no amount of critical theory and critical pedagogy can prepare you for a middle school korean kid with no command of the english language who inexplicably blurts out "NIGGERRRR!!!" when you present a flash card of someone of afro-caribbean descent decorating a christmas tree ( Read more... )

i received an e-mail yesterday from one of the rgv kids i worked with last year. he said all those sparkling, charming things people are often trained to say - "the program hasn't been the same since you left"; "when're you coming back?" - but i'd be glad to shut down the cynicism in this instance. i don't go too many days here in korea without ( Read more... )

cattle, or tyrrany of the absent something something - sometimes the twilight appears to resucitate itself; its fortunes reverse; yesterday arrives yet again. we are hardly transplanted to a moment a priori to the twilight, however, but only to a point where we continue our approach towards the threshold - twisting, stretching, tearing away to ( Read more... )

hauntology - i carry with me her trace. at all times, at all moments, she is there. and with her trace, i inadvertently carry his. i am no less spooked twice - these twin spectres inescapable. the immediacy of her echo, her vibrations are easy to grasp in their ontology, though nevertheless difficult for the gut to reconcile with. it is the second ( Read more... )

darl bundren's laughter - perhaps there are moments when the world melts away into seeming absurdity; the perceiver of the absurd feels a gorgeous moment of epiphany and is overwhelmed by its totality. it requires a certain sensitivity to arrive at such a moment - few have - and when one does, there is little else to do but laugh. the absurd isn't ( Read more... )

sometimes i see it slipping over the horizon, swallowed, engulfed...it lies hidden from me, frustrated, annoyed, fearful, regretful. had i forgotten that this is autumn? somber hues of crimson and gold paint the sky in soft downward strokes, and sometimes gently up adrift a cool whisper, but always scattering indifferently on the ground. with each ( Read more... )

the order of things - gimje the savage, the wild, the wholly other, absolute alterity, perfect absence, barren frontier - is no more. a mechanized and routinized life helps mediate the soft tremors of desolation vibrating in the vacanct space of consciousness. but there is something else that has ushered in such a transition, no less transplanted ( Read more... )

yet another msn conversation...this time with mark...hahaha ( Read more... )

how i miss thee, ted ( Read more... )

the shout - a shout, a scream, a cry...these quick, sharp, tumultuous events release us from certitude, expectance, euphoric numbness - they release us (if only for a moment)from life. the anxiety that grips us in that singularity - or imagined singularity - twists and rends the flesh of the soul, produces such ache that sleep dies. gimje is one ( Read more... )