ktravula – a travelogue!

Break Time/Tone

I will not blog much this week because I feel a little overwelmed. On the bright side, I have Steve Jobs’ authorized biography to get through to take some of the stress off, along with a few other materials in my thesis development.

On that last bit, a question for language students: does anyone have a guess as to why (American) English speakers have problem with tone in language? Yes, they are not used to tone languages because English is intonational. But they never have such problem with music which also works with tone levels, so what’s going on? Here’s more, when researchers who have looked at the matter say that one of the reasons for poor tonal acquisition by American/English learners is the limited “pitch range” of such learners, what exactly do they mean? English speakers are humans too and pitch is physiological and not something tied to race or skin colour. I have looked everywhere online for information about this and I haven’t come up with much.

I can do with some brainstorming session here.

Go Cardinals!

The last in the 2011 American World Series games will take place tonight. The St. Louis Cardinals are playing with the Texas Rangers. I support the Cardinals, of course, not only because they’re our team, but because they have come back with resilience in each game where they’ve been written off. Whoever wins today’s game will become the “World” Champions. Why shouldn’t it be the Cardinals?

Here’s another conceit: maybe Governor Rick Perry of Texas will reconsider running for president if his team loses. I’m kidding, of course. 🙂

Go Redbirds!

Update: We Won!!! The Cardinals are the World Champions!

Book, Blook, Bloog, Blog…

Ikhide Ikheloa has joined the blogging community. This next sentence, otherwise supposed to describe him in a few words and put him in the context of Nigerian and African literature, will however be used to tell you something else: that blogging is the future, or at least the way to it. With electronic data content and text being gradually becoming the most viable medium of communication, it takes no prophet to see that what literature is will also eventually take on a more pro-electronic bias. I have said this before, and let me repeat it here (as if it needs repeating, duh) that the future of literature depends in some form (if not entirely) on the internet. A future Nobelist from blogging, anyone?

You should also follow @SalmanRushdie and @TejuCole on twitter while we’re still talking about the internet as a literary resource.

Evening in Edwardsville

I took these series of photos in April.

The flatness of the land here makes it easy to have some of the best sunset views I’ve ever seen. My current apartment also overlooks an expanse of westward land that makes it a very delightful place to be relaxing between five and six during summer and fall evenings.

Fading Landscapes

Spoke to mother hours ago. Two men from the landscape of my childhood just passed away. One was Pastor, the leader of one of the first churches that shaped my most vulnerable childhood times. He is around sixty years old. The other was Bro Kenny, younger, the director of the youth arm of the other church I belonged to as a teenager. Together with a select group of agile young people who all lived around that area of our youth, Bro Kenny as we called him then, led us through that period of our young restlessness.

Childhood and youth seems to fade away fast enough, and suddenly becomes a lifetime away. Faces from times past come flashing back, with strong energy currents of a familiar place… worshipers in church about three evenings a week, loving life with purest of enthusiasm, young innocent teenagers developing a crush for the very first time for fellow members of the youth group, trial music composers, dancers, proselytizers, picnickers, thespians, and general happy-go-lucky innocent boys and girls growing up within a bible-based yet liberal upbringing. Childhood was a little stricter, with religious instructions that extended beyond the church walls looming around as a constant threat and bulwark against our otherwise footloose rascally tendencies.

Where did all that go, dusty feet all around Akobo where all of this began? The naivete of youth, and the delightful profundity of biblical directions that sought to explain everything away? The simplicity of the day, the sweetness of the rain, the long pleasant smell of the harmattan at Christmas, the noise of little children during church services, the laughter of grown women and the intensity of their prayers up to heaven, the offering baskets and the coins we put in them, the general fervent intensity of youthfulness and mischief – all just floats around the plate of memory. Maybe this is what one death – or two – does: remind of how much was lost. And more importantly, how much more once was.

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