Thinking poetically

There were times, buried long ago
among memories of schools and friends and the ashes of a life -
the slash-and-burn living of everyday scattering of
identity
- of hope.
I love that word. I wrap myself in it, my nose and eyes burn when
I see it. It chokes me, those four bulging letters,
Like the furies. I've almost murdered you.
Almost.
Remembering a car ride with my father, when it felt like he lost hope.
Or maybe it was the first time I noticed.
Driving me home from something, somewhere, and answering
my probing about his new job with that soft calm serious voice
I'm not interested in a promotion,
that soft calm serious voice again,
that stuff doesn't matter to me anymore.
and again, battering at me with calmness,
i'm too old to care about that now.
too old.
That soft calm voice was a corpse to me.
My own hope weakened that day, my hope
felt a little chest pain and ignored it
That my novels - those aborted children sitting headed with no trunks, no bodies, no real flesh or meaning and certainly no life -
sat meaningless unfinished in cold computer-memory corners
my memories and muscles fading, collapsing.
Hope - that great hope that bulged from under my eyelids, that crammed my guts full of brilliant strong words like sackfuls of expanding grain bursting and breaking my body open to pour out the fecund language of hope and love and meaning

I hope, but that hope is weakening as other things weaken, my grip my memory my strength
I hope, but that hope knows limits that before were but the medieval constraints of small nervous minds
I hope, but that hope knows that sometimes sleep and food and money are needed to live and keep on
I hope, but that hope knows that time is short and fleeing fast
I hope, but that hope knows its weakness.
It is a wise, weak hope.
I hope.

Poem by Neruda

This is a translation of a Neruda poem, an ode. Even for a translation, this poem shows a masterful articulation of the delight in the everyday that can really sparkle. I sometimes think that the most powerful poetry shows us something beautiful about our everyday lives. This is a poem like that.

Soap,
I bring you
near my face,
and your snowy perfume
seems foreign to me.
I don’t know the land
of your origin,
aroma,
do you come from
provincial turf?
Or from my gorgeous cousin?
From laundry in a trough
soaking, or from the starry hands
of a chill?
Or from those lilacs,
oh those lilacs?
Or from the eyes of
Maria, the farm girl?
From branches, full and heavy,
with green plums?
From the soccer field
or from the bathroom
under the trembling willows?
Do you smell like arbors,
like sweet love,
or a saint’s day cake?
Do you spread the aroma
of a dewy heart?

What do you bring me,
soap?
To my nostrils
suddenly
in the morning
before entering dawn’s
waters,
to leave through the streets
among men overwhelmed
by the burden of their merchandise?
What perfume of a distant
town,
petticoat flowers,
honey of wild girls?
Or maybe
it is the old-fashioned
essence of the
general store
and foodstuffs,
strong white linens
pressed in the hands of country folk,
the happy
plushness
of spun sugar,
or my uncle and aunt’s
kitchen cupboard,
or a red carnation
like a ray,
like a crimson arrow?

Is that
your brisk
bouquet
of bargain
stores,
of an unforgettable colony,
of beauty parlors,
of a pure province,
of immaculate water?

Soap,
you
are
pure delight,
fleeting fragrance
slipping like a shipwreck,
like a blind fish
in the profundities of the bathtub.

Posting again?

I'm pulling an old trick and posting twice when I have time, so that I don't feel so bad when it takes me another week to get back to a computer.

I just watched Munich, and I was disappointed. Spielberg uses an interesting plot device to highlight the moral conundrum the main character faces. The massacre of the Israeli Olympic team is told in chunks alongside the story of a team of Mossad assassins sent to kill the people who murdered the athletes. The story is mostly about how the Mossad killers struggle with the morality of assassinating killers - who probably deserve to die, but who deserve to die for doing things very much like what the assassins have to do now. In other words, the act of assassinating the terrorists is a lot like terrorism. Perhaps it could be argued that these were not innocent people, but terrorists argue that way too.

I suppose it's an interesting thing to think about, and I like sitting here thinking about the ways that this movie folds back on itself and connects in odd ways. I like the way that the movie pulls an actor that I haven't seen in anything except Moonraker as Mr. Drax, and makes him a strange sort of French businessman. This actor, and the son who supplies most of the information about the whereabouts of the terrorists to the Mossad team, really intrigued me as a character who sold information about the location of the terrorists, and then someone who turns around and sells information on the Mossad team.

I hate it, though, when a movie tries to catch you not paying attention. There were a lot of things that I missed because of bad lighting or because I wasn't paying enough attention. I couldn't decipher whether they managed to kill the last target or not, and I don't know if the guy who was with him died or not. I hate that I don't know, and I'm too frustrated to go back and check now. Part of it was that I was watching it on a small TV from far away and my eyes are not that great. Part of it was that they didn't make the movie in a way that I could follow easily.

The other movie that I watched was Batman Begins. This was much better. I was surprised at how deep they tried to take it, and how I was willing to follow it. I suppose I'm a sucker for superhero movies, and Batman has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid - though not as big as Spiderman to me. Anyway, I thought that this movie was really well done. I like Katie Holmes as the in-your-face idealist assistant DA, and I like it when she slaps Bale around for bringing a gun to kill the guy who killed his parents. I like Liam Neeson in the movie - he seems a good choice for the strangely mystical Shadow guy. The Ninja training that Bruce goes through doesn't seem like much - there are some montage scenes of fighting and stuff that look kind of cool. But the scary part was the sudden way that Dr. Crane spooks people. That was kind of nifty. I suppose I liked that part - the dust and the scarecrow mask were kind of a shock.

Anyway, I'm going to bed now. Night night.

It's Been a While

It's funny how things get crazy when school starts. There are so many things that I had planned to do over the two weeks that we get between Christmas and the start of school. And so few of them happened.

I've been commiserating with other teachers through my program a lot lately. That's one nice thing about the alternative certification thing - you end up hanging out with other new teachers more than most, I think. I mean, there are twenty other new teachers in my classes that I take two nights a week. I hear a lot of horror stories (war stories, I think we can call them), and I get a lot of sympathy when I choose to share my stories. I know that I'm not the worst off out there, and I know that other people are really struggling to be good teachers. It's hard to take a room full of overachievers and throw them at an uncertain situation with so many ways for things to go wrong. It's a really tough job, and I'm not just saying that. It's funny how many people say that to be nice or respectful but don't really think that. It's like people who say that we should respect our elders but politely tune them out when they talk, or don't go and visit. Don't get me wrong - I know that I should, but I also neglect my family and my elders more than most.

Anyway, I managed to stay up all night last Thursday. And I got two hours of sleep this Thursday night. The way my schedule is, I get almost no sleep on that night. And then I'm burnt out for the weekend and need the time off to recover, so I fall behind again and the cycle repeats itself. Oh well.

Thinking about Teaching

I'm a teacher, and I'm thinking today about how good I am. I'm going to start classes again on Monday, and I'm also going to have to attend classes at a local college of education - that same place that I was attacking in my last post. I'm not excited about the workload, but I'm getting anxious sitting here doing so little. I'm not the kind of person who does well with a lot of free time. I make big plans about all of the things I will do with that time, and I get very little done. I seem to thrive on being busy, and I don't know what to do when I'm not. That's not good for your heart, especially with a family history of heart disease.

So I'm sitting here planning out my classroom as much as I can. I'm not very happy yet with all of the plans, partly because there are so many things that I want to be able to do today. I can't get into my school during the break, so I can't get in there and start making the physical changes that I want to make. So I'm going to be scurrying around on Monday morning, arriving as early as traffic and coffee will let me, and trying to make things happen. I wanted to make the class look physically very different, but I'm not sure that it's going to happen. I don't know that I have enough time. I suppose I could do it on Monday evening after school, but how much can you get done in that short of a time?

I've mentioned the book that I'm reading to help me figure out more about how to plan a lesson and be a better teacher. It's How the Brain Learns by David Sousa. I'm finished now, and I think that reading his book has been very enlightening. This is the first time I've finished an entire teaching book, which says something. Maybe it says that I'm desperate. I don't know. But it suggests also that the book is valuable and readable. It presents ways that the brain retains information, retrieves it, and how to make these things work best in an instructional context. I would like to think that this has made me a better teacher - knowing more about these things - but we'll see.

Anyway, back to work at it. I hope to be as ready as can be come Monday.

Thinking about Schools of Education

I just had a meeting with a professor at my school of education. I won't name it, because I don't want to have to be nice. The place is, first of all, like a poorly run corporation, sitting in an office building in Chicago with administrative offices spiraling through the building in incomprehensible order and array. You have to get help to find an office. It's not even all in the same building. The professors are mostly former and current teachers, and because of the strange diversity of skills in the profession, the professors are also diverse in teaching ability. In other words, many of the instructors in the school of education can't teach. Or they teach the class in a way that doesn't match their students. It's so hard to adjust your teaching from one age to another - speaking as someone who took three years of college teaching into a fifth grade classroom - and many of these teachers don't do it well. There have been a few exceptions. But mostly it's embarrassing how bad some of these professors are.

Then there's always one. One person on the faculty who gets it. Who knows what's going on, understands the issues that you're facing, and constructs the class as a solution to the problems that you really have. Or will have. A teacher who can teach. Isn't that a strange idea? A teacher who can design an effective lesson, and then carry it out. Someone who cares so much about her students - all of her students - that she can learn all of their names within the first week - difficult when there are hundreds and you only meet once a week - and then she makes herself available for office hours DURING THE HOLIDAY BREAK. In my ten years of higher education, including my preliminary examinations, I've only been able to meet with a professor over a break three times. And that was serious graduate school stuff. This was just because she wanted to make sure we were doing okay.

And, of course, many of us aren't. She's smart enough to know that and take steps to solve it. Damn. She's good.

I just wanted to think about her, and I wanted to throw it out there that I want to be as good as her someday. Or even half as good.

Something from Uncle Walt

I didn't write this, but I wanted to post it out there. It's in the public domain - it's more than 150 years old. But it's fabulous. I wish that I could write like this.

Miracles

WHY, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the ships with the men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

Walt Whitman (1856)

Gary Ross!

I just checked out the director of Pleasantville on IMDB. Check it out yourself - it's interesting.

This dude wrote Big, one of my favorites. He wrote and directed Dave, another of my favorites. And he also did Seabiscuit, another movie that I really enjoyed though not as much as the others. But it's fascinating to me that the same guy was involved in those first three movies. All of them have stuck to me. Bravo, Gary.

Thinking about Pleasantville

I just caught the last half of this movie on cable (here it is on IMDB). (I'll be sad when we give that up - it's nice to have ten channels of bad movies to flip through, but we can't afford to keep the crap when we don't need it. I suppose we can't make that argument too strenuously, though, because who really needs TV? What the hell is it for anymore? So that you don't feel bored when you're at home and you have nothing to do? That's a different post.)

Anyway, I was watching this movie and I got hooked. It helps that I like the ladies in it. It helps more, I think, that there is this broad population of sympathetic characters stifled in simple yet powerful ways. It's a wonderful idea for a plot, and I like Tobey McGuire (is that how you spell it?) too.

I want to think more about why this movie gets to me, though. I think part of it is the mother. Tobey's mother. She's so sad, and convincing in her self-discovery. And the cafe dude who paints. I love the way that he stares at the art book when Tobey brings it in. You don't think that a guy like that will be able to enjoy a book with abstract naked pictures in it. But there's that great scene where he just stares at it a few minutes. And you watch his face as it seems to be blank, but he's stuck on it. Staring, as if absorbed by it. And what bookish person can fail to enjoy the scene where the kids are bringing books to Tobey and asking him how they end? That's fabulous - that the public library can become a threatening place because of what's in the books? You can tell this is a fantasy.

The plot is predictable and perhaps even tiresome, with the only slightly interesting gimmick of the black-and-white slowly becoming color. I suppose I'm saying that I don't know why this cheesy movie gets to me.

Let's look at parts that work best for me. I really like the part when Tobey gets William H. Macy to change color in the courtroom. The way that he uses his words to pull the color out of Macy is great - and the way that he gets him to express his love for his wife, in a world where it's not okay to do that. Bizarre as that is, that seems to be the premise. Passion is not acceptable. So this scene - where Tobey pulls such an obvious and commonplace passion out of Macy - becomes rather powerful because of . . . well, I still don't know yet. Because I'm a sap for that? Maybe.

Maybe it's because of Reese Witherspoon. Having sex with her boyfriend at Lover's Lane doesn't make her change color, because she's a slut in her real life and sex doesn't arouse passion in her anymore. But reading D.H. Lawrence does! That's fabulous.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's going on. Jeff Daniels (the cafe guy) is a convincing natural artist. Tobey is a good aw-shucks, relucant revolutionary. I like those things. I like a movie that makes me feel like someone similar to me - Tobey is a lot like millions of nerds out there - can do something meaningful and important. Maybe it's just that simple. I don't really (want to) believe that, but maybe it is.

The more I think about it, the more I like the color-changing gimmick. It's something that is really easy to dramatize on film, and something that conveys meaning immediately. You can invest it with all sorts of connotation - the "no coloreds" signs in the window bring up an analogy to racism and the lynching that was still occurring in the 50's - and it really manages to load things into the image that aren't easy to put there in other ways. I don't know, I guess I think in terms of print and writing too much to really appreciate something like this, but it's effective.

Trying again

Last night, I was sitting in a bookstore. Of course. And I was reading a book about learning theory. And I was getting bored at one point, and listening to a conversation behind me. It was these two middle-aged women talking about movies that they like to rent. You can tell I live in the burbs, can't you? They were talking about some movie - I didn't catch which one - and they were trying to figure out an actress's name. Frances McWilliams. Frances McCollins. Frances McDouglas. I knew the actress pretty well, having just watched North Country and having loved Fargo and the Coen brothers in general, so I was biting my tongue. I didn't want to turn around and say it, though I thought that might be funny. I got up and went to the bathroom, and when I came back I got some coffee. I was standing right in front of them thinking about how I might tell them who they had been talking about. "Frances McDormand. That's the actress you're searching for." How stupid would that sound? "Yes, I was bored with my book, and yes, I was listening to your conversation. Though I wasn't paying attention to the way that you were viciously mocking yourself for your video-rental habits. By the way, you can get these videos for free at the library. Did you know that? Save yourself some money. Oh, and be careful what you talk about at the bookstore. There are bibliomaniacal weirdos skulking about looking for opportunities to pelt you with movie trivia."

Alas, poor Frances. If only your name were Frances Mc. You might have a better fan base.

Ah public libraries

There's this great library in Chicagoland that has all of these quotes from famous people about how great public libraries are. They build character, they are a public conscience, they are a national treasure, so on. That's how I feel about libraries. They're so nice. I might be a little obsessed, because I hunt out libraries and wander around them, checking out oodles of books that I know that I won't read, much as I buy books that I know I won't read. I suppose I keep hoping that some day I will have a chance to be that writer or professor who doesn't have any real work to do and wants to sit and read stuff for fun or enlightenment. Hah!

So I like libraries, enough to border on an obsession. I hunt out libraries in my area, and I bookmark and check their websites and catalogs for books. I like bookstores almost as much as libraries, and I spend hours in them. Literally hours. I bring work to do to the bookstore - like a lot of people - and then I wander around looking at books that I won't read and can't afford.

I've always wondered about that. I suppose that in some way Borders profits off of the coffee and the loitering in its cafe. And I suppose that this is a good business model. But what about the people who don't buy coffee? I suppose there's something somewhere that shows that it pays off in some way. The nerds attract other nerds, and eventually you get the super-nerd with the money to buy stuff who pays the bills for the rest of the herd, right? Or the climate you create by offering coffee and a place to sit (and maybe a washed-up or never-was musician) entices purchasing. Or, perhaps just being a huge bookstore with a wide selection of books that can be easily searched from the Internet is a good thing.

I suppose it's safe to admit here that I want to open my own bookstore. There was this used bookstore in Chicago that I went to a few times. Old building, twelve-foot or taller ceilings (really tall - can't remember exactly how tall), and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full - jammed and bursting - with old and new books. It was not a small space, more like a medium-sized city shop for Chicago, and it was stuffed with books. It was kind of an interesting atmosphere. There was old furniture to sit on and read, and some back rooms and basement rooms to scour for stuff. But it was like finding needles in a barn full of haystacks. You had to climb over boxes to get to some sections, and you couldn't expect to find anything really. They were sorted according to bizarre bookstore logic - with fiction and literature separate and mystery and thriller and so on. And in one of the rooms was an industrial thermos of coffee. Weird. They were selling coffee, but it was hard to get around to someone who might make you pay for it.

This is random crap. I'm done. This sucks.

Happy New Year

I'm uncomfortable with 2007. I wasn't quite comfortable with 2006, and it's already 2007. I've always wondered at how time seems to speed up as you get older. I think it's because you have a greater sense of past time. A year doesn't seem like such a long time when you've lived through 25 or 30 of them already. And a day? Pshaw. I can waste a day surfing the freaking time-sucking Internet.

I don't like complainers, so I'm going to stop now.

I just wrote an e-mail to my advisor in graduate school. I'm getting my dissertation going again. I haven't completed a proposal, partly because I haven't found my niche. I've got my subject, for the most part - Faulkner. But I'm not sure what I'm going to say about him yet. I don't know what to say about him that hasn't been said already.

It's funny how the way that you spend your time says things about you. I have this time off right now, and instead of doing things that will help me be a better teacher, I've been watching movies on cable. I did read a book, or most of a book, and I sat down and made some sketchy plans yesterday. But that's about it. I mean, I'm spending the time doing things that are just . . . stupid. What value do stupid movies really offer? I suppose it's an experience that I can share with other people. I suppose it's something that might someday allow me to talk to someone that I might not have anything else in common with. But what are the chances of that being the case? What are the chances that this movie, right now, will be useful? I suppose it has helped me explain myself or explain something to myself in the past. There was a movie that furnished an example of a particular philosophical problem. Stupid movies can often be smart by accident. Of course, I'm having trouble thinking of an example right now.

Oh, here's one. The movie Dave. It was altogether a silly and improbable movie about a man who coincidentally looks exactly like the president, and who is recruited to double for him in a public setting. Something happens to the president, and some unscrupulous advisors decide to make him play the president while they make all of the real decisions. He becomes a kind of puppet, because they know that the awkward truth - that the president had a stroke while having sex with a mistress - might catapult them out of power. The movie milks this situation for some funny scenarios, like Dave throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game, and so on. And the pundits are the best part of the movie - the celebrity cameos and such.

What I like about this movie is how it seems to ask a question - what if we stopped trying to make government so complicated that no one understands it, and instead decided to keep it simple and just get things done?

The other question it asks is a bit more sinister: what kind of person succeeds, in this system, in becoming president? What attributes does this process reward? I don't think that the people who made this movie created it to answer or even to ask these questions, but that doesn't matter much. I like to wonder about these things, and I enjoy this movie because it encourages me to think about things in new ways. Isn't that the point of watching movies? Perhaps that's the point of watching foreign films. So that we can see what other people consider normal, or abnormal, or what other people think about the world, about life, and about how things are. Because maybe we can change our own reality - question our own values - better if we can see them from the outside.