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| biography:
William
Anthony Nericcio alternative webINDEX | tex[t]-mexgalleryblog |
 eliable
dispatches from elite West Coast spies reveal that William Anthony
Nericcio (aka "Memo," aka "Bill") presently toils as
Professor and Chair of English
and Comparative Literature at San Diego
State
University.
Other clandestine West Coast agents confirm that he labors there in various
academic disguises including: American Literature scholar,
Latin American Studies prof, Chicana/Chicano Studies devotee, ALA/Choice Award Winning Film
Studies Guru, Cultural Studies maven, and, last but not least, feverish rasquache Tejano acolyte of Deconstruction; however, it should be added that other embedded shady narcs contend these diverse academic pursuits are a front for Nericcio's
true obsessions: graphic design, web-surfing, Man Ray's photography, Euro/Indy
movies, Bill Elder, Remedios Varo,
Jacques Derrida, Severo Sarduy,
Rosario Castellanos, and Meret Oppenheim.
Before
joining SDSU's crack team of talented, exegetic misfits, Nericcio held earlier
postings at The
University of Connecticut, his first, most infamous English Department posting, and at Cornell
University, where, working with taskmaster mentors (Carlos Fuentes,
Dominic LaCapra, Edgar Rosenberg, Wolfgang Holdheim, Nelly Furman, Enrico Mario
Santí, Gayatri Spivak and Henry
Louis
Gates Jr.), he completed his doctoral degree in Comparative Literature
with
a dissertation entitled The
Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas.
Our well-paid East Coast gumshoes and informants tell odd,
whispered
tales regarding Nericcio's time in Ithaca: his enigmatic midnight chats
with Vladimir Nabokov's surly ghost far above Cayuga's waters; his now epic 2am
street-fight with four drunk Cornell gringo frat-rats in a snowstorm near
the corner of Court and Tioga; his critical theory lucha libre disputes with
Derrida-glosser Jonathan Culler and his curious better-half, Cynthia
Chase
(a relative of once-funny, SNL-alum Chevy Chase), who deemed
Nericcio's hieroglyphic
notetaking a mark of incipient moronity; his legendary tequila-induced,
body-sculpture-snow-angel-making
with LA playwright Oliver
Mayer at the top of the Buffalo
St. hill; and lastly, his
boisterous conjunto
dancing alongside Carlos Fuentes in an Ithaca Union hall. Sadly, our
usually
reliable 'townie' snitches loitering outside the
Haunt have failed to document these claims.
Our
diligent Northern Mexican agents recently discovered that Nericcio, a
recovering
Catholic school boy from South Texas (seized 1st-grade snapshot to your
left),
received
his Bachelor's
of
Arts degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin
(1984),
this while working part-time at the Texas Tavern (now demolished) and The
Cactus Cafe
as a barrista/bartender and prowling posh 6th Street
cocktail
lounges. This was also the time when Nericcio, along with Jay Whitley
aspired to 80s, new-wave, music stardom in the indy, third-coast, rock
combo, The Dyed Blondes--de rigueur recording studio snapshot to your right.
Now
headquartered near the California/Mexico border with SDSU, he serves on
the faculty of the Center
for Latin American Studies, The
Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences (MALAS) and the Department
of Chicana and Chicano Studies in addition to his English
and CompLit chairing/professor duties. A
native son of Laredo,
Texas,
with assorted ancestors hailing from General
Téran & Monterrey, Mexico, Partanna, Sicily, and (it is
silently whispered) the merry ol' island of England, Nericcio tells
anyone
willing to listen that he is a post-Movimiento Chicano. In
this vein, the
testimony of well-placed former students is useful, with numerous
depositions existing that attest to Nericcio being a 'a Sicilian
Tejano' or to him publicly declaiming nostalgic, nationalistic odes to Flaco
Jimenez,
La Llorona, 'Tejas' and the Rio Grande river. Other witnesses
speak
of overhearing eloquent soliloquies in San Diego dive bars wherein Nericcio, between sips, confesses his obsessions with Sleestaks, The Get-Away Chase
Game, Al Jaffee, Monty Python, Kurt
Wiese, Captain
Kangaroo, Mannix, The Banana Splits,
Medical Center, Wacky Packages,
La India María, Godzilla
vs. The Smog Monster, Land
of the Lost, Dean Martin, Los Polivoces, Mil Mascaras, the late
Edward Said,
Gamera,
and HR
Pufnstuf.
Nericcio
has published articles on Orson
Welles's proto-Chicano masterpiece Touch of Evil1,
Octavio Paz's shrouded schizophrenic political oscillations (Siglo
XX/20th
Century: Critique & Cultural Discourse, 10:1-2 1992-93), and
Jorge
Luis Borges's, Eugène Delacroix's, and Jacques Derrida's
unlikely
textual mènage-á-trois
in Susan Daitch's LC.
In 1996, Nericcio's "Artif[r]acture:
Virulent Pictures, Graphic Narrative, and the Ideology of the
Visual"--the sprawling, illustrated essay was one of the first
scholarly pieces to appear on comics in academe.
In 1998, his illustrated exposé on Speedy Gonzales, "Autopsy
of a Rat: Odd, Sundry Parables of Freddy Lopez, Speedy Gonzales, and
Other
Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual
Emporium," was brought kicking and screaming into the world by Camera
Obscura, A Journal of Feminism Culture and Media Studies--now
distributed
by Duke
University
Press.
2002 saw the appearance of three publications: 1) a
revised and expanded essay on Rita
Hayworth, electrolysis, and the
existential in Violence and the Body; 2) a
gratuitously illustrated meditation on Gilbert Hernandez's illustrated
biography of Frida Kahlo (detail opposite) in NYU Press's Latina/o Popular
Culture;
and 3) a
short rant on anti-undocumented worker violence, the Marquis de Sade, and
California law enforcement for BAD SUBJECTS, UC Berkeley's HOT Lefty rag. A more recent opus (2004), ten years in the making, for The
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies examines the
Paul
Reubens' masturbation scandal back in the 1990s and is entitled "Watching Critics, Watching Journalists,
Watching Sheriffs, Watching Pee-wee Herman Watch: The Extraordinary
Case
of the Saturday Morning Children's Show Celebrity Who
Masturbated"--reliable
snitches claim the highlight of the opus is some odd revelation about
transvestites, Medical
Center, and Robert Reed, the pater familias on the Brady
Bunch. Other
not-so-recent and recent scholarly gigs include Nericcio's London
lecture,
"In
the Storm of the Eye: Pages Torn From a Voyeur Semiotician's Diary
During
the Plague of Bad Theory"(1998), for Goldsmith
College and the Institute of
International
Visual Arts (inIVA) and "Cinematography,
Photography and Literature: Robert Frank's Aesthetic Triptych"
(2000)
for the Museum of Photographic Arts
(MoPA),
San Diego. Nericcio's
also has lectured abroad at the Freud
Museum in London where he spoke on the 'fertile' connection between
Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic work and the Viennese wizard's collection of
erotic
antiquities--this took place during a Fall 2001 Semester in London
where
Nericcio worked as a Visiting Senior Lecturer in Literature for the Foundation
for Interational Education and SDSU (note the surveillance photo to
your right, that's him with the strange expression standing by Freud's
infamous couch).
Apparently the Freud Museum guards failed to inform London authorities
of various improprieties with Herr Sigmund's couch as in San Diego,
Spring
2002, this candid shot was taken of Nericcio ranting about Nietzsche at
a pacific REVIEW public
reading.
2003 opened with Nericcio joining the editorial advisory board of GOBSHITE
QUARTERLY an independent international literary
magazine.

Travel
also seemed to be on the agenda with lectures at NEMLA, The
University of Connecticut's Department of English, and Brown
University's Department of Africana Studies, topped off with a
visit
to the Netherlands where Nericcio chaired a panel and delivered a
lecture
at the first
Congress
of the International Association of American Studies in Leiden. Summer
2003 found him once again leading a group of adventurous SDSU students
to London
for the 1st annual LONDON CALLING, SDSU Summer Program. He has subsequently led UK-junkets in 2005 and 2007.

November
2003
saw Nericcio working as the warm-up act (spycam shot opposite) for the Ballet
Nacional de Cuba for the La Jolla Music Society. December 2003,
Nericcio
delivered a harangue for Affirmative Action at the San Diego MLA
for its ADE/ADFL enclaves. In February 2004,
Nericcio enjoyed his
Spring
sabbatical--but took a break from occasional naps by jetting up
to
the East Coast in February for a cool Gangster Symposia at the SUNY
Stony Brook Humanities Research Institute--click young John Gotti's
mug to your right for more info.
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In
Summer 2004, Nericcio,
taking a break from the vagaries of the
University
Lecture Hall, traded chalk for pine tar as he played utility outfielder
for the league-leading National
City Dukes in the San Diego Adult Baseball League. Fall 2004
he started up with his Sinematic
Bodies: Intro to Lit and Film circus (which featured, among other
things, a
mad dash across campus by mimes (chapeau Antonioni) and started
overseeing
the production of cultural studies tomes with Harry Polkinhorn for Hyperbole
Books--touted by the one and only, notorious and untoward Playboy
Magazine
(scroll
down
to the SDSU-link on the left hand side). Spring 2005 saw the
startup
of his Freud's
Bastard
Children class and the Literature
After Derrida lecture series. Fall 2005 saw Nericcio
lead a graduate seminar
on his fallen guru Jacques Derrida and teach a
comedy seminar in honor of his mentor, Richard Simon. 2006
was filled with flights of sinemadness
with Michael Powell and Walker Percy; frolics in the imperial
bedroom, with James Joyce, Homer and Carlos Fuentes; prowls
down
the alleyways of film
noir and pulp fiction with Orson Welles and Quentin Tarantino; and
ended explosively with 500 students in
Wiik Auditorium. 2007 began with a bang as Nericcio finally finished his 16-years-in-the-making magnum
opus for the University of
Texas Press, Tex[t]-Mex:
Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--it appeared
January 15, 2007.
Since 2007 and into 2008, the Laredo ex-patriot has been spotted at
Oberlin College, Purdue University, USC, Los Angeles's Skylight Books,
The Universty of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas, San Antonio,
and the University of San Diego hawking his wares and generally trying
to invoke academic mischief. In February 2009, Nericcio is rumored to
be invading Ohio State University for a lecture and signing. Summer 2009 finds the Laredo exile back in London teaching and, in the fall, finishing his follow-up book to Tex[t]-Mex, Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race.
Indulgent
visitors to this page waiting for hell to freeze-over can peek at
online
syllabi from Nericcio's courses (click on the images below) or sample
this
alternative index
of WWWeb-based shenanigans where many of his essays are available in
Adobe's
ubiquitous pdf format. Also available are two
illustrated fragments
from
his theoretical memoir on the US/Mexico border: "REMEMBER"
& "CHISME";book
reviews of Charles Bukowski's finale Pulp,
Rudolfo Anaya's new age weeper Jalamanta,
and Richard Rodriguez's bizarre smash bestseller Days
of Obligation (these pieces originally appeared in World
Literature Today); an
illustrated transcript of Nericcio's MOPA introduction to Robert
Frank's,
Alfred Leslie's, Jack Kerouac's and Allen Ginsberg's Pull My Daisy
(popthe Kerouac balloon floating to your right); and lastly, a scathing
send-up of Ray Bradbury's, Edward James Olmos's and Disney's
cine-chimera, The
Wonderful Ice Cream Suit--lick the tasty yellow helado/popsicle
opposite.
Lastly
(for the poor, misbegotten soul who has scrollled this far down the page!), do please
click on the picture here to your right to view the birth of Nericcio's
efforts as a
Ford Focus Spanish-language voiceover star and would-be commercial
actor. Or, alternatively, click this link
to see a newspaper story for which Nericcio SWEARS he did not pay or
another yellow
press wonder that documents the trials and tribulations of teaching
500 student classes at SDSU.
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Footnotes
1.
There is some archival evidence
of a personal connection to Welles; The Library of Congress has
graciously
allowed us to repost a facsimile of this Los Angeles Herald-Tribune
fragment;
the photographer is unknown. L of C forensic photographic
specialists
date the piece to around 1967.
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