At the time I was driving a small Hyundai Accent, a relic from my high school days when it was the only car I could afford, and I needed a car living out in Framingham where I attended an alternative private school. Which was why I’d went to UMass Boston in the first place, actually. No grades, no transcript, a local state school seemed my best option, and even that took a lot of conversation about how they could possibly evaluate my application. I was advised to take a summer course on campus so they’d have at least one grade to judge my admissibility by. I took Introduction to Creative Writing. I (thankfully) remember very little of what I wrote for that class, but I do know that it must have been angst-ridden self-absorbed drivel. What really stuck with me was the reading assignments, from the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. A poem by Diane Ackerman, “sweep me through your many-chambered heart” which for years I recited to myself daily. Suddenly I was aware of not what was said but how it was said. And that made all the difference.

Two years later, after being admitted to UMass Boston (with the original intention to transfer somewhere “better”) and turning down an admission to a much fancier “writing-focused” undergraduate program in upstate New York, I was firmly embedded in the urban, working-class, diverse, mature writing community on campus. The Joiner Center Writer’s Workshop brought in poets like Martín Espada and Yousef Komunyakka; Askold brought in poets like Kevin Young and Tomas Sayers Ellis. I developed a new awareness of writing in the world, that writing didn’t have to be exclusively interior, or that interiority could become so much more. The personal, political.

It was then I met Adrienne Rich. I can’t call her Adrienne, we only had the briefest of encounters and it seems too personal to use her first name. Still, when I called her Ms. Rich she laughed. I picked her up in front of her hotel in Downtown Boston, on Commonwealth Ave. overlooking the Mall, part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace, a system of parks, fens, and rivers running through the city and, according to Wikipedia, “the only remaining intact linear park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first landscape architect.”

If I remember correctly, and likely I don’t, she was waiting for me on a bench outside the hotel. It was a lovely spring day. I knew it was her because I’d looked her up, and read as much of her poetry as I could in the previous few weeks, since Askold had told me I’d be given the honor of escorting her to campus. Other students were going to be escorting her on campus, sitting with her at the organized lunch. But I would be the first UMass Boston student she’d meet on this visit. I’d have the most time alone with her. I should use it well.

Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet and essayist. A pioneer feminist, gay-rights and anti-war activist.

I remember her being diminutive, surprisingly so. I remember her having a little difficulty walking, but not too bad, she said. She got into my car, double parked in the valet spot so she would have the smallest distance to cross. I remember turning it on, her commenting on the fact that I drove stick, chatting about that, about Boston, about how things have changed. I remember knowing the route I would take, knowing approximately how long I had, knowing that I had an obligation to impress her, on behalf of UMass Boston, that I had an obligation to get the most out of this encounter.

I remember silence. I remember wanting to talk with her about “Diving Into The Wreck,” about how reading it made me shiver with the memory of my own descents into water, into the world. I remember knowing that nothing I could say could really stick and hold. That whatever it had been that shook me when I read “The Art of Translation” had to do with her reaching into a tangle of associations I couldn’t even unravel and pulling. And pulling out from herself and out from me the sense that what I thought, what I experienced mattered, not despite my gender or politics but because of it. I remember wanting to tell her that she’d changed me, changed my writing, changed my view of the world and of art within it.

We arrived about twenty minutes later to campus, where I was to drop her off at the Healey Library basement. Lunch was on the 11th floor of the library, with views of Boston Harbor and Marina Island from the brick and concrete compound that was our campus, built in the 70s and capable of being entirely locked down in case of a student riot. The students never rioted. There are three ways into the Healey Library, which has its main entrance on its second floor. A set of concrete stairs suspended over the central brick plaza of the campus leading into the glass catwalk that connects all the buildings, because the snow and ice in the winter get whipped around by the wind off the ocean. Adrienne Rich couldn’t possibly be asked to climb a flight and a half of windy, concrete stairs.

The other way to get to the main entrance was from the catwalk itself, coming from the Administration building, recently converted into classrooms when Admissions and the Registrar and Financial Aid all moved over to the brand-new Campus Center, a shining white and glass building facing towards rather than away from the sea. Or from the Science building, one in which I spent almost no time at all. Both required a substantial walk in the catwalk, too far for Adrienne Rich to do comfortably.

So the only choice was through the basement, into the service elevator the facility managers used to bring the trash down to the loading dock. The garage had been closed for repairs – one of the problems of using poured concrete at the ocean was that the salt air ate away at structures. The garage may or may not be safe any longer. Students joked that it was closed because that’s where Jimmy Hoffa’s body had been disposed of, entombed among the concrete pillars in the yellow-light darkness of the UMass Boston parking garage. A joke that referred to the University’s supposed mob-ties, since William T. Bulger had been the president of the entire UMass system since 1996. His brother, Whitey, was arrested just last year after a 16-year man hunt by the FBI. He’d been living in a rent-controlled apartment in California.

We needed special permission to drive into the dilapidated garage, and we had it. I had practiced this before, walking through the library with T. Michael Sullivan, the coordinator of the Joiner Center’s Writing Workshop. We started on the 11th floor: “This is where we’ll have lunch.” and took the back elevator down to the Upper Level, which was 2 floors beneath the 2nd floor entrance to the library, where the doors opened into the damp dark of the abandoned garage. Michael lit a cigarette, sipped his coffee, and we stood there contemplating the cracked concrete. “You can park anywhere,” he said.

When Adrienne Rich and I parked in front of the elevator, Michael and Askold and two other students were there already, waiting for us. I helped her out of the car, carried her bag of books, Askold offered her his arm to help navigate the pocked cement floor. We climbed into the elevator and rode it to the light, airy glassed-in room on the 11th floor. Before we exited the elevator, Adrienne Rich thanked me, she gave me a slight, tentative hug.

I sat at a table far from her at lunch. I’d already had my allotted access to her. I sat in the front row for the reading, waited at the end of the line for her to sign my book afterwards. Askold had said she might not sign everyone’s book, depending on how her hands felt. But she persevered, I’d say over 50 copies, each one possible torture for her arthritic hands. Her commitment to us, her readers at this urban working-class state school, was palpable. She had said she would only sign one book per person, and though I had brought two, I only asked her to sign the copy of her collection of essays Arts of the Possible for my mother, a first-wave feminist and scholar.

I was the last person in line, though her escorts for the rest of the day were hovering behind her, waiting to move on to the next event, a private dinner with faculty. I thanked her for coming to UMass Boston. She saw that I was holding a copy of the recently-released Fox and asked me if I didn’t want her to sign it, to me, as well. Her hand shook and she wrote “For Erica -” at the top and her name at the bottom of the title page.

It is this copy of Fox I opened again today, to think of her in that moment, kind and generous, open and brilliant, a luminous figure with the sun glaring in from the ocean through the windows behind her. Her shaking hand. Her tentative embrace.

From the blog graffitimundo:

The walls of Buenos Aires have paid homage to Nestor Kirchner in various ways. In the immediate aftermath of his death, the words ‘Siempre Nestor’ were splashed across the city. To mark the one-month anniversary of Nestor Kirchner’s death, the political group La Campora distributed stencils to activists in every barrio of the capital, and the image of ‘El Nestornauta’ began to appear throughout Buenos Aires and beyond.

El Nestornauta is a combination of two images – the  face of Nestor Kirchner, wearing the suit of the classic Argentine comic character “El Eternauta“.

I’ve also been printing like a madwoman, making, among other cool things, these sweet postcards for Anomalous Press to hand out at AWP and display on the lovely Iowa Review table.

And wow, was AWP crazy this year. I wasn’t initially going to go, but then being only a few hours away driving, and getting to see all my conference-friends, and invited to a translator’s party, well…it was too good to resist. So I abandoned my responsibilities as a student and drove to Chicago and had a whirlwind three days. From dancing to early-90s hip-hop with Chad Post of Open Letter Books/Three Percent Blog and CJ Evans of the Center for the Art of Translation/Two Lines Journal (who has surprisingly awesome moves on the dance floor) to getting to hear Debra Di Blasi of Jaded Ibis Press talk about multi-modal literature, I had a wonderful conference experience.

But it was also really overwhelming. 10,000 writers, editors, academics, publishers, and spouses of the aforementioned all in the same space. I think there are a few things I’ve learned about conference attending over the last few years, and I’m going to crystallize them here.

1. Have a specific and limited agenda.

My first conference was ALTA in 2010, and I didn’t have any idea what it was going to be like. ALTA is a relatively small conference focused on literary translators, so a good intro to the conferencing experience. But I was still overwhelmed and confused, there were a lot of things I wanted to go to, and I also wanted to meet new people and hang out with friends, etc. It was hard to feel like I was getting what I wanted out of the experience. Then I went to MLA that same year, and talk about big and scary. But, I had a specific agenda at MLA: record the first five episodes of the Reading the World podcast. With that as a concrete agenda, I didn’t feel badly about missing several panels that looked potentially interesting, not going to all the parties and receptions I could have possibly gone to, and not seeing every single one of my friends who happened to be there. My first AWP was similar – I took responsibility for a table, and though I shared the sitting duties with other wonderful folks, I had a specific agenda. Be at the bookfair, hand out handmade broadsides. It was great because I just told people where to find me, and they came to me. And I got to meet a lot of new folks by sitting at the table. I went to only one panel, the last one of the conference, and thoroughly enjoyed it because I didn’t feel stressed about having missed other things happening. This AWP my agenda was to hang out with a specific friend and go to a specific party. It was accomplishable, and left time for a few other things like panels and wandering the bookfair, but in a limited and manageable way.

My takeaway: there will always be other conferences, so there’s no need to cram everything you might potentially do at the conference into this one. I get more out of what I’m doing when I’m not always thinking about the next thing, and that way I can let things unfold in a way that allows for great surprising things to happen, the real joy of conferences for me.

2. Warm up my voice.

Ok, this may just be me, but every conference I’ve been to in the past three years I’ve lost my voice entirely by the third day. It’s all the loud talking in the bookfair, in bars, in the lobby, just always having to shout over others. I apparently have weak vocal cords (thanks, dad) so I absolutely must remember to do vocal chord exercises in the weeks leading up to the conference. There’s nothing worse than wanting to have a conversation with someone and having to hope they can read your lips because your voice sounds like a frog with a sore throat is lodged between your vocal chords. Maybe I do an inordinate amount of talking, but there it is.

3. See the city, at least a little.

Some conferences have off-site events, or planned excursions, but I don’t always find those things as exciting as I do the things I just randomly discover by wandering. I’m a city-girl through and through and one of my favorite activities is discovering a new city by exploring and getting a little lost. I set aside a few hours on my second day to do this with a friend, and we wandered in the rain up Michigan Ave. to the Chicago Cultural Center where we discovered two amazing art exhibits, both totally free and open to the public, in an exquisite building. It was a nice interlude in all the conference madness, and a good reminder that there are amazing artistic things happening outside of AWP. Plus, the exhibit Morbid Curiosity was totally inspiring. A victorian-style curio collection of art that has to do with skulls and skeletons. Really a stunning exhibit.

4. Don’t just talk about yourself.

Seems sort of obvious, but a few friends have asked how I can hold conversations with complete strangers, and the answer is usually don’t talk about yourself. Ask questions. Be interested. Repeat. I see so many people at the bookfair at AWP especially just going up to tables and trying to talk about their own work, which from the other side of the table gets pretty blurry pretty fast. If you’re looking to make meaningful connections with publishers, editors and writers you admire, talk about things you have in common, not just your own interests and work. The way you find those things out are by asking good questions, and listening carefully. I had some amazing interactions at this bookfair with a few publishers I really admire. And though I do have some work I’m looking to place, I’m much more concerned with building genuine relationships with people I think are doing awesome and interesting things.

P.S. – The same is true for having a good twitter feed. It’s all about community-building.

5. Follow up right after the conference.

I got a bunch of cards, email addresses, and invitations to continue conversations after AWP. That’s what makes me excited about these conferences – the potential future relationships that I’m building. So it’s a good idea to do it right away. In the past, I’ve put it off feeling like I need to catch up on all the things I let lapse during my time at the conference. But now I’ve set aside the day after the conference ends for follow-up correspondance (and blogging, obviously). Otherwise it won’t get done.

Ok, so that’s it for me.

Last April during (but unrelated to) PEN World Voices, I (Erica Mena) had the great pleasure of meeting with Edith Grossman. Edith Grossman, in case anyone doesn’t know, is one of the most important translators of Spanish literature. If you google her, you’ll discover that she’s translated some of the best book of the twentieth century, over 60 at this point. She had spoken the week before at Boston University, and I had hoped she might be available then to talk about her new book Why Translation Matters_ but the timing didn’t quite work out. But I was to be in New York at least for the Best Translated Book Award, and she was available.

We met in her apartment in the city. If ever there were an environment which perfectly matched my impression of a person, this was it. We sat in at a table by the window in her living room, surrounded by books and art, the artifacts of a creative life. Some of the background noise you’ll hear is the city traffic, movers, people walking by, all part of what made this conversation so interesting.

Thanks, as always, to Matt Landry for providing technical expertise and to Open Letter for hosting and supporting us. Next month, we’ll be back with a conversation with translator Marian Schwartz and new co-host Anna Rosen Guercio.

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here. To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s Listen, use the following feed link. Or stream it from the Three Percent website.

Speaking of which, have you been on Amazon.com recently? Of course you have. So you’ve probably seen the heart-wrenching ASPCA add that makes me feel like a monster every time I buy something on Amazon instead of giving that money to sad homeless kittens. I’d insert it but I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a screen-shot of it. Anyway, as a grad student whose net worth is in the negatives by a lot, it’s hard for me to justify buying fresh fruit, much less giving money away. Still…that sad little kitten face makes me want to budget them in instead of food.

And so that’s what got me thinking about cats on the internet. Remember that Sprint commercial? “Now with 4G we can put even more cats on the internet.” Oh yeah.

Even people who aren’t necessarily defined as cat lovers in their everyday life likely spend a good amount of their internet time looking at cats. Pictures of cats doing weird things, with funny captions, videos of cats doing weird or cute or hilarious things.  Think about it this way – how many dog videos/image macros/memes can you think of? A handful, sure. But how many cats? Dozens, easily. Nyan cat, surprised kitten, keyboard cat, LOLcats, ceiling cat, talking cats, Maru, and that’s just off the top of my head. And not including cats on the internet for genuine cat lovers, like The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee.

So why are there so many cats on the internet? This seems like a question for the good folks at the Internet Research Institute, home of Know Your Meme and possibly one of the greatest sites in existence. Is it because dogs all do more or less the same things, while cats have an infinite variety of quirks? Or is it because people with cats are more likely to post their cats to the internet, whereas people with dogs are busy doing things like taking a walk?

I’ve been thinking about how this has possibly precipitated a social change regarding cats, too. The preponderance of cats on the internet doing cute/interesting things may make people more likely to consider having a cat in their life, or at least lessens the social stigma that used to be associated with being a “cat person.” Or, in my case, the potential of being a “cat lady.” Maybe?

Well, whatever the case, here’s my own contribution to cats on the internet:

And that concludes my procrastination for the day.

The title is a portmanteau, combining “eter” and “astronauta.” I created a similarly constructed English portmanteau combining “eternal” and “astronaut,” changing the “a” in “eternal” for the “o” in “astro” to create the prefix “eterno,” reminiscent of “cosmonaut” also. Since the words are cognates, I could have left it as The Ethernaut, but the emphasis on the first syllable in this word seems uncomfortable in English. Naturalness in English was a goal for me in this choice, and throughout, since there is such a specific register and level of expectations for comics writing in both English and Spanish. But I wanted to achieve that naturalness without grinding away at the literariness of the original work, one of its defining and most important features.

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/from-the-translator-the-eternonaut#ixzz1jGCKNl7k

Here’s a little from my introduction to the work on the site:

The Eternonaut does what science fiction can do so well, asks hard questions about the world, and wonders what we can do to change things. At the end, the comic writer wonders, is telling the story enough? Perhaps not, but then again, it might be. Oesterheld uses the vehicle of the story to engage with many of the pressing global political issues of the time, but from a distinctly Argentinian point of view. There are references, overt and implicit, to the Cold War. But the perspective is unfamiliar to readers in the U.S. It isn’t the red-scare propaganda; neither is it anti-capitalism propaganda.

Read the rest of the excerpt here!

But by night, I’m an ass-model turned actress who lives in L.A. and gets into fistfights with other ass-models on VH1. Be amazed at how much I can fit in to just one life!

But seriously, since Erica Mena got into that fistfight, I’ve been getting called all sorts of names on Twitter, because my handle is @ericamena and my alter-ego’s is @erica_mena and the brilliant people who watch that show and think an appropriate reaction is to insult strangers by any means available can’t remember to use an underscore.

What’s interesting is we’re about the same age, as far as I can tell, and we’re both Puerto Rican. But I grew up in Boston, and she grew up in New York, and she has a child, and I do not, and she’s comfortable being naked in front of large groups of people and I’m not.

Of course we’re not the only “Erica Mena”s in the world, though some of her usernames are “Only1EricaMena” which strikes me as sort of silly. But according to Facebook there are dozens of other “Erica Mena”s out there, most of whom appear to be significantly younger than us. But for some reason, I’m getting a lot of the “ericamena” usernames: gmail, Twitter, MySpace (remember that?), Instagram. But not Facebook, or .com so y’know, its sort of even.

So, to conclude. Erica Mena (poet):

Erica Mena (model):

So I waited a month, figuring that Apple would get their shit together, before doing the update on my brand-new-in-September MacBook Pro. Which I love. I did the update last weekend and have so far spent six hours on the phone with Apple tech support trying to resolve the half-dozen issues the update created on my computer.

First it broke my bluetooth, a huge problem for me because I rely on a smartmouse and mac bluetooth keyboard to not have excruciating back pain while I work. It took all of Sunday, the day I did the update, to fix.

In the meantime, while my husband was pulling out all the stops to fix it, it broke my Time Machine back-up. I tried to revert to the previous OS using my time machine backup to see if that would fix the bluetooth problem, and instead it stopped the restore half-way through, effectively losing me half my files. So Monday morning I tried to restore again, only to have it fail half-way through again, because two PDF read-mes that had come with a font I bought six years ago had been automatically locked. By Lion. And I couldn’t unlock them.

Another two hours on tech support (and an incredibly rude person who told me it was an Adobe problem and I should call them, then hung up on me) and I finally got that fixed. But then, the next time I tried to back up using Time Machine, it deleted my entire history of back-ups on the Time Machine drive, and then failed to back up. So yeah, that makes me feel great. I tried using another hard drive for the Time Machine, one twice as big, formatted so it’s totally clean to start. Still, back ups are failing. I’ve managed one successful back up since last Sunday.

In the meantime, my spotlight has been broken, re-indexing every few days and taking hours to do it, not finding files I can literally see on my desktop. And every time I go in to repair permissions in Disk Utility it finds dozens of system core permissions that need to be repaired, the same handful, and repairs them. Even if I do it twice in a row, without doing anything else on the machine in between.

This, of course, means that everything is running unbearably slow. Oh, and my wifi is cycling on and off, connecting sometimes, booting me, and then not detecting my home network. And I can no longer connect remotely to my other computer. And it is randomly ejecting my external hard drives. And automatically shutting down SugarSync, one of the programs I rely on to do work across computers.

So I’m reverting. Luckily my old computer, the one this MacBook Pro was bought to replace, is still running 10.6 and I’m going to use its time machine to restore this computer to how it was in September, when I got it. I just hope I don’t lose all my files in the process. And sadly, we don’t live within 4 hours of an Apple store, so we’re on our own, with the dodgy phone tech support.

What happened, Apple, Steve Jobs died and quality control went to hell?

I recently talked to my mother about replacing her old Toshiba laptop with a MacBook Air. I’m a big fan of Apple in general, and think they make better systems than anyone else. But she could never in a million years handle all this. So if this is the future of Apple…it’s looking pretty bleak.