“The Rain God” by Arturo Islas

Beautiful novel.  It accomplishes so much in just 180 pages. It is able to tell the story of three generations of a family, but the way the telling of these stories is structured makes for very compact (densely-felt) rendering of these stories.

The novel is broken into different sections, and each section reads like a long short story; each section focuses on a different character, beginning and ending with Mama Chona– the matriarch of the family.  [The sections and their main characters: Judgment Day, Mama Chona; Chile, Nina; Compadres and Comadres, Juanita, Miguel Chico, Lola; The Raid Dancer, Felix, Ants, JoEl; The Rain God, Mama Chona]

What I like about the storytelling is this is definitely a novel in that it differs from a short story collection like The Things They Carried or Krik? Krak!.  The characters remain the same in each story (unlike Danticat’s collection).  Unlike O’Brien, the protagonist shifts, and because the narrator is a close 3rd person persona, the narrator seems to shift, to.  Also unlike O’Brien, there is an obvious movement forward in time (Time’s Arrow and If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler conflict with my conflation of chronology and the novel, but it’s an oversight I’m allowing myself right now).

As a way of conceiving a novel.  The narrator begins with a focus on Mama Chona– who she is, how she came to start the family she started.  Then, to continue to tell the family history, the narrator shifts to talk about one character (or one group of characters) at a time.  For example, the death of Felix is but a subplot for the larger drama between Miguel Chico and his wife Juanita.  Parts of Felix’s story (including the introduction of his daughter) come into this section because Miguel enters Felix’s story.  The narrator takes this diversion, shows the reader the characters of Miguel Chico’s brother’s family, and then goes back to the drama of Lola, Mickie, and Juanita.  The next section is fully devoted to Felix, and explains the events surrounding his death.  In the process, the narrator also explains more about this family, and the family history.

I wonder if a way to approach this structure is to think about characters.  Then think about 4 or 5 pivotal events that would effect several of those characters.  Than, write those events from the point-of-view of the characters to whom the event causes the most amount of change or tension.

Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

I’ve yet to know a winner lose.
This memoir, by Oscar Zeta Acosta, is one of the best autobiographies/memoirs I have ever read.  For too many reasons. The chapters alternate between a present-tense narrative that careens into the future and past-tense nostalgic backstory that explains how the writer got “here.”

The first few sentences explain the push-pull I’m talking about:

I stand naked before the mirror.  Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle.  It has not changed since I can remember.  I was always a fat kid.

Maybe I’m exaggerating, but to me this is a slick variation of the opening of The Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ^1:2The same was in the beginning with God. ^1:3All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made. ^1:4In him was life; and the life was the light of men. ^1:5And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not.

What I mean here is more about storytelling/mythos, especially autobiography.  When we seek to tell the story of our lives, we are talking about origins.  As Acosta opens his autobiography, he seems to think his present (his belly– an incredible symbol) has always been what it is.  In The Gospel of John, the past, present, and future are contained in any one moment, and in every moment.  The beginning has always been as it is now.  Or to understand the beginning, we merely have to look at the present.

So that’s structure.  The style: amazing.  Acosta’a voice is a voice that I want to call my best friend.  The voice is funny, self-effacing, confident, observant, capacious, desperate, destructive: Imminently human.  As I read, I was reminded of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  In many ways, the character of Oscar and the narrator Yunior in Diaz’s novel seem to be an homage to Acosta.  I haven’t found any extra-textual support for this.  It’s just a hunch.  But Acosta and Diaz’s voices– they are definitely talking to each other, trying to understand race and history and personal memory and love and desire.  I could linger over Acosta’s sentences for a good long time.

Content. Toward the end of the memoir, the story seems to grasp for the “raison d’etre” a personal life history seems to need.  Acosta discusses his radicalization, his awareness of Brown Pride, and his sudden passion for the Chicano movement.  I don’t imagine that this is at all sudden.  But Acosta lingers over the details of his younger years, and this hard-living years, that the political years come on quite sudden.  This is me being the critic I don’t want to be.  The point is, the voice, the man, the story, the work is amazing– an amazing piece of American literature.

“My Antonia” and “Housekeeping”

I happened to read these two novels within two weeks of each other.  Both stories are tied to a particular place; both novels explore how place gives birth to particular stories.  Both explore the same place (the Midwest or western US), and both novels  illustrate the vulnerable business of maintaining the reputation and propriety of womanhood.

I read Housekeeping first.   I could study Robinson’s sentences for years and still not grasp their density.  I love the bold beginning: “My name is Ruth.”  This person has nothing to hide, no stake in anything but the bare solid facts.  “I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.”  I love the roll call here– and find it interesting that the mother is tactically omitted.  Otherwise, this would be a thorough history of Ruth’s origins.  All of this history is made compact within one sentence.  One breath.  The narrator dispenses with these details right away before moving on to the grandfather’s backstory.

The tone and mood in this opening stays with the narrator throughout the novel.  There is very little that departs from this matter-of-factness.  And by the end, we learn how all of this history has affected the narrator. So too, we learn of the narrator’s reputability.

My Antonia seems to stand as a history of a place more than the life story of a person.  As the title suggests, the story is about Antonia, a young Bohemian girl who moves to Nebraska the same time as the narrator.  While Antonia must stay tied to the land, specifically to Black Hawk where her family settles, the narrator moves from farm to town, from town to capitol city, from capitol city to the Northeast.  From the Northeast eventually to Eastern Europe where he visits Antonia’s hometown.  The narrator’s movement takes the focus from Antonia, yet it still shows a phenomenon of Midwestern life: Diffusion and migration.  Antonia maintains a connection to the homesteader’s life, and therefore to the narrator’s childhood. For Jim Burden, she is “my Antonia” because she reminds him of “the road of Destiny” and allows him to possess “the precious, the incommunicable past.”

AT one point, Antonia is thought to be a ruined woman, even though she has more scruples that Lena Lithgard, who by all accounts has done well for herself. Antonia, unlike other immigrant girls, has been left behind.  When Jim sees her last, she has been made thin and hard by hard labor and  she is poor.  Her looks have faded: She has lost many teeth.  But, she retains the glow in her eyes– the spirit– that Jim has always loved.

What does this mean?  Why can’t Jim be with Antonia if she is who he loves?  Or is his relationship to her about a relationship to place?  Is Cather talking about a country’s relationship to its roots (its heart) in general?

I’m not sure.  I do know, Cather’s male narrator has a much more romanticized view of the integrity of home and our ties to the past than Robinson’s rootless Ruth.  Ruth is not tied to anything; her life is movement.  She and Sylvie try to destroy the house in order to make a life together; unlike Antonia, she does not represent the preservation of home.  Both authors court Destiny, or at least History.  And the vehicle for both is a locomotive: Jim and Antonia come West on the same train; Ruth’s grandfather perishes when the train he engineers veers off track into the lake.  This death hovers over the narrative as if it is a tragedy from which none of the characters can escape.

Jim’s narration is buoyant, pedantic, wistful.  Ruth’s is…dark, severe, resigned.

“At Lake Scugog”

1.

Where what I see comes to rest,

at the edge of the lake,

against what I think I see

and, up on the bank, who I am

maintains an uneasy truce

with who I fear I am,

while in the cabin’s shade the gap between

the words I said

and those I remember saying

is just wide enoughto contain

the remains that remain

of what I assumed I knew.

2.

Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were

gingerly trades spots

with the person you ae

and what Ibelieve I believe

sits uncomfortably next to

what I believe.

When I promised I will always give you

what I want you to want,

you heard, or desired to hear,

something else.  As, over and in the lake,

the cormorant and its image

traced paths through the sky.

Troy Jollimore New Yorker July 27, 2009

First of all, the form.  There is a pattern, the first and third lines refer to contradictory observations (what seems,what is or what also may be).  The second line gives a grounding in the scene.  “At the edge of a lake” is not random; this image is the physical manifestation (can an image be a physical manifestation?) of the difference between what is seen, and what is thought to be seen.

Stanza two has a similar rift– who I am and who I think I am.

Stanza three breaks the form in a few ways: While– transitional adverb.  Signals a change from the previous statements, and sure enough this transitional word introduces the longest line in the poem so far.  The rhythm of the poem changes as well.  The syntax changes.  This stanza begins the second part of the sentence (the first part o the poem is all one sentence).  Also, the thought in the third stanza is not complete; it introduces an idea that the fourth sentence needs to complete.  Even though stanzas one and two end without a period (nothing in one, a comma in two), the enjambment between “saying” in line nine and “is” in line ten is the most drastic shift from stanza to stanza.  It’s a leap.  This leap echoes (reinforces?) the line “is just wide enough to contain.” The enjambment illustrates the gap the poet mentions in line 7.

Part II: gingerly, uncomfortably.  Given the cardinal rule about never using adverbs in poetry and fiction, I find the inclusion of these adverbs very curious.  I like them– they work.  But why, how.  What do these adverbs get to stay?

Who is this narrator?

Thoughtful, observant, controlled.  The PN is very certain about where he directs the readers attention.  The tone is formal.  Mood: (mood, mood.  Always trouble identifying the mood).  Serene?  Melancholy?  Resigned?  Can you me serene and melancholy and resigned?  OK, scratch melancholy.  “Anabelle Lee” is melancholy.  This is more…serene.  Or reflective…if reflective is a mood…

“The Five Wounds”

I’m trying to understand this story by Kristin Valdez Quade published in this week’s New Yorker.

I love the opening sentence: “This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus.” It’s a simple statement– no observation, no loose commentary. But, “this year” already tells me there is something regarding Jesus– a ritual of some kind– that happens every year. I can guess that a different person gets to be Jesus each year. All of this information comes across in this one sentence. (When I write, I know I am too tempted to have all that explanation right away. As it comes to me in my head, I have to put it down that way on the paper. If I’d had this Idea, I might have written: Every year during Easter week, the town re-enacts the Passion of Christ, and each year, a different man is chosen to play Jesus...I’m already bored here. Quade’s sentence is so sharp– it grounds the story and moves it forward at the same time.)

“The hermanos have been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station.” What do we learn here? We lean a lot about who the narrator is. This narrator is intimate with wherever this story is taking place (‘which used to be a filling station’). The narrator feels no need to explain– there is a kind of assumed familiarity with the reader (I’m supposed to know what hermanos and morado mean, which I don’t. But I keep reading because I already trust this narrator who seems to want to include me in this story so intimately.)

“People are saying that Amadeo is the best Jesus they’ve had in years, maybe the best since Manuel Garcia.” There is so much in this sentence as well. I didn’t know it when I read it the first time, but this sentence introduces the main conflict of the story– the tension between Manuel and Amadeo. But this sentence also reveals the less-than-pious nature of this ritual. Some Jesuses are better than others. Being a good Jesus gives someone bragging rights. Being a good Jesus can give a person status. (Even these sentences I am writing don’t quite make sense: ‘Being a good Jesus,’ as if there anything other than a good Jesus. That’s what I’m saying, “best Jesus” is oxymoronic, ironic. But the narrator is being completely sincere here. The narrator is not critiquing the mindset that decides one Jesus is better than another. The narrator takes this common knowledge at face value.)

“Here it is, just Holy Tuesday, and even those who would rather spend the evening at home watching their satellite TVs are lined up in the alley, leaning in, fingers curled around the chain-link, because they can see that Amadeo is bringing something special to the role.”
This sentence– the longest in the story so far– tells us more about time, place, and character. “Here it is–” the narrator is very present, very close to the scene. Since it is “Holy Tuesday” and Jesus’s big moment happened on a Friday, we can guess how close this scene is to the climax. Again, this happens so subtlely…we barely notice it, but it’s there. “Satellite TVs, chain-link” (I love the word ‘fence’ is omitted because it is unnecessary), “alley.” I don’t know where I am, in what part of the country. I assume the Southwest because of the inclusion of Spanish words, but I don’t know. However, with these words, the narrator establishes a kind of place. Satellite TVs are common, and a big deal. “Chain link” implies this is not an upper-middle class area. More working class, perhaps? Not necessarily urban or rural, but “chain-link” says something about the simple utilitarian aesthetics of the place. Finally– alley. Also locates the narrative in a somewhat clandestine, perhaps dirty, dark place.

In the third paragraph, the narrator lets us see the main character more clearly. The narrator first does away with the iconic images of Jesus (which seems necessary– if you are comparing your main character to Jesus, whose likeness is widely rendered, then it might be helpful to correct the reader’s impression of who the narrator is talking about). As it turns out, Amadeo is anything but Christlike: “pockmarked, bad-toothed, hair shaven close to scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck. You name the sin he’s done it.”
Here we have the first unexpected detail (that I think also helps to push the narrative forward). The guy playing Jesus is anything but Jesus-like. He’s thug-like. Scary. Ugly? Ah, now this is interesting. There is tension now, and now the narrative is moving.

The first 9 paragraphs are devoted to the opening scene.  Before there is much background, the narrator shows us Amadeo through his actions: “Amadeo builds the cross out of heavy rough oak instead of pine.  He’s barefoot…Unlike the others, though, Amadeo does not groan, and he’s shirtless, his tattooed back broad under the still hot sun…Today he woke with the idea of studding the cross with nails to give it extra weight, and this is what people watch.”  So we see him, we see Amadeo building his cross, and we know he is a sinner who is also a glutton for punishment.  We also see people watching him, which also tells us about what people in this place value.

“And now here comes old Manuel Garcia, dragging his bad foot up the alley, his wounded hands curled at his sides.  He must have heard about the show Amadeo is putting on, because when else does he exert himself, except to but liquor at the Peerless?”

Again– more tension.  There is a kind of rivalry here because (1) both men have drawn attention for their role as Jesus (2) both men are physically marred (3) both men are lazy.  There is also tension because “Now instead of watching Amadeo, they watch Manuel.”  The shifting attention of the nameless onlookers shows the tension between these two men.  Manuel “coughs wetly” which shows– what does it show?  His disinterest?    His phlegmatic personality?  His displeasure?  In the next paragraph, we get one of my favorite sentences of the story: “Some have even gone so far as to say that maybe the man was suicidal, and a death wish is not the same as devotion, even if they do look alike.”

At the end of the opening scene, the ninth paragraph, the narrator explains: “Only Manuel Garcia is qualified to judge this new Christ, and it appears he has arrived at his verdict, because he coughs again, wet and low, dislodges something deep in his throat, and spits it through a space in the fence so that it lands just inches from Amadeo and his cross.”  The explanation happens through a sensually vivid action.  We can hear the cough, and, unfortunately, we can see what it has produced.  This action is nasty.  Manuel Garcia is nasty and irreverent.He has no regard and respect for the pious ritual he is witnessing.  He is selfish and gross in his denunciation.

As I write that description, I realize that those characteristics of Garcia lead to the (rising action? climax? almost climax climax– I don’t know the terms) confrontation between Garcia and Amadeo’s daughter Angel.  The triangulation between these characters begins with this scene because it sets up who Amadeo and Manuel are, and what each character wants.  It’s simple.  Amadeo is a sinner who wants redemption.  Manuel is a sinner who wants status, the power to judge, the power to spit on others.  One wants humility, one wants to bestow humility.  When put that way, the story doesn’t seem very interesting.  It seems fairly trite.  But put into this very vivid scene (I can feel the hot, the sweat, the dust, the pain), I feel tension for which I want resolution.  I want to  know which Jesus will prevail: The humble one who seeks redemption, or the self-serving suicidal one who seeks vindication?

And of course, that’s a juicy bit to chew on, which the story does.  And I could go on and on about the symbolism (the names for example: love of God, God within us, Angel).  But the point here is to look at the narration– how the engine of the story works to get the story going.  The opening works hard to tempt us into believing that the story is worth reading– and indeed it is.

Play it as it Lays

As I was reading this book, I was reminded of The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. Didion’s book seems a kind of offspring of these other two books. It is as if West’s narrator tells the story of Rhys’s Sasha as if it were happening in West’s Hollywood not Paris.

Like Midnight, there is never any hope in Play it as it Lays. The tone is one flat line throughout. The isolation is obvious: “To hear her own voice she would sometimes talk to an attendant, ask advice on oil filters.”

The narrator is an unobtrusive close third person narrator who clearly sees the tragedy of Maria’s life. The storytelling is laden with ennui, yet the narrator seems to be presenting the reader with the facts of Maria’s life.

The structure of the novel is cinematic; unlike West, Didion does not rely on detailed narration. Instead, the novel moves from scene to scene. The reader is dropped into one moment of dialogue to another. Occasionally, the connection to film is more heavy handed. The narrator or Maria makes an explicit connection between life-as-lived and life-as-film: “Maria smiled and nodded. It did not require an answer: It was a cue for the actor, who waited a suitable instant then picked it up.”

Structurally, I am fascinated by the way this story gets told. Each chapter drops the reader into a scene that is immediately very visual: “She sat on the rattan chaise in the hot October twilight and watched BZ throw the ice cubes from his drink one by one into the swimming pool.” This sentence amazes me for its pure storytelling power. Every word conveys the listless energy throughout the novel. The sentence opens with she– the narrator doesn’t even bother to re-name the heroine. This implies her character’s weakness, her ability to be secondary to all the other character in all the scenes of the novel. “Rattan chaise” implies luxury, leisure, lounging. “Hot October twilight” is unexpected, uncomfortable. There’s a kind of restlessness with this description

(long heavy sigh) twilight

I was a girl
before I was a feminist.
Tuns out
the girl is stronger.

What could possibly bring me out of my eight month blog hiatus except a young adult vampire romance series? A hiatus bookended by the profound (election of the first African American president) and the ridiculous (werewolves and vampires). So it goes.

But I admit: Stephenie Meyer has captured my imagination. When Twilight mania hit last fall, in conjunction with the release of the film, I ignored it. Eschewed it, even. I added it to the list of fads (Birkenstocks, The Simpson’s, Harry Potter, the umpteenth resurgence of Chuck Taylors) I have avoided so as not to get caught up in the zeitgeist. Working in a high school and being an advisor to ninth grade students, many of whom are girls who fell in love with the series as middle-schoolers, the avoidance was short-lived. Soon after the DVD release, I watched the movie through Movies on Demand. It was good– aesthetically pretty exciting. The characters are beautiful, of course. The scenery is spooky yet magical. The climax is sexy. I was thoroughly entertained, and I thought I could discount the mania with authority.

But, I am almost loathe to admit, the story stuck with me. The love-sick, hopeless romantic 14-year-old girl in me, who is closer to the surface than I imagined, couldn’t stop thinking about the intense against-all-odds love between the two main characters, Bella and Edward. Then, my critical feminist mind started going to work on the details. This vampire romance was a thinly-veiled version of “the purity myth”! The “consummation” or penetration in this case was the bite (of Bella by Edward) that would render her immortal. Bella, eager to be with Edward, at all costs forever and ever, wants the bite. At prom, end of junior year– Bella wants the pain, the burning, the death of her human life that she knows will ensue if Edward injects her with his venom. Edward, ever the chivalric hero, wants to protect Bella from her own hasty desires. It is he who worries about “her soul” and cannot bear to be the cause of the end of her human life– no matter how much he loves her. (He and his clan only bite humans and convert them to the dark side as a life-saving measure. They also control their thirst for human blood and feed only on animals– “thinning the herd” where necessary. These are humane, compassionate and environmentalist vampires.)

And again, I am loathe to admit, I found this conflict sexy! I wanted to know more about the author– Was she trying to use the vampire myth to reinforce abstinence-only propaganda? What was the point of hyper-idealizing the male protagonist? Did she want to inculcate her devoted adolescent female audience to a certain morality?

So, I Googled her, and what I found was the story behind the story:

I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. Up to this point, I had not written anything besides a few chapters (of other stories) that I never got very far on, and nothing at all since the birth of my first son, six years earlier.

I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 (“Confessions”) of the book.

Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple’s story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn’t want to lose the mental image.) Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn’t done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering. But I didn’t want to lose the dream, so I typed out as much as I could remember, calling the characters “he” and “she.”

From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the “golden spike” that connected them in late August, three months later.
So after reading that and the rest of the FAQ pages on her website, I had a new problem. I was now completely intrigued with Meyer as a writer and mother. The genesis of this story was something I could completely relate to– of course not to the same extent. Because Meyer found a way to pursue this story as doggedly as she did makes her a bit of a hero in my mind.

At that point, never mind that I had seen the movie– I had to read the product of this woman’s labor! As someone who is curious about the writing process, I had to see the result of something that began as a dream and became a constant distraction from motherly duties.

At this point, I never thought I’d get past book one. Book one in the Potter series had had no lingering effect on me. I was sure I’d be as immune to the world of Meyer as I was to the world of Rowling.

Of course, I was wrong…

Two poems about looking at the same two rivers

Dominion

by Eleanor Lerman

We spent the night in Maryland, in an old house with stonr floors

and stairs as steep as a bookcase

An October landscape crouched outside the windows: bent

trees, low hills

Witch country,I told you. No, you said, there were no witches

in the slave states

That didn’t help. I went to sleep and dreamt about a woman

who had something in her eye

She was given an operation, and when she woke up, she was dead

(This really was my dream.) I feel funny, she said to the nurses,

but they wouldn’t name the problem

Ha ha, you said, when I related this in the morning. You really have

been watching too much TV

Then we drove on to Washington. A gray day in the capitol,

though that hadn’t stopped the crowds

Schoolchildren were touring the FBI building, nuns were lunching

at the CIA

The Freedom of Information Act, I decided, had changed everything:

the spooks, the sergeants

were all quick to grant us access: These are your museums, they

pointed out

These are your files (Like every other mild paranoid my age,

I believe I have a file

though I’m sure it’s pretty flimsy. Someone like Patty Hearst,

on the other hand,

probably has one a mile wide.) There are still lots of secrets

in these buidings, you remind me

And I believe that. There are secrets everywhere. Secrets in us

Later, I wanted to see a famous building with walls converging

in a famous point

that everyone has to touch, including me. It’s like rubbing

the backbone of a beast, folding your hand along the spine

of a sleeping world

Don’t do it, you warned me, though I had said I would

for weeks

It will only make you feel crazy. And you were right:

for hours

I felt as if I had a soul, and that soul had mingled with

a million ghosts,

a million handprints of the touring public. I tell you and

I tell you, you sighed, but you never listen

All over the world, in every language, someone is saying that

to someone else right now

Later, we drove on to Harper’s Ferry. Sunlight made a

dramatic entrance in the afternoon,

dropping thin golden shafts between still-threatening clouds

We parked the car and crossed a footbridge that led back

a hundred years,

past flood markers and plaques commemorating John

Brown’s raids

On a steep street, in a shop that had been built before

the Civil War

I stopped to buy a button from a soldier’s uniform, lingering

for a long time over my choice:

blue, because they saved the Union, or gray because

you have to sympathize with tragedy?

In the end, of course, I bought them both. You bought

a map of the Chesapeake and sat on a stone wall

eating ice cream,

planning the rest of our trip. I walked on, climbing

a path to the Maryland Heights

and up there on the cliffs, buffeted by winds, by death,

history, dreams, war, and information

I wondered, Over what do I have dominion? Don’t think

that even now I have a clue

though it was a reasonable question to ask in a place where

I could see the convergence of two great rivers

but no further south, over the curve of the earth, to wherever

they were going

Earthly Love II

I have burdened you with the trust
of decoding my silence. All summer
I had stories of things I didn’t want to say.
When memories move in suddenly,
unexpectedly, you tire in their
refragmentation of the present.
You are too aware how this moment
may later crowd the simple act of being
somewhere else.

As if spending days
counting series of lasts were not enough, my father
listened to a speech from his childhood. He remembered
thinking German tanks might troop down his street
and take him away. He stares as he listens,
lonely like it is the P.A. system in his
elementary school. Like it is so many things.

This is always what’s at stake.
What to do if it comes and wondering what to do
when it does. I’ll tell you about the handgun I’m
afraid my father will use because he has seen
tumors become the size of a small universe.
I’m not asking for your interpretation to be mine—
even when death makes us want to name something
we can always need.

But the silence wedged in between
our small comments about what we see—
even when memory is busy labeling two unrelated things
the same. The blank look across the same river.
The nothing in your hand,
this means everything.

How I opened my classes in September

I believe in cultivating a life of the mind.

I believe giving our brain the food it wants, honing our thinking can give us the mental equivalent of a sword, making intellectual samurais of us all.

I believe our world could use more intellectual samurais, compassionate as they are smart.

Although I have always loved TV and movies (including Gilmore Girls, and I hate to say it, occasionally America’s Next Top Model) I believe our culture often appeals to our basest qualities.

I believe our desire can be reprogrammed for the sake of lining another person’s pockets.  I’m not original in this, but I believe corporations can co-opt our very human-ness, our wanting—to the point that we barely recognize ourselves.

I believe as your teacher, I am in service to something that counters that force.

Because

I believe we all deserve to be part of an institution whose vision, goal, purpose, and practices are not regulated by profit.  I believe one such institution is a school, and that is why I am here.

I believe we are all powerful.  Yet I believe we often check that power by boxing ourselves up in categories like “I’m not a math person,” or “I hate to read,” or “I’m not musical.”

I believe even as we find our one true passion, we eclipse other passions we may not have had the chance to discover.

I believe we are all poets.

And I believe understanding a poem teaches us how to live.

I believe boredom is a symptom of fear.  If we get bored, I think we are afraid—afraid of what it feels like not to be small.  Afraid of the bigness of the world that makes us small.  With our boredom, we deflect that bigness, lock it out with our own apathy.

Therefore, I treat “boring” as a matter of perspective.  Instead of saying something or someone is boring, I say one’s perspective suffers from boredom.  Boredom can be tolerated or eradicated…if you choose to see possibility in your own intelligence.

I believe one’s mind is like a big magnet.  We magnetize our brains with everything we read, and the more we learn, the stronger its pull becomes, until nothing is beyond the reach of its force.

In short: We are what we read.

I believe when we develop our minds (our ability to reason, imagine, create, interpret, connect) we increase our ability to find aspects of our world interesting.  I believe the more developed our minds are, the more interested and interesting we are able to be.

I believe if we reason better, imagine more, create deliberately, interpret well, speak thoughtfully and connect often we become our own entertainment, our own fulfillment.   And we create more paths by which we can travel.

This why it doesn’t matter which road you take, the one less-traveled or not; it is you, not the road, that is in control.  You determine the story of your life, because as you are living it, you are telling it.

I believe writing teaches us our mysteries.  It preserves our pasts, keeps us in service to our memory.

I believe each of us has a story, and we owe it to ourselves and others to bear witness to that story.  When we become conveyers of our own story, we can live more fully, and more truthfully.

I believe writing is a necessary skill, but even more than teaching you how to write, I’d like us to become authors—people who live inside language, who use language to create worlds, and become world enough for themselves.

I believe English class is not important just because a box on a college application says so.

I believe the ability to interpret challenging pieces of literature and art is a privilege everyone deserves.

We humans are meaning-makers, caught up in the details and ramifications of our own stories. In this class we will read and try to understand and when we do, I believe we will be honoring the very make-up of our being.

Understanding literature can help us see the symbols, foreshadowing, images that shape our stories and become our lives.

I believe life gets better when you are past the phase when the collection of digits that make up your standardized test scores becomes a major means by which you are taught to characterize your capacity.

I believe in school rules.  I believe if you chew gum in class someday someone other than yourself will have to scrape your gum off the bottom of a chair you did not buy or make.

I believe you deserve to cultivate an attention span not broken by the temptation of texting.

I believe food tastes better in the cafeteria.

I believe in taking hats off at the front door.

I believe music is amazing.  I believe music is the keeper of memories we’d otherwise lose if they were not connected to a particular song. And I believe songwriters, even the bad ones, are the bards of our time…

So I am thankful for the innovation that has made thousands of songs portable, but I believe in unplugging ourselves from this world so that we don’t feed the beast of our boredom.

I believe, in a perfect world, grades would not exist.  But I believe they satisfy the fears of people who are afraid that if left unchecked, nothing would happen in schools.

I believe if I don’t grade it, it doesn’t mean the assignment doesn’t matter.

I believe I have done my job when you no longer have to ask me “is this right?”
I believe I have done my job if I make myself irrelevant.

Here’s how I believe that happens:  Whatever the assignment, you find a way to discover what part of you that assignment evokes.  Bring yourself to the task and you will discover yourself in it.

I believe journeys are spiritual and intellectual, not just physical.  I believe honing our intellectual swords, meeting challenges, and bringing ourselves to a task can be revolutionary.

I believe a group of people can be a sacred space.  When secrets have been shared, lives discovered, voices heard, we have all been a part of something that transcends the everyday.

And because of those spaces, we will never be the same.

This, I believe.

What else?…Sarah Palin

Sometimes in my most solipsistic moments I begin to see national or world events as some divinely provided symbol sent as commentary on life.

And so it happened that as I was going back to work, feeling pangs of motherly guilt, and crying about daycare drop-off in small out-of-the-way places at school, the world send me Sarah Palin.

Could the cultural myth of the Supermom, revised and burnished by the reluctant approval of the religious Right, be any more ironic?

But there she was iconicized in the form of the New York Times website, her biography perfectly dovetailing the profiles of undecided voters. Thrust forward were her credentials as a mom: five kids, mother of a special needs child, hockey mom, army mom. All of this while hunting moose, whistle-blowing, and cheering on her snowmobile-racing husband. Oh, and governing the state of Alaska.

Sarah Palin did not make me feel inferior as a mother. But, the heralding of Sarah Palin as mother underscored the cultural biases that, on some level, impact how I feel about my own parenting. (I wonder, was Hillary Clinton villainized as she was in ‘92 because she’d only had one child? Was her lack of productivity as a mother reason to doubt her ability to advise her husband? Was it reason to fear her stanch feminism?)

With the hullabaloo around SP, I saw the old trap for mothers that I and my mom-friends still feel the pinch of today. SP (with her red high heel sandals, up-do, and carcass of a grizzly slung across her couch) embodies the old perfume commercial whose jingle I can still hear in my head: “I can bring home the bacon…fry it up in a pan…and never let you forget you’re a man…’Cuz I’m a woman…” Ah, yes. Isn’t that what feminism is all about? Elevating the status of a woman by talking about how a woman can do all the things a man an do…and more?

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses the history of how women’s bodies have been misunderstood. According to Aristotle I believe, women were incidental (convenient?) receptacles for sperm– the real source of humanity. Indeed, women’s bodies have been as much about what is seen as what is unseen…And perhaps eroticizing women’s bodies is compensation for all that is unseen and misunderstood.

It’s a leap, but Sarah Palin– for all her highlights, beauty contestant photos, and newscaster sheen– is another example of a myth thrust in front of women to tell them what they are. But who needs to have women explained for them, really? Sarah Palin is the latest in a long line of patriarchal fantasies. She is another fantasy of male cultural reproduction…She represents the fantasy of what a patriarchal world wants to believe it can produce. And ironically, this fantasy has been sold to women as the epitome of female power– of female choice!– and of feminism itself.

Of course, it’s not ironic that Sarah Palin is anti-choice. In order to keep the male patriarchal fantasy alive, the fantasy must reproduce. Therefore, women in this fantasy cannot have control over reproduction. Which is another way of saying sex, for a woman, must be about reproduction. Sex, for a man, can be about desire. Again, Sarah Palin embodies both. Sarah Palin is not a notch in the belt of feminism. She is another version of the old mold, slightly revised to co-opt the language of feminists.

And every morning, when I leave my little boy, I am happy to go work and sad not to stay at home with him. The choices are a blessing. But they are not without consequences, a reality the mythological, supermom, “cake and eat it too” example of Sarah Palin will never address.