speach tree

Had dinner tonight with a few people in Chinatown. A few things KB said made us kind of nod in recognition: You're not organizing if at the end of it, you're burnt out. If you don't have education, if you don't have a right hand, you can find people who do. They can fill that role. If you're too smart, it shuts everyone out. There are two models: one is to "empower" people you think are stupid or incapable, play god. Give them "power." The other is to "unleash" people's true power. To organize the undocumented, women, un-educated. The ones everyone looks down on. Which is organizing? Things to think about...

i recently learned that one of my colleagues, XK, was a farmer in F__ province in China, quit after elementary school was a favorite with his boss and hates to read. he has one of the most assertive and clear speech of anyone i've met, and he has also helped to clear the air of a lot of bad energy with his presence. i'm going to try being more like him, more 前向き and more daring in the coming months...

but luckily I have hard nails and it didn't hurt. My father is moving out of his rental house in the suburbs of northern VA (into another house of equal size and shape in the same suburb of VA). I am frantically going through my reams of print-outs, books, notes, journals, field-notes, letters, pay-stubs, magazine articles, sketchbooks, receipts, thesis drafts, and mangas dating back to before the millennium. D, R, and I recently discussed our attachment to material objects that - in addition to taking up space - give us access to privilege. What do I mean? Well... For example, my books. I have all these ridiculously articulate books about literary theory, poverty in America, Native cultures, immigration law and theory, and sewing machines, most of which I have not read, but which place me in the (over)educated class, one marker of which is that we have more than 100 books in a personal collection. For more on the educated class, read the liner notes for College Dropout by Kanye a...

some words i have recently re-discovered and with which i have rekindled a romance: hummingbird morsels porcupine crave skitter pumps rush ponytail stem astringent sinister condensation dominate battle mushroom yum words that have lost favor with me recently: space feel syllable tail challenge script descent race class press guilt like futile suicide waterproof sorry I tried to explain the four writing systems in Japanese today with my middle school students. I guess the basic one would be hiragana - a script that indicates different sounds arranged in syllables, which can be rearranged to form words. Katakana , the other basic script is a counterpart sound-script that looks edgier and is used only for foreign words. The third script is kanji , Chinese characters that signal both a sound and a meaning - some kanji characters are associated with multiple sounds and multiple meanings. The final script is romaji , based on the alphabet, used for the transliteration of Japanese words as we...

R and I were talking about Louise Erdrich, one of my literary heroes, and her character Fleur Pillager. R raised the issue of self-exotification, a problem I had been thinking about specifically with respect to Erdrich's work ever since I finished reading Four Souls and moved on to Tracks . N and I had talked about the voyeuristic relationship of the reader to the text, something that is not necessarily exoticist but it's certainly a trope that encourages exoticism, I think. We also talked about how the stories Erdrich relates are not living stories - they are often of the past, and thus it is easy to remove one's responsibility and relation to the text. In any case, I feel that the intimacy of the stories penned by Erdrich are a result of her own upbringing as a writer and as a person, and I don't want her to write differently, but I have to acknowledge this trap of self-exotification... I guess my argument though with that assessment is that Erdrich doesn't just p...

Must remember... I teach for critical thinking... critical thinking... I've always known that this was what my teaching was supposed to be about, but I think it's taken me close to a year to come close to understanding what this means. What I'm trying to say is that so far, I have been nothing but an entertainer.

July 19, 2007 I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I finally got to talk about it with GC and DW last night, which was very helpful. But first, I should start with the problem, which is that: I tend to get more or less flustered when one of my students asks me to talk about something that I have complicated feelings about. It hasn’t always been easy to ask people about their feelings or about their families, or where they come from; but now I find this much easier than to talk about feminism, or white supremacy, or immigration. The other day one of my students (IJ) asked me about the shirt I was wearing – depicting a Zapatista with a bandana around her mouth and braids down the sides. Below, the letters EZLN. He was like: - What is that – EZ…L…N? Is that like a gang? I ended up saying something like - Well, … they’re more like… freedom fighters. To which he replied: - So are we gonna fight? And I said: - Uhhh… well, first you need to know what you’re fighting for. - We fight for...