things excavated, i:between the pages of a book, a change of address form in vaughn’s name dated 30 june 2005. i think i was meant to have submitted it to CMPB or ICA or whoever it is because i was coming home and he wasn’t, to declare that he was overseas and not to be called up for reservist, or something of the kind. does the fact that i still have this form mean i never submitted it (circumstantial evidence pointing to me having used it as a bookmark) and will he be arrested for NS evasion or something, when he next comes home?
~
things excavated, ii:
a piece of foolscap, on which is scrawled the cryptic remark “pugna interrupta” which i obviously thought was important at the time, for i underlined it several times. it bore no relation to anything else on the page. who was fighting and why did it break up?
~
things excavated, iiieven as i poise to throw out material on scaldic poetry — very sensible, surely, for when i was in school i’d had little interest in that area, and at this late stage should i ever go back to my old field i would stick to the 14th-16th century, obviously, why would i even attempt to learn old norse?! and yet i glance down — a handout by joe harris of his translation of ‘sonatorrek’ — and i see “my line is at its end like the withered stump of the forest maple / the man is not happy who bears the limbs of his kinsman’s corpse down from his house” and i think but that is gorgeous i could read that together with weinberger’s iceland essays and mayne’s cuddy about lying about like an old stump and mulisch’s quinten jumping into a puddle and there is a paper waiting to happen one day! (and so i stay my hand.)
~
things excavated, iv:blueshield massachusetts claim form explaining the ambulance of october 14, 2005, cost $372.80. this was the time i fell off a wobbly chair in the department lounge, got up merely wounded in dignity and walked home, and an hour later when i rose from a chair there was a sharp pain in my back and i blacked out and my roommate called the ambulance and the e.r. people gave me lots of morphine and i missed two weeks of school lying in bed listening to the radio and drinking thin soup.
things exacavated, iv-i:
a card from heath in relation to above incident, beginning “cara i just read you were in the hospital –” no one calls me ‘cara’ anymore, these days! (no one knows how to use the vocative either.)
[i am in self-imposed incarceration until my room floor stops looking like the ruins of carthage… this is agony - now that the exams are over i want to go out to see and do things, and if i stay in i want to curl up in bed and read!]
things excavated, v:recipe: shelled edamame dressed in ponzu sauce and topped with roast walnut crumbs, and a light sprinkling of chicken floss. this was apparently darryl’s idea of a good salad.
~
things excavated, vi:…as many as SEVEN empty (or relatively empty) notebooks of varying sizes and bindings. i shall spend december sitting in random places scrawling all day, as i used to before this law school lark gobbled up all my time.
~
things excavated, vii:assorted american income tax notices (i am considered resident alien for tax purposes, because of the five-year rule for F1 students.) i don’t even want to get started. my tax liability in singapore is a fraction of that and i get better public services. mmhmm.
~
things excavated, viii:a paper about the angel island poems. I could not make a field trip at the time (2006) so had to write an initial paper based on the photographic material and transcriptions of the poems — which had become available by then. I was looking at the recurrence of the word ‘angel’ in the poems, the different ways the word was rendered in Chinese (the indigenous Chinese word (but without mythological equivalence), transliteration, and direct translation of the English concept - importing religious overtones) and the shifts in meaning. i wonder what the current state of scholarship is on this corpus — asian-american literature is obviously completely outside of my field, but at the time i was looking into this topic for a class the only articles or dissertations i found were written from a socio-historical perspective (and one HLS dissertation that was about immigration law), no one as far as i can tell was writing about the poems as literature yet.
~
to be continued….
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird