words for a friday

xenolalia - speaking in a language that you don't know the meaning of

The future of work

This article ostensibly talks about a Walmart first, the whole staff of a Wal-mart store walking out. Given Wal-mart's aggressive anti-union, anti-labour policies, what drove these, mainly hispanic workers, to take such a drastic step. It was the implentation of a new company policy, that is a sign of indentured work in the future to come:

moves to cut the hours of full-time employees from 40 hours a week to 32 hours, along with a corresponding cut in wages, and to compel workers to be available for shifts around the clock.

In addition, the shifts would be decided not by managers, but by a computer at company headquarters. Employees could find themselves working 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. one week and noon to 9 p.m. the next. "So workers cannot pick up their children after school everyday, and part-timers cannot keep another job because they can be called to work anytime," says Vasquez.

In addition to scheduling changes and reduction in hours, workers are now required to call an 800 number when they are sick. "If we are at an emergency room and spend the night in a hospital and cannot call the number, they won't respect that," says Larosa, who has worked at the store for six years. "It will be counted as an unexcused absence."

Nostalgia in Hindi

I went to India 7 years ago, and it was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life. Music and vibrant primary colors saturate every pore of your skin.

The songs of a blockbluster movie are released months before the movie is released. These songs are broadcasted over every little tin-pot battery radio receiver held by every grizzled shopkeeper in every roadside stall in every dusty streets in the state of Utter Pradesh.

And so the songs of the hit of 1999, "Taal" has sedimented somewhere in the deep dark recesses of my travelling memories. The movie stars the scrumptuous Aishraya Rai, former Miss World (who only lipsynchs). It was the only film I saw in a cinema, somewhere in Delhi. Although I didn't understand a word of Hindi (namaste), I got the gist of the 3 1/2 hour story, and a kindly doctor explained the story to me a week later. Well i had though those memories lost, that is, until I found on Youtube, a music video of "Ishq Bina", the hit-song from the movie, a gorgeous fusion of Indian lyricism with some western flourishes. Enjoy.:



Note the product placement and displaced sexual metaphor in the last frenzied minute of the film clip.

In the prophet's own words

Why do earnest spiritual seekers often find it necessary to learn to read spiritual texts in the original language? We have middle-class white buddhists contorting their hands around sanskrit letters, young black muslims coughing out arabic glutturals, biblical scholars struggling with declensions of aramaic and ancient greek, and of course, young american jews struggling with the hebrew of the Torah in downtown Manhattan.

Learning languages is hard. I lived in a foreign country and it took me over a year and a half to learn the basics. That's only to have a non-idiotic conversation at a party, talking about where I come from. It takes at least double that time to achieve the proficiency to read complex spiritual texts. So why the bother?

Most religion wrap themselves around a holy book. There's something majestic and authoritative about marks on papyrus. And ultimately, theology in written form is just more transportable. In the days before the printing press, books were much more precious commodities - laborious to make, expensive to finance, and difficult to make accurate copies of - books were expensive treasures for the rich and indolent, and the scholars that they would patronize. Even today, with the technologies of the printing press and the word processor, a beautifully produced book still possesses the qualities of a magical object.

Religious books in America are less exotic treasures and more of a marketable commodity. There is a whole cottage industry of translating religious books. All you have to do is march down to your nearest esoteric book store, and you will find a gazillion different translations of the Bhagavad Gita, all printed on cheap india paper in dirt cheap ink-type, that is thick and heavy, and hard to read. Differences between translations are enormous. Some translations translate difficult terms literally, keeping the phoneticisms of the original language. In other translations, english words are appropriated in awkward sounding ways, like the use of that clunker, lovingkindness, in South-east asian buddhist texts.

However, in many different traditions, it is taught that the earnest seeker must learn the original language that a holy book is written in, before they can truly understand the meaning behind the books. Why watch a grainy video shot by a handicam inside a noisy cinema when you can experience glorious 75 mm film in dolby surround sound?

If you've ever met earnest beginning spiritual seekers, you will find that they generally tend to be insufferable puritanical party-poopers, full of pointless trivia, and prescriptive to the hilt. Like the cool kids, they'll wear the right gear, say the right things, and rain down a stream of do's-and-dont's. To join a new religion is to deny one's original culture. It is an act of identity recreation. Speaking a new language, is the final erection of the new self.

But what is to be gained in reading the original book in the original language? The simple reason is that the great holy books are often, also great works of poetry. Spiritual power is poetic power married with spiritual insight. And poetry transmits meaning not just in the simple meaning of the words, but through shades of meaning and technical effects of rhyme, rhythm and meter. The Koran contains a myriad of puns and in-jokes, in arabic.

And because spiritual writing is poetry, it suffers the same difficulty in translation. Poetry is notoriously virtually impossible to translate. Most religious translations are made by earnest religious scholars, not linguistically adept poets. That is why teachers of religions find translations tinny and stilted. When religious teachers complain that a translation misses the spiritual essense, they are really saying that it lacks poetic fluency. So when a spiritual seeker takes the long and arduous journey in learning the original language of a spiritual text, they are really taking the world's most painful poetry class.

Guest blog from Warren Longmire

Live and direct from the marsh cafe, this is warren longmire bouncing light across the keys of one BASCO HO's macbook. Lovely keyboard indeed I must say. There is something sexy about a nice keyboard. But I digress...

Check out my search for the san fran god scene at www.ascatteredlight.blogspot.com. It's the hotness. Be well. Be merry. I'm out.

bic runga does jacques brel

Trawling on youtube, I find an extreme example of pan-national cross-cultural fertilization. Bic Runga, new zealand singer of malaysian chinese descent sings in french - "ne me quitte pas" the signature song by belgium's greatest export, jacques brel. It's the torch-burning song, and Bic gets to shows off her singing chops, on-stage emotional histrionics, and command of the french language: