To my friend Bonnie, A note for you, for what it means to me “to be an American” – as you request. It is a fraught notion. As you know, I’ve history of a third of my life living in Asian nations, allowing perspective, uncommon for most of our typical neighbors. As well, I left the first time, to build a book of poems for a collection of my pointed realizations, penned in our shared language in a way that…
The images that rotate in the screen behind my icons on my computer’s Desktop are of a trip that I took in the last month of visiting China where I saw a bunch of Tibetan language on signage, together with HanZi script, the panel-language of “Chinese” if you will. The place names and titles of shops or road sign images of these pictographic communication tool are still clear to me as names that speak in their image based representations. Jiu…
I’m saddened to hear about the 5.9 scaled earthquake that has struck the Gansu state of China in the last 24 hours. It is an area that I have a great appreciation for, having visited twice. I don’t often travel such great distances multiple times, but after my first visit to Gansu, I had to go back for more…more mountains, history, massive carvings in cliffs, temples, monasteries, noodle shops (their capital, Lanzhou, is known throughout China by name, the way…
Seemingly months have passed since I’ve written in this blog, but not for lack of momentum, more for lack of digital participation. Time spent to reflect has been brilliantly analogue lately. Carrying around a leather-bound notebook while traveling a piece of the planet I’ve never been has been a pleasure that I am happy to share a shard of today. The notebook still needs to be typed at another time, but this reflection that I can share is based on…
Now I’m writing the introduction to what it was like to leave the nation I’d lived for about seven and a half years during the Covid epidemic’s breakout. China was where it began. That’s not in question. Nor is it an issue to me beyond the fact that I was a resident of China at that time, so I was near some of the early real social earthquakes as they happened, and some of what I’m writing in this book…
Recently, my University asked for recommendations regarding books that would be valuable for a publication they are putting together in relation to Black History Month. Below are my submissions. Upper Hand, The Future of Work for the Rest of Us, by Sherrell Dorsey, speaks directly to Black people in the scope of participating in the broader, American business world. ~Once the relatively safer space of school is over and the gloves are off, so to speak, in the competitive world…
Creating my next book has me considering a Frame Narrative style for the fifteen/sixteen chapters in six or so main sections that I’ll be putting together a bit like the last book with the pictures of China. And, so what that made me think about is the Voice. The voice of the book needs to have particular ears perked for it, in my mind anyway. You’ll notice that I mentioned many who helped with that in the last one. While…
So, school has been busy. Good busy, but busy nonetheless. I accidentally started studying the Thai language and am apparently enrolled and doing fairly well in a Chinese language course that I already have credit for, and apparently achieved the minor last term, but hey, that’s cool. Languages are fun. Loving how Thai is built~ They wrap vowels around consonants and are grammatically similar to English with the SVO thang. Good stuff. Sticking with Chinese solidly though. So much good…
As my most recent history is with the Chinese system, that’s where my knowledge-base and tool-reflexes lay, but I won’t recommend that as a target this year as they have a system of isolation and quarantine that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. That said, depending on the goals of this student, there are still a lot of places to start that are more general than not. I used to use https://www.eslcafe.com/quite a lot, but that was many years ago, and it…