My apologies on not having posted in a while. Rest assured, I have not been idle during this break, but rather have been focusing my efforts on my "real" academic writing.

I will be travelling to Arizona and New Mexico on Friday where I hope to accomplish a few things, including sight seeing, visiting border towns, volunteer with Humane Borders, go to the Ancient Ways Arts Festival and Market in Zuni Pueblo, and meet with a few graduate coordinators at Arizona State University. Along with this, I intend to read Leslie Marmon Silko in public, and see if I can purchase a copy of Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years. This is, of course, in direct reference to the Tucson Unified School District's banning of texts (mostly by Native American and Chican@ authors), and I'd love to know how easy it is to find copies of these books in book stores, even though they were only officially banned in the school system.

I also am heading there to do some of what Monique Mojica would refer to as "body research". If I'm writing about the desert, the border, and the people who live in borderlands every day of their lives, I should really go and be there. Not to gain any sense of authority or authenticity, since that would of course position me in a colonial-tourist overseer kind of role, but to reconfigure my internal landscape that right now is based on the fiction I read, the photos I see, and the videos I watch.

I will be documenting the trip with photos, blog posts, and anecdotes (both theoretical and personal). It's about time I crossed some borders.