falcons. flecks.

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:51:15 GMT

We drove through California. Spring 2008.

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:28:08 GMT

Lizzie; Taos, December 2005.

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:11:23 GMT

Ndioum, Senegal. August 2009.

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:51:02 GMT

Sacramento; August 2009

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:25:13 GMT

To revert to oneself is not to establish oneself at home, even if stripped of all one's acquisitions. It is to be like a stranger, hunted down even in one's home, contested in one's own identity and one's very poverty, which, like a skin still enclosing the self, would set it up in an inwardness, already settled on itself, already a substance. It is always to empty oneself anew of oneself, to absolve oneself, like in a hemophiliac's hemorrhage. It is to be on the hither side of one's own nuclear unity, still identifiable and protected; it is to be emptied even of the quasi-formal identity of a being someone. But it is always to be coram, disturbed in oneself to the point of no longer having any intention, exposed over and beyond the act of exposing oneself, answering for this very exposedness, expressing oneself, speaking. It is to be an undeclinable One, speaking, that is, exposing one's very exposedness.

Otherwise Than Being, Emmanuel Levinas

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:15:00 GMT

What is there to say?

Shit is whack right now: insane protests resulting in dead bodies, burnt cars, looted shops, random roadblocks, lots of teargas and random bullets.

We will see what tomorrow has to bring, I suppose. It is so strange to watch this happen, the way you know things can turn this fast, but never believe that they will turn at all.

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:21:19 GMT

Immemorial, unrepresentable, invisible, the past that bypasses the present, the pluperfect past, falls into a past that is a gratuitous lapse. It can not be recuperated by reminiscence not because of its remoteness, but because of its incommensurability with the present. The present is essence that begins and ends, beginning and ending assembled in a thematizable conjunction; it is the finite in correlation with a freedom. Diachrony is the refusal of conjunction, the non-totalizable, and in this sense, infinite. But in the responsibility for the Other, for another freedom, the negativity of this anarchy, this refusal of the present, of appearing, of the immemorial, commands me and ordains me to the other, to the first one on the scene, and makes me approach him, makes me his neighbor. It thus diverges from nothingness as well as from being. It provokes this responsibility against my will, that is, by substituting me for the other as a hostage. All my inwardness is invested in the form of a despite-me, for-another. Despite-me, for-another, is signification par excellence. And it is the sense of the "oneself," that accusative that derives from no nominative; it is the very fact of finding oneself while losing oneself.

Otherwise Than Being, Emmanuel Levinas

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:57:45 GMT

Will a putting between parentheses suffice - a type of writing, of committing oneself with the world, which sticks like ink to the hands that push it off? One should have to go all the way to the nihilism of Nietzsche's poetic writing, reversing irreversible time in vortices, to the laughter which refuses language.

Otherwise Than Being, Emmanuel Levinas.

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:03:12 GMT

Ezeulu moved his head up and down many times. "It is a story of great sorrow, but we cannot set fire to the world."

Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe.

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:37:39 GMT

Vera was alone walking through the forest. In the bushes she caught sight of a rabbit stooping by a large stone and reading from an old book.

--What are you reading?

The rabbit looked askance at her. After some time it deigned to speak.

--This is a story about elves and hidden people who live their lives inside rocks like this one.

It closed its eyes and turned its head back towards the book.

--Can you read with your eyes closed? Vera asked in surprise.

--Of course.

Vera felt the rabbit wishing she was gone.

--Goodbye, said Vera.

--Yes, goodbye.

The rabbit still had its eyes closed. But then it opened them and looked on Vera.

--Perhaps one day we will meet.

--Perhaps, said Vera and strode off.

Said Linus,

--Like a bird that arrives at a house and must first remove its wings before entering, I am astonished by the sudden nearness of voices.

The Disastrous Tale of Vera and Linus, Jesse Ball & Thordis Björnsdottir

Also from Gods & Soldiers

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:16:15 GMT

And from this evidence at the end of a long tunnel of night, Negritude appears to be rooted in an épistèmè that defines the African as other, fixing him or her in a binary relation (of conflict or of marriage, what does it matter?), of same and other, of subject and object. That this order of things is a heritage of Western thought, hundreds of contributions have already established; in their readings of Senghor's complex, they have not desisted from suggesting the intellectual falseness of his famous "kingdom of childhood." For us today, however, following Mudimbe's analysis, the subject/object relationship appears to be directly inherited from the colonial order that created an infinite number of dichotomies, of which Negritude itself as "a discourse of alterity," as Mudimbe's phrase goes, is one of the most vulgar manifestations. It becomes clear that this relationship, inscribed as it is in all its glory by Sartre in his famous preface, Orphée noir, remains canonical. It is not only canonical in its logic (the figure of Narcissus is sufficient for that), but in its structure. It defines an idea's house and thus opens or closes various passageways and their possibilities. "I is an other," Rimbaud tells us; his phrase captures the paradoxical situation in which Negritude has placed us: I look at myself in the analytical mirror, the weapons Negritude has provided in my hands--and I see myself as the West's other! At the same time as I recognize the distortion of my face, I discover the chains on my ankles that bind me to that familiar dichotomy--same and other. In short, following the lead of colonial discourse, Negritude has Africanized Africa. How does one escape the violence that for Mudimbe is a "panacea" and for me, who was born in Cameroon, is the revelation of a conceptual prison? The lack of movement that has followed this frightening discovery, as much as it stuns me, shows that Negritude, in its épistèmè, has left us in a profound transcendental fall before the zigzags of our history, by erecting ethnology's assumptions inside of us; and leaving us unable, for example, to conceptualize the violence of which we are capable. It is incumbent upon us to create other paths, to see Negritude only as the prelude to a new order of intelligence, and to thus go beyond ethnology's othering dualism; we must open our minds to the "patience of philosophy," to begin to pay attention, to devote ourselves to the disassembling of our own reflection.

The Senghor Complex, Patrice Nganang

From Gods and Soliders, an anthology of contemporary African writing

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:38:57 GMT

In an as yet unpublished short story of mine, the action is as follows: a terminally ill woman asks her husband to tell her a story so as to alleviate her unbearable pains. No sooner does he begin his tale than she stops him:

--No, not like that. I want you to speak to me in an unknown language.
--Unknown? he asks.
--A language that doesn't exist. For I have such a need not to understand anything at all.

The husband asks himself: how can you speak a language that doesn't exist? He starts off by mumbling some strange words and feels like a fool, as if he were establishing his inability to be human. But gradually, he begins to feel more at ease with this language that is devoid of rules. And he no longer knows whether he's speaking, singing, or praying. When he pauses, he notices his wife has fallen asleep, with the most peaceful smile on her face. Later, she confesses to him: those sounds had brought back memories of a time before she even had a memory! And they had given her the solace of that same sleep which provides the link between us and what was here before we were alive.

When we were children, all of us experienced that first language, the language of chaos, all of us enjoyed that divine moment when our life was capable of being all lives, and the world still awaited a destiny. James Joyce called this relationship with an unformed, chaotic world "chaosmology." This relationship, my friends, is what breathes life into writing, whatever the continent, whatever the nation, whatever the language or literary genre.

I believe that all of us, whether poets or fiction writers, never stop seeking this seminal chaos. All of us aspire to return to that state in which we were so removed from a particular language that all languages were ours. To put it another way, we are all the impossible translators of dreams. In truth, dreams speak within us what no word is capable of saying.

...

Languages serve to communicate. But they don't just "serve." They transcend that practical dimension. Languages cause us to be. And sometimes, just as in the story I mentioned, they cause us to stop being. We are born and we die inside speech, we are beholden to language even after we lose our body. Even those who were never born, even they exist within us as the desire for a word and as a yearning for a silence.

...

I am a biologist and I travel a lot through my country's savanna. In these regions, I meet people who don't know how to read books. But they know how to read their world. In such a universe where other wisdoms prevail, I am the one who is illiterate. I don't know how to read the signs in the soil, the trees, the animals. I can't read clouds and the likelihood of rain. I don't know how to talk to the dead, I've lost all contact with ancestors who give us our sense of the eternal. In these visits to the savanna, I learn sensitivities that help me to come out of myself and remove me from my certainties. In this type of territory, I don't just have dreams. I am dreamable.

Languages We Don't Know We Know, Mia Couto

Some Days Are Like This, While Others Aren't; Noelle Kocot

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:01:16 GMT

I caught myself perverting all the laws
Of taxidermy in a dream state,
So I went ahead and made an offering,
The spindly helix of some translucent fever

Squirming across the net of my own rising heat,
Its purpose known to myself and it alone.
I felt intent on keeping it this way, and when ready,
To cool myself down into a tame and weighted thing,

And suck the being (if one can call it that)
Back through the night's dilations
With the elephantine stealth of an unrecorded tribe.
I think I may have in fact accomplished something

In the throes of all this drama, something no doubt emptied
Of the held breath of an underwater soul,
And the closed-eyed dizziness
Of its whole stuffed zoo of wavy icons,

But really, I cannot yet see what it can be,
As I seem to have overshot my heartbeat once again,
And the free-floating boomerang of my yearning dictates

That my head remain bowed in this eternal act
Of deference or exhaustion.

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:07:08 GMT

I am much, much too tired to explain how amazing the mountains were today.

Things from independent study reading: Disability and Special Needs Education in an African Context

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:37:19 GMT

All human action is incomplete, partial, and characterised by contradictions, concealments and distortions...the meanings that are constituted by social practices (e.g. classification and labeling) often assume a life of their own (reification) and become cultural ideologies (or standards) for a host of value laden discriminatory practices (e.g. educational placement of students with mental retardation in restrictive settings)

.

there is a distinct impression of shared perception between the Western agencies, national governments, and local education institutions that adoption of Western cultural ideologies in mental retardation is the natural course of things, much like the rise and setting of the sun

.

the problem with charity is that it sees disability as an individual problem, not an institutional one

.

knowledge as a material effect of power

.

as a community of intellectuals and inquirers, we have to understand and unpack the conditions under which knowledge about disability is produced and reproduced.

R. Chimedza

Translate the last line to apply to all knowledge and that pretty much sums up spring quarter for me, which ends on Wednesday if I finish this damn paper that keeps boiling over in contradictions: a good thing, but a difficult thing to write eloquently.

Sun, 24 May 2009 00:51:21 GMT

Fourteen-hour shifts on over-seventy degree days in Seattle should go suck it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sat, 09 May 2009 19:06:31 GMT

Tue, 11AUG09

SEATTLE (SEA) 11:53AM ---> NEWARK (EWR) 8:08PM

NEWARK (EWR) 9:25PM ---> PARIS (CDG) 11:05AM (12AUG)

Wed, 12AUG09

PARIS (CDG) 4:15PM ---> DAKAR (DKR) 7:55PM (12AUG)

Mon, 31AUG09

DAKAR (DKR) 6:20AM ---> NAIROBI (NBO) 5:25PM
My parents fly in two hours later. On the 1 September, off to the Masai Mara for 4/5 days to frolic in the Mara as tourists and look at big magical animals. Then we either bus or fly to Entebbe, rent a car, and spent the rest of the time driving around Uganda so they can meet all my people and see all my projects. On the agenda?

The North: Gulu & (hopefully) Kitgum
The West: Kyzanga, Jenifer's project: House of Hope. This is presuming she is still safe there (witchcraft things recently that have been really bad). Parts of the project got burnt down and everyone thinks she should flee but she won't do it, yet anyhow. So assuming she is still alive and the project is still functioning, I guess.
Down Home: Najja, Mawotto (my old, old village and people), The Elizabeth House (of course), meeting Esther and Moses and their families. Possibly white water rafting on the Nile. My mother will not partake in this. Hike up Monkey Mountain. Hiking in Mabira forest. Visit the source of the Nile. Visit Jinja town. Sipi falls in the East up by Mount Elgon, possibly. Oh yeah, and the Entebbe Botanical Gardens.

Tue, 22SEP09 (the unhappy part)

ENTEBBE UGANDA (EBB) 7:50PM ---> NAIROBI (NBO) 11:45PM ---> LONDON (LHR) 6:45AM (23SEP) --->

LONDON (LHR) 8:40AM ---> HOUSTON BUSH INTL (IAH) 12:40PM ---> SEATTLE (SEA) 5:09PM (23SEP)

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:50:03 GMT

Also, Seattle, I do not know what you think you are doing being so beautiful all the time, but it makes me very pleased.

Oh, Brabantio, your daughter has married the Moor:

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:10:08 GMT

Take hold on me; for my particular grief
Is of so floodgate and o'erbearing nature
That it engluts and swallows other sorrows,
And it is still itself.

Shakespeare. [See, I am doing my homework!]

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:09:31 GMT

Moving!

The Elizabeth House

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:34:36 GMT

Massaging Nicholas, 3/10/2008

A friend of mine came to visit my work today, and so, for the first time, I have photos of my kids, and for the only time, photos of me with my kids. I love them so, so hard. I'm so happy to be able to show these to you.

Infections & Inequalities, Paul Farmer:

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:46:40 GMT

Millions of women living in similar circumstances--but with very different psychological profiles and cultural backgrounds--can expect to meet similar fates. Their sickness [AIDS] is a result of structural violence: neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (or economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress.

If we are to present meaningful responses to AIDS, we must examine the differential political economy of risk. Structural violence means that some women are, from the outset, at high risk of HIV infection, while other women are shielded from risk. Adopting this point of view--that we can describe a political economy of risk and that this exercise helps to explain where the AIDS pandemic is moving and how quickly--we begin to see why similar stories are legion in sub-Saharan Africa and India, why they are fast becoming commonplace in Thailand and other parts of Asia. The experiences recounted here may be textbook cases of vulnerability, but their moral is deciphered only if we clearly understand that these women have been rendered vulnerable to AIDS through social processes--that is, through the economic, political, and cultural forces that can be shown to shape the dynamics of HIV transmission. The anthropologist Brooke Schoepf, writing from Zaire, explain how AIDS has "transformed many women's survival strategies into death strategies":

Women, who often lack access to cash, credit, land or jobs, engage in "off-the-books" activities in the informal sector. Some exchange sex for the means of subsistence. Others enter sex work at the behest of their families, to obtain cash to purchase land or building materials, to pay a brother's school fees, or to settle a debt. Still others supplement meager incomes with occasional resort to sex with multiple partners. [Whether these women are] married or not, the deepening economic crisis propels many to seek "spare tires" or "shock absorbers" to make ends meet.

Taken together, the dynamics of HIV infection among women and the responses to its advance reveal much about the complex relationship between power/powerlessness and sexuality. But many questions remain unanswered. For example, by what mechanisms, precisely, do social forces (such as poverty, sexism, and other forms of discrimination) become embodied as personal risk? What role does inequality per se play in promoting HIV transmission?

...

arbitrarily constricting the social field generates the illusion of equally shared risk. It obscures inequalities central to the advance of HIV.

Please mail stuff! Especially vegan chocolate!

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:28:08 GMT

Julia Martin c/o Leslie Weighill
P.O. Box 637
Mukono, Uganda
East Africa

If you send me stuff, I will bring you back awesomeness in December. Serious awesomeness! Letters get here quicker, but packages will make it safely so long as you don't put anything super valuable in them, which you won't anyways. Things that are extra-appreciated are:

--Letters! I want to hear about your life!

--Books, particularly longer ones. I'd really like to re-read East of Eden. I could even return it in December as I do have my own copy at home. But any books would be just super-plus. If anyone does want to send me East of Eden, reply so I don't get six copies of East of Eden!

--Spices. OMG any spice you could think of.

--Non-perishable vegan snacks that can't be found here (I can find...peanuts, basically).

--Dried anything. Fruit, chickpeas, lentils, etc all make me very happy.

--Pictures of you!

--Pictures you took!

That's all I can think of. If anyone sends me so much as a scrap of paper with a note on it from you I will love you forever and ever, honestly. Love to all.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 08:01:39 GMT

Life is beautiful. Some days, here, it's hard, too. I forgot that part. I'm not yet as numb to the death and dying as I was out in my village.

.

I don't know if I mentioned that my program director is raping my girls. There's nothing to be done--they're too scared to come forward and the justice system is completely corrupt.

.

I can't wait to start new work in September.

.

The airlines is trying to charge me 1700 dollars to change my ticket--I might just have to buy a new one. More loans from parents. They are incredibly supportive of this choice of mine, and I have so much gratefulness for that right now.

The News:

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:18:30 GMT

J--

I would've liked to tell you on the telephone, but our connections have been so terrible. Do you call through the service using your cell phone? If so, try using the home phone. The connection to my parents has been fantastic for the most part and they use a land line in Oregon.

.

I am taking fall quarter off and staying here through mid-December. My mother is working on changing my flight, and I'll be working for a different CBO starting September fifteenth. I'll still be living at the guesthouse in Mukono, but I'll be working at the Elizabeth House, which is a home for severely disabled kids. Most of them have either cerebral palsy or malaria-induced palsy, or we don't know what they have. Most of them can walk and talk a bit. Out of 16 who stay there permanently, only 4 or 5 are wheelchair/bed-bound. On Mondays through Wednesdays, about 15 more come from the neighboring villages and it's a madhouse. The women who work there are sweet but spend most of the day sitting around chatting and the kids don't get much love. I went on Thursday with my friend Tama and decided I had to work there, and I'm with my current school until mid-August. I still have August 15-September 15 free for school holidays--the kids at Elizabeth House also go home then.

Most of what I'll be doing is playing with the kids, helping them eat, and helping them go to the bathroom. Tama is trying to put together a log with information about each kid, and if he doesn't finish by August 1 when he leaves, I'll continue working on that. The Elizabeth House has only had 3 volunteers so far (in the past four years) because Leslie doesn't put people there unless they ask since it's a very different kind of placement than teaching or doing outreach. One of them was Kate, who is one of my favorite people ever. Luckily Leslie isn't charging me any living expenses, but my parents are still having to lend me donation money, flight changing money, and Ollie-boarding money. Which is a lot of money, but not more than making a whole other trip back here. And the fact is, I just want to stay. But I'll come home in December, I swear. That whole college thing does need to happen.

Also, I had a dream in which I tried to leave on September 14th, and I left my passport in Mukono and was forced to stay.

.

Last night my puppy out at school died. This morning before I arrived they threw her body down the latrine. Apparently I'm supposed to be happy they waited until she died to throw her into the latrine, but I was still traumatized.