language dies with woman

Yang Huanyi, China's last woman proficient in the mysterious Nushu language, died at her home last week. She was thought to be 98. Yang learned possibly the world's only female-specific language from seven sworn sisters as a girl. Nushu characters are structured by four kinds of strokes, including dots, horizontals, verticals and arcs. Linguists believe her death marks the end of a 400-year-old tradition in which women shared their innermost feelings through
codes incomprehensible to men.
... Beautiful story. But I wonder -- so women normally speak in codes comprehensible to men?

Another good reason

why they shouldn't vote for Bush...Here in an interesting article on a new controversial book, showing why we shouldn't mess with the Bushes --

But, as one of W's Yalie frat brothers tells Kelley, it's not the substance abuse in Bush's past that's disturbing, it's the "lack of substance ... Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn't interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn't travel; he didn't read the newspapers; he didn't watch the news; he didn't even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me." New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read - the only title he could find was The Fart Book.

So is that where the fundamentalist rhetoric of USes and THEMs comes from, as well as the even more interesting authoritative claim over what is evil? No wonder.

the limits of 'practical' research

The quality of research being made available to struggling hopeful scholars like me is severely limited. It's not just in terms of funding, but at the most basic level, mentorship is contingent on engaging in mainstream research. I could argue that political science in my country is locked-into mainstream research on 'good governance', 'new public management', civil-society empowerment and capacity-building, as well as in token critiques of environmental degradation and human rights. What this shows is that expertise and intellectual mobility is rooted in 'practical' research -- and while I have no qualms about being practical, it still precludes a lack of criticism, most especially the easy comfort of being complacent about one's assumptions and biases, no matter how limited.

I would probably be accused of hiding behind theory, or, as a navy officer said to me recently, I'm probably good at 'explaining what I cannot do." But it just saddens me that criticism seems to inhere only in the humanities, where it's still safe to be political because it is articulated into art, yet in the realm of politics itself, too much criticism is the ticket to academic alienation. If this is how my life is going to be like, I would rather withdraw into impractical isolation... or just read too much critical political theory into poetry. It's no wonder that I find so much comfort in Milosz and Heaney, with their poems grounded in history, war and modernity, and of course, in Adrienne Rich, with the mantra that writing is first and foremost the act of awakening a critical imagination.

I know that I must move beyond my own local, historical context. I know that practical constraints exist in order to be surpassed, but I'm just a little disgusted right now. It's no wonder that I've been so unproductive and escapist. Maybe I am being complacent -- or as Ellen Wood once said, I'm becoming comfortable within the 'interstices of capitalism'. Is a critical imagination necessarily a socialist one? I'm not sure, but I'd much rather be given the space to read about it and generate critical research on it, then to dismiss it altogether for its lack of practicality.

i think i scare them away

This weekend's highlights --

(1) Scuba diving for the international coastal clean-up. Yup, treasure hunting for trash. But we didn't find anything funky, unlike last year's refrigerator... and someone even found a whole chicken!

(2) When we went night diving I turned my divelight off and saw the natural lights emanating from the sea anemone, small fish, and from my own movements -- the sea has its own nightlights! It literally twinkles! (Scientific explanation: bioluminescence.)

(3) Saw a seasnake (one of the most poisonous in the world) and was dumb enough to hold it. I'm lucky it was full. I never knew I had unconscious suicidal tendencies. And that's not even funny.

(4) Reading this poem and sharing it with the world ---

Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
~ Act of Union, Seamus Heaney

Beautiful. I find myself falling in love with Heaney. I denied his greatness for a while, but found him again.

... "I caress the heaving province where our past has grown."

Yup, I sent that line to about ten friends. Some of them new ones. They must have thought I was hitting on them. But it's just too beautiful to keep to myself.

Oh well, I'd like to hope that the good ones always stay.