Going through old papers, I found this. My business card from when I taught English in South Korea in 1988-89. Lots of memories, mostly good, some bittersweet, and also regrets. Maybe it’s now far enough in the past that I can write the part of the story that’s mine to tell.
Flower Friday
From “Arthur Mitchell, by Marianne Moore:
Slim dragon-fly/too rapid for the eye/ to cage…
Just finished the first final draft of an 11,000 word essay. Next step: let it sit a bit and then read it through again to see where it needs to be tightened.
Currently reading: The Truffle Eye by Vaan Nguyen, translated from Hebrew by Adriana X. Jacobs 📚. The author is a second generation Vietnamese immigrant to Israel.
Two articles I happen to come across today at more or less the same time, without further comment:
In The New York Times: In Worm, at Least, Making Sperm Is Found to Shorten a Male’s Life
From Princeton University: Mating is the kiss of death for certain female worms
Monday Morning Music
Soul Man
Flower Friday
I’m happy to have in Cloudbank 16 a translation by Sonia Alland and myself of “The End of the Labyrinth,” by Salvador Espriu, who was and is an icon of Catalan literature:
Monday Morning Music
Which Side Are You On?
I do not know the political or geographical specifics, but I identify with everything else about this poem: Mahikeng, A Forgotten Place - Botsotso @Botsotso_Gova
Currently reading: Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories by Rebecca Harding Davis 📚
Monday Morning Music
The Bricklayer’s Song
A lovely poem by Christina M. Rau, @ChristinaMRau, from What We Do To Make Us Whole.
Me and Gypsy, two different moods. The white chihuahua in the back to the right in the one where Gypsy’s giving me her paw is Bruce, and the mix who’s begun to wrap himself in his blanket is Charlie.
Watching someone being gaslit right in front of you and not being able to do anything about it—the details of why I’m in that position are not for the Internet—is frustrating, infuriating, and downright painful.
Continuing to make my way through Christina Rau’s What We Do To Make Us Whole (@ChristinaMRau). I’m enjoying how the language pushes at the emotional edges where sense breaks down, highlighting syntactically “plain” lines like this: The mountain wins/because it doesn’t need.
Clouds out the plane window looking like a landscape.
Not that women’s bodies have ever not been a battleground under patriarchy, and acknowleding we now need to think in terms of “people who can get pregnant,” SCOTUS has issued open declaration of war. Choosing sides is no longer, simply, a matter of opinion or differing values.
Things I never thought I’d talk about in class: I’m teaching the Prologue to The Arabian Nights, in which, as an article I had the class read put it, two kings and one male demon are “cuckolded” by the women in their lives. Students read it as a reference to the genre of porn.
In Christina Rau’s What We Do To Make Us Whole, this is from “Taking Tea From Places:”
Fall to pieces like muck left in the cup.
Still I’d rather have you broken
than not have you at all.
Finished reading: Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres 📚. This will, I am sure, be an unpopular opinion, but, as much as I agree with Metres on just about everything this book has to say, I was rarely moved by it in the way I expected to be, based on what I’d head about it. Nor did I feel substantively engaged or challenged in an intellectual way. Given the subject matter–Israel/Palestine–and given my own thoughts about the subject, some of which I’ve blogged about, I should write more at some point to try to figure out why my response to the book was so tepid.
Done grading for now. I am struck over and over again by the futility of the exercise when there are so many students in the class that there’s no way you give the kind of individual attention that might actually make grades a vehicle for learning.
Last one before I go back to grading. Two different shots of the same sculpture on a street in Düsseldorf.
They remind me of two old men having a cup of tea on a lazy afternoon.
