As per the title of this venue, I've been chewing the fat of the voice. The assumed/conjured voice, rather. If agency is nowhere, or with the spooks (Spicer), or with me, who am I to unfold? If the "me" is not I, if the "I" ain't me, is a trick being played? Do we not enjoy tricks?
As a response to the charge that contemporary American literature is simply too insulated (Click-Me), I placed myself firmly within the equation of utility (user+subject=used subject) that develops away from utility toward exploitation. To see what's what, and... who's what. Stories of platform (you know, for conjuring over) I stuck with:
-33 Chilean miners trapped a half mile underground for 70 days.
-Red toxic sludge flood in Hungary.
-Mexican bicentennial amid nationwide drug war.
My response (American, to be sure) was firstly in the very approach. My efforts to keep informed of the Chilean miner situation involved simply reading the paper and collecting clippings, eyeing the telly, catching online updates (as they arrived at me, akin to how an average (?) American might've stumbled to them), discussing the stories with friends and strangers.
Secondly, the method of composing a response was a sort of conjuring, allowing the writing to respond for and about itself: several references to purchasing. Mentionings, also, of the agony of citizenship, beer, significant periods of time spent in alleys, fog horns, solitude, colonialism, blind dogs, elections, outsourcing dangerous industrial practices, crooked politicians, general and acute paranoia, rejection of the body as representative shell of character, insomnia, wondering where they buried Garcia Lorca.
I stuck with these stories for as long as they were carried by The NY Times, SF Chronicle, and USA Today.
What is ultimately, though not solely, fascinating is the fact that in the case of the miners, they began to exploit the system that championed their story, then marketed themselves to become compensated through it. Holla.
They became agents of their own exploits. Kardashians without ever having to... do whatever the Kardashians did to become The Kardashians. Had they and their dyer situation not been utilized, exploited to sell papers ( comment on mining conditions in the country, reflect the efficient leadership of the Chilean president, even showcase the global engineering technologies industry to the whole wide world ) they would not now have the opportunity to utilize, exploit that same audience to get that chedduh by selling interviews, sponsoring themselves out to various causes/products, signing autographs at malls, appearing on Letterman.
