Yet another random thought gone bad: This Pirate Life

Strange Machinery OR Peculiar Institution

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:34:48 GMT

A newspaper sets an essay assignment, to respond to a piece about the disappearance of the "discrete experience" of college in the US, written by a post-boomer, about what University in this country has become recently.

I suppose I didn't notice the actual topic of the essay, which was to be "Why College Matters," just that it was to be in response to the article. (the actual topic, of course, was only found in the Official Rules.)

Even so, I doubt I would've been published. Some of the following might sound familiar.

There must be some people for whom memories are not a constant source of estrangement, hallucinatory intensity, and disorientation.
For a lot of us today, however, memories can be pretty strange.

For example: I'm sitting in the office of an academic Dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Dean leans forward, his brow and hands moving in unison. He looks at me, concerned, conscientious, thinking hard.
“I must say,” he begins, “your idea, and your plan—Your argument for this major—is very good, and you're obviously very passionate about the subject. However, in all our majors, the language study only constitutes a part of the major, and the remainder of the, typically, thirty-five to forty credits is made up through depth study. We've had students come to us with major plans like yours before, and we can't approve a major based solely on language study, because that doesn't fulfill the depth requirement.”
I must have looked concerned, as he continued:
“Ah... That's really what a liberal arts education is about, you know? It's about that balance between a broad field of study, and also delving deeper into one in particular.”
I looked down at the Individual Major proposal in my hand. Apparently, there had been some sort of miscommunication or misunderstanding somewhere. The major included Indonesian, Arabic, a well-rounded selection of courses from Anthropology, Political Science, and Comparative Literature on the functioning of language in society, culture, politics--

He shifted in his chair once more. “What you're proposing, really,” he said, “Is a dissertation, not an undergraduate degree.”

Confused and bewildered, a month later, after hearing three additional professors in a special panels meeting tell me the same thing—that these were separate disciplines, and that it did not do to blur the lines, that it would do better to become an Expert in One before Blending and Thinking Critically about Many, I acquiesced.
I had had a good experience, after all, with my Comparative Literature course about monsters. We had learned a lot about monsters; about where the word, in English, comes from: from the Roman and Greek tradition of augury, and that often, a monstrum was a sign, a sign of something wrong, something that needed to be fixed, in self, in society, in culture. Fine, then, I said: Comparative Literature it will be.

Depth. Breadth. Criticality. Con.fus.ion. Difference. Universality.

How many knives, how many incisions and cuts, separations, differentiations, can you make? Is this the true test of a University degree—How well you cut, how well you separate and subjugate?

What kind of sign is this?

By September of the following semester, I was rather concerned. The Department of Comparative Literature, for all the quite amazing personnel and students that made up the program, faced problems. The Graduate School was suspicious about some degrees granted under a special committee for interdisciplinary studies, and the College itself wouldn't admit to any motives. There was nothing I could see that would guarantee the continued existence of my Department past the next semester.
When the spring semester class bulletin was published, I noticed that the courses required for the timely completion of my major were not to be offered. Unsurprisingly, with its future in limbo, the Department's personnel were overburdened, and had been refused the right to contract any more professors, as well as to grant tenure, for the time being, to any of their current professors.

For all that it had cost me, in blood, sweat, and outrageous out-of-state tuition, the time had come to leave.

Let us take a breath, here, a moment.

Apparently, today's youth is mourning, is missing, because Mr. Perlstein's article seems certainly to be laced with grief, that 'discrete' experience of University, that time of experimentation and expansion.
There is, Perlstein insists, something that has changed.
I think I have heard this before. I think I have heard this rhetoric, and it might be something that you, my elders, recognize:

“...And you know that something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones...”

If you want to see a generation gap, look again at your University-age interviewees. Read closer Perlstein's observations: “She is, indeed, a cog in the organization...Organization kids don't mind it.”
Look again at the rate of prescription drug dispension in this country. Think twice before you put your kids on Ritalin, before you talk about the importance of standards: educational, linguistic, rational. Look again at your objectivity: your depth, your breadth, your confusion and com.prehens.ion, com.uni.cat.ion, your difference and universality, your subjugation and unity.
Look again, and you might see a sign. You might notice that the most effective standardized test, nowadays, wouldn't be the SAT. It would be a test of systems thinking, of thinking with machines. The common denominator is no longer the human, it is the machine.
You said it in the sixties, you told each other to throw your bodies on the gears, but the machine chewed you up and swallowed you, and now, in your decadence, in your middle age, you have bred conditions that have forced your own children, the next generation, not to be apathetic and unaware, despite the accusations, but to be so damn pinned down and watched, so regulated, so stripped of any opportunity besides the one towards a shallow, meaningless, materialistic and unsatisfactory version of any kind of self-fulfilling so-called 'success' that they have little other choice, besides drawn-out minimum wage suicide.
Look at the tuition rates. Look at the incredible machinery, legal, political, social, put in place to keep us in the cycle! Even if you saved all your adult life for your child's education, where is that going to put your child except tens of thousands of dollars in debt, a year after graduation? Where is there any possibility for anything, except the system getting tighter?

The United States, I dare not say Our, Government, in the past seven years, has produced monstrosities.
I dare not say, either, that these be wrong or right: I only say that they be monstrous. They are signs.

So, to return in spiraling circles, has our machinery blinded us so? Are we so tied to our posts that we can no longer take the time to interpret? Has the machinery encoded the signs so that we no longer are capable of reading the signs, only capable of telling each other what is wrong here, within the machine?
Here, perhaps, in this institution that would be University, that would be any institution, laboral, educational, or social, we might tell each other that things have become quite difficult, that there is not the freedom that there used to be. We might tell ourselves, it all just seems like so much hacking up, separating, so much violence: my Spanish Theater term paper identical to what I saw in Iraq on the evening news.

Apparently you, my elders who have set this essay assignment, remember something different than what I have experienced, all of my life. Apparently, you have memories of a time when people didn't have the gun to their head as much.

Is that strange for you?

welcome to singapore

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:55:41 GMT

1 large handful Degreased Tofu Sheet Knot
1 large handful kimchee
1 T Korean red pepper paste
1 T sugar or honey
1 t salt
3 T sesame oil
2 t horseradish
2 t dijon mustard

In a medium-sized pot, place tofu sheet knots and cover with warm to hot water. Allow to sit for a solid twenty minutes, to soak. Drain and set aside.

In a large sautee pan or wok, heat sesame oil and red pepper paste, until the paste begins to sizzle and pop; don't let it burn!

Add the degreased tofu sheet knots, sugar, and salt. Toss well. Add horseradish and mustard, and sautee over medium-high heat until integrated.

Add kimchee; toss to integrate, and cover for two minutes, taking care that it does not burn. Reduce heat if necessary.

Remove lid and toss over high heat for another minute; serve in a bowl, hot, with chopsticks and well-chilled aloe vera drink for the burning.

Rams

Fri, 18 May 2007 18:26:03 GMT

In my head, I keep trying to write an extremely elaborate fusion Franco-American postcolonialistic layer cake, but every time I start to cut it up and serve it up, the crust falls in, because I keep making it without using flour, and my imaginary xanthan gum just isn't enough.

"Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny."

The only ex-planation needed

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:25:42 GMT

There is a song by the bachata group, Aventura, called 'obsesion'. The song mainly consists of a duet, between a male, insisting that it's love, and a woman, insisting it's no such thing--it's a simple obsession.

At one point in the song, explaining to the man why she refuses to be with him, she tells him, "There's no illusion in your thoughts."

Border Crossing Bread

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:24:08 GMT

4 C Whole Wheat Flour
2 T Baker's Yeast
1.5 C Hot Water
2 T Salt
.5 ct Very Ripe Avocado

1 lb Ground or Pulled Chicken
3 C Granulated Sugar
.5 T Paprika
1+T Dark Chili Powder
1 t Cayenne Chili Powder
5 oz Dark (70% cocoa solids) chocolate, either in chips or in very small pieces

In a sautee pan or griddle, cook the chicken, breaking up into very small pieces in the process. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 400 F conventional, 350 F convection.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, salt, and yeast; mix well. Add avocado, sliced or mashed well, as well as a little bit of grease from the chicken. Knead until a smooth, cohesive, non-sticky dough, adding extra water if necessary. Place in a lightly greased bowl in a warm place, and allow to rise until roughly doubled in size.

Turn out onto a lightly floured work surface. Add sugar, chicken, spices, and chocolate. Work into the dough, until incorporated completely. It will be an odd sort of gritty, stringy mass. Add more flour, a little bit at a time, working in and kneading completely, until once again a cohesive, smooth dough. Place back in greased bowl and allow to rise again.

Remove from bowl, knead briefly, and divide in two. Shape into two large rectangular or circular loaves, sealing well underneath; place on a greased pan and allow to rest for a few minutes. Slash the tops and sprinkle with more chili powder and kosher salt.

Bake for 20 minutes, rotating if necessary, at 400; if available, test the internal temperature of the bread with a food thermometer, and bake for another 15 minutes at 425. If a harder, thicker crust is desired--or the bread is browning dangerously fast--place a pan of water on the lowest oven rack halfway through.

When fully baked, remove from pan and place on the counter; allow to cool completely. A thick, chewy bread, it is delicious with chutneys, butter, or for sandwiches.

Security Threat

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:58:26 GMT

I probably seemed, thinking back on my arrival, to be half-demented.

Thinking back on the semester I had just spent in Madison, that would probably be an accurate description.

Bogota was not, exactly, what I had expected—There were things that seemed spot-on to me, and yet the carnevalesque, the seeming parades of excited, happy people waiting outside, taxi drivers thronging to hustle you where you needed to go, all lit by flickering fluorescent bars and plastic Christmas arrangements hanging from the palm trees—all of that, that was something else, that was something new.

These people, these wonderful people whom I had never met before, driving me home and sympathizing about international travel, all these things that seem now concentrated, spinning, around a single quiet moment in which I tapped on this girl's shoulder in the crowd, staring intently at the exitway I had unwittingly avoided, dark eyes, and a green sweater.
This was new.

We left the house, briefly, just to see what we could see—aprovechar—, although without any particular plans. We sat in the middle of a park, with a bottle of anis-flavored aguardiente from a nearby shop, and the wind blew gently, and the mountains were to my back, the broken glass gritted under my feet, the stars were somewhere above the twinkling behemoth Christmas-decorated trees, and we talked.
It was wonderful.

I had barely begun to adjust to the altitude—the change from 900 to 9000 feet is a mild impediment—when the opportunity arose to take it to the next level. Elizabeth and I were to go with her mother, to the south end of the city, to visit the communities and churches that she worked with there, a good 1500 feet higher, and in a world that, some would say, was completely different from anything I'd ever known.

These are neighborhoods that tend to be of an extremely high percentage—some estimates at 80%—women and children, all refugees from the mountains and countryside; their husbands never made it out of the violence between government and rebel factions, all tearing each other apart for power and cocaine. Perhaps they were still living, fighting on one side or another; perhaps they had been killed offhand for perceived or actual, as if that made a difference, cooperation with another group—be it forced cooperation or no. Perhaps they were kidnapped, or perhaps they had simply disappeared. The remaining family who makes it to the outskirts of the city proceeds to make shelter with whatever they can, and make life with whatever they can.

Working our way down the hillside, the entirety of Bogota sprawling out in the valley below us, our home somewhere on the slope opposite, we stopped at a shack halfway down what will someday become a street, the shack built from wood and sheet metal, ragged pieces of cloth serving as chinking. Elizabeth's mother asks the eldest of the daughters that answers the door where the shop is; the girl replies that we must have passed it, but replies that yes, there is one further down the hill, and points out which building it is.

I glance, out of the corner of my eye, at the next one we pass. A solitary teenage boy is watching reggaeton music videos at top volume on a television, lying on his bed. Just inside the door is a four-foot, brightly lit Christmas tree. I look at Elizabeth, and a half-smile fills both our faces, trying to resist the temptation to dance to the music.

The shopkeeper knows Elizabeth's mother, and she introduces us both. Shelves on the dirt floor hold plantains, yucca root, onions, and potatoes. Behind the counter is toilet paper, soap, razors; there are various kinds of alcohol for sale, and potato chips. It is the corner store of any Hispanic country, on a hillside south of Bogota. A woman lives in the other half of the building, with her husband, and six children. We chat, and Elizabeth follows me outside for air.
“Did you see that woman?” she asks.
“The one with the kids?” she nodded yes—“She is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen.”
We talked a little bit with the two girls playing outside of the shop, the two daughters of the shop owner. They sang and danced around with sticks, then picked up longer sticks to tend to the fire underneath some five gallons of rice cooking.

Our local neighborhood guide came out of the shop with cups of coffee for Elizabeth and I. She followed our gaze to the five-year-old with the fire poker, and explained with a broad smile, “They're going to make tamales tonight.”
“Ay,” said Elizabeth, “Que bien.” We smiled, and accepted the coffee, fresh-ground, fresh-brewed, the best coffee I have ever had, and looked back over the valley.

Luckily, my altitude affliction that hit me later that day—extreme dizziness, disorientation, and general weakness—began to fade after a few days, and I bought a bag of coca to chew when Elizabeth and I were hiking up the city's steep slopes.

Above the center of town, where the buildings began to thin out and the slope was dissected ever so often by another highway, we sat in a partially-completed nature garden, just off of the path, and looked through the eucalyptus leaves towards through downtown and off, towards the south, where we had been just days before. We sat for fifteen minutes, without speaking a word, chewing the coca slowly.

We descended, and wandered through the dingy streets of the center of town. We had no particular destination in mind, just seeing what we could find. Elizabeth wore little golden-colored metal fish earrings, like something out of Marquez, with scales that interconnected and made the fish bend realistically. She carried her mother's old beat-up leather bag, and I my flashy, silver Kelty mountaineering backpack that my mother had given me when I started college. I had my jacket and some water, and we were set for the day.

As we went up, off of the main street, toward the mountains, a woman came jogging toward us, looking very flustered, and waving what looked to be a credit card at us. She began speaking to us very rapidly, and I could hardly understand her. She motioned to a neighborhood up the hill and slightly to the right.
“...Que estan por alli, estan esperando a la gente, que no les den papaya!”
“OK, gracias,” Elizabeth replied, and the woman continued huffing on down the street. I turned to Elizabeth.
“Que no les den papaya?” The phrase didn't make sense to me--'Don't give them papaya'? Elizabeth, however, looked at me with a mixed expression of amusement and concern.
“Yeah,” she replied, “Don't give them an opportunity.”
“Did she just get robbed?”
“Yeah... It looks like they took everything except her credit card.”
Following the curve of the street away from the neighborhood the woman had indicated, we continued on through cafes, stationery stores, and palm trees.

Attracted by the sound of loud reggaeton, we turned down a street that seemed mainly residential. We passed a small cafe on our left, the little girl sitting in a chair just inside giving us a strange look, which was about par for two light-skinned people in Bogota. We approached the second cafe, the one with thudding music, on our right; the curtained-up windows and scruffy man standing in the doorway, however, deterred us somewhat, and we passed by his creepily wide smile and unintelligible greeting quickly. We started up the small hill at the end of the street. I allowed myself a small smile, and exchanged a glance with Elizabeth.
“That was kind of sketchy,” I said.
“Yup,” she replied.
From the corner of my eye on the other side, I saw the man from the doorway coming up the hill behind us. Familiar with the begging tactics in the city, I was alarmed, but didn't panic quite yet.
“Que nos viene siguiendo,” I muttered to Elizabeth.
“Que?” she asked.
“Que nos viene siguiendo,” I repeated.
The words had hardly left my mouth when I was jerked suddenly to the right and my entire torso was being held to the point of an eight-inch kitchen knife, positioned a few inches away from my Adam's apple.

“Ven, chacho, dame la plata,” he snapped. Out of nowhere, a second, bulkier man appeared, and demanded the same of Elizabeth.
“Dame los peces,” he said, gesturing to her earrings. As I explained to my assailant, who was looking for money in my side pockets, that my wallet was in a pocket at the bottom of my pants, he lowered me to the pavement with the knife point. I fiddled with the button on my pocket, trembling slightly and breathing fast. He grabbed the light metal chain I wore around my neck and jerked, grunting again, “Ven, chacho, dame la plata!” The chain snapped, and as he put it in his pocket, the knife was never far away. I got my wallet out—a pared-down version for the big-city environment, with just my drivers' license, bank card, and some 200,000 pesos that I had taken with me, so that we could get it changed to smaller bills in a bank in the center of the city. He took it, looking through it carefully, and then took my shiny, American, high-tech backpack, too, for good measure. I sat on the curb, intensely aware of the other man going through Elizabeth's purse. He recognized the purse was of no value, so simply took her money and her phone.

“Ok, ahora pa' bajo,” the first one snapped, as they began to move up the hill with their loot, and motioning us to go back down the street, whence we came. “Salgan, salgan ya, y pa' bajo.”

“Bien, bien,” I replied, and Elizabeth and I quickly moved back down the street. Halfway down, as the two disappeared out of sight up the hill, we heard them yell: “Bye-bye!”

We soon entered the center of the city, and headed for the road home. Walking past the shops, we were intensely aware of every movement of ever person around us; facial expressions, be they directed at us or not, whether we were looking at them or not, were catalogued and analyzed automatically; tiny gestures with the hands or slight shifts of weight were all keys to the desires and motivations of those around us.

We stopped on a street corner, and Elizabeth reached into her change pocket. She pulled out a bill, two thousand pesos: bus fare home for both of us. We waded out into the chaotic rapids of downtown traffic, and flagged down a bus.

We were up and going early, all bunched in the car, Elizabeth and I with a giant mug of coffee in the backseat, trying to stay present. Her dad peppily hurtled the car through Bogota traffic and out onto the highway, past fields and fields, greenhouses full of flowers to be exported all over the world. The conversation turned to the police.
“Wait, the police can search your entire car?” I naively asked. Elizabeth's mother scoffed.
“Oh yeah. They can search whatever they want.” Elizabeth looked at me, puzzled.
“Is it not that way in the US?” I shook my head, and smiled.
“Uh-uh. Come on, Elizabeth, you know the song.” She looked nonplussed.
“Do you mind if I look around your car a little bit?/Well my trunk is locked and so is my glove compartment, so you gonna need a warrant for that/Well, aren't you sharp as a tack, you some kinda lawyer or somethin'?/I ain't passed the bar, but I know a little bit, enough that you wanna illegally search my shit/...”
“Ah,” she said, her expression clearing. “Gotcha.”

We arrived after about two hours of travel, down and out of the mountains, and immediately into a tropical climate. Banana palms overhead next to roadside diners and hammock shops, green everywhere, beautiful, round, sloping river valleys. These friends of Elizabeth's parents had a finca, a small farm, overlooking a river. The entire family spoke estimable English, and the master of the ranch was eager to show us everything.

“Do you like your coffee?”
“Yes, it's excellent.”
“I grew it right over there.” He pointed to a gully not thirty feet away, full of coffee trees, their beans already ripening. “It is totally organic. Eventually, I want this place to be self-sufficient.” His son and daughter, both students at the University of the Andes in Bogota, sat around the table with a few friends, drinking cup after cup of the rich, thick, delicious coffee, twitching and smoking. Elizabeth and I sat with them, immediately accepted as a member of their peer group.
“Uyysh. Drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, and tremble. That's what being old is like,” one of them commented. The mother of the family was impressed by my and Elizabeth's level of Spanish.
“This kid?” the son asked, motioning to me, “Shit, he must speak better Spanish than I do.”
“That's true,” his friend replied, “At least he doesn't make up words. What the hell is “'migo”, anyway?” Elizabeth's mother came over to the table, and asked him,
“Hey, do you have photos of your stay on the kibbutz? I'd love to see them.”
“Oh, sure, sure,” he replied, reaching for his laptop. “I've got some good ones of Egypt, too.”

Elizabeth and I, after going for a walk amongst the thigh-thick bamboo in the gullies, and touring the coffee trees, swung on a rope swing and sat, lying back in the heat, watching two of the teenagers fall deeply asleep in the rope hammock.

Elizabeth’s parents, proud of her achievements during her end-of-year exams the last year of high school (in international families, sometimes celebrations get put off a little while), wanted to take her out to a special meal. So we found ourselves, packed in a taxi, zooming down the highway southbound, toward the center of the city.

Elizabeth’s mother and father chatted animatedly with the taxi driver; Elizabeth and I sat, quietly, in the back seat. Eager to give me a deeper impression of Colombia, they had chosen a nice, but traditional, Colombian restaurant. Low, white, with a handsome awning, we pulled up next to it, and were quickly ushered inside by men in suits, and at least one opening the door for us, wearing a vest bearing the name of the restaurant in large block letters on the back.

We were, of course, the first to arrive that day for lunch; the mixture of cultural expectations and habits made Elizabeth’s parents interesting cross-breeds, and sometimes you found yourself a bit thrown off, like when they eat on an American schedule.

No matter, though, the waitstaff was all very obliging and polite. We sat at a round table by the window; Elizabeth and I ordered canelazo, a warm, cinnamon-anise liquer combination, her mother coffee, her father diet Coke. Elizabeth and I sat facing the door.

It was a wonderful meal; I ordered the Colombian favorite, patacones, of which I couldn’t get enough—somewhere in between a potato pancake and a banana chip, the round discs were made of plantains, sliced, pressed, and deep-fried. With barbecued pulled pork and a light salsa on top, the meal was heavenly.

As we left, the clientele began to arrive; the waiter graciously ordered a taxi for us, and we waited inside briefly until he pulled up. We quickly got in the taxi, and after receiving Elizabeth’s mother’s directions, he paused, and looked at her.
“Me regala el codigo de seguridad?”
“Ah, si,” she replied, giving him the number—the number given to us by the taxi company, for our security, his, and theirs, to make sure that this is our trans-action, that it is his, that everything is as legitimate as possible.

As we rode through the bumpy, broad streets, the conversation switched back and forth from English to Spanish—English from Elizabeth’s parents, and Spanish from me and Elizabeth. We eventually got out at the Parque 93, the ritziest block of the city, covered in Christmas decorations bearing the stamp of Colombian beer companies. As we continued our afternoon stroll with the parents, the conversation continued to be English more and more. Elizabeth and I twitched, we sweated; we were, as we had been for the last twenty-four hours, incredibly conscious of the actions of everyone around us. We spoke as little English as possible; I was painfully aware of how tall Elizabeth’s mother was, of her father’s blonde-red hair and sparkling blue eyes, his white sneakers. Eventually, they took another taxi home, and we agreed to meet them later, after we ran a few errands. We still hadn’t told them.
“Ay, pero si es que me pone tan nervioso andar por la calle con tus padres,” I burst out at Elizabeth.
“Ya, lo se, es que aunque les hablo en Espanol, me hablan en ingles…”
“Si, es tan extrano, que, tu y yo, vamos, no parecemos colombiano colombiano, pero con ellos—“
“Claro! Con ellos ni se puede fingir.”
This, I thought, as we hiked back up to the Septima, to step into a bus that kept moving before we had even fully entered—This is your life, this is your world, this is your being, your skin, your language; these are the things that become a security threat.

We finally told them, when Elizabeth’s mother asked her, before we went out the next day, whether Elizabeth had the cell phone. They were extremely supportive and sympathetic, and very upset that I should have such an experience during my first trip, my first time, in the country.

We explained the whole thing—where we had been, how it had happened, what they had taken. It was, as Elizabeth’s mother pointed out, the most dangerous time of the year. All the wage-earners got a Christmas bonus, and the thieves were well aware of this. Besides that, the thieves needed their Christmas bonus, too. We also talked about the fact that Elizabeth and I, walking as a pair, made a much better target than either one of us alone; a woman alone is just one person worth of valuables, and a man alone might try to fight back. But a man concerned for the health and safety of his female companion is much more likely to acquiesce, and they double their profits with one assault.

Elizabeth and I went out, into a beautiful, sunny afternoon, feeling better about having told them. We went down to the city center, to one of the artisinal markets, and bought the hats that we had been wanting—the hand-woven, intricately patterned straw hats that were ubiquitously recognized as a Colombian national symbol, as having pride in ones’ identity and relationship with the indigenous roots and land of the country.

As we left the market, I adjusted the brim belt and put mine on. I smiled at Elizabeth out from under the broad brim.
“I like this,” I said. “If something in Colombia has taken something from me, then I will take something from Colombia.”

The TV in Elizabeth’s house, always on and disconcertingly pouring out American news on satellite, was still, grimly and with much bravado, pomping around the circumstances of President Gerald Ford’s death, as we all got up bright and early Wednesday morning. It had been a bizarre set of coincidences, since the previous Friday, when Elizabeth and I arrived home at quarter to five. The Embassy would be closed all weekend, of course, and Monday was New Years’ Day, but it would also be closed Tuesday, in observation of a national day of mourning.

But I had my immigration slip, my photocopy of my passport, my UW-Madison ID, and a hundred dollars from the Gills.
As we packed up downstairs, I poured my coffee into a large travel mug. Elizabeth’s mother rustled around in the cupboard, and came up with another one. Holding it out to me, she offered, “Here, this is for Elizabeth’s.” I paused.
“Oh, well, I was just—“ I motioned uncertainly to putting all of the coffee in one mug.
“Oh, of course, how silly of me. I don’t know why I’d be concerned about sharing a coffee mug, I’m sure you guys have shared a lot more than that.”
Struggling to keep a straight face, I replied with a smile, “Well, yeah.”

The US Embassy in Bogota is currently the second largest in the world, second only to Baghdad—to which many former Bogota employees have recently been transferred. It is a giant white building of indeterminate shape and size, locked in between so many layers of fence and concrete, not to mention the guns and spikes. I waited outside the gate, now without any kind of identification at all, having given it all to the Colombian guard, for ten minutes before I was allowed to proceed inside, with Elizabeth and her parents. Down a long walkway, we stepped through a second security point, giving up my newly-returned ID a second time, this time in exchange for a plastic tag bearing the stars and stripes to hang around my neck. We went through the metal detector—Which, I noticed, was not turned on, due to the fact that the elderly man in front of me did not set it off with his umbrella and his confusion—and back out into the sunshine of a courtyard. There was a metal fence down the middle of it, and the left hand side held dozens of benches, upon which sat hundreds of Colombians. I paused for a moment with Elizabeth’s father.

“They’ve changed the setup since the last time I was here. They change it every so often, for security reasons; they don’t want people to be too comfortable with the place.

“All these people over here are waiting for visa interviews. Some of them have been waiting for years. And you know, the crazy thing is, some of them try to fake their documents. Can you imagine, waiting that long for an interview, and then being blocked for the rest of your life from getting a visa because you faked your documents?”

As we proceeded up a pathway through the courtyard, alongside a driveway involving an extreme tire damage airlock-style double-fence gate, Elizabeth’s father noted the doors we were about to proceed through.

“See? These are the doors I was telling you about. Look how thick they are as you pass through them.” Made of steel plates and rivets, we passed through the castle-like entryway, and into a dimly-lit, uncomfortable space full of odd angles, and through another metal detector, with an extremely peppy and businesslike Colombian officer hustling us through. I guided myself to the left, to Citizen Services, and spoke with a smartly-uniformed Colombian woman, who insisted on giving me instructions in English while I spoke to her in Spanish. Eventually, she seemed to realize that I could actually communicate in her native language, and she relaxed, giving me a relieved smile, and a much friendlier tone. I filled out the application, sweating and caffeinated, and waited briefly until a window opened up. I approached the bulletproof glass, and the woman asked me in beautiful, easy Colombian Spanish where and how it was that my passport was stolen.

We found, of course, some police officers not thirty feet further down the trail; trembling a bit and pissed as hell, we explained the incident to them.
“Y… Llevaban pasamontanas?” the officer asked, covering his head with his hands to emulate a ski mask.
“Si. Y llevaban cuchillos y una pistola.”
“Que les han robado? Camaras?”
“No, que va. Dinero, y mi pasaporte.” His partner called their office, at the bottom of the hill.
“Si, tengo aca dos—“ he paused briefly, and inquired after our nationality. Elizabeth grudgingly accepted her status as a citizen of the United States. “—Norteamericanos, y, pues, han tenido inconveniente aqui en la senda.”

I looked at Elizabeth. There was no need to say anything. How much more could it be driven home? The most this man, an officer and representative of the law, could say to his fellow officers was, “They’ve had an inconvenience here on the trail.”

It was a Sunday in Christmas season. It was a trail up a mountain in the middle of the city, to a well-known monastery. We passed dozens of families enjoying the summer weather and making a picturesque pilgrimage to what was, for them, a very holy site. Elizabeth’s father himself had gone up and down the trail, without problems—although, as we later found out, in the company of Colombians.

The drinking age in Colombia is eighteen; although this may seem lax by United States standards, the bouncers at bars and clubs card with extreme vigilance. My University ID had no birthdate, and without my drivers’ license, Elizabeth and I were going to have a definitely difficult time with nightlife. So I had slipped my passport into my handmade, indigenous-patterned Colombian boots we had bought at our favorite artisinal market in the center, and we had gone out, to make photocopies and climb a mountain.

It was beautiful. We climbed a good three thousand feet, all the way up to Monserrate, a white cathedral situated directly over the center of the city. The cold air blew fresh from those heights, and one got a sense of the enormity, the immensity, and the grandeur of the Andes, stretching all the way down south of this continent. We snacked, briefly, lazing in the warm sun to take the chill out of the altitude, and started back down.

It was about halfway back down the path, as we turned another switchback, that I heard a sharp intake of breath from Elizabeth. Looking up, I saw under the brim of my hat two men, both in sweatshirts and ski masks, coming toward us. Both had serious-looking hunting knives, and the one coming toward Elizabeth, I noted, held a revolver.

As absurd as this seemed to us, being mugged twice in four days, we did what was clearly necessary. I reached into my bag, but my assailant quietly slipped the bag off my shoulder. They both, to my extreme alarm, seemed very nervous and unsure of themselves. Twitchy and jumpy, they kept looking up and down the path, asking us for our money and valuables so many times that it seemed they were forgetting they had already asked. They patted us down, and there was a great deal of confusion when the search arrived at my pants, which were simple wrap-around, tying in front and in back. He patted down my hips, where pockets would normally be, and quite matter-of-factly, went for my crotch. When he felt nothing there, he seemed to be quite disbelieving, and unable to hear my repeated explanations that I had no money on me, that everything of value was in the bag that he already had. He kept groping, until I explained to him quite clearly, “Hombre, no tengo nada de dinero alli, que no hay nada menos cojones”—no money, just balls.

At which point, he promptly bent down and pulled my passport out of my boot.

They were getting very nervous, and seemed to have exhausted us. Perhaps a bit heartened by his success so far, my assailant took another, better look at me, and the knife came back up.

“Bien, el arete,” he said. Unfortunately, my earring was a pressure-closed ring; it could only be opened using a pair of pliers, prying the circle open until the ball connector dropped out.
“Hombre, que no, que esto no se quita. No se puede quitar sin—“ I choked on my sentence, and he repeated his demand, raising the knife again.
“Damelo!”
“Que NO, que esto NO SE QUITA,” I began, clearly and succinctly, and Elizabeth, her breath coming deep and fast, moved towards me, covering my earring with her fingers, and desperately trying to explain the situation.

He gave another look over his shoulder, and one to his partner—Elizabeth’s finger seemed to have shattered his fixation on my earring, and they sent us on down the path.

As we approached the next switchback, we heard a call from both of them, now disappearing into the underbrush—“Bye-bye!”

All things considered, I suppose I can’t say I was surprised to find myself, on my first visit to Colombia, sitting in the police station of central Bogota. That’s not much consolation, however, when, in the past four days, you and a friend have lost more than a hundred dollars, two cell phones, a Colombian residence card and an American drivers license, and your passport, not to mention wondering whether you will survive the next corner you turn. Whether you will survive going shopping. Whether you will survive going to get some plantains, or going out for a drink.

The thin, hyper-efficient officer called us up to the desk. With no compassion and no interest on his face, he mumbled an unintelligible Spanish at us and handed us forms. When I handed mine back, having had to scratch out several things due to the pen running out of ink, he immediately tossed it back at me and snapped off several remarks to the clear effect that I should not be scratching things out on an official form. Unfortunately, I was not in the mood for bureaucracy, and asked for a better pen.

With the forms completely filed out, he looked us, bored, in the face, and asked what had happened.
“Que nos han robado, mientras que ibamos subiendo Monserrate.”
“Y que les han robado? Camaras de foto?”
“No, que va, que no las llevabamos.”
“Que, entonces?” he asked, not waiting for an explanation. “Plata? Money?”

That was too much—hearing him sneer the English at me, with a satirical little smile on his face, me not worthy of this nasty little beauracratic officer’s respect because of some history between some set of politics—I got nasty.
“Que NO. Que no nos llevabamos nada de plata encima.”
“Bueno,” he replied with casual indifference, shuffling our papers in front of him, “Los turistas suelen llevar…” Tourists. Nice touch.
“Ya, pues, me han robado el pasaporte, y a ella el telefono movil y su cedula colombiana.” Because tourists also usually carry Colombian ID cards. This gave him something new to process, and the conversation moved to Elizabeth, probably for the benefit of all.

We got out with the piece of paper we needed, signed by the officer, so that I could present it to the appropriate people, to be able to leave the country, and more pissed than ever. It was a long walk home, but we had no chance but to start.

It was a beautiful, sunny day, but Elizabeth and I eventually took off our Paisa straw hats, not wanting to attract any more attention, as most Colombians seemed to find the juxtaposition of their national headgear and our skin color a cause for amusement. We were almost to the northern end of the center of the city, when I looked sharply at Elizabeth. Walking in front of us were two soldiers in US green camouflage fatigues.
“Que?” She replied to my look with an equally quizzical one.
“Los uniformes,” I said, with a subtle gesture.
“Que?”
“Son Estadounidense.”
“Yeah,” she said, breaking into quiet English for further explanation. “Plan Colombia. It’s a Clinton initiative.” We continued in silence, my rage building.

“You know what the worst part about this is?” I said, wheeling around and giving up on expressing this thought in Spanish.
“What?”
“The worst part will be returning to the United States, to live there, and knowing that that country is the cause of all this.”

By the time I returned, all the way back through the gates and checks, to Citizen Services during a single 15-minute window that Wednesday afternoon, every person I had spoken to in that Embassy had spoken to me in Spanish. Then it came time for me to receive, finally, my passport. Due to my extreme tension and my line-cook move-fast instinct, I managed to be at the front of the line, when an officious but smiling white woman in a black suit came to the window.
“Oliver Renwick?” she asked.
“Yup, that’s me.”
“I see this is a replacement for a stolen passport. How did yours get stolen?”
“Oh, well, I had it to make photocopies, and I got mugged. I had it in my boot, but…”
“They took it out of your boot?”
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging good naturedly. Get that dirt off your shoulder.
“And were you in Colombia on business or vacation?”
“Oh, vacation. Just down for the holidays.”
“What in the world possessed you to want to come to Colombia for vacation?”

I paused, and looked at her, past my reflection in the glass. My reflection, slightly unshaven and a ring hanging out of my ear, bracelets bearing the Colombian flag and images of Catholic saints, my tight white t-shirt proudly displaying the flags of almost all the worlds’ nations.
“I don’t know,” I replied, “A sense of adventure?”

On the way out, I stopped at the second gate, handing the two pretty Colombian female guards my plastic nametag. As she sorted through the stack of IDs, she complimented my clothing.
“Nos gusta tu vestimiento,” she said. The wrap-around pants were always a hit.
“Ay, pues gracias,” I replied. “Los pantalones me los hice yo.”
“No me digas.”
The other inquired after my passport: “Es que te han robado el pasaporte?”
“Si,” I replied, “Pero vamos, es que estas cosas pasan en cualquier parte.”
“Entonces, te gusta Colombia?” Do I like it? Do I like this country?
“Pues, bastante. Estoy pensando en volver, para estudiar.” I like it enough to want to live here, if that’s what you’re asking.
“Que bien. Aqui se vive bien… Se levanta pa’ trabajar, se va pa’ la casa, se come, y se duerme tranquilo.” The two traded a smile.
“Claro,” the first one said, handing me my ID back, “Es que sabias que Colombia esta a pocos kilometros del cielo?”

I was still laughing, out of relief, adrenaline, and love for Colombia, when I reached the gate.
“Remember the female guards at the second gate?” I began explaining to Elizabeth.
“Yeah.”
“Well, they said they liked my clothing, and they also informed me that Colombia is only a few kilometers away from heaven.”
“Ah,” Elizabeth said, smiling, “I warned you about that.”

There was one more gate. One more gate to go through, out of this duty-free zone, out of the shops and the bars and cafes, out of this country, into the in-between, the twilight, Faerie, the docks, the gates, where everything is a door and a border and yet everything lifts itself above that and becomes a no-man’s-land, a place-between-places.

I had some time left, though, and I wasn’t ready to go through that gate.

I sat down at the last string of cafes, and ordered a double shot of the sweet, anise aguardiente, for a very reasonable 2500 pesos. Shit, that was cheap for a bar on the street, not even mentioning airport prices.

The television was playing Hispanic music videos; I could barely hear the music, but the first I saw was clearly vallenato, the Colombians’ accordion-playing, aguardiente-soaked dancing-and-love music. Next came a video with the Residente from Calle 13, the so-called ‘avant garde’ reggaeton group from Puerto Rico, flirting around a city with Nelly Furtado.

I had another drink. Or two.

I looked at the clock, and decided it was time. I wrapped my belongings up in my kaffiye—the Colombian bag I had bought had, of course, been stolen as well—and tied the corners in a knot.

I sat, though, for a moment longer, and watched an urban couple, so Hispanic, take care of their child at a nearby table. Next to them sat an enormous man eating a platter of beef; a short, curvy girl with dark red Latina hair, wearing a tight camouflage sweatshirt, came over to talk to him.

I had been here two and half weeks. Two and a half weeks. And yet, I knew these people. I felt almost comfortable with them. I wasn’t ready to go. I couldn’t go
.
I stared desperately at the hallway, leading to that final gate.

I wasn’t ready to go. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t. I did not want to leave. It had all been too wonderful.

I began to cry.

Two-thirty in the morning at Miami International Airport is, predictably, not a fun time and place to be. Especially not if you’re a young white male flying alone from Bogota, Colombia, on an emergency replacement passport. The attendant at customs barely glanced at me, and motioned that I follow the red arrows, not the green ones, over to the investigation counter.

Unfortunately for the tired, young black woman behind the counter, I was hungover, caffeinated, emotionally distraught and had been reading a book by Judith Butler, entitled Giving an Account of Oneself. And I was pissed as fuck at the United Fucking States of America.

The bag came open, and it all came out. All of it. Bags of coffee, bags of granulated cane sugar, bags of Colombian spices, my roll-bag with my chef knives in it. Those always go over well with security staff. An enormous bag of candy from my mother, with a tub of arequipe, like a caramel spread, that had busted open inside. An open bag of coca leaves.

She looked at me quizzically, holding up the bag in her plastic-gloved hands.

“Those are coca leaves. They’re just the raw leaves, you understand, not any sort of processed or concentrated product. They’re perfectly legal.” What had started out as a snappy and aggressive customs agent was starting to deteriorate into a confused, tired young woman. She looked at me and the offending bag, nonplussed, and went over to another officer, this one male. She came back a few seconds later with him in tow, heaving his considerable weight and explaining, “Oh, yeah, it’s fine, unless he’s got, like, fifty thousand of them.”

As she continued her methodical search, I began to hear the conversation of the other guards, obviously off-duty, over by the computers. Every one of them, I realized, besides the black woman, were latinos.
“Yeah, man, but it’s got so much recoil.”
“Where do you get your ammunition from?”
“Oh, I get it offline, it’s really cheap. Actually, I gotta get a couple more boxes, I’m going up next weekend.”
“Oh yeah? Where do you shoot?”

My attention was brought back to my belongings, as the hefty agent who knew about coca laws leaned against the counter and pushed the bag of coca leaves.
“You ought to be careful with that stuff, man,” he said grimly, shaking his head. I fixed him with an eye-to-eye stare, trying not to sneer.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, man, that shit’s bad.” He scooted a loose leaf or two around the table. “I mean, it’s just like chewing tobacco, it’ll rot your teeth.” In my fatigued state, it didn’t occur to me that he was probably feeding me a line. Instead, my cook’s instinct immediately perked up, fascinated by more information about such a legendary subject.
“Oh, really? Where’d you learn that?” He paused, uncomfortable.
“Books, man. You gotta get educated,” he replied, and moved away.

I signed a paper for the box of aguardiente confiscated, and began to try and shove my belongings back into some semblance of the wonderful packing job I had done in Bogota. Before I had finished, the black woman had spoken briefly to her superiors, and ducked under the guide ribbons. Her shift was done; she was heading home.

I thought of the women and children searching for a life on the hillsides outside Bogota, and wondered if they thought it was terrible, the things they have to do to survive. What about those nervous young boys, probably their first armed robbery ever, by how they went about it, with shiny new blades and a Saturday night special—was that terrible? I watched the young woman officer leave, and wondered if she thought it was terrible, the things that she was doing, the things that she had just done, in order to survive. Who was more secure here? Who was made safer by this kind of behavior, by these laws and these pressures at borders, like this? Was this woman making her country a safer place, by making sure someone’s rules were enforced?

It seemed to me pretty terrible, the things that people like her did on a daily basis, for whatever combination of personal conviction, nationalistic training, and a simple need to survive, that in the end, made them all the less secure, and destroyed other peoples’ lives.

It seemed to me pretty terrible that what was once my own country had made me hated, had made me a target, had made a prejudice against me and had made me contemptible, for something so arbitrary as place of birth and growth, the world over.

The three brothers that were, in fact, not brothers, sat across the table from me. In fact, they were my three brothers, without being my brothers. My stepbrothers, and with a mixed family of their own. The greasy American fare, fries and meat, sat heavily in my stomach. The conversation had turned to Uncle Nathan, not actually their uncle, and Uncle Ben, their uncle without being their uncle, and a place called Iraq.

I guess, then, it was logical that the topic should arrive at Uncle Sam.

“I want to be a soldier when I grow up.” I sat back in my seat, and my father and stepmother turned to look at him more directly.
“But,” said my stepmother, “If you’re a soldier, then you might have to go to war, and you might have to kill people, and you might die.”
“But if you fight for your country, and you’re fighting to make sure your country’s safe, and you die, then that’s an honorable death.”
My father and stepmother exchanged a glance.
“That’s true, that’s true, but…” Time for Dad to take a shot.
“Look, the situation right now is, that it looks very likely that the President was not telling the truth when he said we had to go to war. He was probably lying.”
I decided to pick it up: “And that means, that all those soldiers out there haven’t necessarily died to defend their country. Maybe it wasn’t necessary for them to die. It means, that maybe all those soldiers have fought, and died, for a lie.”
“That,” my father concluded, “Is why I, at least, feel that the war right now is a bad thing.”

I put my head in my hands, pushing up the wide brim of my Paisa hat. When I looked up again, my father was looking at me intently.
“What’s up? You worried about the draft?”
“Oh, no. I’m not worried about that. If there’s a draft, I’m gone.”
“Was it just the phone call you got before lunch?”
“No, I mean, I’m nervous about that, but… Dad, I sometimes feel like, talking to people of your generation, it’s difficult to explain to them how scary it is to be growing up right now. Life is so cheap, you know, and so difficult. The things that I am forced to do on a daily basis—I mean, do you realize how many lists I must be on in Washington, because my girlfriend is from Colombia, and I went to visit her? Because I was in the first class to study Arabic at this university? Because I study fucking Indonesian? I mean, just right there—Because of what I study, dad, because of my academics, as if that meant anything, I am a security threat.” I shook my head, and looked back out the window.

But my father nodded, and smiled, a very odd smile. It was a smile of compassion, but it was a smile of recognition. It was a smile of grim agreement; my father, evidently, saw something of his view of things confirmed.

allow me to re-introduce myself--

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 05:42:08 GMT

Missed Signals with Blue Cheese and Beef

Serves None

It was a strange morning: ten AM, a 'kitchen interview' with the chef of Olivia, 'to see how things go'. Then, scheduled at 3 PM, an interview with the entire cooperative chef board of Moosewood Restaurant, downtown.

Greg was kind that morning, which I appreciated--he understood I might feel a little wrong-footed, and as I soon realized, he himself felt a little clueless, when presented with me, asking for a job, having arrived in town not a week before. The kitchen was dark, without all the lights on, the dim sun radiating through the Central New York State clouds and in through the square of a window above the dishwasher. We worked our way, slowly but surely, through lunch, communicating in more than words, in movements loaded with style and expression that only a seasoned cook can express or interpret. Even from my five years of experience, I was intimidated by Greg, in his silence and quiet confidence, speaking, it seemed, only when absolutely necessary, always with the energy to do exactly what was necessary.

An order came in for fried sticky rice--an intriguing item, to me, on the menu; as we dropped them in the fryer, I asked Greg how they were made.

"Well, it's just a little bit of avocado tucked into the rice, then rolled in sesame seeds and panko."
"Panko?"
"Yeah. Japanese bread crumbs. It's this stuff up here." He reached up and waved around a quart container of the flaky white crumbs.

As we plated the cakes--on a bit of spring greens, with edamame beans, and some squirts of soy-wasabi aioli, I remarked on the simplicity of it.

"I like to use as few ingredients as possible," Greg replied, "And let the food speak for itself."
It felt so good to hear that. "Uh-huh," I replied emphatically, nodding and returning his fixed gaze. "I approve."

"So, the deal is," he said, fifteen minutes into the interview, everyone smiles, "We wouldn't have work for you right now, not until the end of the month, and not full-time for a while. What...What is your situation like? Are you thinking of having more than one job, or...?"

"Yes. Actually, I, ah, I haven't determined my schedule or anything yet, but I have accepted some thirty hours a week at Olivia Restaurant."

"Olivia? Oh, isn't that--"

Another woman cut in--"Yeah, it's up on east hill. I ate there... I dunno, it was kind of difficult to eat there as a vegetarian. They do a lot of... Finnicky things, with lots of ingredients. And they mix ethnicities in a really strange way."

I stopped dead, thinking of the hearty soups and sandwiches, the cheese and potato-laden vegetarian dishes I saw being prepared in the kitchen--"This is going to be a winter vegetable stew."

Finnicky? Lots of ingredients?

They mix ethnicities in a really strange way?

I smiled awkwardly, and muttered something about minimalism. As we went through endless scenarios of work schedules--decision by democracy--I heard the phrase, "that seems fair," and the only thing I could think of was Greg talking about graduation weekend the year before: "Apparently, our desserts were a little too avant-garde for the public. We served a deconstructed carrotcake, and I dunno what else... We had people calling ahead, saying, 'We heard about the desserts. Can I just get a brownie sundae?"

We agreed to talk within a week.

What is this, though? For all her wonderfully home-grown hippietastic views, the woman had a point--It is difficult to eat at Olivia as a vegetarian. Now, that's not to say that she should be able to, that vegetarianism is better or more defensible than omnivority, more moral: How is it that animals are different from humans, and how is it that you are not feeding on humans more than animals, again this dichotomy that does not stand up, so how is it that you are feeding less on blood, because it is a blood issue at base, when you keep a vegetarian diet, than if you were omnivorous?

My first shift at Olivia, there was an extra burger, and it was offered to me. I took it, always wanting to try out the dishes at a place I work at. It was good; very good, actually, excellent. The local grass-fed beef had apparently has 30% less grease than normal, and had a wonderful, meaty flavor, compensated with the blue cheese and bacon on top of it. A hearty, comfortable burger--thus described on the Olivia employee menu briefing: "COMFORT".

I finished it, and thought, well, that was good meat.

But it was just good meat. It was just the good, it was just the quality, it was just the reliable, the traditional. I spent all of last summer breaking through the eggs, milk, and gluten of our bakeries. How long am I going to spend putting these cows back together, putting them together with us, and cutting them up again so that they don't occupy the place--so that they are not the place? So that the place, the hyperbolic place, the seat of place, that is, the seat of subjectivity, the subject itself, is not them?--How long, then, until they don't take the dominance that they do in our cuisine, the place of the Good, the place of the Necessary, the place of Comfort--of the Real, and Reality itself? How long until the meat is not the place, until the place is not the self, until the meat is not the self, until these words are forgotten and it is just the food? How long until these dichotomies are erased, borrosos, mixed up and blended, indiscernible?

It's MEAT. Not MEAT(subGood), just meat, motherfuckers.

It's a cultural issue, it's an issue of people and an issue of people as animals, it's an issue of everything, because it is the issue of everything--but in my world, at least, we're doing things differently.

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 05:16:37 GMT

Towards the end of the night, I've noticed my superiors have this tendency to leave without telling me. Like, get in their car and go home, not just out back for a cigarette. I don't really mind, and it's definitely nice to have them trust me that much, it's just kind of... Odd.

learning curve

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:30:56 GMT

Brian: So, where do people go to ski around here?
Emma: I think most people go to Labrador... It's about an hour away.
Oliver: Does it bark at you?
Emma: Ha ha ha. I don't laugh at stupid jokes.
Oliver: No, it's just that. Uh, in Spanish, 'labrador' means 'thing that barks'.
(pause)
Oliver: But it's still a pretty stupid joke.
Emma and Brian, in unison: Yeah... Yeah, that was pretty bad.

Lunch

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:00:21 GMT

Yucatones con Chutney Con-fundido

Serves 1

For the Yucatones:

¾-1 C yucca root, sliced in medallions or strips, boiled for 30 mins, drained
Olive Oil
Salt

For the Winter Chutney Andaluz:

1 ct. apple
½ ct. orange
2 T panela or granulated brown sugar
½-1½ t cayenne pepper
½ t ground cinnamon
1½-2 T fresh grated coconut

Core the apple and dice. Place in medium saucepan over medium heat; add brown sugar, and allow to dissolve. Peel all orange slices, removing white pith with a knife if necessary. Chop into small pieces, and add to the apple pan. Add cinnamon, and cayenne to taste. Keep on medium to medium low heat for fifteen to twenty minutes, or until there is relatively little liquid left in the pan, and the mixture is sticky and chutney-like. There’s no need to caramelize the fruit.

Divide the yucca into two equal parts; on a plate or cutting board, use a fork, spoon, or metal spatula to shape the yucca into a pancake- or patacon-like circle, roughly ¼ in. thick and 5-6 in. in diameter.

In a frying pan, heat a quantity of your preferred frying oil: 2 T per yucaton is more than sufficient. When the oil is at frying temperature, carefully lift the yucatones from the preparation surface with a spatula and place them in the hot oil. If the yucca was warm when you worked it, you may want to let it cool, as this helps to maintain the shape of the yucaton.

Fry the yucatones, at the same time or in succession, depending on the size of your pan, until they are golden brown on both sides, flipping two or three times and sprinkling with salt to taste during the course of cooking. Remove from oil, drain briefly on racks or towels to remove excess oil. Set aside in a warm place.

Before serving, add the coconut to the chutney and mix well; place over low heat and cook briefly, until coconut is integrated and sauce is hot all the way through.

Place the yucatones on serving dish, with chutney on the side—Serve hot!

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 14:27:19 GMT

Serves 4, perhaps with some leftovers

First Course

Colo-miso

3 T Coca leaf, stems removed
6 oz. Firm tofu
.75 t Salt

Fill a large saucepan with 8 C water. Julienne the coca into fine strips, and place in water. Cut the tofu into 1/2 in. cubes, and place in water. Add salt, more if deemed necessary. Place over medium high heat, until boiled. Simmer for 45 mins, serve hot.

Second Course

Rollitos

For the filling:

.5 Mango
1 Lime
2 Green apples
.25 White onion
2 Cloves garlic
1 t Margarine
.5-1 C Panela or Light Brown Sugar
Crushed red pepper
Salt

For the Rice:

2 C White Rice, preferrably Japanese
2.25 C Water
1 t Salt
1 T Vinegar, preferrably rice vinegar or another milder, sweeter vinegar (apple cider, tarragon, etc.)

Julienne the onion finely. In a medium sized saucepan, melt the margarine and roughly 1/3 C panela or brown sugar. Sautee the onions in this mixture briefly, until they start to become transparent. Turn off heat.

Core the apples and dice them to very small cubes, roughly 1/4 in. Peel the lime, taking care to remove as much white pith as possible (if necessary, cut it off). Reduce this also to 1/4 in. cubes, removing any seeds. Dice the garlic extremely fine. Take the meat off of the half mango, and cut across the strands to reduce the stringiness as much as possible.

Return the sautee pan to a medium heat, and add all the previously mentioned ingredients. Add salt, crushed red pepper, and panela to taste, and cook over medium or medium-low heat, stirring often and adding water as needed to prevent burning, for forty-five minutes to an hour. The end result should be something like a fine chutney.

Wash the rice four to five times, until the water has ceased to be cloudy; add the 2.25 C water, salt, and vinegar, and bring to a boil. Reduce to a medium-low heat, covered, for another 15 minutes or so, or until done. Remove from heat, and allow to cool; if possible, refrigerate.

When the filling and the rice are ready, you are ready to make the rollitos themselves. Grease a piece of aluminum foil roughly 1x1 foot with vegetable oil. Spread a quantity of rice--.25 to .5 in. thick--in a rectangle 10 in. by 4-5 in. on the end of the foil nearest to you. On the edge of that rectangle closest to you, place a line of filling about 3/4 in wide down the length of the rice. This should be about 4 T of filling.

The rolling process consists of two main movements. First, quickly fold the edge of rice closest to you--using the aluminum foil to mold--over, so that the filling is completely encapsulated in rice. Press down firmly, so as to cement the form of the roll, but not to deform it. Taking care that the foil itself does not get folded up in the roll, the next movement is essentially a copy of the first: fold the first roll into the remaining rice, so that it itself becomes enveloped in more rice, and you have one full, round roll. You may want to push the ends in a little bit if they are not good cylinders.

As you continue to make rolls, place them in the refrigerator; this will aid with the cutting process. The recipe yields roughly three rolls.

When the rolls have cooled for a good twenty to thirty minutes, or when ready to serve, remove them from refrigerator and carefully turn them out onto a cutting board. Using an extremely sharp knife, in short, downward movements, taking care not to smash the shape of the roll itself, cut the rolls into 1.25-in. sections. Garnish with panela and salt and serve.

Third Course (Dessert)

Arequipe-Queso An-Pan

.6 T Active Dry Yeast
.25 C Warm Water
Sprinkle Sugar

1.5 T Vegetable Shortening
.5 C Boiling Water
.5 t Salt
.5 C Sugar

1 Egg, beaten
3+ C All Purpose Flour

.5 C Queso Campesino or other firm, fresh mild goats' cheese, in small cubes (1/4-1/2 in)
.3 C Arequipe or Dulce de Leche

1 Egg, beaten, with a bit of milk if desired, for brushing
Fine-ground coffee or cocoa, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Farenheit.

Activate the yeast in the warm water; add sugar, allow to sit. Meanwhile, in a large mixing bowl, pour the water over the shortening; add the salt and sugar, and mix until shortening well-melted and sugar and salt well-integrated. Allow to cool briefly.

Add egg; mix well. Work in flour, adding until a smooth, somewhat firm dough. Place in a greased bowl in a warm, humid place and allow to rise until double in bulk, 60-90 mins.

Punch down and form into a ball; allow to sit for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the cubed cheese and arequipe in a small bowl. Set aside.

Taking walnut-sized, or a little bit larger, pieces of dough, work with floured hands and work surface into circles, roughly 5-6 in. in diameter. Place a quantity of the arequipe mixture, about 2-3 t, in the middle of each circle; carefully fold up the buns, taking care that there are no holes, and seal well. Place, seal side down, on a greased baking sheet. Brush with egg. Dust with coffee or cocoa. Place in preheated oven and bake for 15-20 mins., until a healthy golden brown. Remove from oven, allow to cool, and place on serving tray.

Serve with hot coffee or cocoa.

andalucia

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 19:15:09 GMT

A room

with a heater, an oven-stove, a small bathroom, a soft place for sleeping

and lots of windows

would be enough.

The most semester of all the times

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:14:38 GMT

When it comes to hyperbole, you could really say all the things. All the things, at all the times, in all the ways. With ALL the words.

How is it possible?

ALL the words? ALL the times?

Could it be that the impossible is that which permits the possible? Only in the face of the impossible, only in the face of absolute hyperbole, are we able to actually act, act in a way that is not performance?

(what?)

Why does it happen, how does it happen, that the semester in which my household begins speaking in hyperbole, always in all the hyperbole all the times about all the things with all the people, is also the semester in which I study the philosopher of hyperbolic responsibility, and hyperbolic impossibility? What kind of ultimately hyperbolic, supremely hyperbolic, coincidence, co-incidence, co.in.cid.ence, is this?

In what way is a coincidence exemplary to us, in what way does it represent to us the order of our world? What should make a coincidence more meaningful, or more coincidental? In what way does an example of the coincidences in our everyday lives become not just a coincidental coincidence, but in fact an exemplary coincidence--Not one in a series, but the most coincidental, the supremely coincidental?

Odd, is what I mean to say--Odd how this semester has been all the things, all the times ("everything, all the time"), and explicitly so, in what seems to be a somewhat limited way through which academia and "knowledge", "learning", words through language and social patterns, somehow arrive at a point we call explicitness.

Odd: Every day, I try to go about it as if it were a day, as if I were some self of mine and as if I had some things, some priorities, some sense of limits and normality. But there have been no limits, and every arrival at a limit, at a stable point, has been accompanied by the sound of a piece of rebar being stuck in the gears, and the whole machine starting to whirr and chirp, churning at the wrong times, in the wrong directions; every time I've approached a limit, every time I've thought a limit, thought a base, it's been accompanied by the whirring, snapping, esoteric noises of deconstruction:

In all the ways, in all the things, all the times.

Odd, and what could be more normal? What is more-than-coincidental, what is it about this normalcy that is not only an example of our normalcy, but an exemplary example of it?

Organic, it is. Not a part of a 'structure', a structure other than the organic one. Normalcy isn't normalized, it's organic; that is to say, that normalization itself is an organic process.

****

The semester, an organically normalized organic concept, is about to be called over.

I have a creeping suspicion that after such a hyperbolic semester, things are going to proceed to get extremely fucking strange.

And that right there is my call to responsibility: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

I'll take the BLT sub, please

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 02:42:12 GMT

"You know," I replied, "I had a really vivid dream last night. It's funny, I don't usually have dreams that I really remember, but last night, right as I was about to wake up, I had this dream, or remembered it, or whatever--

you got that caesar?"

"Yeah, just a sec."

"...And, I was driving. This was on a road back home, in Ohio. I was driving at night, and I had something in my left hand--

MELISSA!!

--yeah, I had a sandwich in my left hand, and it was, like, my reaction time was not keeping up with the speed that I was driving at. So, I kept just barely fucking sliding through these turns, you know, just staying on the road--And then, eventually, I didn't stay on the road. I leave the road, and I crash.

But the funny thing is, the whole time, I wasn't worried about it. I mean, I could've dropped my sandwich, you know, and grabbed ahold of the wheel, but..." I shrugged.

Matt grinned, and flipped the bread.

"You were just totally chill, huh?"

"Yeah, man, just fuckin' cruisin'. I think, actually, it might have been a metaphor for how I'm dealing with my life right now...

MARY!!"

"You know," Matt said suddenly, "I really wonder if I levitated last night."

"I think you did, man, I think you did."

pas d'opportunite

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 06:05:05 GMT

Goodbye America, vol.2

This is a step that has been taken before.
Not this step, as such, but such a step. A la mode.

I blunder my way through the cold, misleading myself to the wrong door of the behemoth 18-floor Van Hise Hall, home to the professors and departments of the some 60 languages taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It's actually a mild, for Wisconsin November, day, but the wind cuts sharp by Van Hise, at the high point of the isthmus between lakes Mendota and Monona.

Ana, leaving the building, is bundled up tight.
“Hola!” she says.
“Hola, como estas?”
“Con mucho frio.”
“Si, si, ya lo veo... Yo tambien, vamos.”
“Como estas tu?”
“Bueno... Voy. Y tu, tu, vete pa' calentarte.”
“Si, lo voy a hacer--”
“Hasta luego.”
“Ciao!”

I manage to get inside, forgetting that I had been confused, and changing direction in mid-stride to get to the door I should have come in, I bump into someone.
“Uy, perdon,” I mutter automatically, and brush past her. Looking up at me, her eyes linger on me, a strange expression on her face, for a second long than might be normal. Either she didn't understand me, or, more likely in Van Hise, she understood me perfectly. In her native tongue. And what would I be doing, sketchy-looking gringo-guiri, kaffiye wrapped around my neck, addressing her in Spanish, as if it were normal, as if it were accepted, here?
Was I a native speaker, addressing her as I normally would, or was I condescending, speaking to her based on skin color?

Brush it off. Brush those shoulders off, keep the head high.

What to do with the land of opportunity? What to do in the land of opportunity? When there's so much opportunity just swirling around you, what do you choose? When you're placed in a privileged position, with the opportunity to reap the benefits of the generations that have come before you, blindly reproducing you into this unique accidental historical moment full of opportunity, placing you blithely at the crossroads of so many ways and so many methods, so much harvest there for the taking, if you dare step up and take it?
I think of a girl I know, a classmate, as I descend the echoing, chaotic stairs of Van Hise. She's a graduate student. She's better than the rest of us undergraduates in the class. She knows it, we know it, the teacher knows it. She does what's best for her; she takes the class to heart, performs her best, and takes the entire class in hand when it suits her, when it is necessary for her, when she needs to commandeer the class to understand something that is head and shoulders above the rest of us. And certainly doesn't give a damn for the rest of us.
She exposes my own vices, viciousnesses, to me.
She is going to be very successful; you can see it in her face, in the determination with which she utilizes every free moment, reading books for other classes until the bell rings, the constant tension and attention that she holds herself at. She's running for the roses, an unending race.
I mean, what kind of opportunity, what kind of success, is this? Not a popular kind of success, perhaps; not a success of money and riches. Instead, this is the true success. This is the virtuous success, the pure success, the humanisitic success: This is the success done for the benefit of others, of Human Knowledge and Understanding. And damn, it's exciting.
It's a great opportunity, university is. If you're not to be satisfied with the simple life, there are so many problems, so many fields with so many issues to be solved. So many things to devote your utmost attention to. Coherence, cohesiveness, understanding, a solution, an explanation must be achieved.

The professor sits down, with a room full of attentive graduate students, texts and printed-off PDFs ready at hand to be cited when needed. He is greeted with warm words from the hosting professor, and the lecture begins.
Weighty topics. Close readings, precise differentiations between words. A world of history, the weight of everyone at least since Abraham, if not before, brought to bear. A myriad of sources and citings, great thinkers set on the table like so many tarot cards.
Tremendous erudition. Tremendous erudition.
This man, all these people in this room, all these students who will be here for the duration, who will be stretching themselves, pushing themselves, constantly re-reading, re-searching, re-determining, agonizing over these weighty topics—Such satisfaction. Such fascination. They are more than head and shoulders above me. They speak and exist on another plane. I cannot even begin to take part in their conversations.
I wonder, though, and I begin to seethe. I wonder, Another plane? A higher one, a better one? Or simply one that I, for whatever reason, cannot be a part of? N'est pas possible? It is, literally, not possible for me to possess these truths, to reach this understanding: that, for some reason of my composition or my position, in some sense that those things are different, I do not, and will not, have the opportunity to access such truth?

Pas d'opportunite.

Brush it off. Get that dirt off your shoulder.

How could I not take that step, that step of port-age, that step of carrying the great weight of these beautiful, high things? Could I not, with my supposed formidable skills, all the tests tell me so, people have sometimes intimated it, could I not carry that tremendous erudition with the ease and skill that these kids carry it? Step after step of port-age, carrying all of it together, all of us united, carrying it together: pas et autre pas de port-unite. Making it coherent, filling out my gloss, coming to an understanding, bringing together.
Given the opportunity, how could I not?
How, how, could I have the opportunity?

***

It all came down, then, the wall that is in fact very negotiable, the wall that is what will happen that, in all its solidity and undeniability, all its non-negatability, is in fact fluid, does in fact move with you, in response to the strength and violence of your own movements.
It came down, when I was seated in front of the computer, looking at the course offerings for next semester, and looking at my requirements, and thinking about my plans.

“Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.”

Thank you, John. You terribly know that better than anyone could have guessed.

The courses needed are not an option. They are not offered. That combination of factors that we all know too well, that always comes, no matter the situation and the context, that simple combination that makes it impossible, pas. The department had its own problems, the University didn't sympathize, I have my plans. And, irrevocably, undeniably, life happens.

This, then, would be my pas d'opportunite. From this absence of opportunity, completely pas d'opportunite, I would step above all those opportunities, step above the old ones, now gone, now passed. The passage has narrowed, and my feet no longer fit between the walls of the streambed, there at the bottom. I must take a step upwards, upwards but onwards.

The only opportunity in the land of opportunity is to take the opportunity to have no opportunity in the land of opportunity.

Oliver J.L. Renwick

"...ding-dong, bell."

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 23:36:34 GMT

Pink Floyd, for all of their absurdities, does (did?) one thing well: Revelation. It's not a theme, it's more of a motif, one that is perhaps the driving force in their music, and the links to the psychedelic drug experience are there to be made.
It occurs at crucial moments in their songs, in exploding galaxies of electric choral glory. Perhaps the most 'classic', that is, one of the most known, most celebrated, most debauched and most overplayed--
All of that aside, and at the heart of all of that, is that paralyzing moment: "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon!"
It's a moment that begins tracks earlier, at the opening of “Speak to Me/Breathe”, the beginning of the album; it's the first terrifying altered perception of the drug experience, that sets the tone of the entire trip. It's a moment that never goes away, perhaps in the entirety of Floyd's oeuvre; it's a moment that recurs again and again, throughout Dark Side of the Moon, but other albums, as well: It can be heard, “tongue-tied twisted”, in “Learning to Fly”; it is the “same old fears; wish you were here”. Perhaps, at times, imbued with different emotional qualities or tones, but never—never—departing from this same moment, this paralyzed and stunning galacto-psychedelic vision of awe, and terror, of the whole in one moment, every aspect of your aural data filled with the wall-of-sound symphonic-level output of these recordings. Never, in any of their significant work, is Pink Floyd unmoored from the moment of more-than-religious, more-than-spiritual, and somehow, more-than-chemical revelation.

Four and a half minutes into the thirteen minutes of “Shine On (You Crazy Diamond)”, is, of course, where the song really picks up—where it calls out, a single, echoing riff of four notes on the guitar, a call, a warning, an intimation, unavoidable and eerie: “Hey!” it says, as if calling from behind your back. You freeze, unable to resist, and turn, in slow motion with the reverb and echo, your heart beating as the drums begin to kick—Building slowly to a full blast of psychedelic revelation. The riff echoes, repeats, builds with the drums, the solos rise and rise—the cresting of the wave before your eyes—and then, fully, from all sides, you are pressed down upon, slammed against a wall, forced to keep your eyes open: “Shine on, you crazy diamond!”

****

I sat at the kitchen table, scribbling away at an assignment in Indonesian.
“You know,” I said to Aaron, “The other day in Arabic, I had an odd realization that there will come a time when I will miss Greek roots and Greek-derived words.”
“Kind of a strange realization, huh?”
“Yeah... I guess I didn't like to admit it, but I spend so much time every day thinking about the roots of words... It's funny, though, because every once in a while, you'll run into a word that's been influenced by the cultural inheritance of Greek literature and philosophy in Arabic, and there will actually be a Greek cognate in Arabic.”

This is how I spend my days: I spend my days in historical work, in digging, in looking at the old, the ancient forms—the paradigms, grammatical to philosophical—and seeing how they've colloquialized over the years. To a certain extent, all of us, here in the US, or in the West, whose boundaries now, if there are any, are very difficult to determine, partake in this. Not, perhaps, in the comparative historical work that happens when you learn the roots in their original form—In Greek, in Latin, in the “old style”, but instead in this social adaptation, in our Quest for Justice, in our dealing with modern life—In our sciences.

There's such a richness, there's such a variety, such a texture. Down in the valley of one contemporary colloquial, reaching down through the soil to those roots, those classical underpinnings—and then the hard climb up to a pass, or totally over the mountain peak, free-falling down into another valley.
This is my life; this is transition; this is Europe, this is the West, it is Romance tongues.

There is a pass that, for a long time, was shut. It was clogged with bodies; both sides had warred over it so bitterly, until one seemed to have triumphed, and sealed it over, called it closed, without realizing that in the process, their enemy had become a part of them.
I passed through this pass some time ago, now. Its name is Despeñaperros, and let us forget the reason why. I descended into the sand and dust in the land beyond, and unwittingly left behind my own dead in the pass. Unwittingly, the long-dead, long-silenced enemy had become a part of me, too.

Out on the rolling plain, I passed through Eçija, with its towers shimmering mirages in the frying pan of midsummer sun. Yellow faded into blue, into white and sand-brown, all bleached out by an incomparable sun.
Somehow, I returned whence I had come; and somehow, I have not left that frying pan.

There is the echo of this light—the echo o f this moment of swimming vision—that seems to recall itself, something I do not perform, but that performs me.
The beat is slow, the music soft and smooth in those first six minutes.

My head was swimming by the time I got to Indonesian, heavily caffeinated and more than a little disoriented by my twenty-minute oral exam in Arabic.
I tried to focus on the exercise, but the sunshine and the text, the words in my head, the connections between Indonesian and Arabic, born from the sweeping jihad of the incredible testimony, that revelation of the Messenger of God, that swept across continents, carrying itself and establishing itself, colonizing itself within the language and culture, within the people, of Indonesia—
People now swimming in the waters of absurd historical causality, their porous language colonized again and again: Dutch, French, now English, hints of Spanish trickling through the Pass of Despeñaperros, and proudly sailing through the Ocean Blue—
It is thus that the question flashes, dances, sways, flows in and out of a mysterious illumination in front of me, the mysterious illumination of the illuminated letter—
And I ask, “What's 'hadir'?”
As Sisca answers me, I begin to freeze. I hear a call coming from behind me, over the pass, with a banner and a horn—hadir, it says, cannot escape amongst the archipelago. Hadir: 'yu-Ha-dhi-ra”. The call comes, a single riff, four letters: ya, Ha, dha, ra; four notes, echoing mysteriously, irrestistibly, and as I assent to Sisca, as I say, “I understand,” I am pressed, irrevocably and without option, against a wall, as I am shot higher than a cloud, soaring up above this landscape until the valleys themselves are barely visible, and in each outstretched hand, the entire watershed inverts itself, categorizes itself in giant cultural-linguistic pyramidical montane hierarchies. I step across the border, and stand above it, immobile. The border between my two hands, between two massive mountain ranges that consist of nothing but valleys and the inexistent, razor sharp and lethal ridges between them; that border that is something in Turkey or Greece, somewhere perhaps in Constantinople—But above all, that border that is extant in Despeñaperros.

“Shine on, you crazy diamond”—Such a poor phrase, such a bastardization and butchering of mediocre imagery and motifs—So bourgeois, so half-rate: So 20th-century middle class.

But what can ever be said about revelation?

Goodbye America, Vol. 1

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:03:09 GMT

Without a beginning, and without an end, you're always starting in the middle of everything—And always, and impossibly, it seems that's where we are.

I lean forward in my chair as the dean begins to formulate his response, working his hands and his brow in almost identical, simultaneous motions.
“I must say, your idea, and your plan—Your argument for this major—is very good, and you're obviously very passionate about the subject. However, for most majors, even a languages and cultures major, the language study only constitutes a part of the major, and the remainder of the, typically, thirty-five to forty credits is made up through depth study. We've had students come to us with major plans like yours before, and we can't approve a major based solely on language study, because that doesn't fulfill the depth requirement.”

I must have looked concerned.

“Ah... That's really what a liberal arts education is about, you know? It's about that balance between a broad field of study, and also delving deeper into one in particular.” I looked down at the major proposal in my hand. Apparently, there had been some sort of miscommunication or misunderstanding somewhere, and I wasn't at all sure that it had taken place in this room. Indonesian, Arabic, perhaps French, and a well-rounded selection of courses from Anthropology, Political Science, and Comparative Literature on the functioning of language in society, culture, politics--

He shifted in his chair once more. “What you're proposing, really,” he said, “Is a dissertation, not an undergraduate degree.”

I took my eyes off the paper, and placed them firmly on his face.

***

All of us milled chaotically around the picnic shelter, half a dozen languages, a few dozen hungover faces, the countryside smells of herbal grasses and boisterous mountain air assailing us, the sound of occasional Peugeots or Skodas passing on the town's main road.

It took me a few seconds to register the sheet that the volunteers were handing out; when I did, however, it all clicked, and I smiled. This was an artifact of European culture; no, civilization, even! This would hardly be possible in a place that didn't have such rich and ancient, such engrained, social structures, philosophical veins of inquiry, and even such a permanent and established urban and economic geography!

Choose, the sheet said; Spanish students faced this decision—Not that they needed a sheet, no doubt they had been thinking about it for years—In their sophomore year of high school, at age sixteen. Choose, the sheet said: Are you Humanities, Hard Sciences, or Social Sciences? Keep in mind, it said, although not in words—Instead, in heritage, in prejudice and social war, in segregation and poverty, it said this—Keep in mind, this is not only your last two years of high school. It is also the preparation for and determination of your college track: Not just your major, your entire field of study in University. Keep in mind, this will determine in a very real way what jobs you will be qualified to take upon graduation, what kind of life it will be possible for you to have. There is no room for changes of heart, there is no room for flexibility, for failure, here, unless you want to start one of those college tracks all over again.
This is for your own good, and for society's. This is the justice, be it just or unjust, that is being handed down to you, and you will accept it, one way or another: Time to decide. Now.

So I submitted. I said, what the hell—I had a year of Latin two years ago, I've never taken Greek, but at least I'll be in English class, which'll be a relief. Let's go with Humanities, since supposedly I'm good at languages, and that's what they seem to stress in that track.
Of course, due to social pressures that were never fully articulated, only implied in other reasons that were only mild suggestions, due to something in the eyes or the stance of my English teacher, I ended up in French instead, so as not to intimidate the students of English.
Knock that off the list of classes where I know what the fuck's going on.
One year. One year, in a foreign language, in a foreign city, in a foreign country, a culture more distant from my own than I could ever have known. One year with a new family, losing and gaining only to lose again friends, stranded and supported, under force.
You'd think that one year, in the grand scope of things, wouldn't do all that much.

***

It will not stay stable, and it cannot stay stable.
Welcome to America University, Welcome to the United States Liberal Arts Education. Welcome to “that special time in your life,” welcome to free reign and experimentation, “learning more about the world,” “expanding your horizons,” and my personal favorite: aspiring to “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Please, post this quotation, from the eminent Mahatma K. Ghandi, wonderful misogynist that he was, on your dormitory bedroom door. Please, join a student organization dedicated to making the world a more peaceful, just place. Please, do, there are a lot of people who could use your meat, who could use your body and your resources as a United States citizen so that they can continue to survive. Please, do this, so that your society may be changed to a more outward-looking place, a more worldly place, and less terrifyingly self-centered.
But please, and this is not so much a please as it is a refusal, do not ask me to reconcile myself. Do not ask me to reconcile myself to myself, to a self I become through this quasi-mystical, completely provinical experience of the Liberal Arts Education. Do not ask me to appreciate the world around me through the fields of study that I encounter in the breadth of my liberal arts education, and thus, upon leaving, beginning on my career path and becoming a healthy member of society, I can, at last, have grown up and become a whole person, a person in my society, and yet, still, uniquely, “myself”.

It is thus that fascism has ruined me for freedom. Rather, my freedom under fascism, my freedom under force, my freedom under law and justice, has ruined me for freedom under freedom, for freedom under happiness and choice, under opportunity and a secure future, having well reconciled myself. It is thus that I have unlearned to be free through lack of obligation, and instead, to be free through an obligation of force: the force of the outsider, the force of a very clear, and at the same time, completely impossible situation of you and me, of the force of your language, your land, and your culture's imposition upon me. This is the obligation, the force, that I have come to know as freedom: For it is only then, it is only in that fight which is a constant one simply to exist, to continue to be legitimate, to continue to be able to eat by engaging in something so seemingly exogenous from myself, that I have truly been myself.

And here it does not, cannot, hold up. For what is it that this American freedom of choice, of the American Liberal Arts Education, is, if it is not fascism? It cannot be anything else but the American cultural fascism, a cultural artifact—But also a product of our civilization! Of our nation's founding principles, of the cultural, physical, and social geographic makeup of our society; where else would an American Ethnicity Breadth Requirement come from? How else could it happen? It could never happen in Europe—There, after all, everyone is equal under the Law.

***

Aaron leaned back, a pile of Chinese papers and flash cards on the hexagonal table in front of him. Slow drum beats and horns floated across the room, lights flashing dissonantly behind him. The bubbles chimed into the music, and stopped abruptly as a dense cloud of smoke flared out of Aaron's mouth, across the table.
I flipped through my notebook, and came across a sheet from the year before.
“Oh, dude,” I said, “I wanted to share this with you.” Aaron looked over, attentive behind his tube of Two Abel sheesha. “It's some enraged rants of mine from my linguistics class last year. Ahem. 'For example, you can't un-door something, or un-floor something.'” Aaron, straight-faced, looked me in the eyes, and picked up his backpack from the floor next to him. He held it suspended.
“Oh, look, I just un-floored my backpack,” he said, and let it drop. We shook our heads in silence as he took another drag, and passed the pipe.
“Just remember what my professor said,” he replied, picking up his pen and shuffling his papers, “That linguistics is about determining what language can and can't do. For example, in a given language, you can't speak backwards in order to speak politely. It's not possible.”

This is, after all, the legitimate face that Learning gives to language: This is Science, this has Evidence behind it, this is Proven by the Scientific Method. This is Universal. This is proper, it's a real field, called Linguistics. This has the power to subjugate: If it doesn't fit the evidence, it's an anomaly, to be solved later.
It's not a bad system, in its way; it certainly classifies things.

***

From my freedom to choose, from my priveleged stance amongst the richest of the rich, from my violent stance as a native speaker of the most powerful language in the world—And speaking the most powerful dialect of it, with an intimate socio-cultural knowledge of it—As an American, then, I have choices. I could be heroic, in so many ways. I could furiously take to task the problems I see in modern American scholarship, being as how the Universities are clearly our suppositories of knowledge. I could spend a lifetime thus, and an honorable one; I could be so learned, so intelligent, so rich in my understanding and knowledge, so wise. I could forsake my namesake of a country, I could return to Europe, and submit to the law of the European system, thus becoming something more, something else, than what I was born to be. I could be a heroic, just, moral example to society and humanity. These options are open to me: Supposedly, I don't have to kill, rape, and steal in order to stay alive.

And for those of us who would not be provincial? For those of us who do not care to buy a patch of land and tend it, cultivate it, make it bear fruit? For those of us who would not be sustained by a patria, governed by a local deity, dare I say a local logos? For those of us who have travelled, and have never come home, because they no longer belong to their home?

Those of us for whom, to use your terms, 'broadening' is deepening, and 'depth' is nothing but unnecessary weight?

Your insistence upon speaking, living, philosophizing, being, and eating in the colloquial—Your insistence upon and inability to go beyond the provincial, with no wider vision, no ability to stand on your own two feet, without your words, your memories, your life and your morality to back you up, places me in an impossible position.

Oliver J.L. Renwick

here we can appropriate the term "hell week"

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:57:21 GMT

-Balzac
-The American Universities of Cairo, Beirut, and Sharjah
-The USINDO University Summer Language Program in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
-The Institutions of Interpretation of Israel and Palestine
-Wild Rice Cakes
-Fascism
-Immunizations
-La Universitat de Barcelona
-Abraham
-To put it simply, hard rolls and citrus fruit (fuzzy types)
-J.M. Coetzee: "carno-phallogocentrism"
-Fossil Fuels
-Cultures of the name "sacrifice"
-Non-fluency, non-self, non-being; in-validity, unacceptability
-Coffee and soybean plantations
-Virginia Woolf
-An itch I cannot scratch

I would formulate the problem, then, as one of not being able to use the knowledge one acquires, except by way of un-knowing it, of knowing--enacting a knowledge that is--"new".

Here, then, we are on the familiar ground of unfamiliar ground: 'The will to ignorance must be the base upon which the will for knowledge is reared.'

"Hay que aprender el texto para olvidarse de el," Belen would say; I think Stanislavsky said it first.

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do," one of those wonderful inspiration gems from your sixth or tenth grade guidance counselor--given, perhaps, without a thought of what it actually implies.

Distillation: con-tar, cont-ar, co-untar

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:31:45 GMT

No, not a representation, not an imitation, not even a presentation--And yet, perhaps, in some senses, a little bit of all of these. An account. Yes, all right, a testimony if you wish, but a testimony that is not a testimony in the senses that the word seems to imply.

How can one posess without letting go--And more than that, more than a simple letting go, a decisive letting go, a letting fall, a giving to none, a giving from--This giving that is necessarily the antithesis of posession would, in execution, be the decisive, definitive action of posession.

Can one be present, decisively, without the conscious, decisive action of being absent? How is the act of absenting yourself decisively the act of being present?

Is it not?

----

What would such an account be? What form (what paradigm, what structure, what process, what aesthetics, what senses, what scale, what shape? What color? What frequency? What conjugation?) would such an account take (assume, embody, live, represent, imitate, destroy in being, exemplify?)? To what would an account such as this, whose presence is in the absence of any presence so far presented/present-ed--testify?

What affirmation? What truth? What structures? What transcendence(s)? What justice, and what reason?

How would such an account testify?

Me, Myself, and Comparative Literature

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 20:35:14 GMT

I can say for my fellow students in the Comparative Literature Department that, if they are not as crazy as I am, or not as twisted as I am--Or, at least, I can't tellif they are or not--they're certainly a bunch of fucking oddballs.

And as for the professors...

I had a wonderful conversation about Turkish Delight, and traditional methods of preparing it, with the head of the department recently. I had to, however, bring up the question:

"So, are you, like, Acting Head, or something...?"
"Prospero and I are sharing duties as head... 'To help you work towards your degree'," she added, with a stifled, slightly hysterical laugh.

It was a warm office, filled with snippets from comics, which she did most of her work on, and tins of Arabic sweets; apparently, she had recently returned from Cypress, hence the tan.

I had gotten more of an answer than I wanted. The department was going. It was gone; there wasn't, apparently, any real chance that it would be staying intact. "It will be merged with another small department," Prospero had told me, "Probably Classics."

The news had come out last year, a week after I declared the major, that the department was in trouble; the Administration apparently saw problems with the number of small departments in the humanities, and needed to consolidate.

And it's just an academic department, just a discipline, but I kind of liked it.

Comparative Literature, I would say, takes as its subject "the text", but that would be incorrect. It also takes as its subject the song, the film, the politics, the society, the language. It is the place where philosophy, literature, political views, societal values, and aesthetic considerations can all be played off of each other and considered critically. Yesterday, in one class, the topic matter included Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Husserl, Heidegger, Erich Auerbach, The Old Testament, Kierkegaard, and Bob Dylan. Everyone in the room was at least bilingual. The professor can barely speak English without French syntax and constant use of Greek words, with the affirmation, "That's a word in English." And they are, of course.

I can't exactly say I have warm feelings and a good connection with my discipline and my colleagues in the discipline; the whole concept of Comparative Literature kind of defies those kind of ties.

"Comparative Literature is constantly in crisis, no?" said Max, one day, at the beginning of class. "But then again, I think that's kind of appropriate to the discipline."

I suppose, though, that times are hard, and they're only gonna get harder.

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 17:32:03 GMT

sick sick sick sick.

god DAMN it, I need more orange juice

The letter is luminous; the faces cubist

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:27:52 GMT

I DON'T DO DRUGS!!!

WHY does my brain continue to play this ridiculous shit on me?

Kurds need cold medicine, too!

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 16:26:07 GMT

I learned to tie a kaffiye as a turban, properly, last night.

"We were sitting at Chinese conversation table, and we were talking about what you call an ugly girl in Chinese. And then we were just talking about what we call an ugly girl in English, and this girl said to me, 'What do you say when you're talking with your friends?'

And I said, 'Uh... When I'm with my friends, we don't really talk about girls... We mostly just talk about international politics.'"

****

"Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat..."

****

During a conversation in a seminar on testimony, while talking about the conceptualization of space within the form of video-testimony, a professor responds to a comment with:

"I would complicate that!"

Jacques Derrida is eating my SOUL.

I haven't been othered like that since high school

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:42:25 GMT

"C'est pour moi un devoir, je dois m'adresser a vous en anglais. This is for me a duty, I must address myself to you in English."

****

There has been growing tension in the University Club kitchen, ever since we lost the hyperactive sexual fiend Sean to the wiles of alcoholism and prison; the kitchen staff consists of Chef Luther, Carlos, Misael on dishes, and myself.

So, two native Spanish speakers with a smattering of English, one native English speaker with a handful of Mexican cursewords, and myself.

And it seems that Carlos and Misael much prefer that I translate for them, that I communicate with Matt about any little thing, rather than actually ask him, even though they probably could. I understand this, but at the same time, it is no situation for me to be in, if I seek to maintain my status as an independent worker in the kitchen. And frankly, I find it a bit strange that after living and working in the country seven years, Carlos isn't beyond intermediate conversational American English.

But that's my point of view, the addict to new languages, the always-other.

But Chef Luther definitely doesn't like the constant Spanish speaking, nor, indeed, this uncomfortable burden that Carlos and Misael have placed upon me. I don't, either, but I'm not in charge of the kitchen: I am the go-between, I am the mediator, I am the neutral, the non-full time worker, the always-other.

In the midst of things today, at the end of a very big rush, I say to Carlos, in Spanish, "Carlos, if you make one more pear (salad), we can sell this ticket; I've already got the caesar."

"Ah, si?" he says.

"Si."

Chef Luther, a few feet away from Carlos, snaps.

"Call the orders in English, you're not a motherfucking translator."

That, and Chef Luther's little temper tantrum about Carlos not sealing a bag of tortillas--"If you're gonna make your own food, at least clean up after yourself"...

I think Carlos is gonna quit.

The whole situation--Because Carlos and Misael never call me "guey", do they--When they talk about "estadounidenses", they include me in it, it's "ustedes", not "los gringos estos", and then this bizarre and inexplicable, but somehow very primal and basic in the Amerikan, even an open-minded and chill Amerikan like Chef Luther's, consciousness and sense of self and society, response, this intense Othering from Chef Luther towards me, towards Carlos, towards all of us, towards having to deal with this incomprehensible babble going on around him all the time, and this crazy, constantly-misunderstanding, constantly-erring, non-Amerikan, without the Protestant work ethic at all, fucker named Carlos

and me, always the other, even amongst others.

Differance, indeed.

The whole situation is completely bizarre, bordering on the inexplicable, and, in all truthfulness, is a terrible microcosm of so many of the pains wracking what we call this country right now.

Wracking a lot of countries, really.

Je ne comprends pas.

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 17:48:42 GMT

Sometimes, even if you just tap something lightly, the re-ver-berat-ions go really far