Off Trail, with Nashi and Kurari

Given how illness and overwork have decimated Citizen of Somewhere Else for the past month, it's time once again to consign another programming schedule to the recycle folder of history. I have a bunch of posts in various stages of ye olde writing process that are worth putting out there whenever I get them done, not on a day of the week that no longer even corresponds to my teaching schedule. My grades are due on the 27th, so don't expect too much going on here before then.

In honor of this being the last Family Friday post for awhile, however, let me note that onechan is like Tiger Woods in having a birthday come during the holiday season. Hers, though, is ten days before his, and, unlike his folks, we don't get her one shoe for Christmas (not least b/c we don't celebrate it) and one for her birthday, although we are almost as cheap. But when you have an imagination as rich as hers and a little sister as cool as hers, you don't need much stuff.

Case in point: onechan has been adding to our pantheon of imaginary characters. Unlike the mythical Saja and Suweet, however, her imaginary friends Nashi and Kurari are pretty much normal little girls. They're both Spanish, and they may be 6-year-old twins, although I have to check on that, because sometimes it seems like Kurari is Nashi's friend and sometimes her little sister. And sometimes it sounds like Kurari's parents are dead. My uncertainty stems from the fact that onechan rarely gives me updates on their lives, preferring instead to tell stories to herself about them and play with them. It was a really funny moment to me last night in my parents' hotel room (they made it for her actual birthday and will stay through her girls' party on Sunday, weather permitting--yeah!) when, in the midst of playing with her gift from them (a wood block stamp/colored pencils kit), she started telling them about her new friends. I don't know how much they caught, because she was kind of distracted and sounded like she was talking to herself, and they were very distracted for other reasons that I shall not be getting into here, but it was striking to me how casually she was speaking of characters she invented (and knows full well are "pretend"). It's amazing to watch onechan become a story-teller and to see how play and storytelling are so intertwined in her head and in her actions....

Welcome Valveteers; or, One Thing You Might Not Have Known About Bill Benzon

Bill Benzon just passed along my little plug for Marc Bousquet's How the University Works, so I'll let all you Valveteers (as in Rocketeers, Musketeers...) in on a little open secret: quiet as it's kept, Bill writes fantastic (in all senses of the word) children's literature.

For what it's worth, this post is rated PG (for procrastinatory gratitude).

How the University Works

Do yourself a favor and get Marc Bousquet's How the University Works--and of course visit his book's blog regularly. The journal he founded and I edited for awhile is doing just fine without us--check out the latest issue and back issues over at Workplace.

This academic labor moment has been brought to you by the letter W.

Whoops, Missed CitizenSE's Blogiversary

Don't be fooled by the date on the first CitizenSE post. This blog began on December 1st in Fukuoka, Japan, out of my dissatisfaction with having only 40 minutes to survey the various transformations of my Hawthorne project and reflect upon what they reveal about changes in my fields in an address to the Kyushu American Literature Society I would be giving the following day. So while I missed the blogiversary, I at least got a post in on the anniversary of the talk that inspired it. Which is better than I expect to do the rest of the month here. We'll see!

Racialization Matters: Notes toward a Global History of Race

Later today I'll be part of a panel discussion on race on my campus--one of those "sum up the history of the race concept in 10 minutes" deals. Given how much I overprepared for my Big Read talk--and totally stepped on my co-panelist's time (sorry, Dustin!)--and given how many student conferences I have over the next week, starting in a few hours (it's final project time!), I'm pretty much only going to try to do two things in this talk:

1. Summarize the consensus view on the history of race in North America (Fredrickson, Gossett, Horsman, Jacobson, Morgan, Omi and Winant, Smedley), the Atlantic world (Allen, Berlin, Forbes, Gilroy, Hall, Linebaugh and Rediker) and the West (Balibar, Fredrickson, Hannaford, Malik, Snowden, Stepan, Zizek);
2. Introduce a few new angles on this consensus that a global perspective (Bender, Dikotter, Dower, Mamdani, Marger, Prashad) can offer.

Too bad it's too late to check out recent studies by Ramán Grosfoguel and Denise Ferreira da Silva, as well as Racialization and Racism: A Global Reader, but that would just lead to the overpreparing problem again, right?

Do Not Taunt Super Wacky Fun Ball Mostly Harmless Jinx

OK, so I've had a lot of fun with the notion of a Mostly Harmless Jinx this past year, but things are getting out of hand. I mean, wouldn't it be ironic if the penultimate post here was on death and we happened not to make it to Syracuse for Thanksgiving Dinner later today thanks to the season's first real winter storm? For you all, that is. Or maybe not. Who know what irony means these days?

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 AM TO 4 PM EST THURSDAY.

OCCASIONAL RAIN WILL GRADUALLY MIX WITH...THEN CHANGE TO SLEET AND SNOW DURING THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING. THE CHANGE OVER WILL TAKE PLACE FROM NORTH TO SOUTH WITH NIAGARA AND ORLEANS COUNTIES THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE ANY WINTRY PRECIPITATION. IT IS NOT OUT OF THE QUESTION THAT THERE COULD BE A PERIOD OF FREEZING RAIN AS WELL OVER THE HIGHER TERRAIN SOUTH OF BUFFALO AND ROCHESTER TOWARDS DAYBREAK.

THE PRECIPITATION WILL COMPLETE ITS CHANGE OVER TO SNOW THURSDAY MORNING. THE SNOW SHOULD THEN TAPER OFF TO SNOW SHOWERS BY MIDDAY THURSDAY AND ACCUMULATE JUST AN INCH OR TWO...BUT THE COMBINATION OF MIXED PRECIPITATION AND TEMPERATURES FALLING TO NEAR FREEZING WILL RESULT IN VERY SLIPPERY ROAD CONDITIONS FOR THE THANKSGIVING DAY HOLIDAY. THIS WILL BE THE FIRST BOUT OF WINTER DRIVING CONDITIONS OF THE SEASON FOR MOST OF THE REGION...SO EXERCISE CAUTION IN YOUR HOLIDAY TRAVELS.

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IS NORMALLY ISSUED FOR A VARIETY OF WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS SUCH AS LIGHT SNOW... BLOWING SNOW... SLEET... FREEZING RAIN AND WIND CHILLS. WHILE THE WEATHER WILL BE SIGNIFICANT... THE WORD ADVISORY IMPLIES THAT SEVERE WINTER WEATHER IS NOT ANTICIPATED.

A laugh a minute that Weather.com is, is what I say.

What with imoto learning how to walk down stairs by herself and repeat whatever everyone around her is saying, letting a little winter storm stop us would be a real let-down. So in honor of our upcoming drive, a little dialogue from a trip to Buffalo the other weekend.

Onechan [interrupting the tsuma and I]: Daddy, talk to me now!
Imoto: Dada!
Onechan: No, imoto!! It's my turn to talk to daddy!!
Imoto: Dada!
Onechan: No, imoto!!! It's my turn to talk to daddy!!!
Imoto: Dada!
[repeat, adding exclamation points as you go]

Hasta la vista, baby! Happy Thanksgiving, from the Constructivist and the Full Metal Archivist....

"I Don't Wanna Be Die"

That's what onechan told me a little over a week ago. She's been figuring out what death is and what it means over the past couple of months. It's hard to recall how it started. She knows that she is named after the tsuma's grandmother and has gone with us to visit her grave site every time we visit Baba and Gigi in Chiba. She likes to listen to the wind-up music on the photograph we have of her great-grandmother, especially on the anniversary of her death. But lately she's been putting two and two together and asking all sorts of questions. She knows both sets of my grandparents are dead and she knows you visit the graves of those you love, so now she wants to visit my dad's parents in Syracuse this Thanksgiving. She's aware that animals die, too. She was fascinated by the dead skunk that nobody would remove for weeks from the edge of the factory parking lot we drive by almost every day on the way to her hoikuen. When I was reading her a story about Thanksgiving last night, she got very upset that the Wampanoags and Pilgrims hunted wild turkey; when she saw the bows and arrows and processed my explanation of them, she exclaimed, "But the turkeys may get hurt!"

She's still trying to get her head around the notion that everybody dies and you never know when it might happen. For a while, she insisted that she didn't want to turn 10, because she thought she would die soon after. It's not that she doesn't know bigger numbers--we've gone up to 100 in English and over 10,000 in Japanese (thanks to our efforts to teach her about takai [expensive] and a dollar still being worth over a hundred yen)--but it took me a long time to convince her that 100 is old, not 10.

Here's what she knows about death as of right now (she's next to me and I'm translating her answers into complete sentences: if you hurt yourself bad, you can die; after you've been dead awhile, you lose your skin; when you die, you rest in cemetery (which she keeps calling a temple or a church). Gotta go--she wants to type ("on a big big page, ok?")....