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I went to see my doctor the other day to get some vaccinations, and decided to ask him about several occasions when, during the course of the past year, I broke out in pretty vicious hives after eating seafood. The symptoms were always the same: Mild nausea followed by itchy red welts which would appear about an hour after the meal and disappear 6 – 12 hours later. Seafood had never caused this kind of reaction with such frequency before I moved to Vietnam, so I was naturally puzzled about it. The doc explained to me that as we go through our lives, an untold number of germs, pathogens, and assorted alien particles pass through our systems, including the weakened viruses he had just stabbed into my shoulder. Most often, this causes an immune reaction which generates antibodies in the bloodstream, and the more antibodies, the more chance of an extreme reaction to some new unknown pathogen. Hence, the possibility of developing allergies we never had before.

Furthermore, allergic reactions are extremely sensitive to a myriad of variables, which is part of the reason the cause is usually quite difficult to ascertain. Like earthquakes, the majority of them are too mild to even notice, so they do not even register in our consciousness. In my case, it’s quite possible that the warm climate and generally lower level of sanitation in Vietnam resulted in a greater number of seafood-borne pathogens than usual. This temporarily overwhelmed my defenses -already weakened from the psychological strain of adjusting to a new home- which can usually deal with microscopic invaders quite handily.

Another interesting thing the doc said- when a large number of antibodies attack a correspondingly large number of pathogens, the blood vessels temporarily expand and the effects of the battle irritate the nerves. What actually transpires is very mild pain, which we perceive as a very itchy feeling.

All of this is quite interesting. My mind perceived something as x when it was actually y, despite the fact that y took place inside my own body which, technically, my mind is a part of. And the annals of Western medical science are replete with other examples of human minds doing the exact same thing. In that case, how much of what goes on outside our bodies is our misguided minds wrongly trying to package into neat little false dualities? Are we destined to continue questioning every little thing while being pulled along on the same broken-down chassis?

…

Today’s epistemological flight from Descartes to Unity

Result: Crash and burn. No survivors.

-Tom Waits

Nearly a year ago now, K’naan appeared on Democracy Now! to talk about his background, his upbringing in Somalia, and the many issues facing his homeland and its relations with other countries, particularly the United States. The interview is insightful and inspiring, definitely worth watching in full; at the end, Amy Goodman asks about his favorite song off Troubador:

I think that the most far-reaching song on this album is probably going to be a song called “Waving Flag.” It’s just something in the melody, something in the feeling that it gives you, one of those songs that you just kind of come upon.

The song does have an arresting melody backed by simple, relatable chords, and the lyrics speak to K’Naan’s experience growing up in, and then leaving, his war-torn homeland. He decries the disconnect between the rhetoric of political figures and the struggle of Somalian citizens caught between rival warring clans. “Wavin’ Flag” exemplifies the artist’s effort to overcome the severe depression and post-traumatic stress of his childhood through music. Amidst the hunger, violence, and despair, there is also an appeal to the unity of song, evident in the lyrics “Everybody will be singin’ it; and you and I will be singin’ it; and we will all be singin’ it.”

Fast-forward to June 2010, and K’Naan’s lyrical prophecy is becoming reality in a way that he couldn’t have imagined at the time of this performance. Coca Cola has adopted him and his song as the centerpieces of their global World Cup marketing campaign, but they had some problems with the song’s rather depressing lyrics. I mean really, who needs debbie-downer stories of violence and oppression when all we really want to do is use a popular sport and a popular song to sell some obesity elixir? From Billboard:

For its part, Coca-Cola loved the song but noted that lyrical references to “a violent prone, poor people zone” and people “struggling, fighting to eat” didn’t fit the campaign’s themes. “The crucial moment in the discussion came when K’Naan said, ‘I can take that song, refashion some of the lyrics and give you an exclusive version,’ ” Diener says. “That’s an attempt on K’Naan’s part to revitalize the song in the spirit of the World Cup.”

Ah yes, the spirit of the world cup: To act as a bellows for the smoldering embers of nationlism. The flag-waving and face-painting make clear that the political allegiances of the masses still lie with their nations, but we’re all god’s children because we all like football and we all drink coca-cola. Never mind the ranks of armored security guards policing heated match-ups, or the xenophobic insults hurled across the lines between Korean and Japanese fans. And the tens of thousands of South African shack-dwellers whose already embittered existences have been further shat upon by the country’s political and corporate elites? Pessimists and naysayers, all of them.

 This sentiment was clearly eaten up by K’Naan as he changed the anthemic refrain “and then it goes back” for his song’s ”Coca-Cola Celebration Mix.” A lyric possibly intrepreted as an observation of the circular nature of history clearly wasn’t saccharine enough for the needs of the singer’s new gravy train, so it was changed to “wave your flag.”

And the gravy train looks to be plentiful, indeed. Billboard reports further that

While Coke and A&M/Octone declined to discuss financial details, K’Naan likely garnered $1 million-plus in combined cash and promotional dollars committed. In addition to paying an overall project license fee to use the master recording-probably deeply discounted from the standard per-usage fees-and a similarly negotiated deal with co-publishers A&M/Octone and Sony/ATV, the project included payments to K’Naan for nearly nine months of personal appearances. As K’Naan is in a 360 deal with Universal, the label is a beneficiary of each revenue stream.

Now that’s a mouthful of music industry jargon, which basically amounts to this: If a musician wants to sell their soul to the devil in exchange for success, they needn’t even go so far as the Crossroads.

In a foreign land
There were creatures at play
Running hand in hand
Needing no where to stay
Driven to the mountains high
They were sunken
in the cities deep
Livin’ in my sleep.

I feel like goin’ back
Back where there’s nowhere to stay
When fire filled the sky
I’ll still remember that day
These rocks I’m climbin’ down
Have already left the ground
Careening through space.

I used to build these buildings
I used to walk next to you
Their shadows tore us apart
And now we do what we do
Driven to the mountains high
Sunken in the cities deep
Livin’ in our sleep.

I feel like goin’ back
Back where
there’s nowhere to stay

There are rare moments when a song speaks to you as if she were an old friend you hadn’t seen in a while. Her spirit travels through time and space to pay you a visit, binding you with love, offering sage words of consolation, sharing in an experience you thought you were living alone. The songs that stay with us are the songs that conjure this kind of deep emotional connection, and through the pure act of listening to them, we are temporarily liberated from our collective thrownness.

Neil sings here about a kind of homecoming; not in the traditional sense of the word, but a deeper, more primordial desire to be free from the fetters of property. The second verse carries an elegiac quality, not least because the buildings whose shadows “tore us apart” were built by the singer himself, and now there is nowhere to live but “in our sleep.” The “foreign land” represents our own ancient history, a place so long forgotten that we may never return. Goin’ back, then, is a dream made impossible by our own hands, for we have buried our innocence in the distant shores of memory.

In a way, this song represents the zenith of a journey that began a decade earlier with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Back then, the songs were about returning to a place where comfort and reassurance were close at hand, where the people were always warm and the beers always cold. Neil grew out of this phase though, and became, in the words of Robert Christgau, “wiser but not wearier, victor so far over the slow burnout his title [referring to Rust Never Sleeps] warns of.” The more mature artist still yearns for paradises lost, but he has also learned to embrace the very impermanence that took us away and may one day take us back.

I’ll be goin’ back this summer. But I won’t need a place to stay.

The most likely possibility is a combination of these two, for I started thinking about the nine months I’ve spent in Thanh Hoa and how reading articles on the internet has been such a huge part of my experience. Not even just articles but blogs, essays, e-books, interviews, lectures, arts reviews, reviews of reviews, comments posted to reviews of reviews, and response comments blasting the previous commenter using every racial and sexual epithet imaginable (and a few unimaginable ones, too). That doesn’t even include the cornucopia of visual and aural media- spoof videos, mash-ups, music streams, podcasts, and online documentaries. I can take comfort in my cyber-nomadic ways knowing that I belong to a tribe of millions, trolling around a vast wasteland like so many Wall-E’s, unearthing diamonds (or at least a few chuckles) from the debris.

Nevertheless, the substantial literature examining the epistemological implications of the internet has been largely critical. A litany of articles with provocative titles such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Multitasking Generation” (or, if you prefer a more direct approach, “The Dumbest Generation“) written over the past decade have popularized the hypothesis that new media technologies bloat our capacity for information without really making us more knowledgeable. Furthermore, instant access to such a wide range of information affects not only our data retention but our cognitive process and attention span as well. Classic tomes and academic treatises which used to be required reading are now skimmed or found on Sparknotes or even (shudder) Wikipedia. The art of in-depth conversation has been pushed to the wayside in favor of bulletized gists delivered over the caffeine-laced beverage of your choice, and that’s if you’re lucky, because most conversations will take place on one of many instant messaging services. With so many inputs and so little time, how can anyone expect to retain as much as 10% of the information they receive? The internet thus creates a propensity for breadth but little concern for depth.

These arguments are viable enough, to a point. No doubt the internet is changing the ways in which we think and act, but are the consequences really as nefarious as they are often made out to be? Let’s start with the stereotypical teenage student who has twenty tabs open in his browser while simultaneously listening to music, writing an essay, and watching a Youtube video that his friend just sent him over G-Chat. Of course he’s not devoting all of his mental energy to that essay due the next morning, but was there ever actually a time when teenagers were able to focus 100% of their thoughts on the task at hand? Being easily distracted has always been practically a sine qua non of childhood up to and including late adolescence, and if a kid doesn’t want to write a paper, they’re going to find ways to distract themselves whether that distraction comes from their own daydreaming or from external stimuli. Seriously folks, are we really worried about young people with “shorter” attention spans? Is this what’s going to cause the downfall of society as we know it?

No, I suspect the real underlying fear is that kids who derive inspiration from a wide variety of sources are less likely to be drawn into one narrow space where they can be confined and easily interpreted. Research on new technology and its impact on cognition stems from academia, and academia has a vested interest in attracting people who specialize. “Find your niche” is the guiding mantra of higher education, and once you find that niche, stay in it and don’t dare to venture out. Instead, stay inside and carve it out to perfection, guard it, and keep it warm and well-lit. It seems to me that this beehive model of specialization has become far too crowded to accommodate those who think audaciously enough to knock down the walls between adjoining cells. Thus, someone who knows what their interests are and knows that their interests can not be encompassed in the scope of one traditional academic discipline is less likely to seek out post-graduate study because they know that that means abandoning all but one (or two, with a little luck) of their interests.

For those still not convinced, consider the following analogy: When music was first offered on the internet for free, the recording industry and its chief lobbying arm the RIAA advanced a very similar argument to that being put forth by the digital-media skeptics. Aside from the more obviously disingenuous contention that free downloads take bread out of the hands of starving artists, they propagated an apocalyptic narrative in which the proliferation of digitized music devalued the art by saturating listeners’ sensibilities. The underlying idea here is similar to the bottom line of most arguments criticizing the new multitasking: that appreciation of a good declines in inverse relation to quantity and ease of access.  Well, as it turned out, people who downloaded an album and liked it usually went on to do one of three things: Buy a digital copy online, buy the CD, or most importantly, go to see the artist live. Who’s to say people aren’t doing the same thing for information they receive over the internet? I know plenty of people, myself included, who have come across a person or idea on the internet and later obtained a copy of a book or journal or magazine to further mine their new-found vein of exploration. Are we not short-selling our brothers and sisters by assuming that they’ll go for the quick and easy niblet each time without ever seeking out a full meal? Just as free downloads have fostered a vibrant and diverse musical culture by affording up-and-coming artists a way to bypass the foundering major labels, I believe the internet now serves an invaluable role as an educational tool, one which can be utilized without depending on over-priced and top-heavy universities staggering under the weight of their own dogma.

I am not suggesting here that institutional education be jettisoned entirely in favor of a more anarchic model of online self-schooling. There is still much to be said in and for the classroom, and besides, we are not providing most people with the kind of primary and secondary education that would lay down a solid foundation for them to venture out beyond the hive on their own. I do believe, however, that too much attention has been focused on the negative impact of the internet on the human mind, with not enough light being shed on its productive and constructive potential. Yes, old ways of thinking are dying out with the new technology, but that doesn’t mean that new and exciting ways of thinking aren’t being born. And of course, not many people read War and Peace from cover to cover anymore, but were we really happier when people did? Besides, that horse left the barn long ago, and to point a finger singularly at the internet is both misguided and deceptive.

For my own purposes, I can say that the internet has been a great pillar of support for me during this experience. Throughout the mind-numbing tedium of teaching English for TOEFL preparation, the internet and its gulf stream of pick-and-choose media has offered endless possibilities for stimulation that I would have been cut off from otherwise. The internet has also assisted me in my teaching by bringing a diverse array of learning tools into my classroom, to the great benefit of my students. Perhaps it is true that we don’t focus as deeply as we did twenty years ago, but like it or not, we are all part of a generation whose thoughts have been pushed toward dilettantism by an omnipresent and utterly indifferent technological judge. But is that really such a bad thing? More on that to follow…

By the way, that article I mentioned at the outset? Haven’t finished it yet.

-Machado de Assis

Getting robbed a few weeks back has proven to be a tough hurdle to overcome. I’m normally pretty proud of my emotional resilience, but I haven’t been able to fully bounce back from this yet. It may even be affecting my general mood; my temper has been shorter in class and  Last Friday I even came pretty close to expelling a student for leaving without completing a required assignment. He’s been a burdensome stick-in-the-mud since the class began despite numerous efforts by both Hayley and myself to reach out to him, so some kind of disciplinary action has been a long time coming. Nevertheless, I wonder if I would have done that had I been my usual mellow, easygoing self.

So am I just divvying out the one bad hand dealt to me by fate with profound indifference? If grief is a tax collected equally by Nature, is it also subject to Newton’s third law? Are all of us merely conduits for energies which circulate throughout the human species with unchanging inertia over the ages?

Yesterday provided a reason to debunk that last idea, a great cathartic release. Some of the students invited the foreign teachers to spend the afternoon at Sam Son beach, and having been cooped up in my room for a good part of the weekend due to the oppressive heat, I decided to get a head start on the motorbikes and ride my bicycle there. It being a Sunday during high season, the beach was crowded with flotsam and jetsam both human and otherwise; a pretty chaotic scene. I was particularly amazed by the number of people swimming and playing in the wet sand while fully clothed, including many of my students. At one point a Western couple cycled through the heaving throngs with looks on their faces befitting Dante and Virgil. Students urged me to go swimming but I declined telling them I couldn’t swim. Really, the water was filthy and I didn’t want to feel gross on the bike ride home.

Well wouldn’t you know it, as if to mock my futile efforts to stay dry, a storm front began moving in a few hours later. The skies darkened almost to the point of night, and there was a mad rush of taxis and motorbikes to get home because, after all, there’s no greater bummer than getting wet after a day at the beach. We let the bulk of traffic subside before charting our course, but less than a third of the way home the rain and lightning began in earnest. Rather than pedal against a headwind, I let one of the students tow me on his motorbike by holding the passenger’s hand. I won’t soon forget the sensation of being pulled along down a narrow country road through the cool nighttime rain, bolts of lightning frequently illuminating the sky. We were no more than half a kilometer away when the rain picked up again, and we were already soaked by the time we reached home so we(me and one other brave student) took off our clothes and danced in the rain like children. It was the kind of storm that entirely cuts off any sensation except the constant roaring and the feeling of water hitting skin. More a baptism than anything else, really.

After the rain we had a thit cho dinner and returned home for an immensely restful sleep.

-Broken Bells

Sigh… For the past week I’ve been waiting for the final brick in the foundation upon which I will base my decision of what to do next year; that final brick being a single email. I had been planning to send out a big update based on that decision, but no word yet so here’s something different for loyal friends who still check back here despite not having a new post in over a month (I know you’re out there- all three of you including my family But the more we worry helplessly about the future, the more we lose our way in the present, so this is something for the here and now.

Tomorrow heralds seven months to the day since I arrived in this town. It’s a small, rural town that easily lends itself to deprecating jokes about a lack of things to do.  No movie theater, no bowling alley, and the one western-style shopping mall in town is geared toward the functional shopper- veni, vidi, Visa. Most cafes and restaurants close at 10 pm, although the staff will generally be gracious enough to occupy themselves with a Korean soap opera while night-owl patrons polish off their watered-down beers and mocktails. Yesterday I passed a former student on campus as I was heading back to my room, and upon stopping to chat I asked where he was going. “I am going to drink beer with my friends at the bar,” he replied. Obviously this student had TOEFL-prepped himself into a phantasmagorical stupor. “The bar!?” I replied incredulously. “oh, you mean bia hơi.” Of course, there are no “bars” in the Western sense of the word. Coffee shops that serve beer and whiskey is as close as you get. There’s karaoke of course, but that is a different animal entirely, deserving of its own genus.

Then again, writing off Thanh Hoa for its lack of nightlife is a bit like turning up your nose at a 20-carat diamond because it isn’t cut to your liking. This may be the town that every other VIA volunteer still forgets the name of half a year into the program, but its value as a place to spend a significant amount of time is found precisely there. This is Anytown, Vietnam, one of the many cracks and crevices where trickle-down Economics slows to the pace of a cà phê phin. Henry Mencken had it right when he remarked “A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.” My experience here has been shaped by the people I’ve met, beginning with the students, who have been incredibly open and hospitable. They share their hopes and aspirati0ns, their concerns and anxieties, and overall, their love for their hometown. Nary a day goes by that I’m not asked “have you eaten (insert local delicacy of choice), a special food of Thanh Hoa?” or “have you been to (insert local place of interest), a special sight of Thanh Hoa?” After a while, the objective observer starts to wonder what isn’t special, and soon realizes, well, nothing. It’s all special, even the everyday, because it’s everyday.

The reason I feel the need to reiterate all of this is because the longer I stay here, the more isolated I feel in my views. We just got a new teacher here a few days ago, and another is leaving early next week, to be replaced in a week to ten days. This new person will be the 12th teacher to come through here since my arrival, an average turnover of one-two teachers per month. I’ve seen them all come and go, and it’s usually been due to some internal dispute with their company or with the administration- the town at-large has been a secondary cause, if even that. Of course, it’s not my place to make any rash judgments about the failure of many to embrace the town and what it has to offer, but it still pisses me off that no one seems to really be paying much mind to the casualties of this pedagogical revolving door: the students.

This is starting to turn into a rant and it’s a nice day out so just one more closing thought: I owe a large part of my good fortune in being able to extend roots deep into the soil here to my status as a volunteer working for an organization committed to cultural exchange and long-term partnerships with the organizations we work for. All told.

Here in Vietnam government response has been varied on this issue, sometimes waffling and other times showing a firm hand. They took several permanent measures to crack down on corruption back in 2006 (no doubt due in part to the WTO trade negotiations going on at the time) and ratified the UNCAC in June of last year. And in true Vietnamese fashion, they have welcomed the observance of International Anti-corruption Day. Unfortunately we’ve already seen the Vietnamese penchant to prematurely memorialize causes which sound good on paper, then leave the root causes unaddressed (cf. my post on Vietnamese Women’s Day).

Perhaps the most prominent root cause in this case is Vietnam’s lack of progress on media independence and freedom of expression. The most notorious example of institutional hypocrisy in this regard is the PMU 18 incident, in which high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Transportation were caught using millions in public funds to gamble on football matches (!). The journalists who aired the MOT’s dirty laundry were initially praised by government officials for their watchfulness but were subsequently arrested for “inaccurate reporting and abuse of power.”

Most observers both outside and within Vietnam expressed indignance and outrage at this incident but there were also some conservative voices justifying the arrests as a cautionary tale against abuse of journalistic power. This is the same argument advanced by the party, raising the specter of an all-powerful press running amok, slandering the good names of businessmen and public officials just because they can. But even if this fantastical state of affairs were to become reality in Vietnam, it is precisely for this reason that modern nations have built libel statutes into their codes of law. More importantly, people in positions of power need people who are paid twice a month to be all up in their shit. An active and unfettered media is imperative to keeping public officials honest, mainly through the threat of the one thing they hate more than journalists: Scandal.

Hopefully the resulting increase in transparency will filter down to positively affect incidences of petty bribery and graft. I needs me a zero-dong note to give to the next train conductor who tries to sell me an impromptu sleeper-upgrade!

I came across one such ditty a few months ago via a link posted on Facebook by a friend; a rather haphazardly told story from a longtime ex-smoker who sounds like she’s still having nicotine withdrawals. It’s an awkward narrative but a sincere one, to the point where I vicariously felt some of the self-consciousness that she had so obviously left at the door.

Listening to it again during a sleepless night, I remembered the many discussions I had back when DC first instituted its indoor smoking ban. It was a controversial move when NYC did it a few years before, as economic worries dominated the mainstream. By the time DC joined the bandwagon though, it had become clear that harm to small business owners (bar managers, restauranteurs, etc) was either nonexistent or negligible, so the floodgates opened and the people who questioned the smoking ban were exiled to the outskirts of polite society. Yet, when the tide of overwhelming public opinion combines with forceful legislation, things tend to get overlooked. Many of my fellow jazz-lovers agreed with the ban for the most part, but felt that jazz clubs should be exempted, as the cigarette smoke lent an inexplicable and essential “something” to the atmosphere.

Indeed, cigarettes and jazz have a long history together. My favorite incidence is the legend of how the Dave Brubeck hit “Take Five” came to be. That song has an iconic drum solo by Joe Morello, a solo which is still being transcribed, analyzed, and dissected by new generations of young musicians. The solo worked not because of what Morello did, but what he didn’t do. That era was still dominated mainly by the Buddy Rich-Gene Krupa school of drumming- the solo as an overwhelming and awe-inspiring display of speed and power. Morello turned that doctrine on its head with his graceful use of space, punctuating and emphasizing the trance induced by Brubeck’s piano ostinato. Anyway, the story goes that Paul Desmond decided to include that drum solo so that he could have a cigarette during gigs. Desmond’s ultimately fatal addiction (he later died of Lung Cancer at the age of 52) thus created space for some wonderful moments of artistic expression. I am not aware of the historical veracity of this story, but gosh darnit, don’t it just make you want to believe?

Even if that episode never happened though, the idea retains its purity: Truth and beauty (i’m told they are one and the same) are often born unexpectedly. In Hixson’s story, a couple of cigarettes resulted in a bond that never would have formed otherwise. That little white tube filled with toxins, the target of so much hatred and the bane of so many existences, birthed a fleeting and beautiful moment, and something tells me that every nicotine addict out there has a similar story. Even in our world of relentless rationality, that’s got to mean something, right?