An Experiment

Play the three following videos at the same time. This is an arrangement. This is me seeing what happens when I overlap music. When I was a little kid, I think I saw someone on TV jam a CD player, putting two CDs in the tray, because they wanted the two singers to sing together. How do different cultures sing together? Adjust volumes to equalize. Repeat finished songs until the last song is done.

Jeongseon Arirang - Kim Young-im
Go Down Old Hannah -  Texas Prison Camp - collected by Alan Lomax 
 Vissi d'arte - Rosa Ponselle

The Second Law

The second law declares the impossibility of perpetual motion machines.

I'm very frustrated. I mean, I was doing something and something made me halt. I mean things are wonderful. I mean I'm learning new skills. I mean I have great things available to me. Maybe it's just the time in the semester. My mind is always preoccupied with my own creative work. I am working on something I love. I think about it all the time. Everything makes me think of it. It's all I want to do. And there are other things I have to do. Things I want to do, but that don't seem so pertinent. For example: I love learning about non-fiction film, but if I died tomorrow, I doubt I'd feel any regret the class went unfinished. For my own work, the work over which I obsess, there would be deep sadness at awareness of my fate and work incomplete. It's strange: My philosophy is a work is never done. And I have to wonder. Careers even. 

The second law refers to a wide variety of processes, reversible and irreversible. It is mainly important for explaining irreversibility.

I've been doing this teaching thing. Though, I don't understand what a teacher is fully. This is a disconcerting thing for a teacher to say. I'm concerned over oppositions between my teaching philosophy and my teaching praxis. How do we know what a true teacher is? And then what to do? K believes there is no such thing as teaching, only showing. A teacher of mine said, with his beautiful Indian pause, "There is no teaching, only, learning." And I believed the man on the subway when he said, "I hate when teachers say they're going to get more out of this than their students. I think, hell no, I better get more out of this than the teacher, that's why I'm here." I could live my life abroad. I could stiffen up, chill, set my jaw, get groomed and grow to tenure. I could just say hells bells, eke out some life on the edge of civilization, hear people only ever in planes, scratch rows in the earth, turn compost to dirt, fell, quarter wood, light fire, write until crazy or forgotten or never found. How is light a state of movement? Why can't I just be in the moment without also moving forward?

The second law asserts the existence of the entropy of a system. Entropy is a measure of the tendency of a process. Entropy is an expression of disorder or randomness.

This weekend I visited my grandmother. My aunt took her out of the nursing home to live with her. I'm glad I'm home now. The past nine months I've watched her mind fall to pieces. Maybe it was all the little strokes. Maybe it was because she didn't care for herself when she could. Maybe that's just luck, that's just life. She remembers life differently than she once did. Talks about eight children she never had. She recalls eleven husbands. She thought my mom was adopting a twenty-seven year old boy from China. She got scared for no reason when I was there. She started yelling, "I'm scared! I'm scared!" "Grandma, what's wrong?" "I don't know! I'm scared!" The Xanax didn't calm her. When my Aunt came home she administered morphine, because my grandma was screaming out in pain. I wondered how they were coping with caring for her every day. My aunt and uncle have two young children, and though my aunt is a doctor, caring for my grandma is more than they can handle. They hired a young Mongolian girl as a live-in caretaker. Seeing her, I realize she too is another burden, as much as it helps. Seeing her, I remember myself as a foreigner, working for a family, and I see how much more trapped she is than I was. 

Heat will not flow from a colder body to a hotter body without the application of work (the imposition of order).

I think about my future. Ponder decisions I make. Reach where the dead ends. Fall down over and over. Get up over and over. And the sun is rising. And the trucks are moving in the streets. And then loud men's voices. And then children on their way to school. And their fathers are at work. And once the papers on his desk were growing in a forest somewhere. And once that forest was covered in lava. And once it was a cloud. And once it was a mote of dust.

According to the second law, the entropy of any isolated system, such as the entire universe, never decreases. Eventually, universe has no energy to sustain motion. That is if there is an upper bound. 

Someday I will end up all broken. I will be tended by medical professionals, and there will be expensive equipment, and I may be dead for days, and I may be dead for moments, and I may be dead for years, and those crafty doctors will know; there will be nothing done. Professionals will know, on the spot, this thing can't be fixed. How soon will it come? Where will I be? Where will I go? What will I leave behind? I heard once of shadows in Hiroshima. I heard about the dead authors of books. I barely know what to make of it. My grandmother said, "In Catholic grade school, they told us to cover ourselves in wet newspaper if there was a nuclear attack." What happens next? We can only postulate dark matter.

"Well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation," Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1927.

What I love about writing is the creation and thought of it. There's nothing fun about it when it's over. First drafts are such a beautiful mess. If any bit of it could be clean. My writing teacher once said that the essay was mimetic, that it mimes. This intersects with something I learned in India: the Universe is mimetic; saturated self-mimesis. Everyone always described enlightenment not as a state, but as an ongoing process.

Now reverse the reversible process, and combine it with the irreversible process.

There is this kind of essay I always find thrilling: the performative essay. Performative essays perform their argument. I once heard someone of caliber say, "Every essay is an essay on the Essay." And in this vein: The performative essay performs the Essay. And the essay is lost. And the essay is wandering. And the essay explores. And then it's all over. And the essay does nothing more. And the essay does nothing less.

The reversible case is used to introduce the state function entropy. For any irreversible process, we can always connect the initial and terminal status with an imaginary reversible process, integrating on that path to calculate the difference in entropy.

I think back to jobs. I think back to work. It is a question of "what I will have done."Television terrifies me for this reason. I begin to feel anxious if I watch too long. My grandma watched a lot of television. It was mostly all she did. And yet I'm okay with watching something on a computer. It doesn't even bother me.

Facts Are Stupid

John is reading tomorrow at Columbia. His new book is causing a bit of a scandal it seems. Here is a link to a Slate article about the recent release. I'd be interested to know what you guys think of this, esp. when considering Ellen's piece "?", about lying and textual appropriation.

Sigh.

Thwarted by technology. I had trouble with the photocopier to PDF function today. Then I couldn't get moodle or the blogger to do what I want. Blast the robot overlords. The readings (A Child Called It, The Hunger Games, and another section of Elements of Style) are on oasis. I will wrestle with the spirits of the interweb to see if I can't get it on the blog. But for now, at least this is all in one place.

Translation

So I burned my brains the last week. I was working on a Sanskrit translation for one of my graduate classes. I studied Sanskrit in India, and though I had the best grade in my class, it has been six years since I even read a letter of the alphabet (Devanagiri [meaning city/home of the gods]). Language skills seriously erode if you don't keep up with them. The poem I translated was "Meghadutam" The Cloud Messenger, by Kalidasa. It would be madness to translate the whole thing. Indian literature has a fascination with all things epic. The translation was only a few lines, but my God! that took so much time. We take for granted the amount of work translators do for us. We also take for granted the level of understanding most translators have of the language from which they work. After I did my own translation, I found seven English translations. The variety between them was ridiculous. I was hoping to check my work using the translations of others. Fat chance. Some of the translations added so many words and phrases that simply weren't in Kalidasa's verses, and none of them matched up. It's amazing the liberties people take. Now, of course this is a poem, and it can be difficult to achieve the same level of artistic excellence by pure metaphrase, but just think, people do this with holy books...

But I've been thinking about a translation project I started a year ago. I'm interested in translating modern English into modern English. This may sound crazy, but it's probably not as crazy as taking an Intro to Islam class at University of Iowa where you don't read the Koran (Yes, that happened. I had to get a copy from a Muslim friend of mine and have her talk to me about it.) I digress. Part of translating English into English is essentially revision. But also there is this element to it of textual destruction. I like finding water-logged books on the side of the road, and then picking phrases out of them. In this same way, I love poetry by Sappho (possibly the oldest poet from whom we have poems,) because her poetry comes to us in many fragments, pieces of texts, things half-eaten by time. There is something lovely, something so wonderful about those half-sentences, something so alluring in the suggestiveness of her remaining work.

Yōsuke Yamashita, Burning Piano

So, I figured I hit a decent number of sentences for this week. I wanted to provide an example, obviously not my best work, but something that you guys could look at to help guide your blogging. There are so many possibilities here. Remember, this is an on-going assignment. By tomorrow, I expect to see four paragraphs on everyone's blog. If you haven't been placed on my blog list, please e-mail me, so I can add you. Since I feel comfortable with the amount I posted here already, I figured I would put up a video. Obviously this is not my video, or my art. This is a clip uploaded onto youtube by KusLab of jazz artist, composer and essayist Yōsuke Yamashita and his work, "Burning Piano 2008."

March 8, 2008
at Noto Resort Area Masuhogaura, Shika-machi, Ishikawa, Japan
Related Event of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Third Anniversary Exhibition, Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu Exhibition

Looking Back

A year ago today I was in Korea. It is strange for me to think about it. Friends have told me they just had the coldest day in Korea in fifty-five years. This makes me think of my grandfather, the cold Korean winter. He was shipped off to Korea to serve in the war just before the cease-fire. When I hear him talk about Korea, the place he describes is entirely alien to me. I think about those army tents with their wood burning stoves. I think about the Koreans coming home from the traditional markets, taking their wet shoes off in the doorways of a chibi, a Korean traditional home. I think about the soldiers standing in the cold, young men smoking cigarettes, staring out at the mountains, staring with a mutual bewilderment into the eyes of the locals, wondering about their wives and their family on the other side of the planet, wondering about the lives and families so inaccessible, bustling about the army base. My grandfather talks about the young Korean boys who would do anything for a dollar. Now, two dollar bills are something banks give out for free. Businesses display them in frames by the front door, the American currency acting as some strange marker of beginnings, somehow now ubiquitous. Sixty years ago, the future was so uncertain. Outside of their vast arsenal, Koreans were living life as they had for hundreds of years. Very little Western influence touched the country, until the Americans came and brought hotdogs and cola, phones and computers, movies and English books. Even the lines that divided their country, the political lines, were imposed on them by the outside world. Now, Seoul seems to stretch down the whole peninsula. Everything seems plastic. The whole country is constantly renewed, faster, brighter, bigger, higher. People call dwarfing, cookie-cutter arrangements of highrises "the country," as if in Korea there were only tall buildings and wilderness, and anything but a street inundated with people was a farm. Even the farming takes place in between twenty-story buildings. The woman on the edge of my block farmed an empty lot in my first spring. She grew sweet potatoes, peppers, garlic. She raked the piles of garbage deposited over the winter into a pile, separated the plastic and the electronics from the things she could burn and set a fire before the thaw.

Osiris and Isis

I have an intense interest in the myth of Osiris. Osiris is an Egyptian god. Depending on the source or the era, the story of Osiris can vary. My take on the myth, for those who don't know, begins with a dispute over the throne between Osiris and his brother Set. Set tricks Osiris into climbing inside a box, locks him in, and chucks him in the Nile. Osiris drowns, and over time the box is incorporated into a tree. Isis, the wife of Osiris, searches a very long time for him. Eventually, she discovers a king has made a pillar from the tree containing her husband's body. She manages to get the box and the body from the pillar, and uses magic to bring her beloved back to life. Somehow, probably by magic, Set discovers Osiris has been revived. In the few moments before Set arrives, Isis and Osiris make love. This is the conception of Horus. Horus never meets his father in life, because Set comes and rips Osiris to pieces, scattering the parts across the earth. However, because of the intense love Isis had for Osiris, the other gods install the soul (ka) of Osiris as Lord King of the Underworld. The reason I find this myth so fascinating is partially connected to a personal trauma. I also find this myth fascinating because it seems to crop up again and again in other forms. I recently watched a wonderful documentary by Chris Marker, Sans Soleil. In the film, with its obsession over the eye and the camera, censorship and preservation, I felt a heavy string of Egyptian, mythological undertones.

Empire and Filesharing

This is a link to a Reuters article about a young man in the UK being charged for breaking US law, even though he was in the UK when he committed the "crime."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/13/us-filesharing-extradition-idUSTRE80C15C20120113

There is something disturbing about the fact that the United States is able to enforce US law in other countries. I did not realize Britain was a US territory. Were I a British citizen, I would be terrified by this possibility: regardless of the laws in my own country, my native sovereignty could be superseded by the rule of a foreign power. Maybe the sun has finally set on the British Empire. God save the Queen. 

Welcome to the Blog

Okay bloggers,
Here's the low down:
We're blogging a paragraph (3-5 sentences) four to five times a week.
I will check to make sure you've done your required blogging on Fridays.
To start, I would like you guys to write about topics that you are passionate about.
What are you already thinking about in your free time?
Though you may be highly obsessed with a facet of your personal life, please try to keep personal drama etc. out of the blogs. Obviously I am willing to consider exceptions, but I am unlikely to allow them.
As we ease ourselves into this, we will refine our posts, discuss blog posts in class, and focus what we're doing.
To start off, I suggest you just post something. Don't worry so much about it being "right." What's important at this moment is that we start blogging. We will hone our blogging as we go along.