Happy Laszlo Krasznahorkai day for all celebrating, condolences on Anne Carson wuz robbed again day to everyone else!

Reminder! Tonight, @alinaetc.bsky.social and I will be reading and talking about poetry and prose collections. 🥰 Free, but RSVP for the link! writer.org/event/grieco...

Bookshop is having a sale to counter Prime Day! What a great opportunity to buy this cool new book I heard about. bookshop.org/p/books/firs...

My favorite moments of this fascist hell scape is when these fucks turn against each other in ever increasing hysterics of performing toxic masculinity or some other fascist trait. It reminds me of those episodes of GI Joe where Cobra Commander and Destro can’t get along, so like, it all falls apart

I think a lot about how part of the completion of the work, is being read. And not just by your dad or your wife or someone who's sitting there while you anxiously stare at them, waiting for a long enough pause to say "What'd you think of the twist?!"

What are you waiting for?

We’ve all had a boss like this

Loved this

Reading social media and feeling the usual feelings, I should say more, I should say it now, I should not wait to build an audience, I have to build an audience. But countering it with the delicious slowness of my process. It takes time to do what I am doing. It takes time to write, to translate.

Started reading Celan for the first time. Can’t really move on from the pairing of poppies and memory, bread crumb and death. Will stay here for a long time

My Spanish is coming along nicely in these classes, but I think I’ll find a bunch of clubs to join and see if immersion can hyper charge it

Still trying to determine what it all means

everyone be nice to me (and all translators), it’s international day of translation

I’ve been thinking a lot about art and impotence, the feeling that so much of the work we do is disproportionate to the effect we have, that we often feel like we have no effect, that nothing is happening. Paradoxically, I also am feeling that Art is the only thing that matters.

Back in Mexico City after seeing family in New York. It’s always rough breathing when I come back to this elevation after some time away, but this time is no joke. I feel hit by a truck

)looc( snoitalsnart ni gnisilaiceps lanruoj til a er'uoy fI )looc osla( egaugnal lanigiro eht edulcni uoy dna segaugnal tfeL-ot-thgiR tesepyt ot woh nrael dluohs uoy

If you're a lit journal specialising in translations (cool) and you include the original language (also cool) you should probably learn how to typeset Right-to-Left languages (oops!)

I did not get the grant, didn’t get the residency, didn’t get the publication. I am patiently, carefully, sitting down with the work and doing it. I pull up the poem and begin to translate it. I open the document and write the story, or essay. I’m an artist, you see.

This what I mean when I talk about art collectives as the future

Like, surely there are poems that are even more “heh, boobs sure are neat” than this, but I’m having trouble thinking of them

Translating a poem in a high register of heroic worship, where “you” are the hero, and all the “most beautiful daughters of your people . . . Lovely magical goddesses” are fawning over “you” and there’s a moment where it says “how fortunate is the breast where your gaze falls” and uh . . .

My 3rd greatest fear for my art is that it will never gain traction and be ignored, which doesn’t bother me as much as my 2nd greatest fear, which is that it will make me so famous I’ll never know peace, which is peanuts next to my #1 fear: the CIA will somehow use it to export US cultural influence

A bad case of the morbs today

Remember how my NEH grant to translate Holocaust lit from Yiddish & Russian was canceled because it “no longer effectuate[d] the agency’s needs and priorities” under Trump? So this and marble statues for Trump’s fascist “garden of American heroes” is where the money went. www.neh.gov/news/neh-ann...

Could have ended this post on the word “take” and would have had an evergreen one

I’m sorta tired of any take on genre distinctions in writing that isn’t “it is a marketing scam that endangers human creativity”

Asked for the best books I read this year; Tough, but today I’ll say: Happy Stories Mostly, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, trans. @tiffanytsao.bsky.social A General Theory of Oblivion, Jose Eduardo Agualusa, trans. Daniel Hahn A Carnival of Atrocities, Natalia Garcia Freire, trans. Victor Meadowcraft

y si los abandone mis esfuerzas en ingles, y solo escribo en español? Que es ingles a mi? No es mi idoma materno, esa es yiddish, en algun sentido místico y transhistorico. Inglés es solo mi idioma primero. ¿y hay un pasado y un futuro en Torah? ¿En literatura? ¿En mi alma?

New post up! Will I ever translate from Spanish to English? Read on!

Partially inspired by @yilinwriter.bsky.social many excellent points and writing about power and racism and translation, I’m doing some thinking and writing about whether I can or will ever come to translating Mexican Spanish writing, now that my Spanish is improving. Hope to write a substack post.

Got through the first hurdle of the day okay (walked past the torta place and didn’t buy a torta)

Today I thought, wouldn't it be a fun prank to write into @raxkingisdead.bsky.social 's occasional advice column on her patreon with all the problems of the narrator of Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In the Dark and see if she could spot it, but then I remembered there's no such thing as a fun prank.

Snuck out of a nice warm snuggle with my sleeping 2 year old to make stuffed cabbage, can I get a hell yeah in the chat

Walking home, I jumped back just in time from a chemical truck doing a sharp right turn. I thought about shouting “do you want more Matt Murdocks?! Because this is how you get Matt Murdocks!!!”

So wish I could go to this one, love Khairani Barokka’s work. Both time and money are short, otherwise I’d be there!

"My short-story collection came out with Stanchion, a small, independent press. It has truly been a profoundly positive, life-enriching experience! And we’ve sold a ton of books, too! I wouldn’t change it for the world." 🥹😊🥹😊🥹😊🥹 Thanks for taking this journey with me @writesloud.bsky.social!

More cool stuff today! 🥰

Going to make a video performing some writing to raise funds for a family in Gaza. Vote for what I should read! 1) Wailing Wall by J. Roth, trans. M. Hoffman 2) The Fist by E. Shteynbarg, trans. Me, Mordecai! 3) Herring Barrels by D. Foygel, trans. Me, Mordecai! 4) unpublished short story by me

I don’t have the courage or self esteem for this, nor have I exhausted all avenues, but sometimes I long to abandon my dreams of being published by anyone else and just find some other way to reach an audience

Sometimes I forget how easy and delicious it is to make a stir fry and some rice. This is a metaphor.

then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If

Bought tickets back to the US for a family visit, starting to panic about it

HOPE THIS #ART TOUCHES HEARTS💔 I’m running out of time—only a few days left before my dental semester closes. Life around me feels like hell, yet my only lifeline is my education. Support has slowed & I’m terrified of losing this chance😞 Pls help me hold on to my future! chuffed.org/project/layl...

Tried to place into level 2 spanish at the university program for foreigners here, hoped I might make level 3, worried Id have to go back to level 1. Folks, they put me in level 4, and offered me level 5, but I said I’d rather take it slow and really solidify skills. I am beaming

Only $3400 of the necessary $15K has been raised. We need every single academic who is still gainfully employed bc they have effectively risked nothing in their words or actions to stop the genocide to share and donate right now.

Love to take an academic test to decide my fate. Love a high pressure sitting and filling out trick questions situation

Writing feels so far away. I wonder why that is. I’ve been working here and there. Reading enough. Translating. What gives?