The Ugly One With The Jewels

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFIpxaAzi9k

Lyrics of this Journey Account by Laurie Anderson, follow below:

In 1974, I went to Mexico to visit my brother who was working as an anthropologist with Tsutsil Indians, the last surviving Mayan tribe And the Tsutsil speak a lovely birdlike language and are quite tiny physically; I towered over them Mostly, I spent my days following the women around since my brother wasn't really allowed to do this We got up at 3am and began to separate the corn into three colors And we boiled it, ran to the mill and back, and finally started to make the tortillas Now all the other women's tortillas were 360°, perfectly toasted, perfectly round; and after a lot of practice mine were still lobe-sided and charred And when they thought I wasn't looking they threw them to the dogs

After breakfast we spent the rest of the day down at the river watching the goats and braiding and unbraiding each other's hair So usually there wasn't that much to report One day the women decided to braid my hair Tsutsil-style After they did this I saw my reflection in a puddle I looked ridiculous but they said: “Before we did this you were ugly, but now maybe you will find a husband?”

I lived within in a yurt, a thatched structure shaped like a cob cake And there's a central fireplace ringed by sleeping shelves sort of like a dry beaver down. Now my Tsutsil name was Lausha, which loosely translated means ‘The ugly one with the jewels’ Now ugly, OK, I was awfully tall by local standards But what did they mean by the jewels? I didn't find out what this meant until one night, when I was taking my contact lenses out, and since I'd lost the case I was carefully placing them on the sleeping shelf; suddenly I noticed that everyone was staring at me and I realized that none of the Tsutsil had ever seen glasses, much less contacts, and that these were the jewels, the transparent, perfectly round, jewels that I carefully hid on the shelf at night and then put for safekeeping into my eyes every morning

So I may have been ugly but so what? I had the jewels

Full fathom thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But that suffers a sea change
Into something rich and strange
And I alone am left to tell the tale
Call me Ishmael

The Ugly One With The Jewels, Laurie Anderson

ELF

A radio report about English as a Lingua Franca. Its causes, its status, its evolving.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013q210

Ten Years After 9/11

An interesting video on Official Propaganda. It shows how the world has alledgedly become a safer place after 9/11, together with the marvellous spread of Democracy, as David Cameron points. Too bad there's just something on such spotless discourse that doesn't seem to totally coincide with reality
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/frostovertheworld/2011/09/201191093336805237.html

Are you where you are?

Sweeping across virtually thousands of anonymous travellers at Rome-Fiumicino Airport this morning, some words came to my mind. And still do they they resound in my unconscious for some reason I can't really seem to pin down... It's often like this. Like when a song unexpectedly lingers on somewhere in you, in that silent inside you which is, however, so pretty much full of music. It's a poem written on the flagstones on the floor at the arrival hall of Oslo-Gardermoen Airport. The easiest thing would be not to ever discover it and to keep stepping on it countless of times. Words that say:

Are you where you are?
Are you not where you are?

Go to where you are

I'll wait for you

-there

Philosophers or Poets?

"Now, between philosophers and poets, the latter, paradoxically, are perhaps the least naive. For if today's philosophers think they know what they don't know, the poets, for their part, know that they do know, but don't know that.”

S. Felman


Any thoughts after such eloquent words? Feel free to put them down here!:)

A Myriad of Accents II

A very interesting website where you can listen to the famous "Please call Stella" text....in hundreds of different accents worldwide. Another interesting bit is the description of the phonic features for each (Native or Non-native) Speaker

http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_atlas.php

Anecdotes

Anecdotes are somewhat the spice of life! Please feel free to write down anecdotes that have crossed your mind - whether they're really true or not doesn't really matter. Use the space provided here in the blog. Remember to use the three main narrative tenses:

PAST CONTINUOUS: For actions or circumstances that were happening at the time (unfinished actions) "*It was raining*..."

PAST SIMPLE: For a succession of events (what happened, finished actions)"...when *I left* home this morning"

PAST PERFECT: For finished past actions that happened before another finished past action: "When I got to work I realised *I had not taken off* my slippers"

More about ELF

http://www.slideshare.net/rachelwicaksono/introducing-english-as-a-lingua-franca-an-online-tutorial

A Myriad of accents

http://youtu.be/dABo_DCIdpM

Two Worlds, Same Sorrow

What Is China?

The ones who walk away from Omelas

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

by Ursula K LeGuin - from The Wind's Twelve Quarters

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of
Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing
of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between
houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown
gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public
buildings, processions

moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and
gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies
and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a
shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the
procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls
rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the
singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city,
where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and
girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and
long, lithe arms,exercised their restive horses before the race. The
horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were
braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their
nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly
excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our
ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains
stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so
clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned
withwhite-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark
blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that
marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of
the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout the
city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful
faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered
together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of
Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do
not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become
archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain
assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next
for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his
noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled
slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep
slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of
their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they
did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the
stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the
bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet
shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex
than us.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather
stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the
treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the
terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it
hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to
embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost
lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any
celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?
They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in
fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose
lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it
better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a
city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps
it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming
it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For
instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or
helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that
the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just
discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor
destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category,
however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of
comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have
central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of
marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources,
fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of
that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that
people from towns up and down the coast have been coming to to Omelas
during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains
and double-decked trams, and that the trains station of Omelas is
actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the
magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that
Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells,
parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would
help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which
issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy
and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who
desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my
first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in
Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely
the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like
divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the
flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above
the copulations, and the gory of desire be proclaimed
upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of
these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing
I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there
be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is
puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of
drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a
great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after
some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very
arcane and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the
pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For
more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what
else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the
celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do
without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the
right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A
boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not
against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest
in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's
summer: This is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the
victory they celebrate is that of life. I don't think many of them
need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A
marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of
the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in
the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are
entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are
beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old
woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket,
and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of
nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a wooden
flute.

People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him,
for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly
rapt in the sweet, thing magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a
trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious,
melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some
of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the
horses' necks and soothe them, whispering. "Quiet, quiet, there my
beauty, my hope..." They begin to form in rank along the starting
line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and
flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?
Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas,
or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there
is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps
in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed
window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a
couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a
rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar
dirt usually is.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet
or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a
boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is
feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become
imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose
and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits
hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is
afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it
knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and
nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes,
except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or
interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person,
or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the
child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at
it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug
are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people
at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always
lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's
voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me
out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for
help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of
whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so
thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on
a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks
and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own
excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have
come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They
all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and
some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty
of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of
their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their
makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of
their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and
twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those
who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an
adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the
matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always
shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had
thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence,
despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the
child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up
into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed
and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were
done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight
of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To
exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that
single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands
for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within
the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word
spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when
they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may
brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to
realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get
much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food,
no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to
know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of
fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane
treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without
walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own
excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they
begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept
it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity
and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true
source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid,
irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not
free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and
their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of
their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of
their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with
children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling
in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful
music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the
sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one
more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does
not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at
all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day
or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and
walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out
of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking
across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl,
man or woman.

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the
houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the
fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They
go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they
do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less
imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe
it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to
know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Interview with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi

The complexities of the United Kingdom

Law and order despite a tsunami

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/japan-victims-show-resilience-earthquake-tsunami-sign-sense/story?id=13135355

Babies are Citizens of the World

What air-controllers deal with...

Here's a quick view of what air-traffic controllers deal with over a day and a night. It does seem, though, that there's some time to breathe long after the sun has set. After all, we all need to sleep, even in the height of pure Capitalism! ;)Just check it again by yourselves.

Facebook Word Traffic.

This is the result of the messaging that happens on every split second! Are you also part of this? If so, what are your messages' travelling paths?

The Price of Progress in South Korea

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/impact_asia/9177358.stm

Mishal Husain: A Global Presenter

Listen to Michal Hussain's interview and try to figure out the questions she's being asked. Scoll down a bit for the activity's link.

The Geographic North Pole

Text of Anderson's Epic Journey follows. Please feel free to comment.



The summer of 1974 was brutally hot in New York
and I kept thinking about how nice and icy it must
be at the North Pole. And then I though, "Wait a
second, why not go?" You know, like in cartoons
where they hang going to the North Pole on their
door knobs and they just take off.

So I spent a couple of weeks preparing for the trip, getting a
hatchet, a huge backpack, maps, knives, sleeping
bags, lures and a three month supply of Banic, a
versatile high-protein paste that can be made into
flat bread, biscuits or cereal.

Now, I had decided to hitch hike and one day I just walked out onto
Austin Street, weighing down seventy pounds of
gear, and stuck out my thumb. “Going North?” I
asked the driver as I struggled into a station
wagon. After I got out of New York, most of the
rides were trucks until I reached the Hudson Bay
and began to hitch in small mail planes. The
pilots were usually guys who'd gone to Canada to
avoid the draft or else embittered Vietnam vets
who never wanted to go home again. Either way they
always wanted to show off a few of their stunts.
We'd go swooping low along the rivers doing loop do
loops and baby (…). And they'd drop me off
at an airstrip. "There'll be another plane by
here couple of weeks; see ya; good luck."

I never did make it all the way to the geographic
pole; it turned out to be a restricted area and no
one was allowed to fly in or even over it. I did
get within a few miles of the magnetic pole,
though. So it wasn't really that disappointing.
I entertained myself in the evenings, cooking or
smoking, and watching the blazing light of the
huge Canadian sunsets as they turned the lake into
fire. Later I lay on by back, looking up at the
Northern lights and imagining there'd been a
nuclear holocaust and that I was the only human
being left in all of North America and what would
I do then. And then, when these lights went out, I
stretched out on the ground, watching the stars as
they turned around and their enormous silent wheels.

I finally decided to turn back because of my hatchet. I'd been chopping some wood and
the hatchet flew out of my hand on the upswing.
And I did what you should never do when this
happens: I looked up to see where it had gone and
it came down — fffooo

— just missing my head
and I thought, "My God! I could be working
around here with a hatchet embedded in my skull
and I'm ten miles from the airstrip. And nobody
in the whole world knows where I am."


Daddy
Daddy, it was just like you said
Now that the
living
outnumber the dead
Where I come from
it'sa long thin thread
Across an ocean.
Down a river
of red
Now that the living
outnumber the dead

Speak my language

Laurie Anderson: ‘The Geographic North Pole’