every planet we reach is dead

if you have an idea that has no words yet it is fragile. if you can relate it to an idea that is already represented with language the first idea will be assimilated and you will be convinced that there had never existed more than one idea.

from kundera's ideas about the word nostalgia and related terms in L'ignorance

"En espagnol, añoranza vient du verbe añorar (avoir de la nostalgie) qui vient du catalan enyorar, dérivé, lui, du mot latin ignorare (ignorer). Sous cet éclairage étymologique, la nostalgie apparait comme la soufrance de l'ignorance. Tu es loin, et je ne sais pas ce que tu deviens."

[In spanish, añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to be nostalgic) which comes from the catalan enyorar, itself derived from the latin word ignorare (to not know about). Under this etymological enlightenment, nostalgia resembles suffering due to ignorance. You are far away, and i don't know what you are becoming]

i opened the fridge and saw that there is more food than i can consume before going back to cameroon. the fabric of the apartment is converted to writhing worms from cans that i keep opening, which i think of at the time as insurance against future boredom. this explanation is weakened as i keep making new endeavors that could never be concluded in 36 hours. maybe it's defiance of a deadline.

i think i deal with people too often. when i go back to teaching i will be worried that i am not interacting with people enough. i think that people are a microwave: if you are busy you will warm up some food or something and eat it warm. if you are very bored you will surely place aluminum foil inside or you will forget popcorn because you aren't really hungry. everything is worse than it started and you curse the microwave. when you eat the food warm though you won't thank the microwave. that is the best analogy i know of. an analogy is the best way to represent something dont on ignore ce qu'il est. Travaillons sans raisonner; c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable

herve villechaize

i don't know who this is but i enjoyed the video

tran pham interviewed by the times

Thuy Nguyen, a 16-year-old junior at Park View High School in Sterling, has watched the recent transformation. She moved with her family to Virginia from Vietnam when she was 9 years old, and recalls that most of her fifth-grade classmates were white.

"I was new, afraid, and I didn't speak very well English," Ms. Nguyen said. "I didn't talk to anybody." Six years later she says making friends is easier.

"What I like about a diverse school is that you don?t feel intimidated if there are other races," she said. "I'm jumping around, talking to the Caucasian clique and the Middle Eastern clique. I have friends from El Salvador, Mexico, Peru -- one girl is half Korean and half Puerto Rican, she's cool -- and from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

"There's a girl from Bangladesh; we tell each other everything. I also knew a Swedish guy. He happened to be very hot. So I talk to all the different groups. I don't want it to be, like, 'You're just in the Asian clique.' "link

er force

had a wad of bread in my mouth holding a jumper cable clipped onto the hatchback so it wouldn't open and i was struggling to put on the seatbelt. we got a camembert but it tastes like freon.

on tagging

Tagged by surya. that i'm sure of. not only the spartan color scheme and minimal brush strokes but where he chose to leave his mark. I am thinking about what motivated him. i read that the smell of urine in men's bathrooms promotes aggressive behavior, but i don't think urinating on the floor is surya's forte; that is sure. i said something to the waitress, just a general remark hoping to disimulate my guilt or perceived guilt for complicity through silence, but surely it had the opposite effect. by now everyone was looking at us. i want to make it clear that normally i don't enjoy restaurant style food since the flavors are so rich and returning from the restaurant becomes quite a chore, so i started making the motions of someone who has been incapacitated by a good meal, arching my back, rubbing my belly, cracking my knuckles then slouching dramatically. just then it occurred to me that the general remark i had made to the waitress could only be belied by my gestures. i must have referred to something like dancing or jogging (though i can't now recall exactly what). just as i was contemplating whether or not a third action could somehow smooth out the tenuous transition from the remark and the gesticulations, surya returned, saying 'I wish it hadn't been so late in the day when we came here, because now we must go. ipso facto.' in the parking lot a young couple approached us, apparently relations of surya since he engaged them in a lively albeit rushed conversation where my head was floating so all the better that i wasn't able to get a word in. we all exchanged contact information since clearly there was too much to talk about to be standing in a parking lot. i misspelled my email address intentionally. a mile down the road i pulled over to let my heart slow down, to collect myself really. the situation in the restaurant had exhausted my fresh nerves, now starting to fray. surya confessed that he'd have offered to drive but was facing the same challenges as me. we smoked three cigarettes each and listened to higher love four times and i started the car again. several times on the drive back i was about to start a speech of disapproval but now i'm glad i didn't since i know now he went back to right the situation the next morning without anyone knowing there was ever a problem. i hear that nowadays (only one year later!) you could never pull off a stunt like that and walk away free. each year people come to resemble gazelles more and more. if there is any chance of trouble they bolt and run until they crash into something. every year they have to put up more barricades on the highways to assure us that if and when we bolt we know exactly where we'll crash. at least a year ago you had time to fix things up before trouble became serious; now any trouble is considered serious. in fact no trouble at all is considered serious and everyone sits seriously, waiting to bolt. the reason i'm bringing all of this up is that this morning I wondered how much things truly had changed. i regret not bringing a camera so you could see what i saw. it was dramatic because usually i am talking with the voice of someone who suspects that people are changing in to gazelles, thinking they are all under my thumb or my glare. not only was surya's name still there, but someone else had scratched into the steel below it in a flowing script blows. though i say i didn't have a camera, i do have a good memory, and i have stolen a calligraphy set from the korean restaurant where i sing on wednesday nights to make the best possible reproduction.

did I cry? no. I am not always in control of my emotions, but this time i handled everything with a cool detachment normally reserved for my backgammon matches. besides, nothing soothed me more at that moment than seeing
, knowing that things weren't as i feared they were; crying was my last possible reaction. i write in the year 2007, about a week after the incident at el arroyo with the gentleman who only consumed milk and margaritas. i need to make reference to unrelated events, since for me, time passes not from one day to the next but from one event to the next. although time flows slowly when you make careful scrutiny of nearby events, it nearly stagnates when you think only of grand and infrequent events. at any rate when people who haven't seen me for long ask me how quickly the time passed, i respond that each day of it lasted twenty four hours, each hour corresponding to the time elapsed between a given number of transitions between two hyperfine states of a particular isotope of cesium. I should try to contact surya again. truly nothing prevents me from doing so, despite what people probably believe. i would tell him that i finished his unfinished ars magna for him. I tag...

egalement une remarque sur

i liked going to the library because of the feeling of looking both ways to see bookshelves. i circled a whole floor but i'd get held up looking at any book on any shelf. land surveys of india, something about human rights, french books on anarchism, books mentioning von humboldt in hardcover with small type, written in german. a sentence that is nothing more than a list is good because i did not claim any relation to the list nor did i claim that the items are related to eachother. i could have been less free had i put books such as... ..., and such things as catch my fancy or i leafed through.... i checked out six books. i don't plan to read even one of them entirely. i saw the racecar movie with bi and na. i liked the parts of the movie where i felt that my expectations about the way people behave in movies were violated. family driving off with the itinerant drunk grandfather behind the wheel, an embarassing secret revealed at the important meeting, the token black guy. austin is warm these days

biblical theories of linguistics

  There are at least two accounts in the bible that seem to have inspired popularly-held and incorrect notions about language.
  The first is the theory of language as a nomenclature. georges mounin in Les problèmes theoretiques de la traduction cites this passage from genesis chapter 2 in illustrating the difference between the traditional theory and contemporary theory:
  "God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. . . . God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas."
  Mounin claims that this passage supports the theory of language as a repertory of words, each corresponding to a preexisting idea. But if ideas were formed before words named them, we could expect each word in a language to be linked to a concept having equivalents in every other language, which of course is not true.
  The second is concerned with the present distribution of languages across the world. The journalist Irena Lozano wrote the following in her essay Lenguas en Guerra:
  "All linguistic diversity is caused, in part, by several minor linguistical factors of voluntary change, (for example, the changes that each new generation introduces into the language it inherits) and, above all, by extralinguistic factors such as migrations of people across the earth and the relative isolation in which people remained when communications were not so easy as they are now. Thus, the people who split up are those who create linguistic diversity.
  However, many of us have stuck in our minds the myth of Babel, which tells us exactly the opposite: God separated mens' languages, thus separating groups of people. As we know, linguistic investigation leads us to the contrary, that the diversity of languages that exists today is to a great extent the product of chance and circumstance."
  Lozano goes on to describe what she believes to be a harmful consequence of the acceptance of this myth: The belief that a community should be defined by its language.

con el coyote no hay aduana

"The gang brought in more than 17 pounds a month, worth about $2 million a month in street sales, officials said. Mexicans illegally entering this country smuggled the heroin by foot and vehicle across the border in Arizona, Texas and California." yahoo news

i think if you want to immigrate to the US yet you have no money to pay a coyote the best way is to be a mule. a kilo of heroin could probably corrupt a lot of people

que pasa contigo

two of my brothers share an apartment. i walked in at noon and one was sitting at a clean desk with a lamp studying chinese and the other wearing a burlap shirt watching a cartoon about alien frat boys on his computer

natalie portman

the question was whether i couldnt articulate thoughts or whether i was unwilling to be candid about my posts but i think it was a question i pose to myself in a reverie as im falling asleep watching v for vendetta starring natalie portman, who all bicurious women claim is beautiful but no men so claim (sample size n=2, two bicurious women) the movie was entertaining and politically conscious but that's two hours of my life that i'm not getting back. i would have spent them...

computational linguistics

excerpt from greetings card:
Quizas, te extrañaba demasiado anoche, por que hice unas cosas por las cuales...

i am behind schedule on my flour bet. i found a program that will take any text and separate all the words and tell you the frequency and length of each. here is part of the analysis from apollinaire's Les Onze Mille Verges:

words appearing eight or nine times:
verges 9
vite 9
voyant 9
actrice 8
aise 8
avan 8
baiser 8
bandait 8
blonde 8
bordel 8
cause 8
cipit 8
cocher 8
compagnie 8
conjur 8
dame 8
devait 8
donnait 8
dur 8
effet 8
encula 8
eu 8
eurent 8

words appearing 22 to 25 times:
venait 25
jour 24
langue 24
trois 24
ah 23
beau 23
dor 23
japonais 23
votre 23
amour 22
aper 22
chambre 22
couilles 22
cria 22

words appearing only once:
capitale 1
capituler 1
captivit 1
capture 1
carcassonne 1
caressa 1
caressant 1
caresses 1
carme 1
carnation 1
carnaval 1

doy fe

24 hours in austin:
i spend the morning looking for the meaning of the french legal term 'dont acte,' find an approximate spanish equivalent, 'doy fe,' and determine that it can mean either 'i do hereby attest' or 'it has been reported thus' duylinh and i make a wager that i cannot use up completely 25 pounds of flour in one week. go to heb and drive around the parking lot with the hatchback up because it won't close. tran comes over has a mojito and talks shit about everything that is no longer dear to hear. duylinh and i have an argument about pretzels and in a flare up of my temper i take the remaining dough and throw it on a baking sheet without shaping it. go to a nearby house with a cardboard box full of bagels, pretzels and brioche, and a shopping bag with a bottle of beer and some stew. spend three hours discussing i don't know what. at some point we have agreed to have a 7-part hamburger comparison taste test and truly it almost does happen then it doesn't so we play dominoes. bi takes us to dinner and gives her phone number to the waiter, who looks about nineteen

apollinaire on cats

Je souhaite dans ma maison
Une femme ayant sa raison,
Un chat passant parmi les livres,
Des amis en toute saison
Sans lesquels je ne peux pas vivre.

Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée

bantam new

my brother is saying forty five minutes until we go forty two minutes until we go thirty five minutes until we go i think i'm just as anxious to leave the valley as he is to go to college. at the family house there is always prepared food, clothing and books covering the surfaces. some cats swarm around outside and one lives inside. they have given it a drinking glass to discourage it from climbing on the dining table and drinking out of people glasses. in my french class in cameroon one of our final tests was to speak for five minutes straight. on my turn i told the story of my road trip to acuna with frank duylinh and le maha notoire but mostly focused on the positioning of border patrol posts and the orientation of the highway with respect to the border. i got cut off before i finished describing the snacks we bought to take with us. yesterday i went with some of the usual suspects to playa bagdad, located conveniently within US territory, just a bit south of port mansfield. we collected travis from his class and followed the signs. they have small shacks along the road with signs chelas cartón 20 x $75.00. we had a box of indios. you might think that the carton is $1500.00 but that is not so, or you may think that the signmaker has unintentionally indicated the price as $1500.00. the signmaker has indicated its first language to be spanish or its target audience to be spanish speakers since the word for times is the same as the word for for. we drove a volkswagen jetta and had a chair designed to look like a mexican flag to make us blend in. the jetta does more to make us look like mexicans than the flag because everyone knows that while only mexicans love volkswagens, there are many mexican-flag sympathisers who are not truly mexicans. we drove along texas highway 510 and reached an array of fishing boats and shacks. the fishermen were mostly drunk. one of them had put a piece of plywood painted ostiones ceviche. he was skinny bronzed bearded and tattooed, also drunk. i went out to discuss with him and he showed an ice chest full of oysters which he claimed were caught the previous night in a nearby lagoon. he brought out two lawn chairs. i sat on some kind of metal frame with a rope latticework and we ate the food off of an old cable spool. we had two dozen oysters and two large cups of fish ceviche with crackers. i estimated the bill could not possibly be more than ten dollars and the man agreed, saying that we were his good friends and would be warmly welcomed back any time we needed refreshments. the indio finished and there wasn't enough volition to arrange a boat ride so we drove back to the city to buy alcohol prosciutto and penicillin. maha claimed that the prosciutto was nine dollars a kilo and it couldn't be passed up. after leaving the supermarket i pointed out to him that he had bought a container of mango yoghurt and no prosciutto. he said well at least i got the yoghurt. having a cameroon carte de séjour instead of a driver's license means that you can purchase up to four bottles of alcohol in the port mansfield bait and tackle shop.

what we do when we're bored

so here's this sketch i've been working on. it is of duylinh nguyen and the medium is HB pencil. thanks to johnny for helping me out by giving technical expertise on rendering and converting the piece to digital media. i think as my first drawing, it is ok, but i'm going to work harder

Additum 11 Oct 07. I didn't really draw the picture. the post was part of a complicated joke intended for a small audience.

i'm over here

the exhaustive research i undertook in writing my recent award-winning article on the politics of lexicography and coyote tourism led me to two interesting discoveries. first, real academia española lets you search all the dictionaries they've published since 1734, giving results such as this:



also i found that the spelling of words such as cual and cuando underwent a spelling change at rae some time between 1803 and 1817. note in the definition of molino

courageous

sebastian covarrubias' 1610 work landmark El tesoro de la lenguag castellana o española not only enraged diderot for its precocity but for its sparse treatment of the then struggling coyote tourism industry. of course, diderot was not born until one hundred years after covarrubias death in 1613, the enmity between the two is well-documented. this is not to say that covarrubias, also an accomplashed cryptographer, was able to predict diderot's birth and hate the person who was to be, but he was censured on numerous occasions by king felipe II's court for inflammatory remarks concerning the coyote tourism industry. diderot's 1745 work Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire universel des arts et des sciences intentionally makes no mention of covarrubias' work, while it consecrates two pages to the works by the minor lexicographer antonio de nebrija and his 1492 gramática castellana and contains a seven page article on the 1726 dictionary published by the real academia española. in the rae article he notes that "rien d'interessant ne se passa à la longeur de plus que deux siecles par rapport à la lexicologie espagnole"

but what is coyote tourism exactly? for most it evokes images of drunken twenty-something fanny pack strapped europeans clogging our highways and leaving piles of trash in our national parks, but it was considered somewhat of a noble calling in the eighteenth century. as early as 1502, guests to the royal court of gascogne were presented with coyote skulls, and Jean le Rond d'Alembert published a philosophical and economic treatise le tresoir caché de la tourisme des coyotes en France (1722), which led to an explosion in the number of coyote tourists visiting France, including particularly large numbers of russians. despite the increasing numbers of deportations and repatriations of unruly european coyote tourists from the united states, efforts are being made to attract cleaner and more considerate tourists through native grass reintroduction programs. coyotes eat grass. wild grass native to the southwestern united states and northern mexico is particularly nutritious to coyotes as well as ocelotes and various birds. the coyotes also eat the seeds of the grass.

when diderot's encyclopedie was formally suppressed by the church in 1759, and many of his contributors deserted him, coyote tourism was one of the sections struck from proof sheets by booksellers fearing retribution. diderot was arrested on drunken driving charges forty eight times in the next twenty five years and died in 1784 from a cardiac arrhythmia due to a cocaine overdose. covarrubias was particularly prescient in understanding the threat of irish tourists leaving trash in american coyote breeding areas; diderot was a wastrel and a blackguard.

que me ves pinche visbo

Tom Ryan used to share a home outside Denver with a girlfriend but now lives alone, enjoying the ability to keep the house as he pleases. That includes a hat rack covered with dozens of commemorative baseball caps.

photo caption in the New York Times

es por eso que debo decir que

my faith in the sport of cycling has been shaken by recent rumors of doping. movie recommendation
matando cabos, mexican pulp-fiction style macabre comedy of errors

y no de excusas vivo yo

we went to the hindu temple so i burned a cd because we would not find the temple. the cd had twenty songs that i had been playing for the last two days, and it was a nice volkswagen with leather seats and a lot of bass. only maha kept rolling down the window to smoke cigarettes, and that made the car warmer. i saw a billboard for a steakhouse which i learned was close to the temple when i was trying to determine whether maha had entered into any indecorous ligatures the previous evening. i have made several observations about how cameroon is different from texas

1. it seems very easy to build buildings in texas. there are contractors so you don't do it yourselves. the contractors don't have to mould their own blocks or mix their own concrete. the concrete mixers don't have to transport their own concrete from the port to the job site...
2. there is so much garbage here and there's usually a place to put it. well perhaps there is no place to put it, but i don't have to bury it myself in my backyard. someone else does. the roads are very wide and full of private cars. there is no one walking around on the streets, though the sidewalks are impeccable.
3. i saw some real live africans in the grocery store. i know this because they were smiling such broad smiles and speaking pidgin english to eachother. i thought of approaching them and asking them questions about their origins, but i remembered that i am always tired of people approaching me to know what i'm doing in cameroon. programs on television of pranks get laughs because they show someone behaving outrageously in public and none of the passerbys is temerous enough to greet the outrage and ask what he is doing. we laugh at the passerby and not the outrage. that everyone wishes to remain a passerby is a difference.

i baked some pizzas with the cheese i brought home. i think it is a good idea to make spanish and english national languages with equal standing and require all government employees to be bilingual. there were delays in atlanta customs because there weren't sufficient spanish speaking agents and a flight had just come in from mexico. the idea appeals to me as a xenophile since it would appall those types of damned if they're gonna make my boy have to learn that nonsense language. it should be english and spanish because the asians already have their biotechnology firms to appease them.

that came to break bread

notes from marseille.

a couple of unshaven guys with sunglasses and shorts, tanned. they laugh uncontrollably, telling me that i'm talking like a black man. go to historic la castellane then to a small sailboat. emmanuèle corrects me on a couple of eating-related faux pas and gives me a prononciation lesson that fails. go to the beach. we sat on the 13th story balcony, called for some pizzas and waited for them to come. the delivery man made it through the gates and there were four pizzas for three of us. the fourth one was free. i thought it was ridiculous that we should need even three pizzas, that we could have managed just well with two and the third and fourth were only ordered because they would be half price. they were very hot and had a sheet of plastic on the top to prevent the cheese from sticking to the box. tibault starting cutting quarters out with seamstress' scissors. then i am lying on the floor and there's only half of a pizza left. i hadn't had proper cheese or pizza for a year so it was nice to have them cooked au feux de bois with roquefort, chèvre, mozzarella... i forgot but one of them was 4 cheese so there were others. also some kind of saucisson from corsica. flics outside place savine motioned us over mais il vient de monter, laisse-le sortir...vous savez qu'on ne sort pas par...donc vraiment je suis un peu perdu

the next two days we also went to the beaches. french women set an admirable example with their unflagging determination to avoid tan lines. one night i lost a wager and had to do 47 push ups. the mother of françois gave us paté rose wine apricots and tapenade because we looked hungry. there is also a drink with almond sirop. i forgot to bring syrup. they have many nice types of syrups that can be added to water to make drinks. i also forgot to buy tapenade. i ate the rest of the tapenade out of the jar with my fingers in the evening. she had given me the rest of it as a gift.

one day lorenzo and i woke up early and decided that we would prepare a true marseillais breakfast. we had reblochon, brie, roquefort, chèvre and some kind of packaged spread called boursin on these baguettes. we also had some kind of duck product, apricots, fried sausages and mushroms with spicy mustard. coffee and ouzo to aid digestion. guillaume said that it is fortunate his mother didn't see this shameless and flagrant lack of respect for eating which cheese with which bread and which wine and which time of the day and so on.

marseille is a good city and i will live there some day if i can