Now/here no/where woman

It's so cold this morning my fingers feel stiff and clumsy as I type and my penmanship sucks more than usual. This is one of those mornings that brims with scintillating dreams that ripple up against the dam of frustrations of a peripatetic who is only here, still. So I retreat into a decade-old memory of sitting on a platform in Canterbury on a bright winter morning, waiting for the train to London to come in, shivering and writing an old-fashioned pen-on-paper letter to some one I love(d) and telling him how strange it was to struggle to move the pen across the page. It was important to me, in that white sunshine, to understand this cold, to feel it completely without giving into it. So I wrote to him about it with my fingers freezing inside my gloves. Looking at the scrawled lines I wondered whether he would be able to read what I had written, and also what I had not written -- of the lasting warmth and moments of heat I wished to pass between us. Now I understand that the lette...

I'm back!!! With a vengeance! Rrrawwwrr!

Tidy up room. Tidy up closet. Tidy up desk. Tidy up floor around desk. Tidy up floor around closet. Tidy up clutter on bed. Tidy up clutter in mind.

READING ADVISORY: Lots of big words meant to justify my comparison of two seemingly unrelated fieldsites (and a sharp, sideward elbow-jab aimed at the positivist tendencies that continue to thrive in some anthropology departments). WARNING TO WOULD-BE PLAGIARISTS: Embedded in this excerpt is a curse upon your privates. At first glance the proposed comparison of the case studies presented here appears to violate at least one traditional tenet of comparative studies in general: “that the items compared must share certain fundamental traits” (Nader 1994: 87). Nader (ibid) refers to this as “the notion of controlled comparison,” based upon anthropology’s early conformity to the canons of positivist science that include the identification of and control over discrete variables in stable laboratory settings or, as might be the case with human society, in bounded, static, homogenous communities. The comparative approach of this study has been questioned repeatedly on the following terms: the ...

I am temporarily in deep dissertation space. Blogging will resume when I discover a way out the blackhole through sheer mind-power. SHHHHHHH!

Under the blinking sacred heart of Jesus, shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee, everybody sits placidly in the jeepney, former vehicle of war converted by Pinoy genius into a medium for mass transport, articulating function and frivolity the way only the Filipino can. Today’s dispatcher in the paradahan ng bayan is the artist Kawayan de Guia, who swears that riding the jeepney through the maze-like state of the nation eventually leads to an inexplicable sensation of being stuck in a bygone era.   And the music! Oh the music! The April Boys back to back with Curtis Mayfield, by turns wrenching and soothing the passengers’ collective broken hearts. Alaskado! There’s no getting off because up ahead is a sign that says no loading and unloading and around the corner is a fat cop with Ray-Bans just waiting for ‘small change’ to fall into his itching palms. The elusive Filipino psyche is out for a joy ride in these musical pieces, these gilded jeepney/paintings and jukebox/jeepneys re...

Lest I forget, life goes on.