A star is born

I wish I knew what this boy is saying, or for that matter, what he’s doing, but for now, we’ll just have to assume that he’s getting ready for something real big.

It’s been more than five weeks since I’ve visited the deaf school. There’s still a lot of work to do. I have the students look over the drafts. They are just photos of words/signs, but I see kids running their fingers over the pictures as if it were text in a book. When humans get ready to enjoy a good read, we kind of wiggle our butts into our chairs like, “Ah, this is going to be good” and that’s how I observe the kids with the drafts. It proves again that books are a primary pleasure and people are starved for them when there aren’t enough. It must also mean that seeing one’s world represented in any form must be pretty fascinating and very satisfying.

The challenge of language is to use strange sounds and stranger squiggles to represent meaning thoughts and collective cultures. On the other hand, the physical worlds that we have constructed are already physical texts of collective cultures and political mishaps, but it takes scrutiny and knowledge of history to decipher them. Why is Vientiane filled with architectural examples of 60s American Modernism? Why is Luang Prabang being re-created in faux colonial style, or better yet, what are the true examples of neo-colonialism? Why is Watay Airport in Vientiane Japanese? What skills of interpretation do we have to answer these questions since the book hasn’t been written yet?