Illegitimi non carbarondum.

- new mantra to combat my anxieties about grad school, job prospects, finding something useful to do with myself, and how to properly order such things.

On blogger's block

I don't suffer writer's block, as far as I can tell, by any means. I always have something going on in my mind that I could write on. At least, there's always something on NPR I can put my 2 semi-Marxist cents in.* But I suffer some anxiety about choosing something to write about, and the struggle between writing to get something out of my mind and providing it due context results in a typically stagnant blog. Fortunately, I am reminded that this sense of "it's not enough" is not only a phenomenon of bloggers, who have no imposing editors or deadlines, in that academic and professional writers are no more immune to that sense of incompleteness. Rex from SavageMinds writes:

There is a saying that works of art are never finished, only abandoned. This definitely seems to be true of academic works as well—or at least the ones I right. I don’t think I’ve ever ‘finished’ something such that I’ve read it over, thought it over, and said “there is nothing more to be done to this—it is finished.” Instead, I finish projects in one of two ways: first, the deadline hits and I have to send it off or, second, I wake up one morning and realize that I have just stopped caring about it and it is done.

I write mostly for practice and as an outlet for my cluttered mind, but this is often to myself, which if presented as decontextualized as it would be to an outsider, it could be read as poetry or nonsense. And really, it just is so much work to make something consistent and readable. In the interest of having something that others can see, I have to a) stop being lazy and b) let go of the anxiety of putting myself out there without sufficient disclaimer. And fortunately for blogs, you don't have to post complete works, or even complete thoughts. For the umpteenth, I tell myself I have no excuses to not write more than I do on this thing.

Does anyone else suffer from these blogging anxieties? While some discretion is managed through the content, the medium of the blog is quite expository, so it's best that you not write anything that you wouldn't mind just anyone knowing.

And some questions for academics: I believe that, typically, academic writers publish in a highly specialized, often impersonal, language in sanctioned media so that they are often, though I understand not all the time, coccooned from that sense of raw exposure. Which leads me to: Do academic writers feel a similar vulnerability when they move to writing about themselves in more open, public sphere, i.e. blogs, or are they more grateful for a less restrictive outlet? Are they apprehensive about exposing themselves to their peers, or do they see it as an opportunity to be more open with eachother?

* I consciously acknowledge the irony and/or sense of this phrase.

"Dare"

-Gui

My story with Gui began in January of this year, about 3 months ago. I came across this ESL / immigrant services organization over the winter, loved their set up, and signed myself up as a volunteer to teach-assist ESL / TESOL classes. When there weren't any spots for me at the times I was available, I was asked if I would like to tutor a unique case, rare enough apparently that there weren't yet classes targeted at his level. This was Gui, an illiterate student from Central America whose English language levels were too low for any of the beginner classes. Although there was a literacy class offered, it was usually geared toward students who already had at least an intermediate speaking level. And because he spoke hardly any English, my Spanish would come in handy to tutor him.

Gui presented a challenge from the start. For all the sorrowful circumstances of Central America in the 1980s (I'm not sure how old he really is), he never had any formal education. He speaks a rural dialect of Spanish so informal that many other native speakers, let alone I, can't understand him. On top of that, he is shy, and self-conscious at the times that his lack of education stands out by say, not knowing how to spell words in his own language. He did have a couple things going for him, his desire to learn not the least of them. He was already familiar with some of the alphabet, and some of the sounds associated with the letters in Spanish, which allowed me to skip ahead only a little bit.

The truth is, his issues make up only half the challenge, and it has been a learning experience just as much for me as for him. I had virtually no teaching experience starting out, and just a glimmering concept of the needs of an illiterate student. Consistently being prepared for each lesson, rather than and winging it on a loose framework of methods so that lessons would devolve into translate-and-memorize sessions, is something that I am learning to appreciate as I get better at it. I began with only lofty ideas of what it means to be a teacher, and only recently have I realized that effective teaching defies many democratic predispositions. Fortunately, the knowledge and educational gap between Gui and me is so wide, and his commitment to learning is high enough that I don’t believe that he had lost any esteem for me as a teacher by the time I did come to this understanding.

As you can imagine, I watch for evidence of progress through a hazy shield through which I cannot distinguish what is only momentarily understood and what has been ingrained, what is deduction and what is simple repetition. My inexperience, or lack of knowing exactly how to measure this progress while teaching at the same time, only makes the vigilance hazier. So today when, Gui, of his own accord, read a caption from a magazine cutout and pronounced the word “dare” correctly, perfectly, long “a”, silent “e” and all, rather than “da-ray,” as I would expect him to, I jumped happily on the inside. Two weeks after suffering through a 2 hour session on the long “a” sound which at the time seemed hardly productive, this pronunciation today showed something definitely stuck. Yes, any other time, he might have gotten it wrong, but it was in his brain somewhere, and I know he didn’t get it from anywhere else but one place.

If a Western scholar does not understand colonial affairs, he will never understand the world.

-House of Glass

There is almost no place on earth that has not been touched or shaped by colonialism. Despite the [to say it generously] liberation of many colonized societies, colonialism, or the philosophies and attitudes of difference that sanction dominance and subordination, has not died. And to put it more radically, colonization has not died. Because colonialism is about power based on illusory differences, and because illusory differences continue to be nurtured in our day-to-day life, understanding the relationship between the two is pertinent to understanding how our own political and social encounters operate on that relationship, so that ultimately, hopefully, individually and collectively, we can challenge those illusions and their consequences.

A crash course can be found in The Buru Quartet, set in Dutch-governed Indonesia at the beginning of the 20th century. It was told orally by Pramoedya Ananta Toer during his political imprisonment in the 1950s in Indonesia, and put in writing with the help of his fellow prisoners once he was allowed pen and paper. The story is nothing short of exposure, from the inside out, of everything you didn’t get out of middle school about colonizers and colonized, which is why the books were banned in Indonesia until 1999. Over the course of the quartet, the author profiles nearly every imaginable character in the colonial setting, from the mixed-blood children of Native concubines, their fathering Dutch officials, to the most educated Natives. Toer chooses two special cases to narrate the rise of Indonesian nationalism. The first is Minke, a privileged, educated Native Javanese man, who rejects the career path of a government doctor to open the first Native newspaper. The second, who continues Minke’s story in the fourth book, is Jacques Pangemanann, a Native police officer, born and educated in France, who is hired as a colonial government researcher and shadow policy writer assigned with the task of keeping Indonesia’s organizations and nationalism in check, by whatever means necessary. The comparison is clear: both are Natives, educated with the same European values of equality and empirical knowledge, but they consciously choose different paths. One challenges the hegemonic structures around him, and the other works for it. The reader is left to judge each character for how they handle their burden of knowledge, in light of the exposed hypocrisy of Western civilization of which they both become conscious - that the values of education and equality are only good for some people, and not for others.

And the reader is left to contend with relativistic idea #1, that maybe Indonesia and other pre-colonial societies would have been better off without “European values,” colonization aside. This is highlighted more by Minke’s comparisons of the brutality of Dutch colonialism to that of the kings of his Native ancestors. Self-determination is not simply a European value, but a human value, that simply happened to be most articulated in history by the French Revolution. It is not the dream of lofty intellectuals, but a living struggle, and you can choose to be on either side of it, educated or not, as long as you have some semblance of morals, like Surati, who intentionally inoculates herself with smallpox so that she would infect the Dutch official taking her as a concubine (see Chapter 2 of Footsteps for a beautiful, though sad, story of hegemony and resistance). And so there is no excuse for relativistic idea #2, that Pangemanann might be forgiven for his choices, even though they contradicted everything he had ever learned, despite being a student at the Sorbonne, because he ultimately felt guilty. It is not enough to be educated, and it is not enough to know that your actions are wrong and feel sorry for them. Was he a good man? It seems he asserts for himself, that, despite his self-abasement, history, or the world outside of his own conscience, would ultimately be his judge.

In novel form, the Buru Quartet is a study in the psychological and social workings of hegemony and resistance. Psychological because it reads like personal notes or a journal, internal and reflective throughout the actions of the narrators and the characters around them. Social because each character, and his/her actions, is positioned in the context of the colonial setting - how they adopt it, speak it, take advantage of it, or resist it. What is also unique is that it feels so close to real life. Minke does not climactically “awaken.” Rather, he learns slowly (for a book), through a series of events, conversations, and personal reflections, in the same way that we really do learn new ways of thinking. Pangemanann struggles continuously through his choices, as a morally conscious person would, but distinguishes between what he thinks and what he does. The reading is thick, but the exposure of our cultural history and human character is highly relevant as long as there is anyone who is oppressed by other human beings.

Phillies vs. Obama

If it comes between watching the Phillies win tonight and being disenchanted by a third presidential debate, I think I'll take the former. I'm banking on my team knowing how to play baseball better than my candidate knowing how to debate.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman explains how the format of political debates (among other things) has been cut into a visually-oriented presentation that takes away the intellectual spar that characterizes a debate, due to the medium on which it is presented: television. Because television has a certain program schedule, the debate cannot under any circumstance run any longer than the time slot allowed by the network, no matter how important anything that anyone has to say. In the debates this year, each candidate has been allowed about 2 minutes to answer a question asked by the presider, and say, a one-minute follow-up per candidate. These time restraints limit the substance of their responses, so rather than constructing well-supported arguments that might require more time, they are forced to economize their answers in a way that will elicit the most response from a general audience in a short period of time. No time for in-depth responses, nothing that will challenge the status quo of values, no follow-up questions from the audience even in the faux "town-hall format." In other words, a 75 minute series of commercials.

Postman goes on to talk about the how medium of television has watered down the general expectation of intellectual substance in both politics and education. Because it is not interactive, because it presents no opportunity for dialogue, it is not a medium for democracy. And because television, as a visual medium, must constantly be visually stimulating. Otherwise, no one will pay attention. The big networks believe this. Compare the flashy icons, bells-and-whistles programming on CNN and Fox to cut-and-dry style of PBS. Which network is being watched more?

Even watching this game on Fox gives me a headache. Almost half the screen is blotched with icons. And every other play is interceded by some playback sponsored by some fast food or SUV corporation.

I've compromised and decided to watch the debate between the Phillies at the plate. Or I could just watch the campaign ads during commercial breaks....

If you want to be a good archaeologist, you've got to get out of the library.

-Indiana Jones

Or how about the university?

Or this stupid laptop, with which I am cultivating this love-hate relationship day to day. While it is indispensible for writing, storing, and organizing information, more time in front of it than is necessary for these things just represents to me how much I am not doing something else.

On the other hand, what archaeology of human thought can be found as readily as it can be right here on the webpages of abandoned blogs? Do these qualify as artifacts?

I leave that to someone else, because inevitably useful as it is, my life is bent on trying to understand everything outside this box.

grown-ups need playgrounds

"You look like a bat hanging there," a little black girl said to me, no older than 9 or 10 years, as I hung upside down on the monkey bars at the playground today.

I helped Soraya, temporarily in my care on the good faith of her parents a short walk away, as she tried to grab on to the next bar while she hung on the first one. "I can't do it!" She jumped down. The black girl tried after her. After a few bars she also gave up.

"I used to be able to do it," she said. "But now I'm fat."

"Me, too, I'm fat," repeated Soraya.

Where did they learn to say such a thing?

It seemed like the United Nations called a picnic day at Marsh Creek. There were people of all colors, ages, religions, and my white skin was practically a minority. Not really tempered to being around children, it was so refreshing to see how open they were with each other to take turns or help (or ask for help) regardless of any racial or gender differences.

A pat on my leg turned out to be a tiny Asian girl pointing to a low platform that was still too high for her to reach herself. No words. A clear, simple message.

"Is that your daughter? Is that your son?" said the first girl, referring to those knee-highs that had enlisted my help. What a great way to feel useful in a short period of time.

"No. I am only attached to that one." I pointed to Soraya.

I have no idea who these kids are, I wanted to say.

I think grown-ups need playgrounds.