The fly in the bottle syndrome adjacent plastic to glass

There is a difficulty in writing about the recent past. The portal of the Spanish language probably has something to do with it. It feels like a year as past since being in Lawrence despite how quickly time went by --feel hesitant referring to "time" like that, as if it were a subjectivity on equal footing with an individual human-- and there is the same old inertia felt. Meeting women is just as difficult as it has been for the last three out of five years or so. Or it is made difficult by my unwillingness to engage in social situations where the risk of boring conversations is not eliminated. Already there are too many good friends with whom valued time is spent.

It did not take long to dive back into reading about the political affairs of my home country. It's exciting, terrifying and frustrating as always. Luck is felt if a poem every other day can be written--even if it's just a fragment. It usually is.

Reading list: one of the most recent university texts on Colonial Post Colonial Literature. It's an anthology of English language short stories. England, the Caribbean, India-Pakistan, Canada, Ireland Australia, New Zealand and former African colonies are all represented. There is more difficulty in understanding some of these stories than expected. It is usually due to rich indigenous religious traditions that are evoked or represented. The question arises: maybe some more history is needed on some of "these people" (to be said with a slight KS-MO Oakie drawl) before going any further?

This goes against my general feeling about how literary narratives should be read. The ignorance of the cultural context in which a story is written can bring about a radical and sometimes more fundamental human interpretation. There is a fear of being trapped in the old identity politics that simply reinforce the legitimacy of racial, ethnic and other worn out dialectics. Still the way that the average human appropriates for him/herself conventional cultural memes, icons, religious and consumerist narratives requires some basic understanding of the culture. As a matter of culture wars debates, it doesn't seem like the multi-culturalists (political if not classical Liberals and other Leftists)have argued their case too well. But that may be more an indication of how segregated and homogeneous most communities in the world are. So many Individuals and images thereof have yet to be born.

The anthology contains a lot of loaded and stupid questions following each story. E.g. stupid as in obvious: "who is the narrator? What is his perspective on the events related to history?"; loaded (also obvious): "What do you think the story is saying about 'progress', machinery, debt and imperialism?". The story in question is about an old cobbler who is talked into buying a more advanced sewing machine that promises to increase output, but the interest on the loan (this is in British occupied India) breaks him.

Then again, it is still remembered how new everything involving literature is to most students.