common, but he is a creator. Many masters are better poets than the creators, but they’re not greater. Greatness isn’t better. Sometimes it’s worse. There are many singers with a better voice than María Callas. But she sang great. Greatness lies beyond description. Because it’s whole. Like the sun itself. Round and full of light. It’s not missing anything. And it fills you. It leaves you full. Surrounds you. It’s something that installs. And affirms its installation. It’s planted, implanted. And it stays put. Like an installation in a space. Like beauty itself.

— What a pity.

— The sum is less than its parts. What do we do with those legs, hands, lips, and elbows that are functional in and of themselves but that don’t contribute to the whole?

— How wonderful.

— Not wonderful at all.

— Yes, because it means that I can be one of those parts that can escape the totality.

— Why wouldn’t you want to contribute to the whole?

— Don’t get me wrong. A thinker thought, maybe it was Ortega y Gasset, that a country is in decadence when the parts no longer want to be part of the totality. It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in Spain, it will happen in the States.

— But what I am saying is more profound. I have a puzzle. I assemble the puzzle. Every piece is in its place. But there are extra pieces. Beautiful pieces. They should not be thrown in the incinerator.

— You can start another puzzle with them. Everything has to work. Even the extras. Just let them be. Let them play the role of the arbitrary and capricious, the odds ’n ends.

— It seems to me that’s you.

— No, that’s the world. And chance should not be taken for granted. Chance is the puzzle that finds the parts that do not fit the whole. It is probably a matter of editing. Trimming here and there until everything fits.

— That’s what they always do. They cut people who have a life of their own. People like you are prime candidates. Because you breathe and you march to the rhythm of your own drum.

— I love what you just did, you bore your soul to us. You lifted your skirt and you said:

— Hey, sweetie, look at me.

But what we saw was not flesh — but we saw the soul, which is to say, all the sorrow we have inside.

— Don’t talk to me about sorrow. I am tired of pain, of blood. I want joy.

— It’s not anybody’s soul we want. Every day students come to me to bear their souls, manipulating sympathy through narcissistic exorcism. That’s not what a poet does. The poet is discreet — he shows us not his soul, but our souls, from a center we can all relate to — without falling into triviality.

— I declare, I read the worst paper in this city.

— You read it for the same reasons that Dante descended into hell, to understand the infrastructures and the super-structures.

— Yes, to know what garbage is. To know the commonest. And I think of the New York Times .

— Cold and pedantic compared to Le Monde . There you see a paper thinking. But the French think that the act of thinking is enough. If they think of a solution, they think they’ve solved the problem.

— How wonderful.

— Not wonderful at all. Blanchot writes a theory of an Infinite Conversation , but he doesn’t create the infinite conversation.

— The same happened to me with Theater and its Double . Artaud said what should be done in theater, but he didn’t do it. When I read it, I thought to myself, I am doing in Profane Comedy what he says must be done.

— So you are more American than you think.

— Why?

— Because you do what the French think.

— Excuse me. I also think.

— Then you are British. Britons are the sum of thought and action. That is why they are successful in war.

— Americans are successful in war.

— Not because we strategize, but because we spend billions on technology and weapons. Bombs away!

— I receive so many term papers — without a single thought — neatly packaged bibliographies.

— That’s because we teach them to crank out journalism of the worst kind. But what they say is democracy — ask everybody’s opinion — and then you end up with the voice of the moral majority. If it’s not about sex, it’s about tallying votes, or it’s about giving the impression to have the facts in hand, even if you don’t have them, invent statistics and sound objective.

— What do I know about culture? I was raised by television. I don’t watch it, but I was hooked as a kid. Totally hooked. I know that the cartoons influenced my style. People will write differently with computers.