NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I'll be at the Sukicon this weekend at the Phoenix Center at Father Duenas school in Mangilao. I will have a bunch of interesting things to display and even some stuff to sell. Sukicon is a gathering or cosplayers, gaming nerds, anime/manga nerds and even comic book geeks. There is an artist alley and different booths by exhibitors. For me, I'll be displaying/selling the following things: 1. I'll be displaying some of my grandfather's tools. I have a nice complete set of the seven traditional tools that I'll put out, as well as some examples of the 150 year history of Chamorro blacksmithing in my family, most notably a machete that is more than 100 years old, and made by my great-grandfather Mariano Leon Guerrero Lujan (Bittot). I also have some tools that my grandfather made and one or two that I helped him make more recently. This will be interesting as I'm sure most of the people attending Sukicon think of "culture" a bit differently, as usually

In my relentless attempts to keep myself so busy that I have trouble remembering everything I am supposed to be doing each day, I may be taking on, just for fun, an exciting creative project that I am uncreatively calling "Chamorro Rhapsody." Who knows what will become of this idea, but it will be fun no matter what happens. It started off, like so many things, as a joke on Facebook. During Chamorro classes last year, as part of a project each of my students got song lyrics and had to try and translate them into Chamorro. Some of them were more difficult than others. "Fly me to the Moon" was translated very quickly in just a couple of minutes. "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia took a little bit longer. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was too daunting for my students and so we worked more slowly on it. It was an important exercise in terms of understanding the nature of translation. Bohemian Rhapsody is much easier to translate than your average rap or hip hop

I've been working on my dissertation for about three years now, but have only spent the past year or so writing it. I could easily take another year to finish it, and sort of slowly and lazily work on it, but I'm in a hurry to get out of the graduate student phase of my life. Menha yu' ni' student debt, esta o'sun yu' nu i lina'la estudiante kolehu, ya guaha otro na malago bei cho'gue gi i lina'la'-hu. So I'm pushing myself to finish and have a tentative date for the first week of June to actually defend this damn thing. Right now I've written the first drafts of three chapters and am almost done with my fourth one. After that I've got one quick chapter left and then a conclusion and I have my sprawling, insane, crazily written first dissertation draft done. Este nai i guinife-hu, na bai hu (put fin) na'funhayan este na tinige', kosaki sina bai hu na'hanao mo'na i karrera-hu ta'lo. A few months ago one my frie

I recently received a call for papers on the topic of "film remakes." The abstract for papers is due the beginning of March and there's a possibility it'll turn into a book. As a lover of movies and other pop culture artifacts, and an academic who actively attempts to incorporate this love into my more supposedly serious work this edition excited me. I should note though that alot of times this incorporation doesn't go over very well. Last week for example, I received incredulous looks from a Native American girl when I said that Gayatri Spivak's question of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" can be answered through the song Don't Speak by No Doubt. If you think that's out of control, wait until you see me and my friend Madel try to show how Micronesians operate as American Viagra in producing American patriotism and sovereignty, through the lyrics to Weezer's El Scorcho. For most people these topics are intensely serious and therefore should be