Interior of Antena Books / Libros Antena, photos by Allyn West unless noted
Antena Books / Libros Antena is John Pluecker’s installation open now at Project Row Houses through June 24. Inside, unfinished bookshelves teeter against the walls, where multilingual titles, translations, and experimental writing from small presses in the U.S. and Latin America are available for purchase and perusal. The walls are bare, save for two hanging T-shirts with the face of Trayvon Martin and a few penciled-in poems — a passage from Longfellow and a fragment of verse in Spanish. A reading couch slumps in the corner, draped in baggy fabric, near a computer programmed to create Oulipo-esque etrecissements, or cut-ups, of Shakespeare. Two vintage typewriters—bought for $5—are ready for anyone to come in and bang out something in whatever language she feels like using. Described as a “pop-up bookstore” and “a literary experimentation lab,” Antena Books / Libros Antena functions as both of these things. Though it seems to function best as a symbol.
“The A/C is on the fritz,” Pluecker warns me as I come in. He and his collaborator, Jen Hofer, are sewing on covers for a new anthology, En las maravillas / In Wonder. The row house reminds you of what it must have been like (and how it still is for some) to live in Houston without refrigerated air. Ten minutes go by, and I’m sweating, my jeans sticking to my knees, and I’m starting to smell. This space makes me think that this is good; I’ve been taken out of my comfort zone.
Interior of Antena Books / Libros Antena
Pluecker and Hofer met about 10 years ago at a conference called Writing Lab on the Border, in Tijuana, where Pluecker was one of just three from the U.S. enrolled in Hofer’s workshop in multilingual writing. The two struck up a friendship. Both work as interpreters committed to social justice, and they crossed paths at movement gatherings and conferences across the country. Eventually, these coincidences developed into a collaborative partnership. As a commitment to their work, they decided to go in together and purchase a new alternative technology called the BabelBox. It is a kind of radio in a box. Just like that iPod thing in your car, the BabelBox broadcasts from an available FM frequency. Creating a more expedient experience from the original expression to the interpretation, mitigating the delay, the BabelBox facilitates an audience’s presence and participation. It makes the argument that, in a multilingual space, everyone needs an interpreter.
Hofer and Pluecker didn’t see why this work couldn’t coincide with their practice as artists and writers. They agreed that “language helps us recognize the history of the place,” as Pluecker says. Eventually, they arrived, almost simultaneously—they argue, playfully, about who called whom—at the idea of creating a multilingual space, where there could be no dominant language. The space would be an act of destabilization—in concept and in practice. They remain careful to say that that they’re not doing this to or for speakers of English. Because that would confirm English as the dominant language, the one that needs to be respected, foremost. Anyone who’s speaking anything other than English in that space would be made to feel inferior, subordinate, would be forced to wait her turn to understand or ask questions. Antena Books / Libros Antena arose, finally, out of this concern.
John Pluecker at Antena Books / Libros Antena
But language has always been an obsession, Pluecker says. Born in Houston to a family of German immigrants who had been in the region for seven generations, he grew up in Washington D.C. speaking English at home and Spanish with several friends in his neighborhood. Living as a writer, translator, editor, and curator in Mexico—including Tampico, Monterrey, Tijuana—Pluecker has returned, left, and come back again to Houston since 2001. He wanted to become fluent in Spanish and enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Houston. He also worked at Arte Publico Press, which has recently moved into a new space at UH’s Energy Research Park. (The press gained recent notoriety when books it published were banned by the Arizona Department of Education for promoting “ethnic studies.”) Pluecker then completed an M.F.A. in writing at UC San Diego.
Now, Pluecker says about 20 people a day come into Antena Books / Libros Antena. He has held writing workshops with elementary students. In May, during Boldface: A Conference for Emerging Writers, held at UH, Pluecker welcomed a group of conferees. Introducing them to the space, he then had them pull the black-and-white placards that are available for free in the mailbox on the porch. The conferees made cut-ups, creating poems and cards out of the materials on hand.
While we’re talking, a dozen students from Alvin, Texas, during what they’re calling “Mission Week,” come in. Some laze on the reading couch, others browse the shelves, play with the typewriters. Pluecker stands to welcome them, explain, show them around. As the students type, Pluecker asks them to make sure they hang their writing on the “Documentation Pillar.” Every word written here has been posted, secured by binder clips suspended from pushpins. Pluecker then describes the computer’s program. One kid says, “Reading Shakespeare is so boring.”
Project Row Houses, photo from Glasstire.com
My impulse, from across the room, is to mutter something pedagogical, to educate this young man about Shakespeare’s emotional complexity and linguistic exuberance. To say, in other words, that he’s wrong. But Pluecker says nothing. The space makes me think this must be a strategy on Pluecker’s part. This young man has every right to find Shakespeare boring, Pluecker’s silence seems to suggest. The space is conducive to this, finally: nothing’s privileged where everything’s encouraged.
Hofer, in town from L.A., will be joining Pluecker in the space, open from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., through its closing on June 24. This Wednesday, June 20, Hofer will be hosting the final Read/Write Club from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. The book up for discussion that night is by Dolores Dorantes, a poet from Ciudad Juarez. (The poems are translated by Hofer.) Writing exercises will follow. Antena Books / Libros Antena will celebrate its run on Saturday, June 23, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., during The Moving Word / La Palabra Movil. Musical performances and a DJ will accompany readings, art, and a community potluck behind Project Row Houses.
