Today, I read.

But the most serious mistake consists of taking the form for the content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump together the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Provisional [...]

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the politics of rice

“Rice is a political commodity,” said Kwanchai Gomez, the executive director of the Thai Rice Foundation, a research center. “It’s not only an economic one.
Quoted in the International Herald Tribune.

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On writing in Brooklyn

Hilarity.
As you may have heard, all the writers are in Brooklyn these days. It’s the place to be. You’re simply not a writer if you don’t live here. Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? People are coming in from all over. In fact, the [...]

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The best thing I’ve read all day.

South Korea opens boot camp to confront cyberspace addiction“Do you have anything to tell your mother?” the drill instructor shouted from below. “No!” he yelled back.
“Tell your mother you love her!” the instructor ordered.
“I love you, my parents!” he replied.
“Then jump!” the instructor ordered. Chang Hoon squatted and leapt to a nearby trapeze, catching it [...]

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Overheard on 17th street

“At this rate, I’ll never successfully impregnate a woman.”

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Sing it:

I asked Joel how he answers the charge that because food like his is more expensive, it is inherently elitist. “I don’t accept the premise,” he replied. “First off, those weren’t any ‘elitists’ you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, whenever I hear people say clean food [...]

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Wetness.

Guess this job:
Physical Demands/Work Conditions:
This position requires visual and auditory acuity and the physical ability to climb stairs, stand for long periods of time, walk distances, and lift or carry up to 15 pounds. While performing the duties of this position, the employee travels by automobile and is exposed to changing weather conditions such as [...]

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So true.

Email is dangerous because it gives us a feeling of action, even when nothing is happening. –Bob Geldof

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And so it goes.

RIP, Kilgore Trout.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
-Kurt Vonnegut

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How cool.

Used books can come with treasures.  Am reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood concurrently as they are bound in a one volume set with The Writing Life.  Found a receipt tucked into one of the pages –a perfect little history.  At the Bluefield Kmart someone whose identity is forever lost, [...]

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The Art of Travel

While looking for Stranger in a Strange Land, I found a book called The Art of Travel in a bookstore that just happened to be in the basement of a nearby subway.  It was like Fate.
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
And
Journeys are the midwives of thought.
Both Alain [...]

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More reading from the Internet TESL Journal.

Motivation of ESL teachers

“Burnout is a professional hazard” (Kottler and Zehn, 2000:98). Teaching is known as one of the most stressful professions. There are three reasons why teachers burn out. Emotional exhaustion is the first element. It is the result of emotional and physical overextension. Trying to do too many things in [...]

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Again, so true.

Books to the ceiling,/ Books to the sky,/ My pile of books is a mile high./ How I love them! How I need them!/ I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel

If I grew facial hair.  I’ve started listening to NPR books, which only increases my desires.  I mean, a Dave [...]

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This is so true. Where would I be without Google quote a day?

There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.
- Mary Wilson Little

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If you ever thought the study of fictions wasn’t applicable to the real world.

 I just think this is well said.
“In the 21st century, we remain hostage to our sense of grievances, and to feelings of entitlement,” [Kofi] Annan said. “Our narratives have become our prison, paralyzing discourse and hindering understanding.”
Annan cribbed his script from a strategy paper he commissioned last year in response to the growing religious rift [...]

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Ugh.

This is probably what I need in my classroom.
In terms of differentiated instruction the ideas that emerge are those dealing with a move from “one size fits all” teaching, or “teaching to the center” to meeting the needs of diverse learners while maintaining high standards and high expectations for all learners. Differentiated instruction is [...]

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Quotable

“I keep a lot of things in the freezer. Notes, notebooks, dead birds I shot places and am hoping one day to eat.” Getting Ford on NPR, a writer who keeps important things, like the manuscripts of his books, in plastic bags in the freezer where they’re safe, both if the house burns [...]

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Oh, internets.

“It’s her role to bring it to the community and see what the community thinks,” he said. “What’s obscene in Mississippi might not be obscene in New York.”
I mean, I guess that’s true but doesn’t it sound weird to say so? And it’s an interesting debate–is it possible for the written word to be [...]

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experiencing a poem

Chang sonsengnim, who always calls me Sara sonsengnim, tells me about Seonwoonsa.  He wants to learn English and I should feel free to correct him.  I should feel free because of “Jobaeki” which literally means something about dolling out dough with a spoon, but means that you will take advice from anyone, regardless of status.
Sa [...]

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Haenyo

I recall one of these ladies watching us with some amusement at Hyeopje beach after the banana boat capsized for the third time as we struggled, bobbing in the water in our life jackets.
The sea women here and on larger Cheju Island, off the southern coast of South Korea, are among the world’s most skillful [...]

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free and easy wandering

If water is not piled up deep enough, it won’t have the strength to bear up a big boat.  Pour a cup of water into a hollow in the floor and bits of trash will sail on it like boats.  But set the cup there and it will stick fast, for the water is too shallow [...]

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Korean homework–not done, news–perused.

I was going to go to bed an hour and a half ago until I started reading about where oil comes from.
By Paul Salopek
Tribune correspondent
Published July 29, 2006

That particular night, according to one industry method of calculating the explosive energy locked away in crude oil, Dunbar dumped the liquid equivalent of 19.2 million hours [...]

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Tibetan motorcycle nomads

On a recent afternoon, on the road outside the small city of Huashixia, a cluster of motorcycles had stopped at a stalled jeep. The jeep belonged to the fourth incarnation of the Lama Drabu, 68, a living Buddha from a nearby monastery. He had been traveling to collect some stones etched with Tibetan prayers when [...]

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the Arrogance of Power

In her relations with Asian nations, as indeed in her relations with all of the revolutionary or potentially revolutionary socities of the world, America has an opportunity to perform services of which no great nation has ever before been capable. To do so we must acquire wisdom to match our power and humility to [...]

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From The Arrogance of Power

The American view of revolution is thus shaped by a simple but so far insuperable dilemma: we are simultaneously hostile to communism and sympathetic to nationalism, and when the two become closely associated, we become agitated, frustrated, angry, precipitate, and inconstant.  Or, to make the point by simple metaphor: loving corn and hating lima beans, [...]

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Defence of Poetry

“I don’t think, I sing. I am the poet of silence,” as someone translated a griot of Morocco from French. And then Arabic: “Words and I stroll together. I am the wanderer of the word. I swindle with the silence of words because they’re what I live in. They are my tent and my waterhole. [...]

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I know that changing the world is not easy

RESPECTING MARX
 
In front of bright storefronts
flourishing with women’s panties
I cannot stop myself
from thinking of Marx.
Iman Mersal

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The Writing Life

Your freedom as a writer is … life at its most free if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.  In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please … even if what you write is demonstrably false.
The [...]

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collected quotes

This is the beginning of a series (theoretically this will not be the only time that I do it) of posts from the paper journals that I kept during my trip. The first pages of all of my journals since the eleventh grade are collections of quotes that I came across during the time [...]

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The Art of Nonfiction No. 1

Interviewer:
By now you've written at least as much nonfiction as you have fiction.  How would you describe the difference between writing the one or the other?
Joan Didion:
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread.  Writing nonfiction is more like sculputure, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.  [...]

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Something that has now been lost.

‘The future? What’s that?’
The New York Times
FRIDAY, MAY 12, 2006
Perhaps you read Friday’s article about members of the Nukak tribe – nearly 80 of them – who walked out of the Colombian jungle and renounced their ancestral ways. What they expect from the future, which seems to be a problematic concept for them, is almost [...]

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