Selfishism? Selfism?

Rolling through some of the blog postings and articles from the last week or so and considering responses to the articles, I wonder if those sources communicate a shift in the meaning of the word 'racism'. There's a clear directional shift in the discussions on whiteness from the figure of white being positioned against an other, darker figure to a self reflecting white engaging in other whiteness. This apparent disregard, in the name of the other, of the other for professional purposes does not clearly signal racism but rather a sort of fatigued self-absorption. White, in whiteness theory, does not appear to hate or even dislike other colours in the rainbow. White's just tired of pretending to care that there's a rainbow. White has a mortgage, his wife's working a second job to pay for the nanny and the Volvo, his kids need Wii's and iPhones so he can reach them with the Blackberry and, frankly, White's got bigger fish to fry. Brown in fabrication has an engineering degree and no less job uncertainty than Yellow in shipping. Let's not even mention Pink, over in sales - the only one with job security, sure, but that's based on a gutwrenching daily diet of Pepto and self-degradation.

They're all white in some light spectrum or other and they just want stuff. If being white can be mobilised to help them get stuff, then so be it. The mortgage still needs paying, the Volvo still has a year left on the lease, the kids still start dating people with piercings in their genitals. White's not really racist, just selfish and tired of being told to feel guilty - even for the stuff White can clearly take responsibility for. White's selfish and oblivious, not against you and not with you either - unless you can help White get somewhere. Perhaps we need a new word for White's particular brand of sociopathy, something that reflects the clear lack of effort or interest White has in employing any emotion on behalf of others, positive or negative. Something that indicates White's total colour blindness.

Marie Wilson Interview

This came up on the news feed and I thought I would draw closer attention to it, given the relevance to our course content.

There are a couple of questions coming out of this interview that intersect with what appears to be my approach to the material encountered through this class: to what purpose do we conflate place and identity? How do we reconcile our upbringing with our shifting environments? Perhaps most relevant to the navigation of this material for me is a question of negotiating interior and exterior, how to reconcile the fragmentation of my research process (communicated brilliantly by the fragmentation of the course material and its presentation) with a coherent identity that can be communicated externally. I'll speak a bit more to that in class tomorrow.

In the Marie Wilson interview we meet one of the three current commissioners of Canada's TRC, the only non-native member, though she currently hails from Yellowknife and married a residential school survivor. Originally hailing from Ontario she represents a northern native perspective in the hearings, though an Inuit subcommittee has apparently also been appointed (CBC1 2009). Do we read her as a white body stealing the pain of others, to use Razack's term? The filters we encounter her through make her even more problematic: she comes to us in this interview as a representative of the United Church, she states that after a lapse, she returns to the United Church to return "to a place of nostalgic safety [that] made me feel tied to my family in a spiritual way". She returns to her upbringing in the church to ground her while she negotiates the pain that residential school abuses (some perpetrated by representatives of the United Church) have caused her chosen family and environment.
Wilson clearly identifies as a member of the northern native community, though she still requires some framework from her original environment to stabilize her in what appears to remain, to some degree, an alien environment. In this interview she is presented to readers by the United Church Observer - a p.r. tool belonging to one of the organizations fully implicated in the abuses Wilson has been appointed (by another institutional abuser, the Canadian government) to help reconcile. Further, her career as a veteran reporter for the CBC, the national broadcaster, further undermines her experiential authority as a representative member of the northern native communities. In her body we see an increasingly fragmented series of identities: mother and wife and co-sufferer of residential school abuses, northern representative, United Church sop, government insider and expert spin artist, experienced researcher and story teller...how do we find a coherent figure who can adequately pursue a mandate of truth and reconciliation in an institutional enterprise funded by a government that created the atmosphere of abuse requiring this mandate as a healing agent. Meanwhile, the CBC describes the commission as: "the panel that will gather anecdotes from former students of residential schools" (CBC 2009). They appear not to give particular weight (read: anecdotes) to the commission or its mandate, even when one of the commissioners is one of their own. Perhaps in this response, we can find the trust and faith in Marie Wilson that we need: were she taken seriously by the media and not constantly augmented by mention of her husband or her career, she might be seen as too representative of power interests. Their dismissal of her worth might be just the proof we need that her body may adequately aid the communication of the suffering of so many native bodies at the hand of Canada's power structures.
I follow these stories one to another to another, sometimes getting knocked off track, sometimes watching the videos, sometimes reading the books (though less so, the medium of a computer screen makes prolonged reading of black text on white background very abusive to my brain and vision), sometimes distilling a line or two into a paper journal or notebook to fuel the creative project that i hope comes out of this research. I hope these many fragments take on a coherent identity, I think they will - without many facets, many taps by external devices at variant angles, no diamond gleams.

new TRC in Honduras?

By Sean Mattson

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - Honduras' de facto government buckled under international pressure and agreed to allow the return to power of President Manuel Zelaya, who was toppled in a military coup four months ago.

The breakthrough late on Thursday followed renewed pressure from senior U.S. officials who traveled to Honduras this week for a last-ditch effort to end a crisis that had handed U.S. President Barack Obama a foreign policy headache.

"It is a triumph for Honduran democracy," the leftist Zelaya said after the rival sides agreed to a deal that could see him restored to office in the coming days.

"We are satisfied. We are optimistic that my restitution is imminent," Zelaya said.

Zelaya, a leftist, was toppled and sent into exile on June 28 but crept back into Honduras last month and has since been holed up in the Brazilian embassy.

De facto leader Roberto Micheletti, who took over the country within hours of Zelaya's ouster, had repeatedly refused to agree for his return but finally backed down.

"I have authorized my negotiating team to sign a deal that marks the beginning of the end of the country's political situation," Micheletti, who took over as de facto leader after the coup, told a news conference on Thursday night.

He said Zelaya could return to office after a vote in Congress that would be authorized by the country's Supreme Court. He said the deal would require both sides to recognize the result of a November 29 presidential election and would transfer control of the army to the top electoral court.

Micheletti said the deal would create a truth commission to investigate the events of the last few months, and would ask the international community to reverse punitive measures like suspended aid and canceled visas.

END OF ISOLATION

The United States, the European Union and Latin American leaders had all insisted Zelaya be allowed to finish his term, which ends in January. They had threatened not to recognize the winner of the November election unless democracy was first restored.

A U.S. team led by Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon and Dan Restrepo, Washington's special assistant for Western Hemisphere affairs, sat in on talks earlier in the day and warned that time was running out to reach a deal.

The coffee-producing Central American country has been diplomatically isolated since Zelaya was rousted at dawn by soldiers and flown to exile on a military plane.

Zelaya had angered many in Honduras by becoming an ally of socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Critics also alleged he was seeking backing to extend presidential term limits, a claim he denies.

Human rights groups have documented major abuses by the de facto government and say free and fair elections would be impossible after Micheletti curbed civil liberties and temporarily shut down pro-Zelaya news organizations.

Obama cut some aid to Honduras after the coup but had been criticized by some Latin American for not doing more to force the de facto government to back down.

The collapse of talks last week prompted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to dispatch the U.S. delegation to push again for a negotiated settlement.

(Additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa; Writing by Jason Lange; Editing by Kieran Murray)

டூ விழத்

there's a large family of scripts (sorry this may be totally known stuff to some, new for me)

partial list from wikipedia: Northern Brahmic

* Kusan
* Tocharian
* Meitei Mayek
* Gupta
o Śāradā
+ Landa
# Old Kashmiri
# Gurmukhī
# Khojki
+ Takri
# Dogri
# Chameali
o Siddhaṃ
+ Tibetan
# ’Phagspa
* Hangul (hypothetical)
# Lepcha
* Limbu
o Nāgarī
+ Devanāgarī
# Modi
+ Nandināgarī
+ Gujarati
o Proto-Bengali
+ Kaithi
# Sylheti Nagari
+ Eastern Nagari
# Bengali
# Assamese
+ Mithilakshar
+ Oriya
o Nepal
+ Bhujimol
+ Prachalit Nepal
+ Ranjana
# Soyombo

Southern Brahmic

* Tamil Brahmi
o Vatteluttu
+ Kolezhuthu
* Tamil
* Pallava Grantha
o Malayalam
o Tulu
o Sinhala
o Dhives Akuru
o Saurashtra
o Khmer
+ Lao
+ Thai
o Cham
o Old Kawi
+ Balinese
+ Javanese
+ Baybayin
+ Batak
+ Buhid
+ Hanunó'o
+ Tagbanwa
+ Sundanese
+ Lontara
+ Rejang
o Mon
+ Burmese
+ Ojhopath
* Kalinga
* Bhattiprolu Script
o Kadamba
o Kannada
o Telugu
* Tai Le
o New Tai Lue
* Ahom

and a helpful beginner guide to learning the scripts is here.:

totally off track but i'm intrigued with the way google promotes this linguistic palimpsest where the computers read in an english foundation (itself a linguistic gui on a massive bit-complex of binary code) but interface visually with indic scripts as representative. to what end, communicate in a language that only the machine can use (from this canadian situation)? while the creative input represents in, for example, Tamil? Siddham, which splinters into Tibetan, among other languages, i've encountered before as the text used for classic buddhist script but i still wonder at the motivation for this project.

any takers?

எ நியூ அட்டெம்ப்ட் அண்ட் எக்ஸ்பெரிமென்ட்

ahh...more learned. so if you enable your blog to transliterate, it will do so but only to titles, in order to make your content searchable in that language...the previous posts were hindi. this title comes in tamil...other languages available are Kannada, Malagayam, and Telugu.

Info from the help site:
"Blogger offers an automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to the Indic characters used in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. This lets you type these languages phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- the sound of the words is converted from one alphabet to the other, not the meaning."

interestingly, online translators still read the text in roman script and searches for the words in indic script produce no results. one wonders what the point to this is - clearly a fair bit of work has gone into its development. what other indic scripts could be available that are omitted here? why these choices?

more to learn.

chektime: 5min
blogtime: 4min

तरी थिस ओं फॉर साइज़

well. the text gets translated into characters immediately upon spacing. no word yet why or how. unsuccessful in finding a translator that recognizes the characters. more to come...

time investigated: 6min
blog time 3min

कोब्ब्लिंग बीट्स

my project begins to gain some conceptual steam and bits are gathering - i'm working on a chapter for a larger work tentatively titled "the berm also rises" as a poetic/theoretic investigation of empire and land formation. within the context of this class i am working on the threads of (neo)colonial development close to home, through the filter of TNR nexii as we've investigated in this class. i'm hoping for a bit of help, given the many interests and research planes pursued by our group - imagine items of interest within the parameters of calgary and area colonialism, land development, truth and reconciliation movement and challenges - if you find such items in your wandering, can you link them to me? i'm moving into a more productive phase over the next few weeks and hope to start crafting coherent pieces soon.

Thanks!

colin

reading/watching time: lost to the internet
blog post time: 17 minutes.

feeling old and helpless

i have for years now been navigating the blogosphere and its predecessors. from the old pyroto and affiliated BBS systems to their java-enabled inheritors, irc and mIRC platforms and their subsequent social networking sites (Bolt, mySpace, Facebook et al). i have joyfully embraced them and expanded myself through them. i play with data clouds, i network RSS feeds, i spend an obscene amount of time investigating the world through my web portal. i am genX turned cyborg and had no real trouble making the switch from dBase to Flash, even though i learned typing as a youth, rather than keyboarding, as is now taught.

there are, however, limits. i don't tweet - the form is too schizophrenic, even for me. and say what you like about the creative possibilities of the 140 character constraint (sorry Arjun Basu, Sina Queyras) but the simple fact is that the Haiku existed for thousands of years with much greater constraints and it's highly unlikely that the flaccid channel surfing automaton that is the twitter nation will ever produce anything of comparable value in form and content.

within the context of this course, i confess, i struggle. when i read Randy Bass's comment to "slow down and look at learning" i begin to twitch. slow down? i enrolled in english studies because i like to read books. my dissertation is an examination of cultural interfaces with the book object. my life online is characterised by spastic hoppings and jerky reactions to the barkings and hoppings of others. my love life, on the other hand, moves languidly between cover boards. navigating the network of blogs, the ever-shifting lines of inquiry, the rotating reading room (where there is neither room nor reading in rotation, as i must print the vast majority of what i read in order to read it) the snarl of paths and links and sites overlaid upon the incessant noise my laptop already creates...it's too much.

my computer is chained to my leg and it grows heavy. my eyes miss the sun - remember reading on grass outside? i feel weak and myopic and no longer one who directs my research but rather one who is channeled and played by the conductor of an invisible cyborg opera. perhaps, given our subject matter, that is the point. perhaps helplessness in the face of a communication media controlled by another is a worthy experience to have as i engage with the subject positions of people for whom canadian experience can have little other definition.

or perhaps i'm just turning into a curmudgeon and think Brass's "bridge to know-ware" is too symptomatic of an age where our interface with language and information lacks a substance replaced by snide homo-linguistic fluff.

time invested in blog entry: (17 minutes)
time invested in know-ware: i don't no, where has the time gone?

body bags

in case you missed it, here's an interesting story on the federal government response to the aboriginal communities being hit by swine flu in manitoba

the cbc story has a network of links leading up to this story, if a bit less detail.

Some thoughts on _Unrepentant_

and on Kevin Arnett's persistent evocation of the holocaust in pursuit of his definition of the residential schools as agents of white Canadian genocide on the native peoples of Canada. Primo Levi wrote in SE QUESTO È UN UOMO of his survival of the Auschwitz death camp: "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died" and considered as later does Hayden White and Berel Lang, that to write of the holocaust could only diminish its horror.

bearing this in mind, it is quite easy to see the white Kevin Arnett as quite fit and an able survivor of what he presents quite convincingly as a home grown genocide. his churlish "i can see through all the bullshit" quips combined with his unconvincing attempt to pin his divorce on United Church officials (c21:40- Q: did you talk about your intentions to do this [challenge church directives] with your wife? A: well, yeah. later we talked all about it. but they sent someone to my house to...) pale in comparison with the actual pain shown by the Native subjects of the film who, as both Levi and Lang note in their holocaust writings, do not talk directly about what happened: the survivors memories are buried, often vague, and the language they use is indirect. you do not hear them say 'the teacher put his penis in me'. rather, the victim says "and he was there, with the vaseline and, you know, he did that three times with each of the boys. for his pleasure. i was six, or eight. maybe nine - i am unsure". this, then, the believable response of a holocaust survivor. not eloquent, barely said, often drawn out by other events.

i suppose what i am saying is that Kevin Arnett and Louie Lawless are unsavory profiteers in the sense of the Native politicians they decry and the Michael Moore's who make such a self-aggrandizing spectacle of other people's suffering. distasteful and, in Levi's sense per the above quote, perhaps the worst of us. that said, someone must tell the story to prevent such atrocities from recurring...though interestingly, that reason for truth-telling is never given by Arnett. i don't profess to understand why not, though perhaps that is because i can not, as Arnett does, reasonably consider myself in the light of a holocaust survivor.

blog time: 23 minutes.
film and research time: 2h17m.

A beginning and a tentative plan

a first step, then. blogging, like most literary arts, germinates from self-writing, from a sort of public journal-keeping. despite its publicity, it seldom achieves communal status and remains the literary equivalent of flashing. one seldom learns much from such glimpses, whether subject, object, or auxiliary clause. it's a dinkus, or pudenda. surface.

blogs are more, now. they surpass even streaking. active, logging cultures and structures more massive and less accountable than selves. this space, perhaps, interstitial. academic, literary, political - all structures abutting and squeezing the fluid. all need lubrication. that shit is money, baby.

here's a space, then. it's linked to another: colinmart@blogger.com but doesn't forward to facebook or myspace like that other. it has a log component (today's investment in course thus far: 1:07:31) and a critical research component (a cursory look at the roughly 700 authors at http://quebecbooks.qwf.org/authors reveals only two authors of native canadian extraction and they do not write their communities) and a creative component. more on that to come, though ideas whirl.

enough. another 23 minutes invested and much more to do.