[12:12 PM]

The issue of language-cum-ethnicity as embedded in the entire fabric of cross-ethnic representation must also be discerned in the context of ethnic studies in North America, where, in many cases, the investigation of ethnicity is no longer entirely or at all grounded in language pedagogy. To give the most obvious example, Asian American studies is conducted by and large in English, the medium in which Asian American authos compose their primary texts. Unlike the case of Asian studies, in which epistemic authority is still by and large disembodied in the sense that it is based on the academic, disciplinary incorporation, by specialists who may not themselves be Asian, of the languages and cultures of peoples who are "over there" on the other side of the world, in Asian American studies, epistemic authority is frequently and implicitly located in the bodies of the ethnics themselves. Hence the imagistic, self-referential turn and the confessional mode of representation are, arguable, deemed much more essential practices in the latter field. As Tomo Hattori has observed: "Asian American literature is still understood, for the most part, as literature written by Asian Americans." Because many of them no longer have the claim to ethnic authority through the possession of ethnic languages, Asian Americans are perhaps the paradigmatic case of a coercive mimeticism that physically keeps them in their place--that keeps them, in Balibar's terms, in their genealogy and, I would add, in their genre of speaking/writing as nothing but generic Asian Americans. The visible, genetic signs of "ethnic difference" on their bodies--an accident of birth--become, in this light, the referential limits embedded in their otherwise proliferating discourse. (The generative logic of Foucault's repressive hypothesis, as discussed in the introduction, is fully at work here.) Without the authentication (however unsatisfactory) of the ethnic language, these bodies bearing the signs of otherness are adrift in a society that will only recognize their existence through the strategy of continual, systematic marginalization, through "the interpretive will to insert the qualities of the author's physical, racial body into the corups of his textual output" (218). (Rey Chow, "Keeping Them in Their Place: Coercive Mimeticism and Cross-Ethnic Representation," The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism)

[10:55 AM]

The intellectual, to venture a definition, articulates concepts, commitments, and visions that legitimate and/or contest the way that we live now. [. . . ] Certainly this work of intellectual articulation is eclectic. It requires, among other tasks, elucidation/elaboration/contestation of received and current ideas; the examination of prevailing practices, beliefs, and institutions in relation to stated principles and as indicators of unstated motivations; an engagement with the multiple traditions which traverse contemporary cultures and influence individual agents; and continuing efforts to bring intellectual discourse to bear within a polity which features a plurality of discourses. (John McGowan, "Intellectual Work Today," in Profession: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies)

[2:16 PM]

Literary analysts of sound generally turn either to poetry, conventionally the most sound-saturated of genres, or to the dense and intricate prose of writers such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and William Burroughs. Critics of lyric poetry in particular, however, are quick to override the slide of the phonotext with the stability of the graphotext. They are eager, that is, to motivate puns, explain away echolalia, submit rhythms to regularizing prosodic analysis, or soft-pedal textual acoustics into a sort of emotional background music. New Critical close readings and conventional thematic analyses alike tend to position earnestness and stability at the heart of "serious" literature. To constitute a literary text as a static, truth-telling object, abstruse, hieratic, and linear, however, not only mutes the roar Joyce called "soundsense" but also strands the text in a private, timeless, hermetic isolation, a seclusion that is not only out of earshot of but antithetical to the acoustical technologies that ground the inquiry of this collection of essays. (Adalaide Morris, "Introduction: Sound States" in her edited collection Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies)

[9:17 AM]

To steady himself he set his mind to the whisper in the machine. He listened carefully. It might have been the squeak of an unoiled bearing, but it sounded more like a voice, a tiny voice, though its words were indistinguishable. It had the rhythm of a voice, the rise and fall and rise again suggesting intention rather than accident, the tone implying a certain urgency more human than mechanical, as if the sound were being made by some entity struggling to be heard. Lucas knew well enough what it was to speak a language no one understood.
     He fed it another plate and another and another.
     The nature of the machine's song didn't disclose itself until afternoon. The song wasn't sung in language, not in a language Lucas recognized, but gradually, over time, the song began making itself clear, even though its words remained obscure.
     It was Simon's voice.
     Could it be? Lucas listened more carefully. Simon's voice had been deep and raucous. He had sung not well but with bravado, with the rampant soaring tunelessness of someone who cared less about sounding beautiful than about creating a sound big enough to reach the sky. This seemed, in fact, to be Simon's voice, rendered mechanical. It had that reckless, unapologetic atonality. (Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days)

[3:05 PM]

LANGUAGE

the spark that leaps
from the base of the spine
and through the guts and heart to
the tongue ignites
into a flame of words that delights at first in its own shape
and then begins to question
the power of the space it has
fictioned and defined by flashing
into being and so withdraws
down the twine of its own tension
to reseed itself
an ember of silence waiting
for the breeze of another breath.

(Brian Chan, in Fabula Rasa)

[12:32 PM]

5. Finally, our local "success" derives from our understanding of local history and the genesis of local behaviors.

The texts of our institutions are complex ones, and systems of behavior and power not only have synchronic aspects but diachronic ones as well. Talk with senior colleagues, staff, and administrators about the histories of departmental and institutional norms. Current behaviors and tensions may seem bizarre and unaccountable until we learn about struggles over priorities and forms of institutional self-definition that may date back years or even decades. To understand how current norms and behaviors developed is to understand how they may be altered and also just how invested certain individuals may be in protecting them, even if they are stunningly anachronistic. (Donald E. Hall, The Academic Self: An Owner's Manual)

[1:04 PM]

Larkin begins to imagine a life with someone besides Ona. He steps onto the balcony off the living room, settling under the shade of a forty-year-old avocado. With a man there would be no consideration of failed posterity. The days would arrive and pass unburdened by a future. There would be no half-empty rooms to which the doors are always closed like time-locked vaults.

. . .

Maybe this is the morning Ona has earned. Larkin considers the formula he has followed, regulating his life like floodgates and spillways relieving the pressure behind a dam. He is a creator of deep bodies of water, lakes straining like bound captives. There is no absolution. By what sequence are a man and a woman meant to come together? We are constantly engaged in acts of contrived progression, decoding the confluence of our postures and rituals. (Brian Leung, "Leases" in World Famous Love Acts)

[12:37 PM]

As a little boy, Darren had begged to accompany his father in the pickup marked CORINTH COUNTY ANIMAL PATROL and help with removing animal carcasses from the roads. Mostly these were white-tailed deer, raccoons, occasionally a foul-smelling skunk. His mother had not wanted him to help with such "grisly" tasks. Ironic now to think that Darren had ever believed such work had a kind of glamour, but when you're a little boy, almost everything your dad does is special.
     Later you know better. And your dad knows that you know. (Joyce Carol Oates, Sexy)

        [. . . to the archive . . .]