I wager that time’s passed.

I enjoyed that freedom, and I miss it, now that I’m working all the time. However, the time wasted continues to pay off: The government expects me to pay very, very little in tuition next year, and the sum to be saved is far more realistic. London seems nearer daily.

I’ve been teaching myself Old English for poetic reasons I won’t get into, here. It’s a very different English from what we speak today, but it’s close enough that the learning comes quick: After a week’s piecemeal study I can already read some original texts. It’s also been quite freeing: August saw the end to a two-year relationship and six-year friendship. This person had been critical for years of my every impracticality — my straight razor restoration was objectionable, while her obsession with zombie films was right and good. It feels good to be able to slowly write out flashcards in insular uncial without fear of flak.

My first serious study texts have been Bede’s account of the poet Cædmon (glossed Old English here, Modern English here, my translation of the poem here) and ‘The Wanderer‘. Reading these, I get a real sense for the possibilities of the language, but the culture is intangible and abstract. In seeking out context, I found images from the archaeological digs at Sutton Hoo. Most (all?) of this stuff is kept at the British Museum, which, as it turns out, is a pebble’s throw from the main SOAS campus.

Education is so going to rock.

One of his most recent projects emphasises in a more bold way the uniqueness of words — or certain words — in multiple human languages: untranslatable is ‘a community project formed to examine issues of untranslatability in general, with a specific focus on single words that require phrases, paragraphs, or pages to translate’. Fun.

The project’s not yet two weeks old, but it’s got a strong start. Saudade, 建前, оскомина, เกรงใจ, Schadenfreude… It’s quite a list.

Take a visit. It’s a fascinating read. And if you can, lend a hand.

I had hoped that I might someday meet Mrs. Appiah, but her generation of Asantes and Akanists is passing away more quickly than I can get myself back to Ghana. It is to be hoped that the Herculean effort represented by her Bu Me Bɛ — a collection of seven thousand proversb — will be remembered through the work of other folklorists, anthropologists, and cultural historians. Rest in peace, Mrs. Appiah. Wo ne Nyame nkɔ.

滇紅茶 is Dian Hong tea. The first character is a name for Yunnan — one that predates 云南 (Yúnnán) by a century, probably, at least. The second is hóng, which means ‘red’. In Cantonese, it’s hùhng. The term 紅茶, literally ‘red tea’, corresponds to English ‘black tea’. This tea is often sold in the US as ‘Yunnan tea’, ‘Yunnan gold tea’, or ‘Yunnan red tea’. Probably some other names out there, too — I got it as ‘yellow tea’, yesterday (though ‘yellow tea’ often refers to another kind of tea entirely).

Any help would be much appreciated.

But I don’t fully get The Waste Land. I’ve read the poem a couple dozen times, and my current slow reading is the first in which I’ve begun to actually understand. I needed BC Southam’s help.

In the poem, Eliot repeatedly refers to London as the un-something city. That phrase has caught me every time I’ve read the poem, and I’ve thought ‘Yes. London will be my un-something city.’

So why is it that I can never remember, five minutes later, what that something is?

(Unreal.)

I remember the way. When I get there, I’ll have to speak like I’m drunk. You have to use the right words in the right order. I’m the drunk man, showing up to fuck her. I have to remember to be obnoxious. There’s a script to be followed…

…Michelle’s at home when I get there, and I push past, into the apartment. I storm to the back, and find the bottle of pain killers. “I’m stealing your pills,” I tell her, and I put two on my tongue and wash them down with liquor. Pills and Liquor, pills and liquor. We’re getting really dark and gritty now. Everything is shot through a blue filter…

“…We should take off our clothes and get right down to it. I’ve never done anything more than gnaw on a girl’s fake cock, and you clearly just need a good visit from the cock deliveryman. True or false?”

“Are you drunk?” Michelle says, reading from the script. She’s the sober woman who’s visited by the drunken lecherous male. She’s reading the script with her hair all shaved off like a dyke, but we can squint our eyes and picture any one of the dozens of appropriate TV actresses. Anyway, isn’t this the part of the movie that everyone’s been secretly waiting for, where the lead character and the awesome dyke character get together? It’s awesome that they’re fags and all, but “Kiss! Kiss!”

“Of course I’m drunk,” I tell her. “My nose is red, isn’t it? I’m hiccupping, Aren’t I? Now, pencils down! Take your pants off and let’s see if you passed. I want to see what it’s like to enjoy heterosexual privilege. This is what god intended, isn’t it?” Wait, no, that’s not my motivation. I put my hand out to steady myself on the wall. Focus. “I mean, if gender’s nothing, then what the fuck is lust? I’ve been getting hard over a concept, haven’t I? I’ve fucked post-op trannies, dickless and satisfying, because I knew they were men. Well, you’re a man. Spread your fucking labia or whatever the shit it is.”

“I’m not a man, and I’m not going to fuck you,” Michelle says. “I’m not into men. I like women. You know that.”

“So you don’t think that gender’s just a construction, then?” I say, and she shakes her head.

“I don’t care what it is,” she says. “It gets me wet to think about my body with another woman. The idea of a penis makes me physically ill. So, I choose orgasms. They’re satisfying and plentiful, and if I have to buy into a constructed ideal, so be it.”

Lockpick Pornography by Joey Comeau

San Franciscans: Come.

For example, in Book I, succinctly titled ‘Of the causes of improvement in the productive powers of labour, and of the order according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks of people’, Smith dedicates a chapter to inequalities in wages of labour and costs of stock. He makes a curious division between ‘inequalities arising from the nature of the employments themselves’ and ‘inequalities occasioned by the policy of Europe.’ The ontological status of ‘nature’ in Smith’s concepts of natural prices, wages, rents, &c. may and should be debated — I tend to agree with Mauss that homo œconomicus (a term which Smith did not use, but which applies well to his understanding of human economic decision-making) has never existed. I’d like to skip past the critique of Smith, for a moment, though, to the third of Europe’s policies that has a deleterious effect on equality of wages and prices:

…The policy of Europe, by obstructing the free circulation of labour and stock both from employment to employment, and from place to place, occasions in some cases a very inconvenient inequality in the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of their different employments.
Bantam Classics, p. 185

The first sort of obstruction discussed by Smith consists in guild and corporation restrictions, but the greater part of the section deals with geographic restrictions, focusing on England’s ‘poor laws’ which restricted the movement of labour from one part of the Kingdom to another.

In most countries in the 21st century, citizens are permitted to move freely from one state, province, or city to another. It seems unlikely that Smith would have foreseen the sort of mass movement of labour that we see today, say, over the US-Mexican border: ‘After all that has been said of the levity and inconstancy of human nature, it appears evidently from experience that a man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported.’ (p. 106) (I may well revise my view of Smith’s view of labour’s motility after finishing Book IV, which deals with Europe’s colonies.) Nevertheless, his reasoning applies equally well internationally, and the suggestion seems implicit. As an individual, his opinion might change with awareness of current conditions, but if his philosophy was right in 1776, it’s right now.

Despite Bush’s recent support for a temporary-worker program, Neo-Cons generally loathe such ideas, and palaeo-conservatives aren’t much more receptive. The Democrats in general certainly have no special interest in open borders. Neither conservatives nor liberals will have anything to do with this sort of stuff: This is the domain of radicals — folks like the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.

Yep.

To: “Bob Offer-Westort”
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Subject: Re: Hey.
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the problem with having a blog is that your friends that write you and don’t get a response KNOW that you are not hospitalized, and therefore can write them back…

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