Tired of sleeping

30 12 2009

I do love to sleep.

When I think vacation I think: I can sleep in!

Weekends? Sleep in!

Days off? Yep, sleep in!

It’s not that I have anything against the morning (it’s afternoons I could do without) but my body and my brain have informed me—repeatedly—that they’d much prefer to remain tucked in and unconscious to any dawn awakenings.

When I was in high school, I could enjoy the early morning after a long night: after watching the moon rise red over Lake Michigan, rise into white, then fade away, we’d squint at the sprawling yellow elbowing its way over the horizon.

Or in Madison, I’d pull all-nighters before stumbling to class with that paper in hand.

Nonetheless, while I remain a night person, the last time I met the morning at the end of a long night was some years back, in Montreal, after hitting an after-hours dance club. It was March or February, I think, and a bit of shock to fall out of the dark club into a white, white (it was snowing) morning.

Can’t do that shit no more.

All of this is a very long prelude to the observation that even I, who in high school was known for my 13-14 hour sleep sessions, who will turn over if the damned radiator wakes me even minutes before the alarm goes off rather than get up, who requires a ritual to get out of bed each and every morning,  even I can have too much bed time.

I was mildly sick on Thursday, sicker on Friday, sicker sicker on Saturday, sicker sicker (with fever!) on Sunday, and, while recovering on Monday, was nonetheless still unable to rise with my alarm and go to work.

I slept. I got up, putzed around on the computer, then would take an hours-long nap. Read a bit, watch Netflix or Hulu, then to bed early. Repeat. Repeat.

All that goddamned sleep. When I finally woke after noon on Monday (after my abortive attempt to return to the working classes), I thought, God, I’m sick of lying down.

Fucking flu: Robbed me of one my one pure pleasure.

I actually didn’t mind getting up to go to work today.

I’m not too worried, tho’: I’m sure I’ll be silently cursing my fate when the radio blares tomorrow.


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No dark sarcasm in the classroom

17 12 2009

‘I love grading! It is the best!’

‘Grading has nothing to do with learning.’

‘Ay? No! Of course it does. It is the best way!’

‘Paugh. We do it because we can’t think of anything better.’

‘Because there is nothing better! This is what intellectuals have done since the beginning—the best, the smartest.’

‘Socrates?’

‘Okay, no, so it was different then. But Karl Marx, Adam Smith—they all had to study! They all had to take exams.’

‘So. So did we. What does that prove?’

‘No, you are wrong. It is the most just and fair way to determine how much the students have learned.’

‘What does justice have to do with learning? Justice has nothing to do with learning!’

‘And you, the philosopher. You should love grading. Write a blog on how much you love grading.’

‘Hah, no.’

‘Grading is the best, I tell you.’

‘You only love grading because you can inflict pain and assert authority.’

‘True. . . .’ (Jtte. laughs)


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Be like Johnnie too good, well don’t you know he never shirks

16 12 2009

Hate grading. Hate hate hate grading.

It’s not just the labor of it—tho’ it is also the labor of it—so much as the pointlessness of the process.

Identify this, define that, explain how this fits with that. . . oh my god, I’m falling asleep already. But don’t worry, I’ll rouse myself with coffee or beer (what the hell) and read every fucking word written before scribbling a number which just might bear some relationship to the worth of that collection of words.

Dot i’s, cross t’s, jump hoops, student and teacher alike. You get a grade, I get a paycheck.

So why bother with grading at all? Well, there’s that matter of the student needing a grade and my desire for that paycheck.

Practicalities, in other words.

Please don’t think that, if I had my druthers, I’d abandon all work requirements for the students. If you are not a prodigy or genius and you want to learn, you have to work. (And if you are a prodigy or genius and you want to be good, you have to work.)

The problem is that the work required for learning is only approximated by the work required for grading, and often, not even that.

I shape and cut and alter the course requirements, but, in the end, what I grade only partially captures what they learn, and, for that matter, what they haven’t learned.

A big part of the problem, perhaps even the main problem, is that most students don’t much care about learning. They care about grades, yes, performance, at times, but learning? Mm, no.

How do I know this? Besides the dearth of students who visit me during office hours to discuss the material, or who approach me wanting help puzzling through a problem I posed, or who show any energy at all in class or in the written work? Besides the slack look on their faces when I ask them the most basic questions about the material? Besides the utter lack of interest in finding their own way into the material?

Simple: because every once in a while, one of them does learn something, and he or she is overwhelmed—because they don’t expect to learn.

Understand? They don’t expect to learn, so when it does happen—when an insight or a question percolates up and into their consciousness—they are visibly giddy or discombobulated or even scared. I never knew. . . .Is this real. . .  ? How could this be. . . ?

I’m not exaggerating. I’ve had students stand in front of me with their mouths opening and closing  and their eyes wide and darting as they attempt to corral this feeling into words. They are agape in the presence of knowledge.

I let them work their ways through it, tell them they have something real, and that they should do whatever they can to make sense, that I will help them to make sense.

It doesn’t always work. You can see them back down, or let it go, or watch as they’re distracted by other matters.

But even then, with those who seem to have tossed their insights aside, you can see an angle to their thoughts, and you know it’s still in there, somewhere.

There’s no way to capture that, that abashed curiosity, in a grade. On the margins, maybe, but in the main? No.

This is why I hate grading. This is why I love teaching.


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Nothing comes from nothing

6 12 2009

‘No! You cannot argue with me! The problem is entirely theological.’

‘Well, philosophical, at least. Existential in any case.’

‘Theological. The deepest question of human beings! We are at the point of crisis. We are!’

‘It’s always there. Always. What’s new?’

‘We cannot continue to live like this. No! We cannot!’

Jtte, my orthodox-Marxist-and-orthodox-Catholic colleague, and friend, is at the frayed ends of her orthodoxy.

She is, in other words, less orthodox than she insists.

I don’t know what prompted this crisis, for her, or, to put it less personally, what prompted this recognition of crisis in the world. We keep trying to make lunch or dinner dates, but our schedules block us from anything more than a quick argument between classes.

And it would help to know, because I don’t know what to make of what appears—appears—to be a profound alienation and an acute need to clamber beneath that alienation, to something real.

I don’t want to push this interpretation too hard, not least because I really don’t know what the hell is going on with her. (And, as a conversation with another friend last week reminded me, ’tis best not to insert meaning into the unsaid.)

I am also admittedly puzzled by her insistence upon crisis. What, now, is different? There is nothing new in capitalism, nothing new in technology, no paradigm-shifting breakthroughs in science, no visitations from outer space nor even, to follow up a recent discussion, the barest hint of asteroids or global nuclear exchange or some new pandemic.

Yeah, things are falling apart, but things are always falling apart.

And yes, we are in the midst of an anthropic fucking-over of our climate, but one to which our scavenger species will adapt. Life may be worse in a hundred years, but it will continue.

So why the crisis?

Jtte, at least, is optimistic: She thinks we will become more human, more of whom we’re supposed to be, that life will get better (whatever that means).

Do we need a crisis for that? ‘Existential crisis’ is one of those tropes around which to build a novel or film or some form of art. It’s what happens when we get everything we want or nothing we want or everything we thought we wanted, or when we lose everything, or when what matters becomes jumbled with what does not—it’s what happens when we live, and think or feel our lives.

Crap. None of this is what I wanted to say. It’s not right, it doesn’t fit. None of these words. . . huh. Nothing.

My friend Jtte is sounding an alarm and I don’t know why.


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We play that we’re actors on a movie screen

2 12 2009

I have to get rid of my computer.

I’m not going to do that.

The internet, then. Save me some money.

Not going to happen.

No, I will keep my computer and my broadband and I will continue to waste time watching movies and bad t.v. shows and then watching them all again.

Yes, I finally got Netflix, and in the week and a-half I’ve had it I’ve watched 2 DVDs and a lot of streaming movies and t.v. shows.

A lot.

Now, I did learn one thing: I am over Law & Order. I watched an episode of L&O:SVU from their tenth season and just thought Blegggh—really?

And even tho’ I can watch CSI on CBS, my interest lags there, as well. Yes, there are still tw0-ish other shows I still tune in, but, mostly, I’m done with the whole t.v. thing.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there are all these movies which I can watch at the click of the mouse.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, save for my inability to close out the Netflix window after finishing a movie. Nope, time for another.

Pitiful. There’s reading and writing and Oh! Going outside!

Not happening.

This will fade, I know. I’ll get sick of myself doing nothing but sitting in front of my (um, new [it was on sale!], larger, external) monitor watching explosions and tears and drinking and running and people doing all the things I could be doing were not I sitting in front of my new, larger, external monitor.

But in the meantime, what’s that crappy movie I won’t admit to liking even as a guilty pleasure which I’ve seen 18 kajillion times. . . ?

Lord. Pitiful.


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And pickles are just pickles

29 11 2009

Russ & Daughters makes great pickles. Sour, with a corona of heat around the edge of each bite.

That’s a pickle.

Russ & Daughters is one of the remnants of the late 19th/early 20th centuries still living in the early 21st: they and Katz’s Deli (packed with tourists as I sidled by) are among the few outposts of the great Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side, each nailed into a corner on Houston.

They’re both north of the Williamsburg Bridge, and a few blocks beyond Delancey—does this make them a part of the East Village rather than the LES? I’m no umpire, here, but they’re tugged from behind by the LES; the other side of Houston heads toward a city far beyond the modesty of the LES.

Or former modesty. The Lower East Side is, as everywhere in Manhattan, bending under the influx of money and cool. Not completely—there are sites in the LES and even the East Village which are more rather than less dodgy, and few would argue that the F and JMZ lines are among the city’s best—but gentrification creeps on.

It’s Manhattan. The desire for the Next Great Deal will always out.

I shouldn’t romanticize either the East Village or the LES. I’ve been in some of those apartments, and they’re awful: tiny, dark, and likely to lack basic amenities (such as, say, a sink in the bathroom). The streets are close together, so lower level windows likely never see sun. And twenty-five years ago ‘Alphabet City’ was a warning against trespassing beyond First.

But they (and the Bowery—why not?) used to be places. Not always good places, but there was something more to them than just. . . well, money.

Money is dull. Don’t get me wrong—I could certainly use more of it—but in and of itself it all-too-often adds nothing but that which caters to it. It doesn’t have to be that way, but money makes it too easy to be lazy in one’s tastes. What can I get? What can I buy? What is everyone else getting and buying?

Lack of money is never dull. Poverty or fear thereof can certainly dull one’s sensibilities, especially in a city (or a country) where money is IT!, but sometimes, sometimes, the lack of money drives those so lacking to seek pleasures and meanings beyond that literal coin of the realm.

Again, I shouldn’t romanticize: So many of those who lived in and constituted the history of these neighborhoods scuffled and hustled and did whatever they could to escape those places. They wanted the money they saw flowing from the pockets of those living further uptown. And my own skepticism of community ought to force me to scrape away the sepia from what could be a violent and oppressive past.

But I miss what was there, what is gone. It’s in large measure the cheap nostalgia of the passer-by: the one who strolls through and marvels and doesn’t have to live in the dim and the dank.

But there was life beyond—within—the dim and the dank, a life unseen by the mere passer-by. The people who lived in these neighborhoods were visible in the streets, but there was something more which connected these people to the tenements and narrow streets and one another.

Perhaps it’s still there, or somewhere, in this city. Perhaps I need to open my eyes and see what’s here, now. There is always something more.


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Friday poem III

27 11 2009

I was sorting through a couple of different poems, trying to decide which one, today.

The one from the collection published when the poet was very old? The one from the poet whose work I’d long distrusted, but felt this one tugging at me?

Then I came across this one, by Jean Valentine. I clipped it years ago from The New Yorker. I used to to do that, clip poems from magazines I owned. Perhaps I should start again.

Osip Mandelstam was one of Russia’s great poets, his life ended, like so many others, in Stalin’s Gulag. He was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, arrested again, and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. According to one account, he died of ‘starvation and madness.’

His poems, in translations, are sublime, but I have heard that Russian poems don’t translate particularly well. If I were a better person I’d learn Russian just to read Mandelstam and Akhmatova in the original.

Why this poem? This is why poems are written. This is why poems are read.

Tell Me, What Is The Soul
(Osip Mandelstam)

There is a prison room,
the floor cement,
in the middle of the room
a black pool full of black water.
It leads to an invisible canal.
Plunder is the pool. Plunder is the canal.

By the wall,
by a fire,
he was reciting, in his yellow leather coat,
the thieves were listening, they offered him
bread and the canned stuff,
which he took. . .


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Burn baby burn

18 11 2009

I fucking LOVE apocalyptic movies!

Death! Disaster! Mayhem! Whoo hoo!

And if they’re religiously themed? Even better.

Now, I define apocalyptic broadly, to encompass existential ends, partial ends (of countries, cities) as well as the mere possibility of world’s end.

Oo, world’s end—let’s see, Childhood’s End, an Aldous Huxley (Arthur C. Clarke—h/t C.) novel about—yep—the end of the world. Read that one (the, uh, first time) in high school.

So let’s extend the love for all things apocalyptic to novels, as well.

It should go without saying that these movies/novels are often awful. Children of Men was a very good movie (and so-so novel), but that, I think, was an exception.

Terminator 2 was pretty good, but really, really, really long.

Terminator? Okay.

Terminator 3? Okay. (I missed Linda Hamilton.)

Terminator 4? Umm, is that on Hulu? Maybe if I ever sign up for Netflix. . . .

Goofy apocalyptic is good, like Independence Day. Or what was that movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche about the volcano in Los Angeles? Goofy is what it was!

And certainly better than the Pierce Brosnan volcano flick—which, while it had Linda Hamilton, did not have Sarah Connor.

So, too, with Deep Impact Armageddon (Bruce Willis/Ben Affleck comet movie) and the Morgan Freeman/Tea Leoni comet movie (Deep Impact). You’d think the Freeman/Leoni duo would kick Willis & Affleck’s asses, but, no: Deep Impact Armageddon wins by goofiness.

Prophecy, with Virginia Madsen and Christopher Walken—really, you have to ask? Christopher Walken! And bonus with angels and Satan and stuff!

Much better than End of Days, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Too stodgy.

The Ninth Gate? Not really world-ending, but really fucking weird. And Satan and stuff.

Stigmata? Not really at all, but it had visions and angels and stuff. And Gabriel Byrne.

Waterworld? Nuh. Kevin Costner, not in his lovable-crank personna (Bull Durham, Tin Cup), but just annoying crank. But Dennis Hopper was fun.

Day After Tomorrow? Please. (And while I’m certainly willing to watch bad bad-end movies, I’m not willing to pay 12 bucks to do so: 2012 will have to wait.)

War of the Worlds? I have the Tom Cruise version stamped on my brain. Too muted. And Tom Cruise. . . .

Oh, and On the Beach. Odd, but great. The first half is a bit of a caper flick, with Fred Astair and Ava Gardner (man!) and stiff-and-honorable Gregory Peck, but still (SPOILER), no relief: everybody dies.

The Day After played on t.v. in the 1980s, to much hue and cry. I saw it again a year or two ago, and while it was mighty cheesy, still.

Testament was not cheesy. I still (mis?)remember the scene in which Jane Alexander is sitting in next to sun-filled window, sewing, her face determined. It’s only in the voiceover do we learn that this is a shroud for her daughter.

28 Days Later gave me nightmares for a week—then terrified me out of sleep six months later.

Didn’t see 28 Months Later, however—tho’ if it streams on Netflix (if I ever. . .) then, maybe.

I should catch up with all the old George Romero flixs. While I’m not a big horror fan, zombies work.

World War Z, by Max Brooks. Have you read it? A fine bit of reportage. Sparked an unfinished bit of writing from me, on the ethics of zombie-killing and -experimentation.

Margaret Atwood has written a number of apocalyptic novels, although these tend toward collapse-apocalypse as opposed to war/violence-apocalypse. Oryx & Crake was hilarious and cold—just right; her new book elaborates on the O&C theme and is, according to a number of critics, better than the original. Hmpf.

And then, of course, The Handmaid’s Tale—I’m currently using that in one of my pol sci classes. When I polled the class on when/whether they would try to escape the totalitarian Republic of Gilead, most of them were of the I’d-wait-it-out variety. Really? I all-but-yelped. Only one student was with me: as soon as we lost our jobs or our money, if not sooner, we’d be gone.

Turn me into an Unwoman—no suh!

Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway. What? You still haven’t read it? Honestly, what’s your excuse?

There’s more, of course. Fahrenheit 451. Don DeLillo. The Plot Against America. Walker Percy. Peter Hoeg. Jose Saramago. 1984. A couple of Marge Piercy’s. A couple of Mary Doria Russell’s. William Gibson.

Science fiction? Speculative fiction? Whatever. If the earth is in peril/ends, it’s in.

C. was going to start an apocalyptic book club at the bookstore, but a necessary manager bailed. Still, I’d expect that she’d have even more to offer.

And, again, quality is not really the point, here. Even the books or movies I slagged I’d still (re)read or watch (again).

The point is that they are 1) fiction; 2) fun! and/or terrifying!; and 3) the world ends!

Should I mention that a number of us have made plans to see The Road Christmas night?

The director had better not make it ‘inspiring’. . . .


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Two poems

13 11 2009

I used to read poetry, and write it, too.

When students ask how to learn how to write better, I tell them Read poetry. Write it, too. They look at me, faces pulled back and skeptical. Your poems may be no good, I say, you may not want to show them to anyone. At this, they nod.

But you will pay attention, I say. You will learn to pay attention to the words.

I keep forgetting this, the paying of attention. Words come so easily for me, I take them in chunks and waterfalls, gorge on and scatter them, thoughtlessly.

Pay attention. I used to whisper this to myself, as a reminder. Then I stopped paying attention.

Friday at TNC’s open thread seems unofficially designated as poetry day. People post their own or, more commonly, poems which move them.

I’ve been rushing past. Words words words—what’s the point?

Slow down. Pay attention.

So, two poems, in honor of my long-ago friend C., and in memory of her younger brother, J.

Fourteen years ago this month—this Saturday—J. shot himself to death. He was thirteen.

What could we bring C.? I brought music; we brought ourselves. And I gave her two poems:

The body of my brother Osiris is in the mustard seed

Seed from an early Egyptian tomb,
after water damage to the case
in the Historisches Museum,
sprouted in 1955.

That was the year my brother’s foot
slipped on spray-wet log.
He was gone
into the whitewater out of sight.

Just downstream
the back of his head
came up
in a narrow chute.

Between terrible rocks
the back of my brother’s head
looked wet and small and dark.
I watched it through the roar.

Through tears, afraid
to pray, I told God
he was swimming. Wait.
He would lift his face.

—Brooks Haxton

Moira

A day comes when nothing matters
And nothing will suffice.
The heart says: I cannot,
The soul says: I am not.

The window whose frame
Once held dawn
Gleams all night in desolation,
And the one tree

Untouched by blight
Offers a fruit you do not refuse,
An anguish impossible to conceive

Until this lucky day.
Weigh it in your hands, so heavy,
So light: is there more to wish for?

—Phyllis Levin


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So when they ask me later, I won’t tell them how it’s going

8 11 2009

So much to do, so little inclination to follow through.

Grading. A kajillion papers. Or 70. Somewhere in there.

The papers aren’t long. If I start grading now, do some tomorrow night, then Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ll be fine.

Or I could just wait until Wednesday—night—and stay up too late and get too little sleep and plow through and end up kicking myself for being such a procrastinating idiot.

Hmmmm, wonder what I’ll do.

Then again, I punted on dealing with the whole credit thing, but  that’s taken finally been taken care of. For now. And If I get a real job, there’ll be no worries at all.

Of course, there are all these worries over getting a real job.

And I’m doing all I can to get a real job—ja, you betcha. Sure.

That’s on the list, eh? And we all know how well that whole list thing is going, right-o? Sure.

If only I were motivated by free-floating anxiety.

 


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