Don't read books

    Don’t read books!
    Don’t chant poems!
    When you read books your eyeballs wither away
    leaving the bare sockets.
    When you chant poems your heart leaks out slowly
    with each word.
    People say reading books is enjoyable.
    People say chanting poems is fun.
    But if your lips constantly make a sound
    like an insect chirping in autumn,
    you will only turn into a haggard old man.
    And even if you don’t turn into a haggard old man,
    it’s annoying for others to have to hear you.

    It’s so much better
    to close your eyes, sit in your study,
    lower the curtains, sweep the floor,
    burn incense.
    It’s beautiful to listen to the wind,
    listen to the rain,
    take a walk when you feel energetic,
    and when you’re tired go to sleep.

12th century zen poem by Yang Wangli

Stuff my students write

In a pop quiz, I asked the students to summarize the plot of the Second Shepherd's Play in no more than two sentences. Here's some corkers:

--Two shepherds have their goat stolen ...

--3 shephards are traveling and one of their sheep is stolen by an evil sheep herder. They go on a quest/journey to find the missing sheep & meet new characters & discover new themes & ideas on their journey.

--Kurt Russell in a Ford White Bronco speeding down the highway towards the Canadian border with the highway patrol from 9 different states on his tail and his love on the line.

--The first shepherd was so bad at his job that a second shepherd was hired to replace him. Then the second shepherd wrote a play recounting his experience as a shepherd in the second degree.

--The second shepherd's play is about religion in a different time.

Miles from Nowhere, continued

If you haven't already read the first installment of this blog post, I suggest you do that first. I'm narrating my epic month of moving to Los Angeles...

But after that, it went a bit like this: 

(You can make these bigger by right clicking and choosing "view image")

why these pictures won't line up I don't know.

   

And now, today, it's a month since I left London. ONLY A MONTH. I can't even remember London, but when I do cast my mind back, it usually recoils with a stab of melancholy, despite the fact that getting here had exactly the effect I knew it would: 
The effect of inspiring me with everything that's exciting about this new chapter that I was having trouble getting excited about while I was still bidding farewell to the last few chapters of my life.  NOW though I am ready for the liminal stage to come to an end! After being tantalized with the possibility that my apartment could be readied before the Oct 1 move in date, it's looking like that was just a tease and I'll have to wait it all the way out, meaning an Oct 1 move in (around a teaching meeting UCLA that day) and an Oct 3 first day of teaching. I've been feeling so impatient and excited to get my stuff back-- that is, to get it out of storage at the moving company. To get my boxes from London off the ocean. To get the suitcases and random boxes out of my car. To start nesting. To feel like this adventure is finally, truly begun.
....

National Talk Like a Pirate Day

I have been reminded that it is national talk like a pirate day. In honor of this, I will tell you the story of National Talk Like a Pirate Day 2006. It was early in my first semester at Brown and in my undergrad-level Anthropology of Japan class I was wearing an outfit I really like. It consists of tight black and grey striped trousers and a very old tuxedo shirt meant for a very big man-- maybe 18" neck? Because it is a real tuxedo shirt, it requires shirt studs to close--there aren't any buttons. So I wear it over a tank top and use a big black hipslung belt to keep it closed.  I feel extremely Patti Smith in this outfit, probably with ankle boots of some variety.
And, sitting next to the two adorable freshmen who were my seat buddies in that class. One was like, 'Oh are you dressed for National Talk Like a Pirate Day?' and I was like, "What?"
And then, poor thing, she was really embarrassed but I thought it was awesome.  And also I learned about the existence of National Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Miles from Nowhere

It's still not yet a month since I left London, which is one of the most surreal realisations I think I've ever had. Because so much. So so much has happened and is happening. I left 22 Campbell Road on the morning of August 25 and took a taxi to Gatwick airport.

Much much more --- after the jump

however

So, to counterbalance my previous post, I have been compiling a list of things that I will not miss about London and things to look forward to in LA.

1. I will not miss the noise of the Somali orphanage upstairs. Ok, so it's probably not a Somali orphanage, but it IS a Somali family who seem to babysit or something, because sometimes many many children are there and they are really amazingly loud, running, yelling, falling down, getting yelled at, crying, etc.

2. I will not miss the people who constantly ring my doorbell looking for someone else. I used to think that the woman who did it a few hours after promising she would never do it again was the worst, but that was before the man who rang my [blaring, horrible sounding] bell twice at 4:45am the night I had just come home from the whole month of July away.

3.

Sinks like this. How am I supposed to wash and rinse dishes like this? Who thought of this? People who waste whole basins of water to rinse every little thing? People who have servants? People who in fact don't use water? I don't get it.

4. Paying utilities, etc to keep two flats in two countries afloat.

5. No screens in windows, and the concomitant big ol' bugs that sometimes come in to visit.

There are more. I'll post this for now... more will be added

one week

It's a quiet day here by myself in my flat in London. Probably the last quiet day here because in one week I will be departing here, flying out for Providence by way of Reykjavik and Boston and Heathrow (not in that order). Many plans have been made about this move and the madness of the weeks coming up. The flat itself though doesn't yet look like much is changing. A hard but silent rain has just come and gone, leaving a chorus of drops tinkling from the black iron of the back stairs beyond my kitchen window. The sky is a uniform bright white-- even the color of the cloud cover barely heralded the arrival of a sudden rain shower. The glorious British summer we've all been gushing about here ended a few days ago. On the day I traveled back from Germany to London and since then it's been much cooler and unpredictable-- sunny one minute, windy, suddenly cold, none of those weather features seeming to have any effect on each other.
Just now even-- the window has grown a warmer bright sunshiny color, belying the raindrops still clinging to the panes.
This is it. I have been cooking up the food in the pantry-- I made a delicious barszcz (if I do say so myself) fortified with the last of the dried porcinis. I am trying to get up the fortitude to start writing up the ads for the kitchen and house items I'm planning to sell. I should probably pull out another box and pack up some books. I have to click over into the mindset of relentlessly dismantling this little nest I've been building up over the year. The invisible moving preparations were hard enough to do-- the visible ones for some reason really distress me. Every time my efficiency disease kicks in and I try to leave all that to the last possible second I can keep everything as it is and then pack pack pack-- but invariably I underestimate how much time all this will take. I should have sold things earlier, I should have done without a few more days...

Maybe this is a symptom of this other problem I have right now: I don't want to leave. Obviously I'll be back, obviously big awesome new adventures are right around the corner, obviously things are great. But obviously... I don't want to go.

Observations from IFTR Day 0

I am at the University of Warwick in a dorm called "Bluebell." U Warwick is in Coventry, sort of. Mostly it is outside the city by 4 miles and there are trees and countryside surrounding the sprawling campus.
Observations:
1. Unlike London, there are no food shops inside or outside the station. It left me no option but to trust that there would be something to eat at the other end on the campus.
2. It is incredibly easy to identify the other people on their way to the IFTR conference. Because they are the gawky Europeans with sheaves of papers who keep asking the bus driver the same question every two minutes. They laugh when the bus's jolting knocks them around and over their rollaboard suitcases.
3. It seems that IFTR is sharing the campus with a national teen football (meaning soccer) camp this week. Our registration did not involve a queue of parents and teenage boys snaking all the way around the center hall of the student union in a spiral. Thank goodness.
4. I met a Finn. We were looking for the bus at the same time and ended up walking together from the wrong bus stop (with the right bus declaring "via Univ of Watwick" on its destination) to the right bus stop, then ran into each other again getting off the bus (also with the aforementioned French people who, by virtue of having a working smart phone, I ended up leading in a sort of ragtag procession from the bus at the correct stop then into the registration building). Then again I saw him at conference (as opposed to accommodation) registration, so that by the time he walked out of the balcony of the campus pub where I was waiting for my dinner, it seemed the time to say, hello, why don't you sit down here.  I did that, then almost immediately realised how complicated this would be: he turned out to be Finnish, and although we had made eye contact with each other innumerable times over the previous hour and even spoke, he lived up to our joking notions of the Finns as incredibly taciturn. It was awkward, even if we were disposed to be friendly.  Frankly I could mostly not even hear him when he did speak, which slowed down our conversations considerably. He seemed to warm up a bit over time, but I did feel a bit angsty about having forced both of us to make friendly for so long and I excused myself with my unwritten conference paper as the reason when I'd finished eating. Oh Finns!
5. There is much much more, but not now. 

So much.

So much has been happening.
The biggest things are that I've signed a contract and I'm moving to a new job in September. Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Theatre at UCLA. 
In 1997 I moved to southern California to start my freshman year of college and it was also the big El Niño year. That winter we had rain and endless rain, mudslides, and closed roads meant that classes were cancelled many times-- but we the on campus kids could still get to Blockbuster, so I remember those rainy days as gleefully irresponsible ones, punctuating the big new events of being at university.
This year, the meteorologists say that El Niño will be back, the biggest since 1997-8. We come together.


---


There's much more to say. And tomorrow I leave for China, where I'll have some leisure I think, and I'll try to start catching up. Hope to hear from you.

University, teaching, education, grades

I have a guest post on Kim Solga's pedagogy blog, The Activist Classroom.  I talk a bit about differences between the US and UK university systems, some of my own troubles with grades in education, and one experiment I did trying to make grades work better for everyone involved.

Old prejudices in new media

Several years ago, I found myself in a university basement, everyone with drinks, playing a sort of silly but strangely entertaining impromptu get-to-know-you game. We simply went around in a circle, each declaring "I like [something]" and everyone who agreed took a sip. After several rounds, I was running low on ideas and thought I'd say "I like Japan" having lived there and all but as soon as I thought it, I thought, no, they have a pretty bad history with the US and Europe, world war Axis and all, so I'll say China-- they were on the "right" side of World War 2 and have been the victims of so many imperial attacks.  Whatever this may say about the skew in my own quick thinking, I was still actually viscerally shocked when I said "I like China," took a sip, and everyone else at the table kept cups adamantly down even to the extent that now I remember an audible expression of dislike uttered in response.  And it was only then that I remembered, oh yeah. Everything that has happened in China since world war... 1949, Communism, Mao, Cultural Revolution, etc... I really don't know how I forgot it in the moment or how my general consciousness could have forgotten the general attitude toward China of not just red-blooded patriotic American capitalists and democracy-philes, but even those much leftier-liberal types that tend to congregate in Ivy League graduate schools.

That is, it seems that no matter what your political stripe, be it "closer" to socialism or as far as you can get, it's always open season to hate China. And, I get it. I do. There are horrific human rights abuses, there is widespread environmental degradation, there are big problems, they are complicated, the country is very very different from the USA, and that is scary. We should be concerned about those problems, but really, I don't actually feel a lot of "concern" from most of the English-language coverage I see of China's problems. I just see old fashioned bigotry.

A few weeks ago, some other internet journalist hit the nail on the head, I thought:
Westerners are so convinced that China is a dystopian hellscape, they'll share anything that confirms it.

That piece is a brief debunk, but another acquaintance picked up on the western obsession with China's air pollution and added to it the consistent scares over poison and chemicals in products manufactured in China. I'd add to that the attention that FoxConn electronics factory suicides garner.  These are serious issues that should be attended to and there are serious abuses here that should be rectified.

But here's what bothers me: the message in these news stories is never about our global complicity in these national issues, through, perhaps foremost, our relentless consumption of what China is producing. Why are those poison-in-children's-toys scares always divorced from any scrutiny to how the pressures to make more things faster and cheaper might lead to industrial contamination? They come off as if it's some kind of privilege for China to get to make products for an insatiable, stingy West and we've discovered that they were maliciously slipping something into the cheap, disposable toy. We looked at FoxConn as if it weren't our iPhones and OUR insatiable greed for more, newer, faster, cheaper, fancier things that undergird the process of production. Isn't it the rampant industrialism that is causing China's air pollution disaster? And who is driving the demand for those that industrial output?

So one part of it is denial. And I think the other part of it is leftover, tenacious racism and bigotry. Could there be a certain kind of scapegoating going on here-- a fierce abjection of the feared other especially when they start to look a lot like us, when they're the supplier to our junkie dependence on more stuff?

It's not the whole world that seems to slip into this category, but by no means is China special. I felt the same dynamics going on in media reactions to Russia lately, especially to the "gay propaganda" issues and of course the Olympics. Of course I'm deeply concerned about what's going on in Russia right now in terms of freedom of speech, treatment of homosexuals, and the Ukraine. Here's someone who was voicing some similar concerns:

Sochiproblems is a bigger embarrassment for the US than it is for Russia

This writer takes a slightly different tack than I do, but I think is asking for something similar to what I think we're missing. For one thing, as this writer makes clear: the government and the people of the country are not the same entity. In both these cases all the people of these large, very large, nations are not only generalised, but elided with national and economic structures, as if the activists being suppressed and workers being exploited were not also Russian and Chinese!

The very way in which we structure and disseminate our information about issues in China and Russia perpetuates old stereotypes and phobias about our historical enemies much more than it expresses any real concern toward alleviating the very real problems that these countries face. It obscures our own complicity and imbrication with those issues and it ignores any gesture toward solutions in favor of fear-mongering and othering.

There are innumerable other instances of these problems of media and thinking. Indeed, such oversights might be a continuing hallmark of our continuing struggle to see past (and post) the legacies of colonial violence, world war, and political partisan hatred. That's hard and the issues are complicated. But I think it would behoove us to start on these issues by thinking more carefully, clearly, and compassionately about those places we don't understand.

St Vincent and what feminism might look like

Sometime  in 2011 or 2012 I went to see St Vincent play in Providence at Lupo's. I didn't know *that* much of her catalogue, but I knew enough to be excited. It was a good show. She is a very slight woman with curly hair and that night she was wearing black leather shorts I remember. Actually, some kind soul has posted video from that night (looks like it was May 3, 2012):

These two videos I found give an idea, but they don't show the part that really made that night memorable for me. 

Taking Time

I've been reading the little blog posts and magazine articles here and there for years: multitasking doesn't work. Doing too many things at once hurts overall productivity.  Etc etc.
I've known that stuff for years, heard student speeches about it while teaching, and suffered through three years of dissertating, which was the hardest, most straight up depressing thing I've ever done where I was buffeted constantly with self-doubt, procrastination, and discouragement. And despite all that, all that stop-multitasking stuff didn't really feel like it was relevant to me.

Digital art

Okay, so as you know, I had some bad tech luck and I'm not really sure how I'm going to afford in on top of my swingin' bi-continental skint lifestyle, but here's something kinda good:


Sort of beautiful "digital" art from my broken electronics.  It kind of inspires me to try to make other beautiful things in this manner-- only preferably not with the ones I was relying on to do more than be gorgeous.

Queen Mary's notable alumni

• J. G. Ballard – Author of Empire of the Sun and Crash amongst other works
• Graham Chapman – Monty Python star
• Bruce Dickinson – Lead Singer of Iron Maiden
• Romola Garai – Actress
• Julie Gardner – Television Producer responsible for Doctor Who
• Florence Mahoney – First Gambian woman to obtain a PhD
•  Bill O'Reilly – American television host, author, historian, syndicated columnist and political commentator (?!?!?!)
• David Sullivan – Pornographer and owner of the Sport and Sunday Sport newspapers
• Sarah Waters – Author of Tipping The Velvet.

day is done

Okay, so it started before today. On Tuesday while sitting innocently on a desk, projecting powerpoint for my Performance in History class, my laptop inexplicably threw itself off the table, landed on its side, and looked fine until I picked it up, when suddenly the screen went like this:

Oops. I still have AppleCare active on this 2.5 year old computer, so I didn't really panic at the time, while the whole assembled 15 or so students sat aghast around me. "Okay, let's get back to 18th century acting!" I asked them, but still silence, and the uncomfortable feeling that everyone was staring at me with shock and pity.  "I can't do anything about it right now, so let's get back to class!" Finally I got them back into it, and kept on using the computer even, the projected image looking perfectly fine.

The panic happened later when I discovered that applecare will not cover what they kept calling "accidental damage." I kept thinking that this mishap feels exactly the same as when my power jack suddenly stopped working, or the hard drive instantaneously failed, but apparently not. I took it to the Apple store (a nearly impossible appointment to get, and I was checking THREE metro London stores) only to be gaily told by Giovanni that it's only £250 to replace the screen-- a real bargain, he insists. I disagree. I tell him I will be buying a £7 cable to connect the computer to the only-slightly-faulty plasma tv my friend gave me for free. That is what I do. Now my computer set up looks like this:

I have a home desktop now. "You can't carry it around town and use it then," Giovanni oh so helpfully told me in the apple store. No kidding.
I am considering my options.

Also, I am feeling that I do not have a large reserve of disposable income right now, because it is expensive and rather complicated to run even my modest finances on two continents.

And then today. I am trying to appreciate the wide world of free and cheap entertainments. I decided I should get on my bike and try to figure out the weird wasteland of green space, Olympic Park, cafes, and highways and then go by the big Tesco for the big stock up shopping trip for Wednesday's Kansas Day party.

And then, while trying to thread my way through the industrial wasteland and endless construction of the Olympic Park, the navigation device in my gloved hand slipped and hit the ground with a simultaneous thud and crack:

Again.

Four days after my laptop met a similar fate. It's so awful it's funny.  And it got funnier.  First the bike shop allegedly open next to the cafe I eventually found was unattended, so I was left with my very flat tires to head on to Tesco. Where I bought too much. And piling it all on my bicycle, in the front basket and back rack with bungee cords, as I headed off to walk the overloaded and underinflated bike home, I managed to flip the back bag, leaving me in limbo with the bag suspended upside down, shedding glass bottles and eggs while it started to rain. Nice people grabbed the bike and picked up groceries while I got it flipped back upright, out of the way, and rearranged everything (bottles in the basket now! it's just the bags didn't fit that way before.) Rolling basically on the rims with every bump, I try to lift it up over the shallow steps that oxymoronically lead to the incline for wheeled things to pass under the highway. I make it up one and realise that loaded that far down, there's no way I'll make it up more. I'm not the only one: there's a muddy track up the bank next to the steps where people clearly push their bikes. Up that, I make it nearly to the top before sliding in the mud, the bike and I fall over again, now trapped in the gully. I'm beyond the pitiful bike person in the rain at this point and it's too funny. Righted once more, I begin the slow trudge home in the light rain. About a third of the way, there's a spectacular bolt and a few seconds later, the thunder. At two thirds, a gale force deluge suddenly begins, which bends me double as the hail starts to fly down the street. I detour into the lee of the DLR station for a few minutes and watch sheets of rain and hail push us all eastward toward the river. When I launch out again, I pass mothers literally shielding their toddlers with their bodies and people attempting to advance down the street behind phalanxes of vibrating umbrellas.
My suede boots are uniformly soaked through, my hat, scarf, gloves, tights, and skirt are sopped as sponges.
Here is what my cornflakes look like now:

Enough of today.

The stairway is a box that

There was a cryptic note yesterday in the staircase in the ArtsOne building where the Department of Drama is (one of the great perks of working in exciting theatre departments is that strange little projects have a higher probability of popping up around one).

It said something like "A stairway is

a box where you throw your takeaway coffee cups."

It was gone a few hours later (and I even discovered why it came to be there) but today I was walking up the staircase and as I reached the top where Drama is (it sounds so funny! "DRAMA is there!" "The Department of Drama" like some surreal government office.)

as I summited the stairs, I was suddenly shocked:
It's so familiar. This is my routine. This is my job, my life. I do this all the time. These stairs are familiar stairs. This blue carpet square pattern is behind the office door, it leads to the "pigeonholes" as we call the mailboxes, and the kettle and the endless Earl Grey I drink. This is familiar, this is my life.

And I missed you. I felt keenly, carved precisely out of me all the rest of you who aren't in this verse of my life. Who I sincerely hope will come back in at the chorus. There were suddenly vacuum spaces in me the shape of friends and family, close ones and not-so-close ones, all of you who've been a part of my routine, my orbit, before.
I miss you. I thought of you in Kansas, California, Abu Dhabi, Japan, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado, Germany, Poland, Finland, China, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Turkey, Malaysia, Ohio. And more. I thought of you. I thought of you specifically and I thought of You generally and I miss you.

I thought (again, as I so often have before) of how strange it is to be strung all over the world. I miss you. I hope to see you soon.