Anchoring Recollections

It seems to depend on a combination of the after-taste of strong coffee, the gusts of fresh wind, and the moth-overgrown concrete bank that together give a sensation of travelling in time to other moments when sitting with a book in hand in a campus-like environment was a thing to do, with a trendy city spreading wide beyond the lightly fenced grounds where name-plates grace patina-carrying brick walls, where time stands still from one page-turning to another, and where another cup of coffee is just a walk away. Less a nostalgia, it is a feeling of concert with a set of recollections, experiences and intentions that this moment anchors in its hic et nunc materiality.

In a Maze of Linguistic Mirrors Looking into Media Looking-Glass

Difficult to say what change I go through as I test linguistic territories I previously only eyed from a media distance, as I slowly become involved in the languages I read in a process similar to that that makes me ask myself if I get infected by the worry about the viral dangers of what only few years ago was a theoretical possibility that as it becomes increasingly realistic hits the media with a double force of realized fears and derealized risks as the international army of experts and executives walk a tight rope of openness and opacity as the public comes to terms with the inevitable consequences of even low intensity public health crisis that a new flu strain can lead to an outbreak that we in our everyday lives do not necesserily know how to deal with other than do the simplest of precautionary measures however insufficient they may be that I become linguisitically aware of in multiple registers of direct inner speech and its translation, seeking for passing translations, translating myself on the sidelines of my attention span, trying not to slip too frequently between direct and reported speech of my proper voice that threatens to get lost in mutliple translations from one primary language into another that vies for a comparable degree of primal connection to my imagination, sensation and expression.

A Movie Night in Jerusalem

It does make a strong impact to watch three short films in the language that you don't understand, with subtitles in English and with a partial introduction in French. The place is in an out of the way part of Eastern Jerusalem. The language of the short films is Arabic. Before the movie starts a sparse crowd starts to gather. One can hear French, Arabic, English and Hebrew spoken. We bring our dialogue in German to this linguistic melange. The movie program is in French and Arabic. What leaves its mark is not only the place - the area of Jerusalem that looks more foreign that elsewhere - but also what the three movies quietly say to us, the viewers. A film about a family tragedies and struggles, another about a love story that falls apart, and still another one about remembering past violence while riding the everyday streets of conflict. One may argue about the aesthetic merits and demerits of films, about the relations between the tradition and modernity, about the canon and its contemporary reception. But the youth of the audience, the nearness of actors after the screening, and the other, more village-like side of Jerusalem that shows through on the way back leave a strange impact. Difficult to express, necessary to explore and important to write down. It is as if I have witnessed a cultural event that takes place between linguistic borders. A culturally borderline experience. Experiences without a translation but looking for it.

Words Appearing on a Virtual Page (Thursday, October, 2008)

My impression is that words do not exist up until the very moment my fingers start tapping on the keyboard in an interaction almost wholly out of my conscious control as if I were steering a process that runs all by itself, as if I were participating in the work of a machine of writing that in a post-structural turn of operation does not need an author anymore, as if formulations were falling on a page as leaves off the wilting trees that can think no more than the squirrels running up and down their trunks, as if the coming winter were sending its primordial chill forward into the still serene and gossamer days that come before a coldness fills the air, as if a general malaise in the global economy were finding its way into the metaphors that usually cheerful arts and letters shower upon the consuming masses that take up easy credit as easily as their pick an ice cream off a stall or up from a crate, as if the void of the virtual page I am filling were drawing me into itself with a bothersome intention of verbal fruition, as if my memories were looking for vehicles of their arrival to expression locked up in faraway domains of my unconsciousness, as if I were transforming myself into an imperfect likeness of another writing personality that visitates my efforts to put words into sentences that are at a loss for a structure that could lend them a meaning reaching beyond the need to make a transition from one world to another.

Everyday Life. With Asian Characteristics

Daily screenful of words. Should I turn to carefully ethnographizing my every twitch of reflective behaviour? Reflectio ergo sum? Possibly a movement from me present to me virtual that is not likely to arrive at any given destination. Visiting today my old residence right in the middle of the campus that was converted into a university office building made a quaint impression. Two exhibit cases in the lobby have artifacts and books make a grounded impression of area and subject studies that find their home under the room of the former hospital that the building historically is. Second floor greets its wanderers with posters on career in Japan, Chinese and Japanese language tests, and a Chinese trade show at the local exhibition grounds. A whiff of opportunity on paths not taken. I wonder what comes of the common Asian heritage of the countries of the region given the preeminence of Chinese culture and civilization - just consider Chinese characters and arts - now that a certain threshold of economic, political, cultural, and social achievement has been arrived at. It may be before long that not only cool Japan conquers the gaming consoles and widescreen entertainment but also other Asian countries become unquestioned leaders in growing niches of everyday life. Merchandise in supermarkets maybe one thing, but a self-reflected awareness on a mass level of an epochal reorientation away from the West and towards the East could be a fascinating transition to observe. And comment on.

Blogging Exercise Redux (Friday, October, 2008)

To manage transitions does appear to be a skill anyone would want to have, me included. It is just that when one has to summon what it takes to make a transition, a real process of looking for sources of the self, especially as they are likely to go through a mutation, has a chance to start in earnest. At the site of multiple negotiations of memories, discourses, and languages, a tentative way of approaching space, of imaginations, of cities, and of movements, becomes being accessible - not because of knowing beforehand how to do it but because of the mere necessity of making a next move, like in a game of chess, when a succession of alternating strategic and tactical steps lets a judgment on overall success or failure to be made. However, in a situation with far more alternatives, far less transparency, and far reaching absence of stakes, I wonder how one can reformulate the playing field of choosing, acting, and evaluating. Sounds resigned. But even in breaking rules, roles, and moulds, a new and tentative form of ordering strives to emerge. As in our everyday life I suppose. Repetition and difference of the routinized ways of behaving oneself - and strange that behaving others come linguistically across as a contemplative turn of speech and, upon a reflection, thought - reveal themselves to work both ways - expectedly and unexpectedly at once, given that this once is an element in a series, very much like a singularity in Deleuze's logic of thought.

Fresh Print of Godard's Pierro le Fou as the Mirror of Cultural Production

Fresh look at Godard's Pierro le Fou amazes at its masterful use of just the notion of intertextuality that must have been gaining in theoretical currency at the time of the New Wave of the French cinema that on the background of apparently low-budget production costs, as far as Hollywood standards go, exhibits high level of cultural investment into a feature film that runs slightly longer than a B-class movie of the day would, given the epic lengths of the major film productions that made the press headlines and roster of critical reviews, which extends the film work not only between the low and high cultural genres, as car chases, social characterizations, and comical moments attest, but also between the 1960s and 2000s as the matters of political, poetical, and social awareness that the film raises before the amused gazes of its viewers have retained their relevance almost to a degree that structural analysis, just coming into theoretical vogue as Godard was making his film, reveals with striking precision when Vietnam war, mediatization of violence, quantified reports of combat casualties and collateral damage make film characters, as well as us by extension of identification, wonder about what would it take to understand the lives the fate of which modern media of representation convey.