yellowfist

moved to blogger...

2008-04-07T10:42:05Z

the DOE blocks livejournal, so there it is.

[aaand scene.]

why i love sandra oh.

2007-11-11T17:55:05Z

OCT 26: MAJOR CONCERT FEAT. MUSLIM HIP HOP ARTISTS IN NYC

2007-10-14T13:59:42Z

<tr><td>

Here's the press release for the fundraiser on Oct. 26! If anyone can't make it and would like to contribute to the fundraising - feel free to call the numbers below about donations or simply send what you would like to donate to the M.I.B. address listed below - it could be a little or as much as you like - everything counts! Your donation could also be forwarding this bulletin once ever or once a day, to all of your peoples!

Hit me back with any questions - if you like!
MIHH

http://www.myspace.com/muslimsinhiphop

Rhythms of the Sacred Legacy:
Mind Expanding and Thought Provoking
"Inner-Attainment"!

Whether it was DJs sampling the speeches of the late Malcolm El-Hajj Malik Shabazz or Emcees greeting fans with "As salaamu alaikum" (Peace be unto you) and rhyming about praying towards the East and not eating pork, various Islamic influences have played a role in Hip Hop culture, since its early years.

Spearheading the conscious movement, heavyweights including Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco and Brother Ali, continue to produce tracks incorporating the most reassuring positive elements of Hip Hop culture, as it was meant to be. Without being marginalized, Muslim artists have always held their position among Rap industry chart toppers. Many Muslim artists continue to embrace progressive Hip Hop culture as a vehicle for unification, upliftment and self-empowerment.

In this same spirit of celebration, the Sisterhood of The Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, in association with Muslims in Hip Hop, is continuing this sacred legacy by presenting their first concert/fund-raiser featuring a multi-cultural sampling of the most profound Muslim Hip Hop and Spoken Word artists from across the nation,on Friday, October 26th, 2007, from 7pm - 11pm at Aaron Davis Hall at 135th St. and Convent Ave, on the campus of the City College of New York, in Harlem, NYC.

Iranian-American producer/DJ K-Salaam will kick off the evening with Dancehall and Hip Hop stylings followed by the fiery and explosive, Amir Sulaiman and the demure Liza Garza, (both featured artists on HBO's Def Poetry Series). Fellow headliners include Hip Hop activist, NYOIL, Borinquen lyrical soldiers, M-Team; smooth and sassy diva MissUndastood; Capital D, of All Natural dropping political science and wisdom; soulful urban griot, Tasleem Jamila Firdausee; up and coming Bay area emcee, Five Eighty; Puerto Rican Muslimah, Poeta Guerrera; and more to be announced. Jorge "Popmaster Fabel" Pabon of The Rock Steady Crew will host the festivities.

Al-Hajj Talib 'Abdur-Rashid, Imam of the Harlem based Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, affectionately called "The Hip Hop Imam" will offer brief remarks. Well known for his work on inter-faith dialogues, social justice issues and HIV-AIDS in the African Diaspora, Imam Talib says, "We are expressing our support...for the positive [Muslim and non-Muslim] young people of the Hip Hop generation who seek an outlet for their artistic expression. We're praying and planning that it will set a new and different standard for 'inner-attainment' in the 21st century!"

Everyone of all ages and backgrounds is invited to attend, especially those who miss that special time in Hip Hop when artists with positive lyrics were topping the charts!

"Rhythms of the Sacred Legacy" is in the spirit of traditional Muslim festivities that extend beyond the 'Eidul-Fitr, the communal break-fast festival that follows the sacred month of Ramadan.

HarlemStage at Aaron Davis Hall
on the campus of City College of NY
West 135th Street & Convent Avenue
Harlem, New York 10031
www.AaronDavisHall.org

For tickets only:
purchase online at www.aarondavishall.org
or call the box office at 212.281.9240

For tickets and/or donations:
please call: 646.326.5763 or 201.774.9343
All donations are tax-deductible.

$25 general admission.
$20 for groups of ten or more.
$15 for students (with I.D.) & seniors (age 62+).

By train: 1 train to 137th St. or
A, B, C, D to 125th St. and St. Nicholas Ave.

By bus: M-11 or M-101 to 135th St. & Amsterdam Ave. or M-4, M-5 to 135th and Broadway.

By car: From 125th St. Turn north onto Morningside Dr. and continue to the Gatehouse at 135th St. Limited parking available directly behind Aaron Davis Hall at the corner of West 133rd St. and Convent Ave.

Please send donations to The Sisterhood of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, Inc. P.O. Box 1775 New York, NY 10026. All proceeds will benefit the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood located at 130 W. 113th St. at St. Nicholas Ave in the village of Harlem NYC. For more information, please visit www.MosqueofIslamicBrotherhoodinc.org

Friday, October 26, 2007 from 7pm - 11pm. A Concert and Fund raiser presented by The M.I.B. Sisterhood in assoc. with Muslims in Hip Hop. Featuring: DJ K-Salaam, Amir Sulaiman , NYOIL ,Liza Garza, Capital D, MissUndastood, M-TEAM, Tasleem Jamila Firdausee, Five Eighty, Poeta Guerrera & more artists tba. Host: Popmaster Fabel. Remarks: Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid aka the Hip Hop Imam. HarlemStage at Aaron Davis Hall West 135th St. and Convent Ave. New York City 10031. Purchase tickets online at www.aarondavishall.org or call the box office: 212.281.9240. $25. All ages! For more info: MosqueOfIslamicBrotherhoodInc.org and myspace.com/MuslimsinHipHop. Flyer Design & Artwork by Mohammed Ali of AerosolArabic.com!</td></tr>

RACIAL SLUR MADE BY H&M EMPLOYEE WORKING AT CHGO MICH.AVE LOCATION

2007-09-18T01:45:51Z

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: frannie

Date: Sep 14, 2007 7:38 PM

Hi Everyone,

Today wrote the following complaint letter to the Better Business Bureau and H&M Corp. Office. I will be contacting the local news and periodicals regarding this. I am asking you to kindly forward this information to everyone you know. I want as many people as I can reach out there to read this. I believe this is very important for you to know. If you can give me any other advice I truly appreciate it. I am still in shock and disappointed.

Thank you for your time,
Frannie

On 9/13/07 @12pm, I went to H&M on Mich. Ave. While looking at clothes, a male employee named Joseph H.; visual merchandiser, who was standing close to me, raised up his right hand and said, "Mail order bride in the house," and ran over to another female employee and they both started laughing. I looked around myself and the only other person standing next to me was a male security guard. I approached the two employees and asked them to try on clothes that I had desired to purchase. Joseph H. rudely pointed to the fitting rooms at the end of the room and said, "Can you read that sign, it says fitting room." As I walked away, Joseph said "ching, ching, chong." I went into the fitting room and told one of the sales associates what happened and asked him to help me by calling the manager. Tom the Dept. Manager came down. I reviewed everything with him and told him how upset I was. Tom stated, "we will discuss this with him later today, I am sorry this happened." He did not ask for any other info. I asked Tom for his name and number. He told me to, "call back next week to follow up because I am leaving for OOT tomorrow." I left and came back @130pm to speak to the manager again because I wanted to get Joseph's name. Joseph was still working on the floor. I spoke to another manager named Greg because Tom was not available and told Greg that I am writing a complaint regarding the situation. Greg gave me the address of the store and told me that he did not have any formal paperwork I could write on "because Joseph would get a verbal warning first, and if it happens again, then it would be written down." He gave me Joseph's name and told me to address the letter to the General Manager. I told him that this is unfortunate because there will be many other Asian women walking in the store today and Joseph H. is in appropriately making derogatory comments. Greg apologized and said there was nothing else he could do.

I do not believe Joseph H. should continue to be employed at H&M, I want this complaint in his employee record, and he owes me an apology.

==========
Thank you so much for all the support you have given to me over the past few days. I felt very helpless and upset when this all happened, but I am feeling better that you are supporting me. Could you PLEASE write a letter to the Corporate Office in NY as well as the General Manager from the Mich. Ave. location for me? I truly, truly appreciate it if you can take a few minutes to do so. Here is the information:

1. Corporate Office Manager
    H&M Hennes & Mauritz
    LP
    47 West 34th Street, 3rd Floor
    New York, NY 10001
    tel:1(212)564-9922

**You can contact this corporate office via email if you go to website: www.hm.com click contact and go under "corporate responsibilty"**

2. General Manager
    840 North Michigan Avenue
    Chicago, IL 60611
    tel:1(312)640-0060

Please continue to pass this along to as many people as you can. I want H&M to know that this is unnacceptable.

Thank you again, Frannie

Elizabeth Murray, 66, Artist of Vivid Forms, Dies

2007-08-13T18:07:27Z

Elizabeth Murray, 66, Artist of Vivid Forms, Dies
from the New York Times

Elizabeth Murray, a New York painter who reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself, died yesterday at her home in upstate New York.

She was 66 and lived in TriBeCa and in Washington County, N.Y.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, said Douglas Baxter, president of PaceWildenstein, which has represented her work since 1995.

An intense, unpretentious woman with vivid blue eyes and an unruly nest of prematurely white hair, Ms. Murray received a full-dress retrospective spanning her 40-year career at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006, one of handful of women to be so honored. In 1999 she was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

Ms. Murray belonged to a sprawling generation of Post-Minimal artists who spent the 1970s reversing the reductivist tendencies of Minimalism and reinvigorating art with a sense of narrative, process and personal identity. Her art never fit easily into the available Post-Minimal subcategories like Conceptual, Process or performance art. This may have been because her loyalty to painting, which was out of fashion, was unwavering. At the same time, her blithe indifference to the distinctions between abstraction and representation or high and low could put off serious painting buffs.

Both tendencies enabled her to be one of a small group of painters — including Philip Guston, Frank Stella and Brice Marden — who during the 1970s rebuilt the medium from scratch, recomplicating and expanding its parameters and proving that it was still ripe for innovation, in part because of its rich history. Her sources ranged from Cézanne, Picasso, Gris and Miró to Stuart Davis, Al Held and Agnes Martin. As she remarked in the 1987 catalog to her first big museum show, which traveled to the Whitney in 1988: “Everything has been done a million times. Sometimes you use it and it’s yours; another time you do it and it’s still theirs.”

In Ms. Murray’s mature work, eccentrically shaped or multipanel canvases fused Cubism’s shattered forms and Surrealism’s suggestive biomorphism with the scale and some of the angst of Abstract Expressionism and more than a touch of Disneyesque humor and motion. Her semi-abstract shapes resolved into bouncing coffee cups, flying tables or Gumby-like silhouettes with attenuated arms and legs that careered across surfaces like thin, unfurling ribbons. Her preferred spatial effect often seemed to be a swirling vortex, with the illusion of motion both countered and underscored by weighty colors and thick surfaces subdued with the active workings of a palette knife. The overall impression was of some inchoate yet invigorating crisis of the heart or hearth, as intimated by titles like “More Than You Know,” “Quake Shoe” and “What Is Love?”

Born in Chicago in 1940, Ms. Murray had a hardscrabble childhood that included bouts of homelessness caused in part by the ill health of her father. Ms. Murray traced her interest in art to watching a nursery-school teacher cover a sheet of paper with thick red crayon, an experience that she said gave her an indelible sense of the physicality of color. She drew constantly from an early age, inspired mostly by newspaper comic strips, and once sent a sketchbook to Walt Disney asking for a job as his secretary. By the fifth grade she was selling erotic drawings to classmates for a quarter.

In 1958, she entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her goal, to become a commercial artist, was derailed by a Cézanne still life she passed regularly on the way to classes. She later said that the painting was “the first in which I lost myself looking,” and added, “I just realized I could be a painter if I wanted to try.”

She graduated from the school in 1962 and earned an M.F.A. from Mills College in Oakland, Calif., in 1964. There she met the painter Jennifer Bartlett, who remained a lifelong friend, and married Don Sunseri, a classmate from the Art Institute.

The paintings she made in California and during her first teaching job, in Buffalo, teemed with ambition, confusion and a penchant for a jokey figuration that qualified as “regional,” a popular pejorative at the time. But these works rehearsed all the aspects of her later art: eccentric dimensionality, large scale, crusty paint surfaces and suggestive, emotionally charged, implicitly autobiographical narratives conveyed by extravagant distortions of form.

In the fall of 1967, Ms. Murray moved to New York, where exposure to the work of Mr. Marden and Richard Serra, and to that of lesser-known artists like Ellen Phelan, roiled her ambition. She came to know other artists who, like her friend Ms. Bartlett, were combining abstraction and imagery. They included Robert Moskowitz, Susan Rothenberg and Joel Shapiro.

The birth of her son, Dakota, in 1969, also firmed her ambitions. She proceeded to dismantle and rebuild her art, replacing acrylic paint with oil paint — which she called “another kind of life form” — and working on small, rectangular canvases. In the majority, shaky black lines forming grids, ladders and fan shapes are embedded in tactile monochrome fields. By 1973, the year she and Mr. Sunseri divorced, the lines had turned into wavy curves and then mobius bands. She began exhibiting at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo in 1973 and had her first solo show there in 1976.

By 1978, with “Children Meeting,” now in the collection of the Whitney, big biomorphic splats of color jazzed by zigzag lines jostled one another. With “Painter’s Progress” in 1981, she reintroduced legible imagery in the form of a large pink palette shape and three orange brushes inspired by a neon sign in the window of an art supply store. Thereafter, Ms. Murray proceeded with a momentum that rarely weakened. In addition to paintings, she made drawings in all sizes and many mediums, as well as prints and illustrated books. In the early 1980s, she watched in dismay as the revival of painting that she had helped foment was taken over by young male Neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Anselm Kiefer. But she also acknowledged that she benefited from the expansiveness of their work, even if she didn’t always like it.

...In many ways the term Neo-Expressionist fit her well as an artist who long maintained that “the subconscious is what you paint about.” Moving between fractured and whole, flat and protruding canvases, and color schemes that could be murky or electric, her paintings asserted themselves as an aggressive mixture of shape, color and surface. Her progress coincided with her happy second marriage, to the poet Bob Holman, and the birth of two daughters in the early 1980s.

In addition to Mr. Holman, who is the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, Ms. Murray is survived by their daughters, Sophia Murray Holman and Daisy Murray Holman; her son, Dakota Sunseri of Los Angeles; a sister, Susan Murray Resnick of Taos, N.M.; a brother, Thomas Murray, of St. Marys, Ga.; and two grandchildren.

In the late-1980 and 1990s, Ms. Murray produced several large gritty canvases that appeared to have interiors, their bulging forms suggesting flattened vessels descended from her signature images of cups and goblets. Also around this time she designed two large mosaic murals for the New York City subway system: one is at the 59th Street and Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan and the other at the 23rd Street-Ely Avenue Station in Queens.

Yet around 2000 she embarked on an entirely new phase in works that marshaled together numerous small, irregular but flat-shaped canvases into lighter works that for the first time incorporated liberal amounts of white.

Ms. Murray grew testy when her coffee cups were described as teacups, which she considered dainty. As she remarked to the critic Elizabeth Hess in 1988, “Cézanne painted cups and saucers and apples, and no one assumed he spent a lot of time in the kitchen.”

TODAY: NATION-WIDE VIGIL FOR GABNET 3!!!

2007-08-13T15:54:08Z

Contacts: Faith Santilla faithsantilla@yahoo.com 626.353.2649
Milady Quito gabnet3offthelist@gabnet.org

U.S.-WIDE VIGIL FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF GABNET 3--U.S. CITIZENS / PERMANENT RESIDENT BANNED FROM LEAVING THE PHILIPPINES

WHAT: Vigil demanding the immediate release of GABNet 3--National Chairperson Dr. Annalisa Enrile, Founders Ninotchka Rosca and Judith Mirkinson

WHEN: 13 August 2007, Monday, 4PM

WHERE: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York/New Jersey, and San Francisco/Bay Area

LOS ANGELES
Vigil starting at 4:00pm
Philippine Consulate
3600 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90010
losangeles@gabnet.org

SAN FRANCISCO/BAY AREA
Philippine Consulate
447 Sutter St.
San Francisco, CA 94108
sfbayarea@gabnet.org

NEW YORK/NEW JERSEY
Philippine Consulate
556 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10036
nynj@gabnet.org

SAN DIEGO
Vigil starting at 6:00pm
corner of 805 Freeway & Plaza Blvd
National City, CA 91950
sandiego@gabnet.org

On Monday, August 13, 2007, GABRIELA Network USA (GABNet) will hold a US-wide vigil in front of Philippine Consular Offices to demand the immediate removal of 3 of its leaders from the Philippine Department of Justice's "hold" list and that they be allowed to return home to the US at once.

GABNet National Chairperson Dr. Annalisa Enrile was barred from boarding her return flight from Manila, Philippines last August 5th. The Philippine DOJ had put her on a "hold" list. Two other GABNet leaders--novelist, journalist Ninotchka Rosca and veteran activist Judith Mirkinson, both founders of GABNet--are reportedly on the same "hold" list and are likely to face the same restriction of movement. The GABNet 3 had attended the 10th bi-annual Women's Solidarity Affair in the Philippines (July 29-August 5, 2007). Dr. Enrile also led a University of Southern California immersion program.

"It's clear that the Philippine government, led by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, is desperately trying to intimidate and silence international solidarity," GABNet Secretary General Doris Mendoza said, "especially those focusing on the countless human rights violations and political killings. But our membership and allies are now even more determined. For us, this harrassment of the GABNet 3 re-confirms the undemocratic and unjust character of this US-backed Macapagal Arroyo regime."

GABNet is a Philippine-US women's solidarity mass organization established in 1989. It co-sponsored an all women human rights legal mission, led by the GABNet 3, to the Philippines last year. ###

Philippine Government obstructs Filipina American Professor's scheduled return home to the US, US Go

2007-08-13T15:16:29Z

Contact: Chito Quijano, Chair, BAYAN USA
chair@bayanusa.org

Los Angeles, CA – BAYAN-USA, an alliance of progressive Filipino groups across the US, is outraged at the recent holding of Annalisa Enrile, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and national Chairperson of Gabriela Network USA. Professor Enrile was stopped at the airport and prevented from returning home to California on August 5, 2007. She is a US citizen and is speculated to have been held, because of her involvement with Gabriela Network, a Philippine-US women's solidarity organization based in the US.

"It is coincidental that the Philippine government stopped Professor Enrile's return-flight to the US the same day Bush signed the "Protect America Act of 2007," but it is no coincidence that both Bush and GMA are intent on eradicating what few civil rights we have left" said Chito Quijano, Chair of BAYAN USA.

According to Quijano, "In attempts to silence their critics, Bush and GMA are rushing to repress and criminalize those who speak out. We must be more vigilant and fight for our basic rights or these illegitimate regimes will continue to pull the human and civil rights rugs out from under us."

Initial reports indicate that Professor Enrile was on a "watch-list" developed by the US-backed Arroyo administration to hinder international participation in protests against the ASEAN Summit hosted in the Philippines in January 2007. The Philippine government had assured the international community that the "watch-list" would be lifted following the ASEAN Summit. And despite escalating pressure from the international bodies such as the United Nations and Amnesty International, and the guilty verdict of the Second Permanent People's Tribunal in March to stop the killings and other human rights violations, the US-Arroyo clique fast-tracked the implementation of the Anti-Terror Law, or Human Security Act to begin on July 15, 2007.

The US-authored Human Security Act establishes a dangerously broad definition of terrorism, legalizes warrant-less arrests and wire-tapping, and criminalizes the actions of mass organizations exercising their democratic rights to protest the US-Arroyo clique's acts of state terror. US-based organizations of BAYAN-USA are additionally concerned by the "Protect America Act of 2007" signed by Bush on August 5, 2007. The act amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow domestic spying, wire-tapping of any foreign calls coming into the US and forcing all telephone companies to submit data to the federal government. Like the Human Security Act, this "Protect America Act" is dangerously broad; no requirement of a connection to terrorism is necessary to justify this invasion of privacy and erosion of civil liberties. It also is a move to legalize the illegal surveillance already being done by the Bush administration.

Member organizations of BAYAN-USA, are united in the defense of Prof. Enrile's international right to travel and return home to the USA. BAYAN-USA condemns all attacks against human and civil rights now legalized by the Human Security Act and the Protect America Act of 2007. "All people, especially those in the US, must counter these attacks against our human rights. We are inviting all people to save the date and join us on the upcoming international day of action on September 21, 2007 the anniversary of Martial Law."

'Never Again to Martial Law!'
Stop the Killings in the Philippines!
Repeal the Human Security Act!
Stop US Military Aid to Philippine Death Squads.

BAYAN-USA is an alliance of progressive Filipino groups in the U.S. representing organizations of students, scholars, women, workers, and youth. As the only international chapter of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN-Philippines), BAYAN-USA serves as an information bureau for the national democratic movement of the Philippines and as a campaign center for anti-imperialist Filipinos in the U.S.

Free the GABNeT 3! Get them off Watchlist!

2007-08-12T17:24:32Z

see full article here:
http://www.bulatlat.com/2007/08/woman-activist-held-two-others-watchlist

Balikbayan Dr. Annalisa Vicente Enrile was on her way back to the U.S. on Aug. 5 after a month's stay in the Philippines. However, as she proceeded to the Immigration booth to have her passport exit-stamped, she was told that she could not get on the plane because she was on the "watchlist."

Enrile is the chairperson of GABRIELA Network USA (GABNet), a U.S.-based women's group affiliated with the militant women's group GABRIELA and the progressive partylist group Gabriela Women's Party (GWP). She is also a professor at the University of Southern California.

In a press conference Aug. 11in Quezon City, Enrile said she believes she is being held because of her involvement with GABRIELA and for being part of a team that went to the country to probe the human rights record of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration.

"I'm being held hostage," Enrile told the media. "I cannot go back to my work and my family."

The run-around

After being told that she could not proceed to board her flight, Enrile said she was "sent and shuffled from one department to another."

At the Immigration, she was told to get clearance from the Bureau of Immigration and Deportation (BID).

On Aug. 6 at the BID, Enrile was told to file an Affidavit of Denial.

On Aug. 7, the BID told Enrile to get clearance from the Department of Justice (DoJ). At the DoJ, she was told to get another clearance from the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA). But at the NICA, she was directed to return to the BID.

On Aug. 8 at the BID, Enrile was redirected to the DoJ.

Enrile then sought the assistance of the Chief of American Citizens Service (CACS) at the U.S. Embassy who committed to help her.

The CACS gave the same message to American human rights activist and GABNet International Relations Officer Judith Mirkinson who went with Enrile at the embassy. Enrile, Mirkinson and renowned international journalist Ninotchka Rosca are said to have been in the government's watchlist.

Intimidation tactic

Rosca said the watchlist is an "intimidation tactic" by the Philippine government against "all overseas Filipinos who continue to love and fight for this country."

"I am exceedingly irritated with the watchlist which has infringed into my private time with my family," Rosca said. Rosca said she is here to attend the Women's International Solidarity Affair in the Philippines which was held from July 30 to August 5, 2007, to launch her latest book and to visit her 98-year old mother.

No charges

Meanwhile, GWP Rep. Liza Maza said the hold order against the three women activists is a serious matter which can be a precedent to gauge the effectivity of the Human Security Act of 2007 (HSA 2007), the newly passed anti-terror law.

"Before the HSA, nobody cannot be held without charges," Maza explained. But with the HSA, Maza said anybody can be held on mere suspicion. "This makes this incident dangerous," she added.

"This is pure political harassment undermining GABRIELA's international work," the partylist representative said. GWP, which was able to land two seats in the House of Representatives, topped the partylist votes of absentee voter's in the 2007 mid-term elections.

Rosca and Mirkinson are scheduled to leave the country on Aug. 14. "We hope not to be held at the airport and we'll make sure Dr. Enrile is coming with us," Rosca said.

***Bulatlat

STATEMENT: US WOMEN’S ORG DEMANDS THE RELEASE OF GABNET 3

2007-08-11T03:52:07Z

Please distribute far and wide…

STATEMENT

For Immediate Release
9 August 2007

Contact: Doris Mendoza, Secretary General, secgen@gabnet.org; (212) 592- 3507, (718) 753-0257; Milady Quito, GABNet3OffTheList@gabnet.org

US-BASED WOMENS ORGANIZATION DEMANDS RELEASE OF THE GABNET 3. DEFEND HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS! NO TO POLITICAL HARASSMENT, INTIMIDATION, REPRESSION!

The Philippine Government, headed by de facto President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, has once again brandished an undemocratic, unjust and cruel rule. She has placed three GABRIELA Network (GABNet) leaders on a "watch list" and has already prohibited GABNet Chair Dr. Annalisa Enrile from returning home to Los Angeles.

On August 5th, 2007, Dr. Enrile was barred from boarding her return flight home from Manila, Philippines. Dr. Enrile was informed that she was on the "hold" list of the Phil Department of Justice. Two other GABNet leaders Ninotchka Rosca and Judith Mirkinson are reportedly on the same hold list and are likely to face the same restriction of movement. The GABNet 3 had attended the 10th bi-annual Women's International Solidarity Affair in the Philippines (July 29-August 5 2007). Dr. Enrile also led a delegation of USC Social Work Masters students on a Philippine summer immersion program.

It is no coincidence that the GABNet 3 have been targeted by the Philippine Department of Justice. They have been instrumental and most vocal in the international campaign to defend GABRIELA Women's Partylist Representative Liza Largoza-Maza who has suffered and continues to suffer intense political persecution, including baseless charges of murder and sedition. They also led last year's all-women human rights legal mission to the Philippines, a report from which points to the Armed Forces of the Philippines and other military elements as perpetrators of the murders/assassinations of close to nine hundred activists, ninety of whom were women who worked closely with GABRIELA.

The scheme is obvious: harass, intimidate all the dissenters, all those who criticize Macapagal-Arroyo's regime. The GABNet 3 are virtually being held hostage by the Philippine Government. The ransom: silence from all critics – Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike. For GABNet though, such inhumane tactics leads only to heightened vigilance and determination.

We demand that the Philippine Government release the GABNet 3 so that they may return to their homes and their lives in the US. We demand that the US Embassy in the Philippines and the US Ambassador to the Philippines act on behalf of the three U.S. citizens/permanent resident and demand that the Philippine Government release them at once.

We call on our friends and allies to defend the GABNet 3. Help us get them safely home. Contact your Congressional and Senate representatives to urge their safe return. Contact via fax the US Embassy, American Citizen Service, at 011-632-522-3242 or fax the US Embassy, Ambassador Kenney, at 011-632-522-4361.

common's finding forever.

2007-07-29T17:03:26Z

Common finds forever: an album that once again expands hip hop's geographic mind-map and solidifies the go-ill's place in this cultural movement. A signature Kanye stamp underscores the top-notch production of this album without undermining Common's message by turning it into the Kanye show; eight tracks is enough. Reluctant fans of Kanye's lyrical ability (or lack thereof) will gratefully salute his vocal absence, save "Southside," which for the named Chicagoans on that fortunate end of the compass rose, will arguably be the duet anthem of the decade. "Start the Show" and "Driving Me Wild" are sure barnburners, while "The Game" carries over the momentum and edge into the remaining, more contemplative five tracks. "The People," though the album's flagship track, will never escape the inherent "Peace, Love, and GAP" contradictions of this (RED) generation of world stage celebs; work on that, Common. The social commentaries of "Black Maybe" and "So Far To Go," find their saving grace in the J-Dilla beats and crooning of Bilal and D'Angelo, respectively. A decided shift from the headnod to the swingin' stepper-set "Break My Heart" rhythms is reconciled with "Misunderstood," an intergenerational dialogue of soul-searching Simone's. And what's a Common album without an epilogue by Lonnie Lynn? Cue cards aside, "origin is forever...just talk, don't sing." well said. Bring home forever, pops. Your son did you proud with this one.

update #1: nyc

2007-06-23T02:06:52Z

yesterday, i saw a rainbow in the bronx while on the train. i mentioned to the girl sitting next to me that it appeared to be coming from/landing on a school down the way. she said, "yeah, i hope that means some money for that school, shit, it needs it."

that concludes week one in the NYC teaching fellows program.

joyous poetry

2007-06-04T14:27:02Z

blessings, fam.

FYI: for those who remember joy de la cruz and miss her, you may remember her website: (http://www.geocities.com/joyouspoetry/index.html). The webpage is still up, but a few of us have been concerned about her geocities account being deleted and her writing lost. I went ahead and mirrored what I could onto http://www.yellowfist.com/joyouspoetry, and archived her guestbook, until a more permanent home can be found. I hope everyone is safe and well.

be peace,

marlon

if i had followed my "plan"

2007-06-04T14:16:57Z

if i had followed my "plan"

i've been thinking of joy a lot lately, so it freaked me out when vanessa texted me yesterday, asking me not to drive to nyc. in a nutshell, i appreciate my friends and i'm flying to nyc. below is an entry of joy's about nyc.

peace,
mars

---

http://www.geocities.com/joyouspoetry/03-0814NewYork.html

Largest Blackout in US History Shuts Down NYC, Other Cities
August 14, 2003

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<TD width="30"></TD>if i had followed my "plan" i've been thinking of <A href="http://www.geocities.com/joyouspoetry/" target=_self>joy</A> a lot lately, so it freaked me out when vanessa texted me yesterday, asking me not to drive to nyc. in a nutshell, i appreciate my friends and i'm flying to nyc. below is an entry of joy's about nyc.

peace,
mars

---

<A href="http://www.geocities.com/joyouspoetry/03-0814NewYork.html" target=_self>http://www.geocities.com/joyouspoetry/03-0814NewYork.html</A>

Largest Blackout in US History Shuts Down NYC, Other Cities
August 14, 2003


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trying to ask myself if i'm not in new york right now because i'm actually trying to be responsible or because i'm scared or because i'm lazy...

then a little voice in my head (yes, have conversations with myself)::

stop trying so hard to get where you think you want to be - be present where you are

<A.."DOCUMENT_IMAGES['I1'].SRC='HTTP: href="http://www.geocities.com/joyouspoetry/..void%280%29" ].src="http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/pictures/Photos_Art/brooklynbridge1.jpg" document_images[="" photos_travel="" pictures="" pbi="" clipart="" www.geocities.com="" i1="" oahu.jpg..="">
less daring and adventurous, but i've done the homeless thing - living out of storage, sleeping on piles of towels on mica's dorm floor, crashing post-party on timi's couch, curling up on david's ottoman, even freezing my ass off on some roof in pb in the middle of the night.  i feel i'm a seasoned nomadic wanderer. 

i'm still game for serendipiocitic adventures, but just aiming to go in with an actual game plan.

Land of Lincoln to be Land of Homer? D'oh!

2007-05-23T01:54:44Z

Land of Lincoln to be Land of Homer? D'oh!

By Bob Secter and Rick Pearson
Tribune staff reporters

May 22, 2007, 5:27 PM CDT

-- Forget Lincoln. Illinois' state capital, renowned for its ties to Honest Abe and other less-honest politicians, now wants to be known as the home of Homer Simpson.

Like many things these days, this has to do with dough — or in this case, perhaps, D'oh!

"The Simpsons," the television cartoon satire that inspired cult-like loyalty among millions of viewers worldwide over its 18 years, is set in a never clearly defined, but incredibly dysfunctional place called Springfield. That has led to a raging debate about which of the more than 30 U.S towns named Springfield is the model.

Twentieth Century Fox is now exploiting that dispute to gin up publicity for its new full-length Simpsons movie, due out in July. Fox has challenged Springfields coast-to-coast to prove why they're the most fitting template for the show. The winning Springfield gets to host the premiere.

Several have taken the bait, including Springfield, Ill., where Mayor Tim Davlin vowed in a recent state of the city address to prove "we are indeed THE city that best represents the community on television."

All of that might seem a great honor if the mythical town in question was the idyllic one portrayed in Father Knows Best, the sappy 50s sitcom set in another Springfield.

But the Simpsons' Springfield is filled with pollution, deceit and residents who are utter doofuses. And that, argues Jason Danenberger, a lifelong resident of the Illinois version, is precisely why his town must be the Simpsons' inspiration.

"Lincoln slept here and there, he worked here and there," said Danenberger, 27, a cook. "But let's be honest. There are a lot more people here who you'd think are related to Homer Simpson than Honest Abe."

The criteria for the contest and the judging are still a little vague, but Fox says it will ship each contender a replica of the lumpy family couch that figures in the opening of every show. The towns are then supposed to include it in a short video that boasts of their Simpson-like credentials, and perhaps trashes the bona fides of the others.

Davlin, who keeps a five-foot tall cutout of Bart Simpson in his office, has issued an online plea for help.

The city's web site, www.springfield.il.us, recently added a pop-up image of Bart's father, Homer, next to the mayor's own picture. There's also a link to an online form that allows fanatics to suggest clues gleaned from the show's 400 episodes that point to Illinois as the locale.

Who cares about the statehouse and the new presidential museum and Abraham Lincoln's old restored neighborhood? Springfield, Ill., is home to a doughnut factory, while doughnuts play an integral role in the TV show.

Since Homer and his gang thrive on junk food, Springfield can also boast of its trademark horseshoe sandwich, the gloppy blend of meat, french fries and melted cheese, all heaped on toasted bread, which passes for haute cuisine.

And speaking of Homer, wasn't that the middle name of disgraced former Gov. George Ryan? He was the last Illinois chief executive to spend much time in Springfield.

Kim Rosendahl, tourism director for Springfield's visitors bureau, says she is peppered with more questions about "The Simpsons" than Lincoln when she goes abroad to promote the city.

"I just came back from the United Kingdom and everywhere we went people asked, "Springfield — isn't that where Homer Simpson lives?"

With its portrayal of Americans as slovenly oafs, "The Simpsons" has developed a huge overseas fan base. A tiny Scottish town called Springfield has already raised its hand to compete for the movie premiere in Great Britain, should Fox want to repeat the contest on the other side of the Atlantic.

Simpson fans from across the globe have compiled an exhaustive volunteer archive of trivia on www.snpp.com. The Springfield history section is kept by Sam Hughes, a recent graduate of Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Hughes said the inspiration for Springfield is a running gag in the show, with contradictory hints dropped that could point to almost anywhere in the U.S.

"The only thing I can say for certain is that its not in Alaska or Hawaii," said Hughes, who lives in Nottingham, a spot with its own rich fictional backstory.

That fuzzy reality is hardly dissuading the U.S. Springfields.

In Springfield, Ore., Mayor Sid Leiken has scheduled a community meeting for Thursday to plot strategy for his community's Simpsons campaign. The big selling point there will be the Oregon roots of Simpsons' creator Matt Groening.

Across the continent, in Springfield, Mass., officials have already held two similar public brainstorming sessions. Azell Murphy Cavaan, the community relations director, said her city, founded in 1636, could brag about being the nation's first Springfield. It's also the birthplace of Dr. Seuss, not to mention being the birthplace of frozen food.

Back in Illinois, Springfield officials insist they've got that all beat. Homer's father is named Abe, just like you-know-who. The fictional Springfield has a rival town named Shelbyville. And lo and behold, there's a real Shelbyville, Ill, not far off from the real Springfield, Ill.

But officials in the real Springfield think their ace-in-the-hole is Todd Renfrow, the general manager of the city's municipal power plant. In the show, the richest and meanest man in town is Charles Montgomery Burns, the owner of the fictional Springfield's nuclear power facility.

Renfrow is being touted in Springfield, Ill., as a dead-ringer for Burns, right down to the long nose and bald head. At 72, Renfrow admits he doesn't know much about the Simpsons but has lately been hearing a lot about Burns.

"He really does look evil," said Renfrow. "People tell me he has this trap door in front of his desk and when people come in and ask for a raise he pushes a button and they disappear. Sounds to me like he's got some good ideas."

Bob Secter reported from Chicago and Rick Pearson from Springfield, Ill.

bsecter@tribune.com

rap30@aol.com

The Republic of Poetry: Martín Espada's Hampshire College Commencement Address

2007-05-22T23:27:43Z

thanks Sarah Browning and polymexina for the post.
---

The Republic of Poetry: Martín Espada's Hampshire College Commencement Address

Martín Espada gave me permission to post here the commencement address he gave Saturday at Hampshire College. Lucky, lucky grads - they've received a manifesto for living, for creating the new world.

THE REPUBLIC OF POETRY: HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

Martín Espada
May 19, 2007

their families, the faculty and staff of Hampshire College: Congratulations. I would particularly like to salute the Baldwin Scholars graduating today. James Baldwin delivered the commencement address here at Hampshire twenty-one years ago. That day, he said: “The reality in which we live is a reality we have made, and it’s time, my children, to begin the act of creation all over again.”

In that spirit, I welcome you to the Republic of Poetry. The Republic of Poetry is a state of mind. It is a place where creativity meets community, where the imagination serves humanity. The Republic of Poetry is a republic of justice, because the practice of justice is the highest form of human expression. This goes beyond the tired idea of “poetic justice,” because all justice is poetic.

In the words of Walter Lowenfels, “everyone is a poet, a creator, somewhere, somehow…It’s in the sense of helping to create a new society that we are poets in whatever we do. And it is our gesture against death. We know we are immortal because we know the society we are helping to build is our singing tomorrow.”

You, the graduates of Hampshire, are the poets of this republic. I do not mean that you must act like a stereotypical poet. You do not have to borrow money from your friends and pretend to be in a coma the next time you see them. You do not have to wear a coat three sizes too large so you can shoplift books. You do not have to drink until you lose control of your bladder. You do not have burst into tears at the sight of a mayonnaise jar because you love the letter M. You do not have to lock yourself in the bathroom and refuse to come out because your haiku is too short. You do not have to speak in riddles like Woody Allen’s fictional poet, Sean O’Shawn, considered “the most incomprehensible and hence the finest poet of his time.”

I know you can build your own Republic of Poetry, because I have seen it. I saw it in Chile, where the citizens overcame seventeen years of military dictatorship to rebuild their democracy, ultimately electing a socialist woman president. (If the people of Chile can survive nearly two decades of General Augusto Pinochet and take their democracy back, then we can take our democracy back too.)

Chile is a nation of poets, and in Chile poetry is inseparable from the struggle for democracy. When I visited Isla Negra and the home of the great poet Pablo Neruda, I remembered an incident that took place there after the military coup of September 11, 1973 (the first 9/11). I wrote a poem about it called, “The Soldiers in the Garden.”

After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda's garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.

The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.

For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the soldiers
vanish from the garden.

In the Republic of Poetry there is no war, because phrases like “weapons of mass destruction,” “shock and awe,” “collateral damage” and “surge” are nothing but clichés, bad poetry by bad poets, and no one believes them. They bleed language of its meaning, drain the blood from words. You, the next generation, must reconcile language with meaning, restore the blood to words, and end this war.

At the beginning of the last century, governments used other words to justify and celebrate war. There was the Latin phrase: Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori (how sweet and decorous it is to die for one’s country). The poet Wilfred Owen, who died at age twenty-four in the First World War, knew better. Here he describes the effects of poison gas at the front:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

You must always call “the old Lie” by its name. If you do, then you will build this republic on the highest ground. Remember: Your language is powerful precisely because it is not the language of power.

The Republic of Poetry has no borders. In this republic no human being is illegal. In this republic no one is thrown on the other side of the fence after building the fence. Every time the fence goes up, you must tear it down.

In this republic, there is no official language, because all languages are poetic. En la República de la Poesía se habla español. Listen to the voice of Jorge the church janitor, an immigrant from Honduras, in this poem I wrote for him:

No one asks
where I am from,
I must be
from the country of janitors,
I have always mopped this floor.
Honduras, you are a squatter's camp
outside the city
of their understanding.

No one can speak
my name,
I host the fiesta
of the bathroom,
stirring the toilet
like a punchbowl.
The Spanish music of my name
is lost
when the guests complain
about toilet paper.

What they say
must be true:
I am smart,
but I have a bad attitude.

No one knows
that I quit tonight,
maybe the mop
will push on without me,
sniffing along the floor
like a crazy squid
with stringy gray tentacles.
They will call it Jorge.

This little drama did not take place at a church in Alabama. This took place at a church in that bastion of liberalism, Harvard Square. We must keep our own churches, and houses, clean. Speaking of which, let us thank the janitors of Hampshire College.

In the Republic of Poetry, everyone has shoes. Here we have Jack Agüeros and his “Psalm for Distribution:”

Lord,
on 8th Street
between 6th Avenue and Broadway
there are enough shoe stores
with enough shoes
to make me wonder
why there are shoeless people
on the earth.

Lord,
You have to fire the Angel
in charge of distribution.

You, the next generation, have to fire the Angel in charge of distribution. To accomplish this, you may have to fire the president, or a senator, or a governor; you have that right in a democracy. However, they are also representatives of a larger economic system. You must radically transform that system so that everyone has shoes, so that everyone has the opportunity to realize his or her full human—that is to say, poetic— potential. Walter Lowenfels sums it up: “When the tragedy of the world market no longer dominates our existence, new gradations of being in love with being here will emerge.”

Any republic should be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable people. Make sure that compassion is the guiding principle of your republic, the pulse of your poetry. Walt Whitman, the bard of prisoners, prostitutes, and slaves, insists that, “whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to/ his own funeral dressed in his shroud.”

To dwell in the Republic of Poetry you must continue to read and ask questions. You graduate today, but in fact, you should never stop being a student, never stop asking, doubting, dissenting, or the republic dies. This was never more true than today, in the age of the Illiterate Presidency.

In the Republic of Poetry your vote counts, because the voting machines actually work. In this republic your dollars pay for schools and hospitals instead of bullets and bombs, because every poem by our greatest poets is scientific proof that living is better than dying.

Now, for those graduates who think there are no more assignments, I have news: The Republic of Poetry is hard work. Poets re-write what they have already re-written, and stay up all night to do it. We are insomniac zombies. In fact, I am presently working on a screenplay called, “Night of the Living Dead Poets’ Society.”

Such will be the case for you, too, if you want to live in a more democratic—and thus, poetic—world. Marge Piercy captures the joy of sitting through one more meeting with yet another committee:

This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake,
to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck
wrestling to some momentary small agreement
like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-head oyster.
I believe in this democracy as I believe
there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs
to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand
and shriek, You Shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.
No more committees but only picnics and orgies
and dances. I have spoken. So be it forevermore.

In the Republic of Poetry, the poet is the true self, whoever that may be. The poet within us rebels against conformity, decorum and obedience, saying the unsayable before the moment passes. I give you Julia de Burgos, who confronts herself—the false self—in this poem:

Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice,
because you are the dressing and the essence is me;
and the most profound abyss is spread between us.

You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;
in all my poems I undress my heart.

You are like your world, selfish; not me,
who gambles everything betting on what I am.

(…)

You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;
the wind curls my hair; the sun paints me.

(…)

You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;
your husband, your parents, your family,
the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,
the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,
heaven and hell, and the social “what will they say.”

Not in me, in me only my heart governs,
only my thought; who governs in me is me.

The Republic of Poetry is a place where, as Walt Whitman says, “your very flesh shall be a great poem.” It is a place where you are your own greatest creation, your own most inspired invention. It is a place where you make of your life an epic poem. You may discover that medicine is your poetry, or law is your poetry, or education is your poetry, or journalism is your poetry, or music is your poetry, or poetry is your poetry.

The Republic of Poetry is a place of miracles. You carry the engine of miracles with you everywhere, in your head, and don’t even realize it. Pablo Neruda fell down, hit his head, and had an epiphany:

How often in my mature years,
in travels, in love affairs,
I examined every hair,
every wrinkle on my brow,
without noticing the grandness
of my head,
boned
tower of thought,
tough coconut,
calcium dome
protecting
the clockworks,
thick wall
guarding
treasures infinitesimal,
arteries, incredible
circulations,
pulses of reason, veins of sleep,
gelatin of the soul,
all
the miniature ocean
you are,
proud crest
of the mind,
the wrinkled convolutions
of undersea mountains
and in them
will, the fish of movement,
the electric corolla
of stimulus,
the seaweed of memory.

You who believe in this republic will be accused of daydreaming and utopianism. To these crimes you must plead guilty as charged. Tell them: Yes! I did it! I was daydreaming of a more just world instead of something more age-appropriate and consumer-oriented, like a $200 pair of Nikes.

This is Eduardo Galeano on the subject of utopia: “She’s on the horizon…I go two steps closer, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.”

A century ago, when your father’s grandfather was a child, the eight-hour workday was utopian; the eradication of polio was utopian; the end of lynching and segregation in the South was utopian. The next generation writes the poetry of the impossible.

You will make the impossible possible. Yet, no change for the good ever happens without being imagined first. The last poem today is about the bread of the table, the bread of poetry, the bread of justice, the bread of this republic. It’s called, “Imagine the Angels of Bread:”

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

Asian American Lit. Final, by Kimiko Hahn

2007-05-21T22:13:06Z

Asian American Lit. Final

Choose three and answer in short essays:

1. Disease is an important literal and figurative element in Carlos
Bulosan's landmark novel, America Is in the Heart. Explain.

2. In Li-Young Lee's poem, "The Cleaving," the speaker refers to
many male figures (Chinatown butcher, grandfather, Emerson, Jew,
and so on). What kind of dynamic does he engender within that
imagery? Explain.

*

Cocksucker, motherfucker. Thief, Wetback. Colonial pig. Explain.

lover, brother, grandfather

Shulamite

*

3. According to Said in Orientalism, Flaubert created a model of the
Oriental Woman that went beyond the boundaries of his own liter-
ary works to influence popular notions of the Orient itself. Although
this man was a sex tourist in the mid-1800s, some of the exotic
imagery persists today. Give an example from our readings.

*

Dear Y—how do you teach Dictee in your class on the long poem?—K

Dear Y—this sounds like ruthless affirmative action—and it is—but
do you use your middle name when sending out poems? No one
would know from your name what you are. It matters.—K

*

4. Identify which literary works the following are from:
No Name Aunt
Kiyo
Jasmine

5. What is the significance of the title, Eat a Bowl of Tea?

12/2

In the corridor after the final: How can that bitch expect us to remember all
those names—they're weird. You know, like different. And who cares. What
would Traise say to them‑

6. Why No-No Boy?

7. How does the Asian American body appear in Jessica Hagedorn's
poem—
In Cathy Songs poem—
In Marilyn Chin's poem—
In Janice Mirikitani's poem—
In Meena Alexander's poem—
In Myung Mi Kim's poem—

*

In Frances Chung's Chinatown—
In Fay Chiang's—

*

In Lois Ann Yamanaka's Hawai'i—

12/2 continued

Asked an editor if they'd be interested in an anthology on Asian
American women and madness—like Hisaye's characters—

In Nellie Wong's—
In Mitsuye Yamada's—

12/2 continued

Do I recycle images hoping they will endlessly ignite? Do we all
recycle them? make our own clichés?

12/2 continued

S said she's not sure about high school—at the entrance test, the
girls were standing on line in ethnic clots. Where do I fit in? I don't look
Asian the way they do. Neither do I.

*
12/5

I am proposing a course on how Asian American writers react to
the image of the Asian Other. Title: Sex and the "Oriental"

Notes

Must reread Shawn and Nora's books. And catch up on next
generation.

Notes

Relation to the English language involves betrayal and adoration—
like Latino writers except they have two (Spanish and Portuguese)
in the mix. Asian Americans have dozens—plus dialects. Plus class and
gender differences in speech.

anata
kimi

8. In 1989 Trinh suggested "a triple bind" for women of color. Is this still
a valid grievance? How and how not—give examples from
Charlie Chan Is Dead.

9. According to the Styles section, "ethnic ambiguity" is the new
thing. State your Own opinion.

*

In Marie Hara's—
In Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's—
In Ai’s—

*
12/7

Probably not cool to add something on Hahn's unbearable heart.

12/7 continued

intra-ethnic

12/8

I plan on proposing a course on Asian American work inspired by/influenced by Asian literature. Title: Continental Drift.

CUTTINGS, by Kimiko Hahn

2007-05-21T21:54:14Z

CUTTINGS, by Kimiko Hahn

CUTTINGS
a zuihitsu for father

My younger sister and I, cleaning father's house before he returns from a
week in intensive care, rush to dispose of mother's cosmetics, store her
jewelry for a later date, and phone a woman's shelter to pick up bags of
dresses, size 4, and shoes, 4 1/2, even stopping to laugh at the platforms
from "the mod era" she swore would come back. We collapse into each
other's arms and cry mommy mommy as if she could hear us if we wept
loud enough.

I look out the taxi window at everyone else's life. Certainly all the people
in all the little apartments have gone about their business making money
off other people's mortgages or addictions, without the knowledge my
mother died last week, someone who found pleasure in baking oddly
shaped biscuits with her granddaughters.

I keep my father talking about his boyhood—his passion for deep-sea
diving though he grew up on Lake Michigan, his going AWOL for art
courses, the four books at the Naval Library on "Oriental Art." Here we
turn, always return, to Maude who wasn't supposed to go first. He said he
had her convinced.

I ask Marie how to tell the girls, Miya now six and Rei, four. She advises
we speak to them separately, to allow each their own reactions.

The funeral director says, "She doesn't look 68, but then oriental women
never look their age." He then reminisces about "The War."

I want to throw out as much as possible—a half-jar of expensive cream, a
suede jacket—belongings my sister wishes to hold on to. I go to the
Funeral Home. I find comfort in The 10 O'clock News; she resents the

superficial, even stupid resemblance of normality.

Two weeks now since mother died. Tuesday nights, I stay with father now

a man who can barely contain what, in a second, became memory. He
lurches from each small room testing himself against souvenirs: animal
puppets from Rome, 1956; a Noh mask, Kyoto, '64; silver rabbit, Phnom
Penh, '65; hotel towel, Chicago, '70. Even after discarding her dresses and
middle-class perfumes she inhabits every corner of every project—collage,
painting, carving. He recalls telling her when they first met at the Art
Institute that art would always come before any thing and any one.

We toast Maude at a neighbor's, drinking what we like since she couldn't
tolerate liquor. Janet remembers the day she knew they'd be friends: "We
were looking at the peonies by the stone wall and your mother said, Know
what these remind me of ? Penises." Our laughter resembles sobbing.

She reread stories as often as I demanded.

Convinced and convincing me through my early twenties I could not sew
or cook despite home ec. classes and odd advice, she cooked and froze
stews, checked if I ever baked potatoes and the last day we saw her, sent us
home with turkey leftovers. It's true I've never roasted one.

The first thing I saw when I returned to clean their house were my three
skirts, pinned and draped across the ironing board.

How suddenly grievances against father evaporate, steam rising from an
icy river. He even corrects himself, calling mother, a woman.

Why is pain deeper than pleasure, though it is a pleasure to cry so loud the
arthritic dog hobbles off the sunny carpet, so loud I do not hear the phone
ring, so loud I feel a passion for mother I thought I reserved for lovers. I
insert a CD and sing about a love abandoned, because there are no other
lyrics for this.

Pulling off a crewneck sweater I bend my glasses and for the next few days
wear the frames off-center not realizing the dizzy view is in fact physical.

Theresa, David, Liz, Mark, Sharon, Denise, Carmen, Sonia, Susan, Lee,
Cheryl, Susan, Jo, John, Jerry, Doug, Earlene, Marie, Robbin, Jessica,
Kiana, Patricia, Bob, Donna, Orinne, Shigemi‑

Suddenly the tasks we put off need to get done: defrost the freezer, pay the
preschool bill, order more checks.

For 49 days after her own mother's death she did not eat meat. I didn't
know, mother. I'm sorry, I didn't know.

The sudden scent of her spills from her handbag—leather, lotion, mints,
coins. I cannot stand.

She had marked April 28 to see Okinawan dancers.

He has not yet slept in their bed, because the couch in front of the
television feels firmer to his seven broken ribs.

At dinner we play a story game; the youngest one asks, "about grandma?"
then corrects herself quickly "about bunny rabbit" as she momentarily
trips on her own preoccupation.

Father tells me there is a Japanese story about a mask maker who has a
daughter renowned for her stunning beauty. Upon her untimely death,
how he does not recall, the father sits by her side to sketch the exquisite
features. Poetic license. Though mother did look beautiful I had never
seen a face devoid of any expression, an aspect even a painting would
somehow contain.

The children notice he has taken off his wedding ring.

At a favorite cafe I hear a newborn in the next booth wailing for, probably, the
mother's breast, as if his life will end this second. It is my cry.

Shrimp. An image of my parents at a card table shelling shrimp the night
before my sister's wedding, the peels translucent pink as my mother's finger
nails. Primitive and reassuring.

At the house in Paia where grandma washed other people's laundry and
raised her chickens, and grandpa sat in his wheelchair, we had a toilet inside
but also the old outhouse, a rickety two-seater. I would go in, close the gray
painted door, latch the hook and sit on the edge holding my breath against
the frothy stench of shit. You could hear your waste hit bottom. The dim
light lent privacy against peeping cousins.

She taught me to pluck or cut flowers near the roots for the long stems.
Recut under water. She taught me to rub my finger and thumb together over
the silver dollar sheath, to rub off the brown membrane and scatter the seeds
on my skirt. Gently so as not to tear the silver inside. I see them and think
of her name, not Maude, but Mother.

Father and I bring the ashes into the City and plan to drop them off at the
temple. Mrs. K has Buddhist robes over her blue jeans and suggests she recite
a sutra. We light incense in the half-light. I forget tissues. My face and sleeves
are covered with tears and mucus. My shoulders shake silently as listening.

Three months have past. I count the days from March 10th to the 100th day
for another memorial service.

lotus suture

As if a metaphor for mother's death the Rodney King verdict and rebellion
in Los Angeles breaks open urban areas across the country. It is a complex
set of issues where some Korean shops and whites are attacked as the
emblems of the establishment. But what is the establishment? Why not the
actual property relations? Who actually owns the buildings, makes the
laws—I feel helpless. Embittered.

Cuttings she had placed in tumblers in the kitchen and bathroom offer
their fragile roots.

Rei discusses mother's death with me. A babysitter told her not to talk
about it. Another told her it is like sleep. I tell her to talk. I tell her it is not
sleep although the person looks asleep but he or she will not wake. She
wants to talk to grandma and asks if she can. I tell her if she wants to she
can; then I ask her what she wants to say. She wants to tell her to wake up.

People who have died but were revived speak of a dark tunnel with a fierce
light at the end. Is it a passage or is it the memory of birth?

Miya speaks of dying—to see grandma again. I am shocked and try to say
something.

I can see her body, not her, her body lying in a pine box, hands folded,
black and white hair combed back, the funeral home odor saturating the
drapes and carpets of the respectfully lit parlors. I said goodbye but it was
really to myself.

I wish I had snipped off a bit of hair. I recall the braid she kept for a while
in her drawer.

I purchase an expensive "anti-wrinkle defense cream" at the discount
pharmacy. The third morning my skin really feels smoother though the
burgeoning lines have not faded. I think something I've only thought the
night before the plane trip: will I live to see the bottom of this jar.

Miya has shelved her grief and when admonished she declares: everything
was fine until grandma died.

For the first time father harvests a half-dozen bamboo shoots from a small
grove on the side of the house. Mother had spoken of gathering them as a
child in Hawaii, soaking then boiling then sizzling them. He finds a recipe
and experiments. He sends some home with me. They taste like artichoke
hearts. We all think of mother. And I think of a poem from the Manyōshu
about a trowel.

He plays her lottery numbers.

The lawyer of the kid who broadsided their car sends a letter threatening
to sue father if he does not respond in five days with information. We feel
naive, in a state of disbelief at the vulgar tone of the letter.

I wear the silk pants she altered for me: a forgotten pin, sewn into the hem,
sticks into my ankle.

At any moment of the day I can hear her admonishment: oh, Kimi. She
especially disliked spills.

I do not want to write about her death. But I do not want to lose these
strong feelings.

Rei does not stop chattering about her: We have no one to make slush. She
always had gum in her handbag. She read to us in Japanese and knew "cat's
cradle" backward.

The 100th Day Anniversary. The weather is already warm. Her brother
from Honolulu tells about her letters to him during World War II when he

was in the 442nd.

We vacation on Fire Island. A few deer walk by the porch so close we can
see how fuzzy their antlers are.

I keep recalling the diagram of the accident scene. Mother's body lying on
the highway where medics attempted CPR. I imagine the wet black road,
the traffic signals changing despite the halt.

Christmas ornaments last packed away by her: the balls she and father
decorated with cherubs and glitter, old wooden angels and soldiers from
my childhood, tinsel carefully rewrapped.

Some days I have a thought to write down but let it go.

During a week-long visit to the snowy fields of Vermont, I hear of a car
bomb explosion at the World Trade Center, killing and injuring many
people. The world continues outside this quiet. And the death of those who
happen to step in its ordinary traffic.

I stop writing altogether. And when I must—postcards, single lines after a
commute—the writing ends with mother.

Afraid father is "seeing someone" and hopeful. I extend mother's jealousy into
the afterlife. It becomes my own hell.

I begin to feel impatient with father over little things like whether my hair
is trimmed evenly. I wonder if my annoyance indicates we are moving on.

Father finds an envelope of marigold seeds mother saved and lets the
children scatter them. The composted earth smells fertile like the pail
she kept with egg shells and melon rinds.

4th Nat'l APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit!

2007-05-21T13:19:56Z

http://www.myspace.com/apiasummit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/apiasummit

www.apiasummit.com

Simpsons collage.

2007-05-19T20:49:14Z

The Simpsons 400th Episode collage is only the coolest thing ever.

http://www.thesimpsons.com/index.html

That is all.

The 4th National APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit

2007-05-19T13:11:33Z

The 4th National APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit,
"first there was the word, then there was the fist,"
will be moved from New Orleans to NYC, August 3-5, 2007.

There will be an official announcement (and plead for help) shortly,
but if you'd like to get the latest news on the APIA Summit,
please join the listserve (http://groups.google.com/group/APIASummitFam?hl=en).
Think about coming out to it and joining the family!

For more info on the Summit:

4th National APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit: NYC 2007
http://www.apiasummit.com
http://beastcoasttour.blogspot.com/ (open space blog)

3rd National APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit: Boston 2005
http://www.bostonprogress.org/summit/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicshogun/sets/72057594057362841/ (YAWP! roadtrip to Boston)

2nd National APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit: Chicago 2003
http://www.thecollectivechicago.org/summit/2003.htm
http://poeticdream.com/gallery.php?gid=103 (photos by David Huang)
http://poeticdream.com/gallery.php?gid=104 (photos by David Huang)
http://poeticdream.com/gallery.php?gid=105 (photos by David Huang)
http://poeticdream.com/gallery.php?gid=106 (photos by David Huang)

1st National APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit: Seattle 2001
http://www.thecollectivechicago.org/summit2001/
http://poeticdream.com/gallery.php?gid=39 (photos by David Huang)

Provisions in Senate Proposal to Cut Family Immigration Categories

2007-05-18T14:17:11Z

Asian American Justice Center
ADVANCING EQUALITY

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Leoni Campbell
Cell: 202-492-4591

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 17, 2007

Asian American Advocates Deeply Concerned About Provisions in Senate Proposal to Cut Family Immigration Categories

"AAJC Urges Senators to Defend Family Immigration"
Washington, D.C. - Today, the Asian American Justice Center (AAJC) expressed concern about a compromise proposal offered by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) that does not fully address the need for workable comprehensive immigration reform. Under this plan, there is a legalization program with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. However, the adult children and sibling categories of the family-based immigration system would be effectively eliminated and replaced with an untested merit-based system, there is no path to permanency for temporary workers and non-citizens will receive inadequate due process protections.

"The close door negotiations produced a flawed bill that will end America's historic commitment to the full reunification of families," said Karen K. Narasaki, president and executive director of AAJC. "The proposed system is inconsistent with deeply held American values and these elements of the agreement must be addressed in order to win the support of the Asian American community."

Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, added, "This bill does not respect family values. It unfairly invalidates family-based visa applications submitted after May 2005 and eliminates the ability of U.S. citizens to sponsor their adult children and siblings. We believe these provisions, if enacted into law, will result in an increase in undocumented immigration, because families will not stop trying to be together."

The proposal would not eliminate the ability of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to sponsor their spouses and minor children. However, it does set an arbitrary and unrealistic cap on the number of visas available for U.S. citizens to bring in their parents. An estimated 90,000 visas per year will be cut to 40,000.

"This proposal compromises the ability of millions of American citizens to reunite with their adult children and siblings, and will undermine the most important ingredient in creating healthy communities," said Gen Fujioka, program director for the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. "Families are the source of our social, cultural, and economic vitality. The Senate proposal makes it more difficult for talented and hardworking immigration to put down roots in the United States."

"The proposal further undermines the due process rights of non-citizens." said Tuyet Le, executive director of the Asian American Institute. "In addition, the proposed new temporary worker program may actually increase undocumented immigration by denying these individuals a path to citizenship and a legal way to join the communities they come here to build."

The proposal would not allow immigrants waiting in the legalization process to bring in family members who are not already here. The 12 million undocumented would have to go through a 13 to 15 year process to become legal permanent residents before being able to permanently bring in even their spouse or minor child.

"Although the proposal includes a legalization program that provides a path to citizenship, AAJC has strong reservations regarding the workability of what these immigrants will be required to do," said George C. Wu, AAJC's National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Partners Community Law Fellow.

"With the process moving forward, we are committed to working with Senators who respect this nation's tradition of family reunification and who want workable and fair solutions to this nation's immigration problems," continued Narasaki. "We will continue to work to improve this bill, but if the needs of current and future American families are not met, we will have to oppose it."

# # #
The Asian American Justice Center, formerly known as NAPALC, is a national organization dedicated to defending and advancing the civil and human rights of Asian Americans. It works closely with three affiliates - the Asian American Institute in Chicago, the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles - and nearly 100 community partners in 49 cities, 23 states and Washington, D.C.

Bipartisan Bill Would Save Internet Radio

2007-05-15T12:27:06Z

Wyden-Brownback “Internet Radio Equality Act” Introduced in Senate

We finally have a senate bill! Time to call your Senator and ask them to co-sponsor it!

Wyden-Brownback “Internet Radio Equality Act” Introduced in the Senate

Bipartisan Bill Would Save Internet Radio

WASHINGTON D.C. – Legislation introduced by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KA) today would save Internet radio from a recent royalty hike that threatens to bankrupt the industry. The Internet Radio Equality Act would vacate a Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision to increase fees webcasters pay to play music online by a devastating 300 to 1200 percent. Companion legislation (H.R. 2060) introduced in the House of Representatives on April 26th, by Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Don Manzullo (R- IL), has already garnered the support of more than 60 cosponsors.

SaveNetRadio.org, a national coalition of webcasters, recording artists, listeners and record labels applauded the bill’s introduction, expressing their gratitude to Senators Wyden and Brownback for their leadership at this critical time for the Internet radio industry and the millions of Americans who listen online every day. “Since the CRB’s ruling, Internet radio listeners, webcasters and the artists they promote have joined together to urge Congress to prevent this vibrant industry from going silent on July 15th,” said Jake Ward, a spokesperson for the SaveNetRadio campaign. “On behalf of Internet radio’s 70 million monthly listeners, thousands of webcasters, and the incredible diversity of talented artists it supports, we commend Senators Wyden and Brownback for their understanding of Internet radio’s importance and for their leadership in taking the steps needed to save it”

Other members of the SaveNetRadio coalition offered their support for the Internet Radio Equality Act:

The Roots Music Association, an international organization representing more than 2200 independent artists and labels, headquartered in San Marcos, Texas said, “we are very pleased by the introduction of the Internet Radio Equality Act in the Senate today. Internet radio has become the lifeblood for so many independent artists that depend on the promotional accessibility it provides niche roots based genres. This legislative solution is the last best hope for the future of Internet radio, and we fully support it.” Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora, one of the country's leading Internet radio webcasters, commended the legislation, saying, “we are grateful for Senators Wyden and Brownback's introduction of the Internet Radio Equality Act. Their support shows an understanding of the invaluable exposure that Internet radio provides to emerging artists, as well as an acknowledgment of the diverse listening experience it offers to music lovers. We are hopeful that, with the Senators' support, this promising industry will finally be treated fairly so that it can continue to grow."

Outbound Music, a Christian webcaster and retailer said, “we are delighted to see the Internet Radio Equality Act introduced in Senate today. Internet music programming reaches millions of listeners who are not within range of Christian broadcast stations. With the passage of this bill, we can rest assured that our spiritually edifying content will continue to reach as wide an audience as possible while allowing fair compensation to artists and affordable rates to webcasters."

Lisa Mathews from the critically acclaimed band Milkshake offered her support of the Internet Radio Equality Act saying, "Milkshake makes original rock music for kids, and kids-at- heart. When it comes to radio, there just aren't many venues for Children's Music via the traditional radio stations. Webcasters provide an outlet for kids and parents to hear new music-- music that is pretty much ignored by traditional radio. For me the value is undeniable. I should pay them for the service they do--I really should. The least I can do is keep their rent low, and be fair when it comes to royalties."

Ian Rogers, VP and GM, Yahoo! Music, said, "Internet radio has empowered and benefited artists and music lovers alike by removing the physical limitations and barriers that once separated musicians from their fans. The recent royalty rate increase threatens to limit the potential of net radio as an outlet for musicians, option for music lovers, and a business for webcasters. The Internet Radio Equality Act strikes the appropriate balance between compensating artists for their work and allowing this industry to grow. We applaud Senator Wyden and Senator Brownback for their leadership and urge congress to take notice and action."

Grammy nominated artist, SONiA said, “Internet Radio allows artists like myself in every imaginable form to sing and be heard around the country and around the world. And because my music is now frequently heard on Internet Radio I am maintaining a successful career that would be impossible without this open medium. The tendency is to build a cage, because maybe that is how it was done in the early days of broadcasting. The Internet Radio Equality Act is the only way that thousands of artists can be heard, and I am one of them."

The Internet Radio Equality Act would vacate the CRB’s decision and set a 2006-2010 royalty rate at the same level currently paid by satellite radio services (7.5% of revenue.) The bill would also change the royalty rate-setting standard used in royalty arbitrations, so that the standards applying to webcasters would align with the standard that applies to satellite radio royalty arbitrations. The bill also re-sets the royalty rules for noncommercial radio such as NPR stations that offer Internet radio music.

For more information on the SaveNetRadio coalition visit www.savenetradio.org

Haka Timatanga

2007-05-10T14:37:26Z

Haka Timatanga

Maori

I te timatanga

Ko te Kore

Ko te po nui

Ko te po roa

Wehenga Matua

Herenga Tangata

He toa Rangatahi

He toa Rangatira

Whakaki te Maunga

Tae ki te Whenua

Hoki ki te Rangi

Tae ki te Pukerunga

Piki ake piki ake

Ki te ara Poutama

Ki nga Taumatatanga e

Wairua Hinengaro Tinana

Pakeha

In the beginning

there was nothing

the big darkness

the long darkness

the separation of Rangi and Papa

formed man/people

formation of young warriors

formation of young chiefs

if you aim for the mountains

you will hit the plains

if you aim for the sky

you will hit the mountain peaks

climb up, thrive

to the pathway of knowledge

to achieve excellence

spiritually, mentally, physically

SLEEP pt2 by HARUKI MURAKAMI

2007-05-08T04:06:21Z

At ten o’clock I got into my bed, pretending that I would be sleeping there near my husband. He fell asleep right away, practically the moment the light went out, as if there were some cord connecting the lamp with his brain.

Amazing. People like that are rare. There are far more people who have trouble falling asleep. My father was one of those. He’d always complain about how shallow his sleep was. Not only did he find it hard to get to sleep, but the slightest sound or movement would wake him up for the rest of the night.

Not my husband, though. Once he was asleep nothing could wake him until morning. We were still newly-weds when it struck me how odd this was. I even experimented to see what it would take to wake him. I sprinkled water on his face and tickled his nose with a brush and that kind of thing. I never once got him to wake up. If I kept at it, I could get him to groan once, but that was all. And he never dreamed. At least he never remembered what his dreams were about. Needless to say, he never Went into nay paralytic trances. He slept. He slept like a turtle buried in mud.

Amazing. But it helped with what quickly became my nightly routine.

After ten minutes of lying near him, I would get out of bed. I would go to the living room, turn on the floor lamp, and pour myself a glass of brandy. Then I would sit on the sofa and read my book, taking tiny sips of brandy and letting the smooth liquid glide over my tongue. Whenever I felt like it, would eat a cookie or a piece of chocolate that I had hidden in the sideboard. After a while, morning would come. When that happened, I would close my book and make myself a cup of coffee. Then I would make a sandwich and eat it.

My days became just a. regulated.

I would hurry through my housework and spend the rest of the morning reading. Just before noon, I would put my book down and fix my husband’s lunch. When he left, before one. I’d drive to the club and have my swim. I would swim for a full hour. Once I stopped sleeping, thirty minutes was never enough. While I was in the water I concentrated my entire mind on swimming. I thought about nothing but how to move my body most effectively, and I inhaled and exhaled with perfect regularity. If I met someone I knew, I hardly said a word―just the basic civilities. I refused all invitations. “Sorry,” I’d say. “I’m going straight home today. There’s something I have to do.” I didn’t want to get involved with anybody. I didn’t want to have to waste time on endless gossiping. When I was through swimming as hard as I could, all I wanted was to hurry home and read.

I went through the motions―shopping, cooking, playing with my son, having sex with my husband. It was easy once I got the hang of it. All I had to do was break the connection between my mind and my body. While my body went about its business, my mind floated in its own inner space. I ran the house without a thought in my head, feeding snacks to my son, chatting with my husband.

After I gave up sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It’s just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it’s just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.

Of course there were variations now and then. My mother-in-law had dinner with us. On Sunday, the three of us went to the zoo. My son had a terrible case of diarrhea.

But none of these events had any effect on my being. They swept past me like a silent breeze. I chatted with my mother-in-law, made dinner for four, took a picture in front of the bear cage, put a hot-water bottle on my son’s stomach, and gave him his medicine.

No one noticed that I had changed―that I had given up sleeping entirely, that I was spending all my time reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years―and hundreds of miles―from reality. No matter how mechanically I worked, no matter how little love or emotion I invested in my handling of reality, my husband and my son and my mother-in-law went on relating to me as they always had. If anything, they seemed more at ease with me than before.

And so a week went by.

Once my constant wakefulness entered its second week, though, it started to worry me. It was simply not normal. People are supposed to sleep. All people sleep. Once, some years ago, I had read about a form of torture in which the victim is prevented from sleeping. Something the Nazis did, I think. They’d lock the person in a tiny room, fasten his eyelids open, and keep shining lights in his face and making loud noises without a break. Eventually, the person would go mad and die.

I couldn’t recall how long the article said it took for the madness to set in, but it couldn’t have been much more than three days or four. In my case, a whole week had gone by. This was simply too much. Still, my health was not suffering. Far from it. I had more energy than ever.

One day, after showering, I stood naked in front of the mirror. I was amazed to discover that my body appeared to be almost bursting with vitality. I studied every inch of myself, head to toe, but I could find not the slightest hint of excess flesh, not one wrinkle. I no longer had the body of a young girl, of course, but my skin had far more glow, far more tautness than it had before. I took a pinch of flesh near my waist, and found it almost hard, with a wonderful elasticity.

It dawned on me that I was prettier than I had realized. I looked so much younger than before that it was almost shocking. I could probably pass for twenty-four. My skin was smooth. My eyes were bright, lips moist. The shadowed area beneath my protruding cheekbones (the one feature I really hated about myself) was no longer noticeable―at all. I sat down and looked at my face in the mirror for a good thirty minutes. I studied it from all angles, objectively. No, I had not been mistaken: I was really pretty.

What was happening to me?

I thought about seeing a doctor.

I had a doctor who had been taking care of me since I was a child and to whom I felt close, but the more I thought about how he might react to my story the less inclined I felt to tell it to him. Would he take me at my word? He’d probably think I was crazy if I said I hadn’t slept in a week. Or he might dismiss it as a kind of neurotic insomnia. But if he did believe I was telling the truth he might send me to some big research hospital for testing.

And then what would happen?

I’d be locked up and sent from one lab to another to be experimented on. They’d do EEGs and EKGs and urinalyses and blood tests and psychological screening and who knows what else.

I couldn’t take that. I just wanted to stay by myself and quietly read my book I wanted to have my hour of swimming every day. I wanted my freedom: that’s what I wanted more than anything. I didn’t want to go to any hospitals. And, even if they did get me into a hospital, what would they find? They’d do a mountain of tests and formulate a mountain of hypotheses, and that would be the end of it. I didn’t want to be locked up in a place like that.

One afternoon I went to the library and read some hooks on sleep. The few books I could find didn’t tell me much. In fact, they all had only one thing to say: that sleep is rest. Like turning off a car engine. If you keep a motor running constantly, sooner or later it will break down. A running engine must produce heat, and the accumulated heat fatigues the machinery itself. Which is why you have to let the engine rest. Cool down. Turning off the engine-that, finally, is what sleep is. In a human being, sleep provides rest for both the flesh and the spirit When a person lies down and rests her muscles, she simultaneously closes her eyes and cuts off the thought processes. And excess thoughts release an electrical discharge in the form of dreams.

One book did have a fascinating point to make. The author maintained that human beings, by their very nature, are incapable of escaping from certain fixed idiosyncratic drives both in their thought processes and in their physical movements. People unconsciously fashion their own action- and thought-drives, which under normal circumstances never disappear. In other words, people live in the prison cells of their own drives. What modulates these drives and keeps them in check―so the organism doesn’t wear down as the heel of a shoe does, at a particular angle, as the author puts it―is nothing other than sleep. Sleep therapeutically counteracts the tendency. In sleep, people naturally relax muscles that have been consistently used in only one direction; sleep both calms and provides a discharge for thought circuits that have likewise been used in only one direction. This is how people are cooled down. Sleeping is an act that has been programmed, with Karmic inevitability, into the human system, and no one can diverge from it. If a person were to diverge from it, the person’s very “ground of being” would be threatened.

“Drives?” I asked myself.

The only “drive” of mine that I could think of was housework―those chores I perform day after day like an unfeeling machine. Cooking and shopping and laundry and mothering: what were they if not “drives”? I could do them with my eyes closed. Push the buttons. Pull the levers. Pretty soon, reality just flows off and away. The same physical movements over and over. Drives. They were consuming me, wearing -me down on one side like the heel of a shoe. I needed sleep every day to adjust them and cool me down.

Was that it?

I read the passage once more, with intense concentration. And I nodded. Yes, almost certainly, that was it.

So, then, what was this life of mine? I was being consumed by my drives and then sleeping to repair the damage. My life was nothing but a repetition of this cycle. It was going nowhere.

Sitting at the library table, I shook my head.

I’m through with sleep! So what if I go mad? So what if I lose my “ground of being”? I will not be consumed by my “drives.” If sleep is nothing more than a periodic repairing of the parts of me that are being worn away, I don’t want it anymore. I don’t need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I’m keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don’t want to be “repaired.” I will not sleep.

I left the library filled with a new determination.

Now my inability to sleep ceased to frighten me. What was there to be afraid of? Think of the advantages! Now the hours from ten at night to six in the morning belonged to me alone. Until now, a third of every day had been used up by sleep. But no more. No more. Now it was mine, just mine, nobody else’s, all mine. I could use this time in any way I liked. No one would get in my way. No one would make demands on me. Yes, that was it. I had expanded my life. I had increased it by a third.

You are probably going to tell me that this is biologically abnormal. And you may be right. And maybe someday in the future I’ll have to pay back the debt I’m building up by continuing to do this biologically abnormal thing. Maybe life will try to collect on the expanded part―this “advance” it is paying me now. This is a groundless hypothesis, but there is no ground for negating it, and it feels right to me somehow. Which means that in the end the balance sheet of borrowed time will even out.

Honestly, though, I didn’t give a damn, even if I had to die young. The best thing to do with a hypothesis is to Let it run any course it pleases. Now, at least, I was expanding my life, and it was wonderful. My hands weren’t empty anymore. Here I was―alive, and I could feel it. It was real. I wasn’t being consumed any longer. Or at least there was a part of me in existence that was not being consumed, and that was what gave me this intensely real feeling of being alive. A life without that feeling might go on forever, but it would have no meaning at all. I saw that with absolute clarity now.

After checking to see that my husband was asleep I would go sit on the living-room sofa, drink brandy by myself, and open my book. I read “Anna Karenina” three times. Each time, I made new discoveries. This enormous novel was full of revelations and riddles. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader. The old me had been able to understand only the tiniest fragment of it, but the gaze of this new me could penetrate to the core with perfect understanding. I knew exactly what the great Tolstoy wanted to say, what he wanted the reader to get from his book; I could see how his message had organically crystallized as a novel, and what in that novel had surpassed the author himself.

No matter how hard I concentrated, I never tired. After reading “Anna Karenina” as many times as I could, I read Dostoyevski. I could read book after book with utter concentration and never tire. I could understand the most difficult passages without effort. And I responded with deep emotion.

I felt that I had always been meant to be like this. By abandoning sleep I had expanded myself. The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

Eventually, my bottle of brandy ran out. I had drunk almost all of it by myself. I went to the gourmet department of a big store for another bottle of Remy Martin. As long as I was there, I figured, I might as well buy a bottle of red wine, too. And a fine crystal brandy glass. And chocolate and cookies.

Sometimes while reading I would become overexcited. When that happened, I would put my book down and exercise―do calisthenics or just walk around the room. Depending on my mood, I might go out for a nighttime drive. I’d change clothes, get into my Civic, and drive aimlessly around the neighborhood. Sometimes I’d drop into an all-night fast-food place for a cup of coffee, but it was such a bother to have to deal with other people that I’d usually stay in the car. I’d stop in some safe-looking spot and just let my mind wander. Or I’d go all the way to the harbor and watch the boats.

One time, though, I was questioned by a policeman. It was two-thirty in the morning, and I was parked under a street lamp near the pier, listening to the car stereo and watching the lights of the ships passing by. He knocked on my window. I lowered the glass. He was young and handsome, and very polite. I explained to him that I couldn’t sleep. He asked for my license and studied it for a while. “There was a murder here last month,” he said. “Three young men attacked a couple, killed the man, and raped the woman.” I remembered having read about the incident. I nodded. “If you don’t have any business here, Ma’am, you’d better not hang around here at night.” I thanked him and said I would leave. He gave my license back. I drove away.

That was the only time anyone talked to me. Usually I would drift through the streets at night for an hour or more and no one would bother me. Then I would park in our underground garage. Right next to my husband’s white Sentra; he was upstairs sleeping soundly in the darkness. I’d listen to the crackle of the hot engine cooling down, and when the sound died I’d go upstairs.

The first thing I would do when I got inside was check to make sure my husband was asleep. And he always was. Then I’d check my son, who was always sound asleep, too. They didn’t know a thing. They believed that the world was as it always had been, unchanging. But they were wrong. It was changing in ways they could never guess. Changing a lot. Changing fast. It would never be the same again.

One time I stood and stared at my sleeping husband’s face. I had heard a thump in the bedroom and rushed in. The alarm clock was on the floor. He had probably knocked it down in his sleep. But he was sleeping as soundly as ever, completely unaware of what he had done. What would it take to wake this man? I picked up the clock and put it back on the night table. Then I folded my arms and stared at my husband. How long had it been―years?―since the last time I had studied his face as he slept?

I had done it a lot when we were first married. That was all it took to relax me and put me in a peaceful mood. “I’ll be safe as long as he goes on sleeping peaceful1y like this,” I’d tell myself. Which is why I spent a lot of time watching him in his sleep.

But, somewhere along the way, I had given up the habit. When had that been? I tried to remember. It had probably happened back when my mother-in-law and I were sort of quarreling over what name to give my son. She was big on some religious-cult kind of thing, and had asked her priest to “bestow” a name on the baby. I don’t remember exactly the name she was given. but I had no intention of letting some priest ‘bestow” a name on my child. We had some pretty violent arguments at the time, but my husband couldn’t say a thing to either of us. He stood by and tried to calm us.

After that I lost the feeling that my husband was my protector. The one thing I thought I wanted from him he had failed to give me. All he had managed to do was make me furious. This all happened a long time ago, of course. My mother-in-law and I have long since made up. I gave my son the name I wanted to give bin,. My husband and I made up right away, too.

I’m pretty sure that was the end, though, of my watching hint m his sleep.

So there I stood, looking at him sleeping.. soundly as always. One bare foot stuck out from under the covers at a strange angle―so strange that the foot could have belonged to someone else. It was a big, chunky foot. My husband’s mouth hung open, the lower lip drooping. Every once in a while, his nostrils would twitch. There was a mole under his eye that bothered me. It was so big and vulgar-looking. There was something vulgar about the way his eyes were closed, the lids slack, covers made of faded human flesh. He looked like an absolute fool. This was what they mean by “dead to the world.” How incredibly ugly! He sleeps with such an ugly face! It’s just too gruesome, I thought. He couldn’t have been like this in the old days. I’m sure he must have had a better Face when we were first married, one that was taut and alert. Even sound asleep, he couldn’t have been such a blob.

I tried to r ember what his sleeping face had looked like back then, but I couldn’t do it, though I tried hard enough. All I could be sure of was that he couldn’t have had such a terrible face. Or was I just deceiving myself? Maybe he had always looked like this in his sleep and I had been indulging in some kind of emotional projection. I’m sure that’s what my mother would say. That sort of thinking was a specialty of hen. “All that lovey-dovey stuff lasts two years―three years tops,” she always used to insist. “You were a new bride,” I’m sure she would tell me now. “Of course your little hubby looked like a darling in his sleep.”

I’m sure she would say something like that, but I’m just as sure that she’d be wrong. He had grown ugly over the years. The firmness had gone out of his face. That’s what growing old is all about. He was old now, and tired. Worn out. He’d get even uglier in the years ahead, that much was certain. And I had no choice but to go along with it, put up with it, resign myself to it.

I let out a sigh as I stood there watching him. It was a deep sigh, a noisy one as sighs go, but of course he didn’t move a muscle. The loudest sigh in the world would never wake him up.

I left the bedroom and went back to the living room. I poured myself a brandy and started reading. But something wouldn’t let me concentrate. I put the book down and went to my son’s room. Opening the door. I stared at his face in the light spilling in from the hallway. He was sleeping just as soundly as my husband was. As he always did. I watched him in hi. sleep, looked at his smooth, nearly featureless face. It was very different from my husband’s: it was still a child’s face, after all. The skin still glowed; it still had nothing vulgar about it.

And yet something about my son’s face annoyed me. I had never felt anything like this about him before. What could be making me feel this way? I stood there, looking, with my arms folded. Yes, of course I loved my son, loved him tremendously. But still, undeniably, that something was bothering me, getting on my nerves.

I shook my head.

I closed my eyes and kept them shut. Then I opened them and looked at my son’s face again. And then it hit me. What bothered me about my son’s sleeping face was that it looked exactly like my husband’s. And exactly like my mother-in-law’s. Stubborn. Self-satisfied. It was in their blood―a kind of arrogance I hated in my husband’s family. True, my husband is good to me. He’s sweet and gentle and he’s careful to take my feelings into account He’s never fooled around with other women, and he works hard. He’s serious, and he’s kind to everybody. My friends all tell me how lucky I am to have him. And I can’t fault him, either. Which is exactly what galls me sometimes. His very absence of faults makes for a strange rigidity that excludes imagination. That’s what grates On me so.

And that was exactly the kind of expression my son had on his face as he slept.

I shook my head again. This little boy is a stranger to me, finally. Even after he grows up, he’ll never be able to understand me, just as my husband can hardly understand what I feel now.

I love my son, no question. But I sensed that someday I would no longer be able to love this boy with the same intensity. Not a very maternal thought. Most mothers never have thoughts like that. But as I stood there looking at him asleep, I knew with absolute certainty that one day I would come to despise him.

The thought made me terribly sad. I closed his door and turned out the hail light I went to the living-room sofa, sat down, and opened my book. After reading a few pages. I closed it again. I looked at the clock. A little before three.

I wondered how many days it had been since I stopped sleeping. The sleeplessness started the Tuesday before last. Which made this the seventeenth day. Not one wink of sleep in seventeen days. Seventeen days and seventeen nights. Along, long time. I couldn’t even recall what sleep was like.

I closed my eyes and tried to recall the sensation of sleeping, but all that existed for me inside was a wakeful darkness. A wakeful darkness: what it called to mind was death.

Was I about to die?

And if I died now, what would my life have amounted to?

There was no way I could answer that.

All right, then, what death?

Until now I had conceived of sleep as a kind of model for death. I had imagined death as an extension of sleep. A far deeper sleep than ordinary sleep. A sleep devoid of all consciousness. Eternal rest. A total blackout.

But now I wondered if I had been wrong. Perhaps death was a state entirely unlike sleep, something that belonged to a different category altogether―like the deep, endless, wakeful darkness I was seeing now.

No, that would be too terrible. If the state of death was not to be a rest for us, then what was going to redeem this imperfect life of ours, so fraught with exhaustion? Finally, though, no one knows what death is. Who has ever truly seen it? No one. Except the ones who are dead. No one living knows what death is like. They can only guess. And the best guess is still a guess. Maybe death is a kind of rest, but reasoning can’t tell us that. The only way to find out what death is is to die. Death can be anything at all.

An intense terror overwhelmed me at the thought A stiffening chill ran down my spine. My eyes were still shut tight. I had lost the power to open them. I stared at the thick darkness that stood planted in front of me, a darkness as deep and hopeless as the universe itself. I was all alone. My mind was in deep concentration, and expanding. If I had wanted to, I could have seen into the uttermost depths of the universe. But I decided not to look. It was too soon for that.

If death was like this, if to die meant being eternally awake and staring into the darkness like this, what should I do?

At last, I managed to open my eyes. I gulped down the brandy that was left in my glass.

I’m taking off my pajamas and putting on jeans, T-shirt, and a windbreaker. I tie my hair back in a tight ponytail, tuck it under the windbreaker, and put on a baseball cap of my husband's. In the mirror I look like a boy. Good. I put on sneakers and go down to the garage.

I slip in behind the steering wheel, turn the key, and listen m the engine hum. It sounds normal. Hands on the wheel, I rake a few deep breaths. Then I shift into gear and drive out of the building. The car is running better than usual. It seems to be gliding across a sheet of ice. I ease it into higher gear, move out of the neighborhood, and enter the highway to Yokohama.

It's only three in the morning, but the number of cars on the road is by no means small. Huge semis roll past, shaking the ground as they head east. Those guys don't sleep at night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater efficiency.

What a waste. I could work day and night. I don't have m sleep.

This is biologically unnatural, I suppose, but who really knows what is natural? They just infer it inductively. I’m beyond that. A priori. An evolutionary leap. A woman who never sleeps. An expansion of consciousness.

I have to smile. A priori. An evolutionary leap.

Listening to the car radio, I drive to the harbor. I want classical music, but I can’t find a station that broadcasts it at night. Stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth. I give up searching and listen to those. They make me feel I’m in a far-off place, far away from Mozart and Haydn.

I pull into one of the white-outlined spaces in the big parking lot at the waterfront park and cut my engine. This is the brightest area of the lot, under a lamp, and wide open all around. Only one other car is parked here―an old, white two-door coupé of the kind that young people like to drive. Probably a couple in there now, making love―no money for a hotel room. To avoid trouble, I pull my hat low, trying not to look like a woman. I check to see that my doors are locked.

Half consciously, I let my eyes wander through the surrounding darkness, when all of a sudden I remember a drive I took with my boyfriend the year I was a college freshman. We parked and got into some heavy petting. He couldn’t stop, he said, and he begged me to let him put it in. But I refused. Hands on the steering wheel, listening to the music, I try to bring back the scene, but I can’t recall his face. It all seems to have happened such an incredibly long time ago.

All the memories I have from the time before I stopped sleeping seem to be moving away with accelerating speed. It feels so strange, as if the me who used to go to sleep every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then are not really mine. This is how people change. But nobody realizes it. Nobody notices. Only I know what happens. I could try to tell them, but they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t believe me. Or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no idea what I’m feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive world view.

I am changing, though. Really changing.

How long have I been sifting here? Hands on the wheel. Eyes closed. Staring into the sleepless darkness.

Suddenly I’m aware of a human presence, and I come to myself again. There’s somebody out there. I open my eyes and look around; Someone outside the car. Trying to open the door. But the doors are locked. Dark shadows on either side of the car, one at each door. Can’t see their faces. Can’t make out their clothing. Just two dark shadows, standing there.

Sandwiched between them, my Civic feels tiny―like a little pastry box. It’s being rocked from side to side. A fist is pounding on the right-hand window. I know it’s not a policeman. A policeman would never pound on the glass like this and would never shake my car. I hold my breath. What should I do? I can’t think straight. My underarms are soaked. I’ve got to get out of here. The key. Turn the key. I reach out for it and turn it to the right. The starter grinds.

The engine doesn’t catch. My hand is shaking. I close my eyes and turn the key again. No good. A sound like fingernails clawing a giant wall. The motor turns and turns. The men―the dark shadows―keep shaking my car. The swings get bigger and bigger. They’re going to tip me over!

There’s something wrong. Just calm down and think, then everything will be O.K. Think. Just think. Slowly. Carefully. Something is wrong.

Something is wrong.

But what? I can’t tell. My mind is crammed full of thick darkness. It’s not taking me anywhere. My hands are shaking. I try pulling out the key and putting it back in again. But my shaking hand can’t find the hole. I try again and drop the key. I curl over and try to pick it up. But I can’t get hold of it. The car is rocking back and forth. My forehead slams against the steering wheel.

I’ll never get the key. I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to turn it over.

SLEEP pt1 by HARUKI MURAKAMI

2007-05-08T04:05:19Z

translated by Jay Rubin

Sleep

This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep.

I’m not talking about insomnia. I know what insomnia is. I had something like it in college―”something like it” because I’m not sure that what I had then was exactly the same as what people refer to as insomnia. I suppose a doctor could have told me. But I didn’t see a doctor. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Not that I had any reason to think so. Call it woman’s intuition―I just felt they couldn’t help me. So I didn’t see a doctor, and I didn’t say anything to my parents or friends, because I knew that that was exactly what they would tell me to do.

Back then, my “something like insomnia” went on for a month. I never really got to sleep that entire time. I’d go to bed at night and say to myself, “All right now, time for some sleep.” That was, all it took to wake me up. It was instantaneous-like a conditioned reflex. The harder I worked at sleeping, the wider awake I became. I tried alcohol, I tried sleeping pills, but they had absolutely no effect.

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But this wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while my mind was wide-awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake.

This incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me―their distance or mass or tenure. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep.

It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

And then, when night came, the intense wakefulness would return. I was powerless to resist it. I was locked in its core by an enormous force. All I could do was stay awake until morning, eyes wide open in the dark. I couldn’t even think. As I lay there, listening to the clock tick off the seconds, I did nothing but stare at the darkness as it slowly deepened and slowly diminished.

And then one day it ended, without warning, without any external cause. I started to lose consciousness at the breakfast table. I stood up without saying anything. I may have knocked something off the table. I think someone spoke to me. But I can’t be sure. I staggered to my room, crawled into bed in my clothes, and fell fast asleep. I stayed that way for twenty-seven hours. My mother became alarmed and tried to shake me out of it. She actually slapped my cheek.. But I went on sleeping for twenty-seven hours without a break. And when I finally did awaken, I was my old self again. Probably.

I have no idea why I became an insomniac then nor why the condition suddenly cured itself. It was like a thick, black cloud brought from somewhere by the wind, a cloud crammed full of ominous things I have no knowledge of. No one knows where such a thing comes from or where it goes. I can only be sure that it did descend on me for a time, and then departed.

In any case, what I have now is nothing like that insomnia, nothing at all. I just can’t sleep. Not for one second. Aside from that simple fact, I’m perfectly normal. I don’t feel sleepy, and my mind is as clear as ever. Clearer, if anything. Physically, too, I’m normal: my appetite is fine; I’m not fatigued. In terms of everyday reality, there’s nothing g with me. I just can’t sleep.

Neither my husband nor my son has noticed that I’m not sleeping. And I haven’t mentioned it to them. I don’t want to be told to see a doctor. I know it wouldn’t do any good. I just know. Like before. This is myself.

So they don’t suspect a thing. On the surface, our life flows on unchanged. Peaceful. Routine. After I see my husband and son off in the morning. I take my ca, and go marketing. My husband is a dentist. His office is a ten-minute drive from our condo. He and a dental-school friend own it as partners. That way they can afford to hire a technician and a receptionist. One partner can take the other’s overflow. Both of them are good, so for an office that has been in operation for only five year., and that opened without any special connections, the place is doing very well. Almost too well. “I didn’t want to work so hard,” says my husband. “But I can’t complain.”

And I always say, “Really, you can’t.” It’s true. We had to get an enormous bank loan to open the place. A dental office requires a huge investment in equipment. And the competition is fierce. Patients don’t start pouring in the minute you open your doors. Lots of dental clinics have failed for lack of patients.

Back then, we were young and poor and we had a brand-new baby. No one could guarantee that we would survive in such a tough world. But we have survived, one way or another. Five years. No. we really can’t complain. We’ve still got almost two-thirds of our debt left to pay, though.

“I know why you’ve got so many patients,” I always say to him. “It’s because you’re such a good-looking guy.

This is our little joke. He’s not good-looking at all. Actually, he’s kind of strange-looking. Even now I sometimes wonder why I married such a strange-looking man. I had other boyfriends who were far mote handsome.

What makes his face so strange? I can’t really say. It’s not a handsome face, but it’s not ugly, either. Nor is it the kind that people would say has “character.” Honestly, “strange’” about all that fits. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it has no distinguishing features. Still, there must be some element that makes his face have no distinguishing features, and if I could grasp whatever that is, I might be able to understand the strangeness of the whole. I once tried to draw his picture, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I sat there holding the pencil over the paper and couldn’t make a mark. I was flabbergasted. How can you live with a man so long and not be able to bring his face to mind? I knew how to recognize him, of course. I would even get mental images of him now and then. But when it came to drawing his picture, I realized that I didn’t remember anything about his face. What could I do? It was like running into an invisible wall. The one thing I could remember was that his face looked strange.

The memory of that often makes me nervous.

Still, he’s one of those men everybody likes. That’s a big plus in his business, obviously, but I think he would have been a success at just about anything. People feel secure talking to him. I had never met anyone like that before. All my women friends like him. And I’m fond of him, of course. I think I even love him. But, strictly speaking, I don’t actually like him.

Anyhow, he smiles in this natural, innocent way, just like a child. Not many grownup men can do that. And I guess you’d expect a dentist to have nice teeth, which he does.

“It’s not my fault I’m so good-looking,” he always answers when we enjoy our little joke. We’re the only ones who understand what it means. It’s a recognition of reality―the fact that we have managed in one my or another to survive―and it’s an important ritual for us.

He drives his Sentra out of the condo parking garage every morning at eight-fifteen. Our son is in the seat next to him. The elementary school is on the way to the office. “Be careful,” I say. “Don’t worry” he answers. Always the same little dialogue. I can’t help myself. I have to say it. “Be careful.” And my husband has to answer, “Don’t worry.” He starts the engine, puts a Haydn or Mozart tape into the car stereo, and hums along with the music. My two “men” always wave to me on the way out. Their hands move in exactly the same way. It’s almost uncanny. They lean their heads at exactly the same angle and turn their palms toward me, moving them slightly from side to aside in exactly the same way, as if they’d been trained by a choreographer.

I have my own car, a used Honda Civic. A girlfriend sold it to me two years ago for next to nothing. One bumper is smashed in, and the body style is old-fashioned, with rust spots showing up. The odometer has over a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it. Sometimes―once or twice a month―the car is almost impossible to start. The engine simply won’t catch. Still, it’s not bad enough to have the thing fixed. If you baby it and let it rest for ten minutes or so, the engine will start up with a nice, solid vroom. Oh, well, everything-everybody-gets out of whack once or twice a month. That’s life. My husband calls my car “your donkey.” I don’t care. It’s mine.

I drive my Civic to the supermarket. After marketing I clean the house and do the laundry. Then I fix lunch. I make a point of performing my morning chores with brisk, efficient movements. If possible, I like to finish my dinner preparations in the morning, too. Then the afternoon is all mine.

My husband comes home for lunch. He doesn’t like to eat out. He says the restaurants are too crowded, the food is no good, and the smell of tobacco smoke gets into his clothes. He prefers eating at home, even with the extra travel time involved. Still, I don’t make anything fancy for lunch. I warm up leftovers in the microwave or boil a pot of noodles. So the actual time involved is minimal. And, of course, it’s more fun to eat with my husband than all alone with no one to talk to.

Before, when the clinic was just getting started, there would often be no patient in the first afternoon slot, so the two of us would go to bed after lunch. Those were the loveliest times with him. Everything was hushed, and the soft afternoon sunshine would filter into the room. We were a lot younger then, and happier.

We ‘re still happy, of course. I really do think so. No domestic troubles cast shadows on our home. I love him and trust him. And I’m sure he feels the same about me. But little by little, as the months and years go by, your life changes. That’s just how it is. There s nothing you can do about it. Now all the afternoon slots are taken. When we finish eating, my husband brushes his teeth, hurries out to his car, and goes back to the office. He’s got all those sick teeth waiting for him. But that’s all right. We both know you can t have everything your own way.

After my husband goes back to the office, I take a bathing suit and towel and drive to the neighborhood athletic club. I swim for half an hour. I swim hard. I’m not that crazy about the swimming itself: I just want to keep the flab off. I’ve always liked my own figure. Actually, I’ve never liked my face. It’s not bad, but I’ve never felt I liked it. My body is another matter. I like to stand naked in front of the mirror. I like to study the soft outlines

I see there, the balanced vitality. I’m not sure what it is, but I get the feeling that something inside there is very important to me. Whatever it is, I don’t want to lose it.

I’m thirty. When you reach thirty, you realize it’s not the end of the world. I’m not especially happy about getting older, but it does make some things easier. It’s a question of attitude. One thing I know for sure, though: if a thirty-year-old woman loves her body and is serious about keeping it looking the way it should, she has to put in a certain amount of effort. I learned that from my mother. She used to be a slim, lovely woman, but not anymore. I don’t want the same thing to happen to me.

After I’ve had my swim, I use the rest of my afternoon in various ways. Sometimes I’ll wander over to the station plaza and window-shop. Sometimes I’ll go home, curl up on the sofa and read a book or listen to an FM station or just rest. Eventually my son comes home from school. I help him change into his playclothes, and give him a snack. When he’s through eating, he goes out to play with his friends. He’s too young to go to an afternoon cram school, and we aren’t making him take piano lessons or anything.

“Let him play,” says my husband. “Let him grow up naturally.” When my son leaves the house, I have the same little dialogue with him as I do with my husband. “Be careful,” I say, and he answers, “Don’t worry.”

As evening approaches, I begin preparing dinner. My son is always back by six. He watches cartoons on TV. If no emergency patients show up, my husband is home before seven. He doesn’t drink a drop and he’s not fond of pointless socializing. He almost always comes straight home from work.

The three of us talk during dinner, mostly about what we’ve done that day. My son always has the most to say. Everything that happens in his life is fresh and full of mystery. He talks, and we offer our comments. After dinner, he does what he likes―watches television or reads or plays some kind of game with my husband. When he has homework, he shuts himself up in his room and does it. He goes to bed at eight-thirty. I tuck him in and stroke his hair and say good night to him and turn off the light.

Then it’s husband and wife together. He sits on the sofa, reading the newspaper and talking to me now and then about his patients or something in the paper. Then he listens to Haydn or Mozart. I don’t mind listening to music, but I can never seem to tell the difference between those two composers. They sound the same to me. When I say that to my husband, he tells me it doesn’t matter. “It’s all beautiful. That’s what counts.”

“Just like you,” I say.

“Just like me,” he answers with a big smile. He seems genuinely pleased.

So that’s my life―or my life before I stopped sleeping―each day pretty much a repetition of the one before. I used to keep a simple diary, but if I forgot for two or three days, I’d lose track of what happened on which day. Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I’d sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was―very simply―amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. As the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I ever had a chance to turn and look at them.

Whenever I felt like that, I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror―just look at it for fifteen minutes at a time, my mind a total blank. I’d stare at my face purely as a physical object, and gradually it would disconnect from the rest of me, becoming just some thing that happened to exist at the same time as myself. And a realization would come to me: This is happening here and now. It’s got nothing to do with footprints. Reality and I exist simultaneously at this present moment. That’s the most important thing.

But now I can’t sleep anymore. When I stopped sleeping, I stopped keeping a diary.

I remember with perfect clarity that first night I lost the ability to sleep. I was having a repulsive dream―a dark, slimy dream. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember how it felt ominous and terrifying. I woke at the climatic moment―came fully awake with a start, as if something had dragged me back at the last moment from a fatal turning point. Had I remained immersed in the dream for another second, I would have been lost forever. My breath came in painful gasps for a time after I awoke. My arms and legs felt paralyzed. I lay there immobilized, listening to my own labored breathing, as if I were stretched out full length on the Boor of a huge cavern.

“It was a dream,” I told myself, and I waited for my breathing to calm down. Lying stiff on my back, I felt my heart working violently, my lungs hurrying the blood to it with big, slow, bellows like contractions. I began to wonder what time it could be. I wanted to look at the clock by my pillow, but I couldn’t turn my head far enough. Just then I seemed to catch a glimpse of something at the foot of the bed, something like a vague, black shadow. I caught my breath. My heart, my lungs, everything inside me seemed to freeze in that instant. I strained to see the black shadow.

The moment I tried to focus on it, the shadow began to assume a definite shape, as if it had been waiting for me to notice it. Its outline became distinct, and began to be filled with substance, and then with details. It was a gaunt old man wearing a skintight black shirt. His hair was gray and short, his cheeks sunken. He stood at my feet, perfectly still. He said nothing, but his piercing eyes stared at me. They were huge eyes, and I could see the red network of veins in them. The old man’s face wore no expression at all. It told me nothing. It was like an opening in the darkness.

This was no longer the dream, I knew. From that, I had already awakened. And not just by drifting awake but by having my eyes ripped open. No, this was no dream. This was reality. And in reality an old man I had never seen before was standing at the foot of my bed. I had to do something―turn on the light, wake my husband, scream. I tried to move. I fought to make my limbs work, but it did no good. I couldn’t move a finger. When it became clear to me that I would never be able to move, I was filled with a hopeless terror, a primal fear such as I had never experienced before, like a chill that rises silently from the bottomless well of memory. I tried to scream, but I was incapable of producing a sound, or even moving my tongue. All I could do was look at the old man.

Now I saw that he was holding something―a tall, narrow, rounded thing that shone white. As I stared at this object, wondering what it could be, it began to take on a definite shape, just as the shadow had earlier. It was a pitcher, an old-fashioned porcelain pitcher. Alter some time, the man raised the pitcher and began pouring water from it onto my feet. I could not feel the water. I could see it and hear it splashing down on my feet, but I couldn’t Feel a thing.

The old man went on and on pouring water over my feet. Strange―no matter how much he poured, the pitcher never ran dry. I began to worry that my feet would eventually rot and melt away. Yes, of course they would rot. What else could they do with so much water pouring over them? When it occurred to me that my feet were going to rot and melt away, I couldn’t take it any longer.

I closed my eyes and let out a scream so loud it took every ounce of strength I had. But it never left my body. It reverberated soundlessly inside, tearing through me, shutting down my heart. Everything inside my head turned white for a moment as the scream penetrated my every cell. Something inside me died. Something melted away, leaving only a shuddering vacuum. An explosive flash incinerated everything my existence depended on.

When I opened my eyes, the old man was gone. The pitcher was gone. The bedspread was dry, and there was no indication that anything near my feet had been wet. My body, though, was soaked with sweat, a horrifying volume of sweat, more sweat than I ever imagined a human being could produce. And yet, undeniably, it was sweat that had come f mm me.

I moved one finger. Then another, and another, and the rest Next, I bent my arms and then my legs. I rotated my feet and bent my knees. Nothing moved quite as it should have, but at least it did move. After carefully checking to see that all my body parts were working. I eased myself into a sitting position. In the dim light filtering in from the sweet lamp, I scanned the entire room from corner to corner. The old man was definitely not there.

The clock by my pillow said twelve-thirty. I had been sleeping for only an hour and a half. My husband was sound asleep in his bed. Even his breathing was inaudible. He always sleeps like that, as if all mental activity in him had been obliterated. Almost nothing can wake him.

I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I threw my sweat-soaked nightgown into the washing machine and took a shower. After putting on a fresh pair of pajamas, I went to the living room, switched on the floor lamp beside the sofa, and sat there drinking a full glass of brandy. I almost never drink. Not that I have a physical incompatibility with alcohol, as my husband does. In fact, I used to drink quite a lot, but after marrying him I simply stopped. Sometimes when I had trouble sleeping I would take a sip of brandy but that night I felt I wanted a whole glass to quiet my overwrought nerves.

The only alcohol in the house was a bottle of Remy Martin we kept in the sideboard. It had been a gift. I don’t even remember who gave it to us, it was so long ago. The bottle wore a thin layer of dust. We had no real brandy glasses, so I just poured it into a regular tumbler and sipped it slowly.

I must have been in a trance, I thought. I had never experienced such a thing, but I had heard about trances from a college friend who had been through one. Everything was incredibly clear, she had said. You can’t believe it’s a dream. “I didn’t believe it was a dream when it was happening, and now I still don’t believe it was a dream.” Which is exactly how I felt. Of course it had to be a dream-a kind of dream that doesn’t feel like a dream.

Though the terror was leaving me, the trembling of my body would not stop. It was in my skin, like the circular ripples on water after an earthquake. I could see the slight quivering. The scream had done it. Tint scream that had never found a voice was still locked up in my body, making it tremble.

I closed my eyes and swallowed another mouthful of brandy. The warmth spread from my throat to my stomach. The sensation felt tremendously real.

With a start, I thought of my son. Again my heart began pounding. I hurried from the sofa to his room. He was sound asleep, one hand across his mouth, the other thrust out to the side, looking just as secure and peaceful in sleep as my husband. I straightened his blanket. Whatever it was that had so violently shattered my sleep, it had attacked only me. Neither of them had felt a thing.

I returned to the living room and wandered about there. I was not the least bit sleepy.

I considered drinking another glass of brandy. In fact, I wanted to drink even more alcohol than that. I wanted to warm my body more, to calm my nerves down more, and to feel that strong, penetrating bouquet in my mouth again. After some hesitation, I decided against it. I didn’t want to start the new day drunk. I put the brandy back in the sideboard, brought the glass to the kitchen sink, and washed it. I found some strawberries in the refrigerator and ate them.

I realized that the trembling in my skin was almost gone.

What was that old man in black? I asked myself. I had never seen him before in my life. That black clothing of his was so strange, like a tight-fitting sweatsuit, and yet, at the same time, old-fashioned. I had never seen anything like it. And those eyes―bloodshot, and never blinking. Who was he? Why did he pour water on my feet? Why did he have to do such a thing?

I had only questions, no answers.

The time my friend went into a trance, she was spending the night at her fiancé’s house. As she lay in bed asleep, an angry-looking man in his early fifties approached and ordered her out of the house. While that was happening, she couldn’t move a muscle. And, like me, she became soaked with sweat. She was certain it must be the ghost of her fiancé’s father, who was telling her to get Out of his house. But when she asked to see a photograph of the father the next day, it wined out to be an entirely different man. “I must have been feeling tense,” she concluded. “That’s what caused it.”

But I’m not tense. And this is my own house. There shouldn’t be anything here to threaten me. Why did I have to go into a trance?

I shook my head. Stop thinking, I told myself. It won’t do any good. I had a realistic dream, nothing more. I’ve probably been building up some kind of fatigue. The tennis I played the day before yesterday must have done it. I met a friend at the club after my swim and she invited me to play tennis and I overdid it a little, that’s all. Sure―my arms and legs felt tired and heavy for a while afterward.

When I finished my strawberries, I stretched out on the sofa and tried closing my eyes.

I wasn’t sleepy at all. “Oh, great,” I thought. “1 really don’t feel like sleeping.”

I thought I’d read a hook until I got tired again. I went to the bedroom and picked a novel from the bookcase. My husband didn’t even twitch when I turned on the light to hunt for it. I chose “Anna Karenina.” I was in the mood for a long Russian novel, and I had only read “Anna Karenina” once, long ago, probably in high school. I remembered just a few things about it the first line, “All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and the heroine’s throwing herself under a train at the end. And that early on there was a hint of the final suicide. Wasn’t there a scene at a racetrack? Or was that in another novel?

Whatever. I went back to the sofa and opened the book. How many years had it been since I sat down and relaxed like this with a book? True, I often spent half an hour or an hour of my private time in the afternoon with a book open. But you couldn’t really call that reading. I’d always find myself thinking about other things―my son, or shopping, or the freezer’s needing to be fixed, or my having to find something to wear to a relative’s wedding, or the stomach operation my father had last month. That kind of stuff would drift into my mind, and then it would grow, and take off in a million different directions. After a while I’d notice that the only thing that had gone by was the time, and I had hardly turned any pages.

Without noticing it, I had become accustomed in this way to a life without books. How strange, now that I think of it. Reading had been the center of my life when I was young. I had read every book in the grade-school library, and almost my entire allowance would go for books. I’d even scrimp on lunches to buy books I wanted to read. And this went on into junior high and high school. Nobody read as much as I did. I was the middle one of five children, and both my parents worked, so nobody paid much attention to me. I could read alone as much as I liked. I’d always enter the essay contests on books so I could win a gift certificate for more books. And I usually won. In college I majored in English literature and got good grades. My graduation thesis on Katherine Mansfield won top honors, and my thesis adviser urged me to apply to graduate school. I wanted to go out into the world, though, and I knew that I was no scholar. I just enjoyed reading books. And, even if I had wanted to go on studying, my family didn’t have the financial wherewithal to send me to graduate school. We weren’t poor by any means, but there were two sisters coming along after me, so once I graduated from college I simply had to begin supporting myself.

When had I really read a book last? And what had it been? I couldn’t recall anything. Why did a person’s life have to change so completely? Where had the old me gone, the one who used to read a book as if possessed by it? What had those days―and that almost abnormally intense passion―meant to me?

That night, I found myself capable of reading “Anna Karenina” with unbroken concentration. I went on turning pages without another thought in mind. In one sitting, I read as far as the scene where Anna and Vronsky first see each other in the Moscow train station. At that point, I stuck my bookmark in and poured myself another glass of brandy.

Though it hadn’t occurred to me before, I couldn’t help thinking what an odd novel this was. You don’t see the heroine, Anna, until Chapter 18. I wondered if it didn’t seem unusual to readers in Tolstoy’s day. What did they do when the book went on and on with a detailed description of the life of a minor character named Oblonsky―just sit there, waiting for the beautiful heroine to appear? Maybe that was it. Maybe people in those days had lots of time to kill―at least the part of society that read novels.

Then I noticed how late it was. Three in the morning! And still I wasn’t sleepy.

What should I do? I don’t feel sleepy at all, I thought. I could just keep on reading. I’d love to find out what happens in the story. But I have to sleep.

I remembered my ordeal with insomnia and how I had gone through each day back then, wrapped in a cloud. No, never again. I was still a student in those days. It was still possible for me to get away with something like that. But not now, I thought. Now I’m a wife. A mother. I have responsibilities. I have to make my husband’s lunches and take care of my son.

But even if I get into bed now, I know I won’t be able to sleep a wink.

I shook my head.

Let’s face it, I’m just not sleepy, I told myself. And I want to read the rest of the book.

I sighed and stole a glance at the big volume lying on the table. And that was that. I plunged into “Anna Karenina” and kept reading until the sun came up. Anna and Vronsky stared at each other at the ball and fell into their doomed love. Anna went to pieces when Vronsky’s horse fell at the racetrack (so there was a racetrack scene, after all!) and confessed her infidelity to her husband. I was there with Vronsky when he spurred his horse over the obstacles. I heard the crowd cheering him on. And I was there in the stands watching his horse go down. When the window brightened with the morning light, I laid the book down and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. My mind was filled with scenes from the novel and with a tremendous hunger, obliterating any other thought. I cut two slices of bread, spread them with butter and mustard, and had a cheese sandwich. My hunger pangs were almost unbearable. It was rare for me to feel that hungry. I had trouble breathing, I was so hungry. One sandwich did hardly anything for me, so I made another one and had another cup of coffee with it.

To my husband I said nothing about either my trance or my night without sleep. Not that I was hiding them from him. It just seemed to me that there was no point in telling him. What good would it have done? And besides, I had simply missed a night’s sleep. That much happens to everyone now and then.

I made my husband his usual cup of coffee and gave my son a glass of warm milk. My husband ate toast and my son a bowl of cornflakes. My husband skimmed the morning paper and my son hummed a new song he had learned in school. The two of them got into the Sentra and left. “Be careful,” I said to my husband. “Don’t worry,” he answered. The two of them waved. A typical morning.

After they were gone, I sat on the sofa and thought about how to spend the rest of the day. What should I do? What did I have to do? I went to the kitchen to inspect the contents of the refrigerator. I could get by without shopping. We had bread, milk, and eggs, and there was meat in the freezer. Plenty of vegetables, too. Everything I’d need through tomorrow’s lunch.

I had business at the bank, but it was nothing I absolutely had to take care of immediately. Letting it go a day longer wouldn’t hurt.

I went back to the sofa and started reading the rest of “Anna Karenina.” Until that reading, I hadn’t realized how little I remembered of what goes on in the book. I recognized virtually nothing―the characters, the scenes, nothing. I might as well have been reading a whole new hook How strange. I must have been deeply moved at the time I first read it, but now there was nothing left. Without my noticing, the memories of all the shuddering, soaring emotions had slipped away and vanished.

What, then, of the enormous fund of time I had consumed back then reading books? What had all that meant?

I stopped reading and thought about that for a while. None of it made sense to me, though, and soon I even lost track of what I was thinking about. I caught myself staring at the tree that stood outside the window. I shook my head and went back to the book.

Just after the middle of Volume III, I found a few crumbling flakes of chocolate stuck between the pages. I must have been eating chocolate as I read the novel when I was in high school. I used to like to eat and read. Come to think of it, I hadn’t touched chocolate since my marriage. My husband doesn’t like me to eat sweets, and we almost never give them to our son. We don’t usually keep that kind of thing around the house.

As I looked at the whitened flakes of chocolate from over a decade ago, I felt a tremendous urge to have the real thing. I wanted to eat chocolate while reading “Anna Karenina,” the way I did back then. I couldn’t hear to be denied it for another moment. Every cell in my body seemed to be panting with this hunger for chocolate.

I slipped a cardigan over my shoulder and took the elevator down. I walked straight to the neighborhood candy shop and bought two of the sweetest-looking milk-chocolate bars they had. A. soon as I left the shop, I tore one open, and started eating it while walking home. The luscious taste of milk chocolate spread through my mouth. I could feel the sweetness being absorbed directly into every part of my body. I continued eating in the elevator, steeping myself in the wonderful aroma that filled the tiny space.

Heading straight for the sofa, I started reading “Anna Karenina” and eating my chocolate. I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. I felt no physical fatigue, either. I could have gone on reading forever. When I finished the first chocolate bar, I opened the second and ate half of that. About two-thirds of the way through Volume III, I looked at my watch. Eleven-forty.

Eleven-forty!

My husband would be home soon. I closed the book and hurried to the kitchen. I put water in a pot and turned on the gas. Then I minced some scallions and took out a handful of buckwheat noodles for boiling. While the water was heating, I soaked some dried seaweed, cut it up, and topped it with a vinegar dressing. I took a block of tofu from the refrigerator and cut it into cubes. Finally, I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth to get rid of the chocolate smell.

At almost the exact moment the water came to a boil, my husband walked in. He had finished work a little earlier than usual, he said.

Together, we ate the buckwheat noodles. My husband talked about a new piece of dental equipment he was considering bringing into the office, a machine that would remove plaque from patients’ teeth far more thoroughly than anything he had used before, and in less time. Like all such equipment, it was quite expensive, but it would pay for itself soon enough, since these days more and more patients were coming in just for a cleaning.

“What do you think?’ he asked me.

I didn’t want to think about plaque on people’s teeth, and I especially didn’t want to hear or think about it while I was eating. My mind was filled with hazy images of Vronsky falling off his horse. But of course I couldn’t tell my husband that. He was deadly serious about the equipment. I asked him the price and pretended to think about it. “Why not buy it if you need it?” I said. “The money will work out one way or another. You wouldn’t be spending it for fun, after all.”

“That’s true,” he said. “I wouldn’t be spending it for fun.” Then he continued eating his noodles in silence.

Perched on a branch of the tree outside the window, a pair of large birds were chirping. I watched them half consciously. I wasn’t sleepy. I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Why not?

While I cleared the table, my husband sat on the sofa reading the paper. “Anna Karenina” lay there beside him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He had no interest in whether I read books.

After I finished washing the dishes, my husband said, “I’ve got a nice surprise today. What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“My first afternoon patient has canceled. I don’t have to be back in the office until one-thirty.” He smiled.

I couldn’t figure out why this was supposed to be such a nice surprise. I wonder why I couldn’t.

It was only after my husband stood up and drew me toward the bedroom that I realized what he had in mind. I wasn’t in the mood for it at all. I didn’t understand why I should have sex then. All I wanted was to get back to my book. I wanted to stretch out alone on the sofa and munch on chocolate while I turned the pages of “Anna Karenina.” All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had been of Vronsky and of how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his characters so skillfully. He described them with such wonderful precision. But that very precision somehow denied them a kind of salvation. And this finally―

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips to my temple.

“I’m sorry, I’ve had a kind of headache all day. What awful timing.”

I had often had some truly terrible headaches, so he accepted my explanation without a murmur.

“You’d better lie down and get some rest,” he said. “You’ve been working too hard.”

“It’s really not that bad,” I said.

He relaxed on the sofa until one o’clock, listening to music and reading the paper. And he talked about dental equipment again. You bought the latest high-tech staff and it was obsolete in two or three years... So then you had to keep replacing everything… The only ones who made any money were the equipment manufacturers―that kind of talk. I offered a few clucks, but I was hardly listening.

After my husband went back to the office, I folded the paper and pounded the sofa cushions until they were puffed up again. Then I leaned on the windowsill, surveying the room. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why wasn’t I sleepy? In the old days I had done all-nighters any number of times, but I had never stayed awake this long. Ordinarily, I would have been sound asleep after so many hours, or, if not asleep, impossibly tired. But I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. My mind was perfectly clear.

I went into the kitchen and warmed up some coffee. I thought, Now what should I do? Of course I wanted to read the rest of “Anna Karenina,” but I also wanted to go to the pool for my swim. After a good deal of agonizing, I decided to go swimming. I don’t know how to explain this, but I wanted to purge my body of something by exercising it to the limit. Purge it―of what? I spent some time wondering about that. Purge it of what?

I didn’t know.

But this thing, whatever it was, this mistlike something, hung there inside my body like a certain kind of potential. I wanted to give it a name, but the word refused to come to mind. I’m terrible at finding the right word, for things. I’m sure Tolstoy would have been able to come up with exactly the right word.

Anyhow, I put my swimsuit in my bag and, as always, drove my Civic to the athletic club. There were only two other people in the pool―a young man and a middle-aged woman―and I didn’t know either of them. A bored-looking lifeguard was on duty.

I changed into my bathing suit, put on my goggles, and swam my usual thirty minutes. But thirty minutes wasn’t enough. I swam another fifteen minutes, ending with a crawl for two full lengths at maximum speed. I was out of breath, but I still felt nothing but energy welling up inside my body. The others were staring at me when I left the pool.

It was still a little before three o’clock, so I drove to the bank and finished my business there. I considered doing some shopping at the supermarket, but I decided instead to head straight for home. There, I picked up “Anna Karenina” where I had left off, eating what was left of the chocolate. When my son came home at four o’clock, I gave him a glass of juice, and some fruit gelatin that I had made. Then I started on dinner. I defrosted some meat from the freezer and cut up some vegetables in preparation for stir-frying. I made miso soup and cooked the rice. All of these tasks I took care of with tremendous mechanical efficiency.

I went back to “Anna Karenina.

I was not tired.

yellowfist

moved to blogger...

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thanks Sarah Browning and polymexina for the post.---The Republic of Poetry: Martín Espada's Hampshire College Commencement Address

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thanks Sarah Browning and polymexina for the post.
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The Republic of Poetry: Martín Espada's Hampshire College Commencement Address