Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Thought-provoking essays on post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, translation, and the insurgency of language. Looking at the Philippines at the time of its Revolution, American occupation, and "People Power" II, and at the USA after 9/11, Rafael traces the attempts by colonial and neo-colonial powers to master translation in order to subjugate local populace. Each time he shows that the powers fail because of the insurgency of language, that which cannot be translated. Particularly interesting to me is the idea of the radical welcome that Revolution shows to the Other. Also fascinating is the failure of American schooling to eradicate Tagalog and other vernacular idioms and accents. The Introduction speaks eloquently of the suppression of other languages in order to speak and write in scholarly English. The final essays on Filipino scholars--Renato Rosaldo and Reynaldo Ileto--are appreciative of their achievements while remaining alert to their limitations. Of the latter's ...

I started learning conversational Japanese yesterday. Met Chisato, recommended by PB, at Panera Bread and looked at basic traveler's phrases. Pronunciation is not difficult. Memorization will take some effort. I've been dipping into Buson's haikus for a month or two now. I do love the warmth and immediacy of his poetry. He makes me want to be a haiku poet. Never had that feeling when reading Basho and Issa. But it's hard to write haiku when the heart is in a state of agitation. Bought Zen Landscape at the New Museum bookstore. Allen S. Weiss writes with genuine feeling about Japanese dry gardens, tea ceremony and ceramics. Wabi-sabi. Mono no aware. An aesthetics of simplicity, asymmetry, use value, old age and the seasons. I'm really looking forward to our trip to Japan in August. I will launch the Japanese translation of The Pillow Book in Tokyo. GH and I are also thinking of visiting Kyoto, and a hot spring town between the two big cities. Chikatetsu wa ...

Music and words. Hard not to make one subservient to the other. Exit Strategies , the May 2 event organized jointly by PEN World Voices and the Met Museum, avoided the issue by and large by having music and words work separately, and so the chief interest of the evening for me lay in their dissonance. GH was less amused. The music was provided by the Kronos Quartet with a long history of in-depth collaboration with composers like Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and with musicians like Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Bollywoord "playback singer" Asha Bhosle, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, Mexican rockers Cafe Tacuba and Azeri vocalist Alim Qasimov. During the event, the quartet played imperturbably a wide range of music from around the world. The same could not be said of the writers who clearly felt that their words were intruding on the music. Rula Jebreal, a French-Israeli journalist, asked her American audience a series of questions about the state of politi...

TLS March 23 2012 from Randall Anderson's review of Franco Mormando's Bernini: His life and his Rome : The explosive exuberance of the Baroque signalled the evolution of Renaissance and Mannerist styles, and through Bernini achieved its greatest heights. For Benedetto Croce, Baroque decadence produced an art of bad taste ( cattivo gusto artistico ), but for Luigi Barzini, Jr it embodied something more liberating: "Baroque is when you can draw a straight line, but you prefer to draw a curve". The "plastic abundance", corporeality and expansive force identified by Wylie Sypher as hallmarks of Baroque style appear in surplus with Bernini, from his ecstatic St. Teresa, afloat on her own garments as much as buoyed by the Holy Spirit, to the yards of fabric, inflated by invisible winds, billowing around his busts of Francesco d'Este and Louis XIV. *** From Commentary "Meaning in the margins: Victoria Lady Welby and significs" by John E. Jose...

Old Testament  My glossolalia/shall be my passport       Gwyneth Lewis, “Pentecost” Lucky you! My glossolalia sends me to jail where I am given a little bread but no ale. The Lord orders me to go to Chicago but I’m smuggling my haggis to Tarshish, while trading on my derivative English, on my way to the Tower of San Francisco. Or not. God’s robocops will lie in wait for that obvious circumvention of fate. I will book my train ticket to Morocco. There, in a bazaar of bizarre tchotchke, I will smoke pure hokum in a hookah, and dream of a world without Chicago. No? Dreams are the Lord’s territories. The seraphim come and go as they please and they will lecture me about Chicago. I will board the space shuttle to Seattle. I will motor to Bali in my red Beetle. I won’t go, I just won’t, to Guantanamo. English will get me everywhere, not bunk, and keep me out of a whale’s ribbed trunk. It will even deliver me up to Hokkaido. Unlike you, ...

TLS March 9 2012 from David Arnold's review of Michael J. Franklin's Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, poet, lawyer, and linguist : [Franklin] ... begins, rather than ends, with Jones's most celebrated achievement--the "world-modifying" address made to the Asiatic Society in 1786 in which he revealed the close affinity between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and hence the ancient connection between India and Europe . * Franklin rejects the idea that Jones was an arch-imperialist, who used his Orientalist learning to help impose Western hegemony over India, whose command of law and language was a route to colonial mastery. Franklin argues that this misrepresents Jones, divorcing his Indian years from his earlier career, and makes a travesty of his lifelong hatred of tyranny. Jones merits recognition instead as a multiculturalist who made deep connections between cultures. *** from Rosinka Chaudhuri's review of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Partial ...

Ostler's erudition is encyclopedic. All by himself, he wrote this handy one-volume language history of the world, ranging from Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic in the ancient world to English in our contemporary scene, discussing Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Russian in the course of his immense story. The narrative is not one of a triumphal march; rather, it is a subtle plotting of the rise and fall of languages, and so puts the current prevalence of English in much-needed perspective. Throughout the book Ostler is at pains to correct the misconception that empire-building has carried the burden of language spread. Some conquerors in fact adopted the language of their vanquished foes. Even when military might led to language spread, what was more vital for the permanent adoption of the foreign language was the growth of the language community, in which a parent, often the mother, taught the children her native language. The hearth and not the battlefield ...

It was a good idea to approach the imperial city of Beijing from Yunnan Province, the home of a great many ethnic minorities in China. The approach immunized against the unqualified admiration of Chinese power and destroyed the illusion of a homogeneous Chinese culture. Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, is dominated by Han Chinese. They thin out in the smaller cities and towns where the Hui, the Naxi and other peoples live, not as ciphers of internal exoticism, but in communities of their own. After driving six hours through stunning mountain scenery, our bus pulled into the city of Dali, the home of the Bai people, who are related to the Tibetans. I felt an immediate connection with the city. I could live here, I said in half-wonderment. The city appeared all of a piece. The unity came from the common architectural style, whitewashed walls bordered by marble panels painted with birds, animals and plants. The slate roofs curved gently upward into two ears. There was no spectac...

Walking around the narrow treasure gallery in the Forbidden City, I was jostled by the Chinese tourist horde. I turned to a girl pushing behind me, and snapped "Don't push me" in English before I registered the uselessness of saying so in a language that she would probably not understand. She, in turn, said in sneering Mandarin to her father, "A Chinese but he does not know how to speak Chinese." The grandmother of one of the home stay families complimented me on my grasp of Mandarin. When I protested, more out of honesty than modesty, that my Mandarin is actually very poor, not having taken my lessons seriously when growing up in Singapore, she would have none of it. She also would not hear of me calling myself Singaporean. For her, a Chinese anywhere in the world is still a Chinese. Criticized or complimented for my Mandarin, I never felt at home in China during my 18-day sojourn. No reason why I should feel that way, for my personal history has little to ...

TLS April 2 2010 from Andrew van der Vlies's review of Chinua Achebe's THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD: The lecture extols the virtue of the "middle ground", the point of view not given to extremism or "fanaticism." This is a space much appreciated in the Igbo society of Achebe's youth and one that informs his own insistence on considering the complex effects of the colonial encounter: "I could have dwelt on the harsh humiliations of colonial rule or the more dramatic protests against it", he writes, but he remains "fascinated by that middle ground . . . where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity". For many, it is Achebe's nuanced sense that while this "space was to be found primarily in the camp of the colonized", it was also "now and again" visible "in the ranks of the colonizer too", that lends his assessment of colonial contact its gravitas and pathos. Ikem Osodi,...

Fascinating and useful summary of the evolution of the word "self" in TLS January 22 2010. From Peter Hacker's review of Galen Strawson's SELVES: An essay in revisionary metaphysics : The word "self" has a venerable pedigree reaching back to the tenth century. It was employed as a pronoun and pronominal adjective (akin to ipse) that evolved into "itself" or "the thing itself". Together with a personal pronoun (as in "Ic sylf") and "he sylfa") it evolved into the reflective pronouns myself, himself, herself. With the possessive genitive, as in "her self visage", it became equivalent in such contexts to "own" ("her own visage"). Used as an adjective, as in "this self knyght that" it became "same", and from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries "one self" had a use to mean "one and the same", which still survives in the phrase "the self same...

Attribution I speak with the forked tongue of colony. --Eavan Boland, “The Mother Tongue” My grandfather said life was better under the British. He was a man who begrudged his words but he did say this. I was born after the British left. They left an alphabet book in my house, the same one they left at school. I was good in English. I was the only one in class who knew “bedridden” does not mean lazy. I was so good in English they sent me to England where I proved my grandfather right until I was almost sent down for plagiarism I knew was wrong and did not know was wrong, since where I came from everyone plagiarized. I learned to attribute everything I wrote. It is not easy. Sometimes I cannot find out who first wrote the words I wrote. Sometimes I think I wrote the words I wrote with such delight. Often the words I write have confusing origins and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me. *

union / union To dream of union is to dream the world in words, the multifarious world conferring with two words. Pick up a fragment of the world, let’s say, a stone, and feel the heart— hard and soft —in the palm of words. Lean on a week as you would on a walking stick and learn the long and short of time-travel in words. When a backdoor is pried open and shows a cave, do you go in or stay out of the house of words? You know the ups and downs of falling deep in love. You know the stairs, that train station, are made of words. The knife is for the wound. The road is for the shoes. Honey and vinegar don’t lose the taste of words. Thank god Paul is not Jee and neither is Jee Paul but between Paul and Jee a world, a dream, all words.

induction / induction I take my theory of winter from the violin. A lot of love is cold, so sings the violin. You can as soon induce a law from idioms as learn to bow by listening to a violin. Last night the world fell back a step and bared its teeth. A god was humoring a mortal violin. If two French kisses do not constitute a proof, then neither is a violin a violin. Waking up from the sleep of composition, love hears, from a distance, the smashing of the violins. The lover writing to his love, it is not like any composer writing for the violin. So many things inspire Jee to sing but you transform a human voice into a violin.

I started learning Spanish last month, weekly lessons with a tutor who comes to my place. Why Spanish? I don't know, really. Small causes turned the floating needle. Getting to know a Spanish colleague. Reading Octavio Paz and Marquez. Wanting to read Neruda and Lorca. Moving among so many Spanish speakers in NYC. Thinking of visiting Central and South America for the first time. Intrigued by Moorish culture in southern Spain. After putting it off for a couple of weeks (I am not a very good student), I finally wrote, with the help of WordReference.com, my first Spanish composition for my tutor. I found the experience liberating in some ways. Freed from the rage for perfect order, I enjoyed the simple act of putting down one word after another. I was happy to learn that the word for "lovers" is "enamorados," and to remember that "fiesta" means "party." Soy de Singapur, un pais en Asia del sudoeste. Hay seis milliones de gente en este pais, la ...

from Paula Marantz Cohen's review (TLS Sep 5 2008) of books on Alfred Hitchcock: [Hitchcock] was flamboyantly modest or, perhaps better, a self-deprecating exhibitionist. His understated preening is evident in his famous interview with Truffaut and in the cameo appearances he insisted on making in all his films. * He had an unerring grasp of the cinematic--on the technical level of understanding lenses and camera angles, and on the conceptual level of visual storytelling. He was able to make suspense into a metaphor for life and to use the theme of mistaken identity as a source of rich existential meaning. He understood the popular audience, was a master of studio politics and a genius at publicity, and yet he managed to hold on to his own vision. *** from Richard Marggraf Turley's Commentary piece (TLS Sep 5 2008) on "Barry Cornwall" (the pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter) and Keats: . . . we reject Cornwall for not offering the layered complexities our long admirati...

It was a straight performance of King Lear at the Globe, no modernizing, adaptation into another culture, or abridging (as far as I could tell), which is appropriate, of course, in this re-creation of a theater Shakespeare wrote for and acted in. David Calder was a powerful and moving King Lear; his eyes were especially expressive. He was completely convincing in his physical and mental deterioration. Sally Breton was malicious anger as Goneril, while Kellie Bright distinguished Regan with an oily manner, which hid a vicious and sensual nature. She bit Gloucester's eye out. Jodie McNee was unsympathetic as Cordelia; she managed to make that saint come across as a busybody. Daniel Hawksford, as Edmund, played for laughs at a few points, and made the character incoherent. Trystan Gravelle, black-haired Welsh opposite Hawskford's blond, played Edgar with a certain nobility, but spat out his lines too quickly. All of them were directed by Dominic Dromgoole, the Artistic Director ...

frm Barbara J. King's review of Gregory Radick's The Simian Tongue: The long debate about animal language , and Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature : In his zoo work, [Richard] Garner invented what we would today call the primate playback experiment. . . . This re-emergence [of the playback technique] is mainly due to the work of the British ornithologist-turned-primatologist Peter Marler. . . . The Amboseli vervets made scientic history. When the vervets heard a played-back call originally uttered in the presence of an eagle, they fled into the bushes. For leopard and snake calls, they responded in distinct but similarly adaptive ways. Seufarth, Cheney and Marler proved that the calls contained not just high-arousal cues but specific information about the environment. * "Linguists," [Pinker] writes, "call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them 'conceptual semantics'. Conceptual semantics--...

TLS Nov 9 2007: from Simon Scott Plummer's review of Alvyn Austin's China Millions: The China Inland Mission and late Qing society : A year before [Henry Frost moved CIM headquartes from Toronto to Philadelphia in 1901], the mission's operations in China had been crippled by the last act of the Bozer Uprising, which targeted the late Pastor Hsi's followers (he had died in 1896) in Shanxi. On one day in Taiyuan, the provincial capital, forty-five foreign men, women and children were killed in front of the governor and their heads displayed on the city gate. By the time Hudson Taylor died (in Changsa, Hunan province), reparations had been made and missionary work resumed, but it was now less itinerant and more institutional. . . . * After its expulsion from China in 1950, the CIM changed its name to the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. Today, that organization, based on Singapore, remains the largest Protestant mission in East and South-East Asia. *** TLS Nov 16 2007: from...

Helvetica is everywhere. Born of post-war idealism, it represented for its creators, disseminators and users rationality, clarity, accessibility, transparency, and accountability. Above all, it was seen as modern; it was the still usable part of modernism. At the same time, the font was seen as neutral. It had no ideological designs on the words, but conveyed the content like clear plastic wrap. I was intrigued by this apparent contradiction between modernity and neutrality, or how one was seen by postwar designers as almost the equivalent of the other. Helvetica, from the Latin word for Switzerland, Helvetia , is a Swiss font. In the eyes of its detractors, Helvetica is the font of bureaucracy and corporations. IRS uses it on its forms, as do American Airlines and Target for their names. In the 1970s, the rejection of Helvetica was a form of protest against the Vietnam War. The pendulum swings, and now some designers adopt Helvetica, but with some personal variations. Innovation, inst...