In the secular night you wander around alone in your house. It's two-thirty. Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit. You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.
Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it's baby lima beans. It's necessary to reserve a secret vice. This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud. You'd be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn't now. Outside there are sirens. Someone's been run over. The century grinds on.
Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Committee response to Virginia Tech tragedy
April 23, 2007
We would like to offer our deepest sympathies to those who lost their loved ones, as well as to those who were injured, in last week's shootings at Virginia Tech. As members of various campuses ourselves, we can only imagine how this magnitude of violence has impacted the entire community. We grieve for this tragic loss of lives and shattered sense of safety.
In the ensuing days, we have been further saddened by the ways in which Seung-Hui Cho's ethnicity and immigrant status have been emphasized in some quarters. We feel that this works to distance him from U.S. society and reinforces a misapprehension that has been present for over a century: the idea that Asian Americans--even those born here--are perpetual foreigners and therefore not "real" Americans. While Cho originally immigrated from South Korea, he did so at the age of eight and, therefore, was raised and socialized as an American.
Without placing Cho's ethnicity or immigrant identity in the proper social context, such emphasis may foster misplaced racial prejudice, suspicion, and discrimination. As the Asian American Psychological Association observes, "Psychological research has indicated [that] experiences with specific individuals of color have the clear potential to be generalized - to the detriment of the community and the shared goal of justice and equality." Thus, as Stewart Kwoh of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center suggests, we must be alert to potential backlash while we also work to "help heal the nation and support the Virginia Tech community."
We recall that the race of the White shooters was not highlighted in discussions of the killings at Columbine High School eight years ago, nor in other high-profile cases that occurred in California; Jonesboro, AR; Paducah, KY; Pearl, MS, and other schools in the United States. While it is beyond our scope to speculate here on the causes of such violence, we can say this: just as other shootings were the exception rather than the rule in their communities, so too must Cho's actions be understood as the aberrant behavior of an extremely troubled individual. Let us not add to our burden of loss by stigmatizing immigrants, entire ethnic groups, or nationalities for tragedies that arise from some combination of mental illness and the pressures of modern society.
We must try to understand and ameliorate the complex factors that cause some young people to commit atrocious acts of violence to others and to themselves. Rather than fixating on race, ethnicity, or immigration status, we appeal to the media and other public forums to focus attention on the issues of gun control, the culture of violent masculinity, and resources for the effective diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Let us try to make our communities more compassionate by reaching out to those who feel alone and forging communication across cultural boundaries.
On behalf of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Committee,
All the things I wanted to do and didn't took so long. It was years of not doing.
You can make an allusion here to Penelope, if you want. See her up there in that high room undoing her art?
But enough about what she didn't do — not doing was what she did. Plucking out
the thread of intimacy in the frame. If I got to know you that would be — something. So let's make a toast to the long art of lingering. We say the cake is done,
but what exactly did the cake do? The things undid in the land of undone call to us
in the flames. What I didn't do took an eternity — and it wasn't for lack of trying.
We fall in love at weddings and auctions, over glasses of wine in Italian restaurants where plastic grapes hang on the lattice, our bodies throb in the checkout line, the bus stop, at basketball games and we can’t keep our hands off each other until we can— so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs, falling in love again. We go to movies and sit in the air conditioned dark with strangers who are in love with heroes like Peter Parker who loves a girl he can’t have because he loves saving the world in red and blue tights more than he would love to have her ankles wrapped around his waist or his tongue between her legs. While we watch films in which famous people play famous people who experience pain, the boy who sold us popcorn loves the girl who sold us our tickets and stares at the runs in her stockings every night, even though she is in love with the skinny kid who sold her cigarettes at the 7-11, and if the world had any compassion it would let the two of them pass a Marlboro Light back and forth until their fingers eventually touched, their mouths sucking and blowing. If the world knew how the light bulb loved the socket then we would all be better off. We could all dive head first into the sticky parts. We could make sweat a religion and praise the holiness of smelliness.
I am going to stop here, on this dark night, on this country road, where country songs come from, and kiss her, this woman, below the trees which are below the stars, which are below desire. There is a music to it, I hear it. Johnny Rotten, Biggie Smalls, Johan Sebastian Bach, I don’t care what they say— I loved you the way my mouth loves teeth, the way a boy I know would risk it all for a purple dinosaur, who, truth be known, loved him.
In the Midwest, fields of corn are in love with a scarecrow, his potato-sack head and straw body, hanging out among the dog-eared stalks like a farm-Christ full of love.
Turning on the radio I hear how AM loves FM the way my mother loved Elvis whose hips all young girls loved, sitting around the television in a poodle skirt and bobby socks. He LOVED ME TENDER so much that I was born after a long night of Black-Russians and Canasta while “Jailhouse Rock” rocked.
Stamps love envelopes, the licking proves it— just look at my dog who obviously loves himself with an intensity no human being could sustain, though you can’t say we don’t try.
In High school I once cruised a MacDonald’s drive-thru butt-naked on a dare from a beautiful Sophomore, only to be swallowed up by a grief born from super-size or no super-size.
Years later I met a woman named Heavy Metal Goddess at a party where she brought her husband, leading him through the dance floor by a leash, while in Texas cockroaches love with such abandon that they wear their skeletons on the outside.
Once a baby lizard loved me so completely, he moved into my apartment and died of hunger.
No one loves war, but I know a man who loves tanks so much he wishes he had one to pick up the groceries, drive his wife to work, drop his daughter off at school with her Little Mermaid lunch box, a note hidden inside next to the apple, folded with a love that can be translated into any language: I HOPE YOU DO NOT SUFFER.
Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community
A few days ago I stumbled across a couple articles mentioning TheFacebook, and a little start-up capital they happened to get in the sum of $13 million. The number intrigued me, so I did a little more research, a little more stumbling, and found something that even I still have a hard time accepting. So, here's what I came up with:
(p.s. - I'm hoping that someone from EFF or people concerned with privacy rights will take notice. This really worries me and a lot of my friends.)
TheFacebook.com, created in February of 2004 by 21 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, is a student social network now active at more than 800 campuses, with more than 2.8 million registered users. [1] Among its features, TheFacebook allows a user to upload a picture of themselves and can include information about their favorite music, books, movies, their address, phone number, e-mail, clubs, jobs, educational history, and even political affiliations. Facebook is extremely popular, attracting on average 80 percent of a school's undergraduate population. However, there are some questions raised regarding privacy concerns on the site, and when some digging is done to find out who is really behind the site's management, there are more questions than answers.
The first venture capital money to come into TheFacebook, $500,000 worth, came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal. [1] A Stanford graduate and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel is author of the book "The Diversity Myth," [2] which received praises from notable neo-conservatives such as William Kristol. [3] In fact, Thiel is on the board of the radical conservative group VanguardPAC. [4]
Further funding came in the form of $12.7 million from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel's manager James Breyer was former chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVAC). [1] Breyer served on NVAC's board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, [5] a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. [6] This firm works in various aspects of information technology and intelligence, including most notably "nurturing data mining technologies."
Breyer has also served on the board of BBN Technologies, a research and development firm known for spearheading the ARPANET, or what we know today as the Internet. [7] In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board, becoming a part of a firm packed with leaders from other areas of Silicon Valley's venture capital community, including none other than Gilman Louie. But what is most interesting is Dr. Jones' experience prior to joining BBN.
Jones herself served on the Board of Directors for In-Q-Tel, and was previously the Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense. Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
While the nearly $13 million that came from Accel to fund The Facebook certainly looks suspicious and unfortunately disturbing after reviewing all of this information, the only problem on the surface seems to be the appearance of some incestuous relationships between the Pentagon, the CIA, and these venture capital firms. But this goes further than just the initial appearances. DARPA shot to national fame in 2002 when John Markoff of the New York Times announced the existence of the "Information Awareness Office" (IAO). [8] According to Wikipedia, "the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data." [9] Protests came from civil libertarians on both the right and the left who saw the IAO as a new Orwellian arm of the United States government. After Congress investigated DARPA's project, funding was cut off and IAO was essentially dead in the water.
The Information Awareness Office seems to have survived some of its original purposes in a mutated form, found in today's Facebook. In fact, one of IAO's original example technologies included "human network analysis and behavior model building engines," [10] a surprising echo of the social networking mapping that Facebook does using SVG visualizations. [11] Add that to the information that Facebook collects and compare it to the startlingly similar goal of the IAO. It appears at first glance that DoD, along with the CIA, has managed to circumvent its previous Congressionally established limitations and find corporate sponsorship for its programs, under the thin veil of a useful social network for unwitting college students.
And those college students continue to log on to TheFacebook, completely unaware of the massive affronts to their privacy. The so-called "Privacy Policy" [12] of Facebook includes a statement saying that they "may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." It goes on to say that, "We may be required to disclose customer information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law or to protect our interests or property. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies."
Some of the aspects of the privacy policy are downright creepy and confusing. This particular gem is especially disturbing: "Thefacebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site." And there's no telling when the privacy policy may change. As of when this was written (July 1, 2005), the policy was effective as of June 28, 2005.
Who knows where the information they collect about these three million college students, alumni, and professors is going, or what they intend to do with it. The fact that these companies and agencies are all so closely related, and that The Facebook has almost no organizational transparency are all cause for concern. Hopefully we can soon uncover the truth.
BITCH www.myspace.com/bitchmusic and warming up the stage: arjuna greist www.myspace.com/arjunagreist Mount Holyoke College Campus in South Hadley, MA 8pm The Great Room of Blanchard Campus Center $10 to the public, $5 for Five College students, $3 for MH students directions: www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/programs/arts/map.html information: 704-785-1572
Adrienne Rich
From an Atlas of the Difficult World
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
Maybe one day, along the way You'll remember me, on this island Smiling at you, how I used to Maybe one day, you'll remember
And it won't be sad, to think of all we had All unhappy ends could be behind us then Maybe one day, along the way You'll think of me, and you'll be smiling Maybe one day, you'll remember
"And," she said, "you must talk no more about ecstasy. It is a loneliness." The woman wandered about picking up her shoes and silks. "You said you loved me," the man said. "We tell lies," she said, brushing her wonderful hair, naked except for the jewelry. "We try to believe." "You were helpless with joy," he said, "moaning and weeping." "In the dream," she said, "we pretend to ourselves that we are touching. The heart lies to itself because it must."
i will be driving around new england staying with people i like. if you are one of these people and would like to hang out and let me sleep on your floor, holla atcha girl.
Wandering through the woods of your absence I come across a tree, symbolizing your sexuality and spiritual sanctum.
It is shaped like the Y-vein in your forehead which I wanted to solve for, yank like a wishbone, or spin like a needle to guide me.
I remember discovering you on a bar's peninsula and immediately surrounding your natives. You were drinking my logic. We swallowed the same blueprints.
Your tongue unlocked the swirling keyhole of my ear as you whispered: yes, again and again, so soft I couldn't hear what you said
except your S'es stretched like tendons over the valley of infants we balanced our piano above.
But I'm not in the vicinity of your falsetto and the only sound reaching out to me is the hand of a clock, cracking its sixty knuckles.
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uberjkim's journal
bouncy
