speach tree

these days it's after i've had a shot of rum, after being out of the house from 10am to 11pm, after bouncing around a classroom feeding off the energy derived from a can of soda, instant coffee, bright-eyed young people fueled by their own youth. today i explained japan's cultural obsession with cherry-blossoms, how a tree totally devoted to the production of beauty (the absence of even a single photosynthesizing leaf) can inspire so much poetry. how entire offices will take an afternoon to picnic and get drunk under the falling blossoms, how some people will go flower-viewing just for the food. it was a "Namiko Abe" moment. (see my earlier post dated april 23.) i also succumb to these moments, although i do identify with the ones who show up just to get drunk and eat the rice cakes. i am learning that my writing identity is becoming more and more estranged from my daytime identity. is this a problem?

too crazy high-tension to sleep, even though i must. i must! i got another offer to sit on a 2009 AWP panel, this time on the process of translation. i'm really interested in socialist women poets of the tokyo literary scene of the 1920's. want to get more into their stuff, but have no time. i feel kind of phony thinking about sitting on a translation panel when i haven't even finished any of my 3 translation projects, let alone new projects, however dreamy they may be. reading louise erdrich is both inspiring and paralyzing for a writer who suffers from chronic loneliness. close to yet just outside of reach of mythical homeland, a.k.a. "The Community." i am slowly getting to know my characters, during time stolen on train rides, between jobs, and long walks between here and there. sometimes it's their names that come to me first, other times, their histories. sometimes i recognize them through their faces, their scars, sometimes their speech patterns. i am tr...

i just learned that someone i respect and look to for hope - someone i just met but feel so comfortable with and can already feel frustrated about and then appreciate all over again - is totally depressed. even as he puts himself out there day after day, arguing, pleading, demanding radical change, he speaks quietly (so that only a few people can hear) of how everything drains him. then i learned that he isn't alone, that so many people who seem to be so fierce are on the verge of suicide. how can i return even a little inspiration to the bottomless pool of despair? i think young people hold a lot of potential in their fresh, clear eyes, to see through the smoke and the clouds. wouldn't it be great to have a school for baby revolutionaries? wouldn't it be amazing to see the world through their eyes?

there is so much to prepare and mobilize for may 1 . and of course, there will be much more to do after may 1. in the meantime, i am trying to stay rested, fed, and productive. somehow i can't seem to focus on my day-jobs, though. i did finish reading other people's children by lisa delpit, however. i am mentally patting myself. i'm going to write my thoughts on it as soon as i can get enough sleep to stay awake through the writing of it.

april: this is the month when hate blooms staining my gut but it is also the month of wisteria. april (08): I imagine the pink and white buds bursting out of trees this month as the knuckles on my flailing fists. I am furious. I bleed longer and more. I eat red things. I eat dark black and purple things. the teeth in my mouth sharpen around harsh words and hot thoughts that emerge as air. I hurt us because I hate us. this is the month I yearn to stab a blossoming tree into a white shirt. this abuse doesn’t hurt me more than it hurts you. the ovaries churn. the entrails heave. I am a rage that will leave me exhausted and spent, repentant, by may.

I keep landing on this woman's blog when I try to look something up related to Japan. decided to check her out, and on first glance she seems to be another japanese woman performing (not insincerely) japanese femininity in a subtle and inoccuous way. i have nightmares of becoming like her, but i have to admit, her posts are quite poetic. part of me almost believes that there is a team of writers who are writing under the name "Namiko Abe" with a picture of a random japanese model on the header. i should explain what i have just written, but this is my blog and i don't feel like it. just check out the other posts tagged "Fu Manchu" i guess...

one really nice thing about being affiliated with the public school system is all the days off. today is the last of my little days off, and i have thoroughly enjoyed myself. i went to a little lake and walked around it with my dad. We were viewing a house he wants to buy at Lake Braddock after a decade of renting his current place. There were many birds and turtles. it was strange walking around in someone else's house, inspecting the ceilings for water spots, walking into closets to check out the size, sniffing the air for dampness. i went to DC to pick up an anthology for a writing workshop i was a part of last year. it's called Writers on the Green Line Vol 1 and i am on page 20. my dad and i had coffee and green tea bing soo at our local korean parisian-style cafe. see above. i then deposited my tax returns. at home, i helped do a spanish translation for NMASS. then i made anchovy pasta which i destroyed with too much salt.

mere hours after writing the below list of wonderful things i was going to do this summer, i spoke with MMH, who asked me to seriously consider working in maryland. she said that if i'm not making time to write and to translate and to draw right now , then will i really do it in my "free time"? she has a point. thus i have been reduced to the proverbial flip-flop of 2004 notoriety. my goal then is to post something on at least one of my blogs every week-day from now until... august. because i am going to japan in august. sigh.

I'm going to spend the summer writing and drawing my comic. I will have to dip into my savings but... that's what they're for, right!? Ahhh I feel so much better. Here is a list of what I WANT to do this summer*: - Work on translations of Jose Watanabe's un-translated poetry. - Prepare a presentation of Watanabe's work, based on my undergrad thesis. - Work on translations of Ryoko Sekiguchi's untranslated poetry. - Finish enough pages of my web-comic to launch in the fall. - Work on my speach tree poetry project. - Prepare for living in Japan in 2009. - Create a set of submissions from old poems - and actually submit them. - Practice and perfect my presentation on the history of anime reception in the US. - Prepare for the coming year so I don't have to scramble in the fall. - Do more for the Break the Chains campaign to repeal Employer Sanctions, restore equal rights for all workers, etc. - Do aikido on a regular basis and find a sparring partner. *Note: wh...

Wow! Creating those new blogs (I'm also working on a blog that's specifically for my students learning Japanese. It isn't ready yet so I won't announce it until it has more meat) really frees up speach tree to be more of a bloggy blog! I've been in a funk lately, and not the good kind of funk. April is a fighting month for me, probably starting with the extravagant fights I used to have with my mother as a teenager. In Providence, a lot of the hate crimes, the police brutality, the street harassment happened to us students of color around this time of the year, when the weather started warming up and people stopped bundling up so much. On my way home to VA on sunday, I got into a screaming match with the ladies who hawk tickets for the chinatown bus - 2000coach to be exact - after they forced me out of the bus and shut the door in my face. I'll spare you the gruesome details but I felt both ashamed for the ugly display and also strangely invigorated by the fight...

http://kinosei.wordpress.com/ I decided to make a separate, more "edited" (ie: censored) blog for the nitty gritty stuff and the stuff I want to show to people who... don't know me that well... The working title is "The Animator" Please take a look around - please also forgive the haphazard and the absurd in it. Definitely a work-in-progress. I hope you find it useful to your work in any way, and that you will share with anyone else interested in education and this particular manifestation of contemporary pop-culture.

Day 3: Kids' Day Sunday April 20 The NYCC blog (MediumAtLarge.net) reports a preliminary count of more than 64,000 attendees for the weekend. Pretty huge. I only made it to 2 panels today, but I met cool people and swiped a lot of SWAG so it was OK. I went to Harold & Kumar, where Kal Penn (who played Kumar), Neil Patrick Harris (who played Neil Patrick Harris), and the writer/directors sat and talked about making the movie, laughing at racists, and shipping in a woman with "the biggest tits in the world." Very enlightening stuff. Interestingly, the first movie did poorly in theaters but the DVD sales alone made it possible for them to make a sequel. Then I went to the Show Floor, where I met an art teacher in the Bronx. I was initially drawn to his historical/historical-fiction comic Bronx Heroes, calling for accurate representation of the Bronx and also for resistance to gentrification. We talked about lesson plans for students learning the art of comics, where to f...

A relatively small crowd patiently waits for the appearance of a perfectly coiffed Japanese pop legend. T.M. Revolution's fame in the U.S. is owed largely to a certain red-haired anime swordsman... 11:30am Arrive at Javits Center and meander to the events hall. I'm too late to get into whatever movie is being featured in the IGN.COM theater (the main stage) so I float around and eventually settle into Del Rey's panel. The Del Rey team announces its new releases for this year and the coming year. Some highlights: Fairy Tail by the creator of One Piece; a collaboration mystery/fantasy suspense by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan; and Me and the Devil Blues about a (historical) legendary blues singer who is said to have been so good that he must have made a pact with the devil. 1:00 pm I peek into the "Comics Writers Talk about Writing" panel but it's a bunch of people I don't know and don't care about so I head over to the Show Room on the upper level. The S...

I guess I'll call it the Dave Chappelle Effect for now. I don't think that Chappelle ever came out and said that he left Comedy Central because he was uncomfortable with performing a black caricature for his audience of (by that time) mostly white people. I think he was a little more tactful, choosing instead to highlight the discomfort he felt about how his fame was affecting his private time with his family. But the effect I'm talking about is something best articulated in "YELLING AT THE SCREEN: An Open Letter From Dave Chappelle to His White Fans" (a parody by a blogger whose name I forget), and also in all the internet gossip about his conversation with Oprah after his return from South Africa... In any case, it's not just Chappelle. More than a few critics say that Chinua Achebe, Amy Tan, Nawal El Saadawi and a few other well-known and well-critiqued writers write more for the benefit of white audiences than for non-whites. Of course, I am no exception. ...

Reading bell hooks and Lisa Delpit back to back is like being slapped and hugged at the same time with two sets of arms and hands. But I'm the kind of buddhist that doesn't (theoretically) have a problem with being bashed with a stick in the pursuit of enlightenment (although I've never actually meditated with Rinzai folks.) What I'm trying to say is that I am finding it so hard to align myself with the actively loving pedagogy that I adhere to intellectually and to some extent emotionally as well. In my classrooms I often resort to harsh words and stern faces, standard edited English, and "punishment". I am only able to negotiate with one of my groups right now, and sometimes I feel that I am doing them a disservice too by being over-indulgent and not expecting enough of them. a tidbit from Lisa Delpit: "Let there be no doubt: a 'skilled' minority person who is not also capable of critical analysis becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of ...

The New York Comic Convention is a 3-day annual pop-culture event attended by 1000s of comic/cartoon/video-game/anime/manga/graphic novel fans from New York and beyond. This is my first time attending, and I'm also chaperoning a group of 5 high school students from my Anime and Japanese after-school clubs. It's interesting to compare the Comic Con to last December's Anime Festival (both held at Jacob Javits Convention Center at 34th & 12th in Manhattan). We arrived at 3pm, in time for General Programs. (The morning activities were only for professionals and industry folks.) I attended bits and pieces of the following panels: America: Through the Eyes of the Graphic Novel a panel of white men talking about America. I (and my students) left after hearing that they were working on a bunch of projects on the "sad events following 9-11," and other projects commissioned by the Department of Defense for the repatriation of Iraq War veterans. I had been excited about...