Showing posts with label Writer-Encounters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writer-Encounters. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Monday, April 03, 2017
Sunday, January 15, 2017
One more reason this week's going to be terrible for us...
Both of us
had put a copy of
in the other's surprise
Christmas stocking...
_
Wednesday, January 04, 2017
Conference Banquet
It was a great #SALA2017, and so glad I got to co-chair it with some wonderful and generous people. Here's a picture blurry enough to post without multiple permissions.
Monday, January 02, 2017
Thursday, September 08, 2016
The Ladies Finger
Don't know how I first came across it, but I love this blogzine--irreverent, honest, charming, and pathbreaking. It seems to be written and produced in India, but it's a great read for anyone with transnational feminist sensibilities.
Monday, January 11, 2016
Friday, November 06, 2015
Frieda
Sometime between ages 16 and 21…
First I fell in love with Ted Hughes. Then I fell in love with Sylvia Plath. Then I hated Ted Hughes, while being mildly annoyed with Sylvia Plath. Then I took to raving against Hughes, and if you mentioned Plath's name would break down in angry tears. Then I pretended neither of them existed while reading their poetry secretly.
If that sounds exhausting,* how much more exhausting to be those intense, talented people, constantly under scrutiny and the pressure to perform.
Love Frieda Hughes' interview in which she talks about her parents. And I've come a long way from being that impressionable and emotional teenager who took everything personally, but still needed to hear this:
"To me, as a child, my father seemed to blame himself for almost everything. It was awful. A child does not want to see their parents suffer. Thousands of people all over the world every day split up, thousands of people have affairs. Not everyone kills themselves."
* Yes, it also sounds nerdy, but everyone knows that already.
_
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Almost...
Pic courtesy J C-D
All I can think of is the poet Kambar
talking about how magnificent
young Rama's shoulders were:
*
"Thol kandar; tholey kandar!"
"Those who saw his shoulders,
saw only his shoulders!"
*
(Those shoulders--so perfect,
no one could look away AND
so broad that they never got around
to completing the act of looking)
_
Monday, March 31, 2014
These Days
I translate everything:
extra hour of daylight,
half hour before kids,
come home--
I make up courtesies.
Every place is all
papers and books
(and prayers)
And I'm always telling
my date again.
No. Nothing personal
allowed--
unless it's already on
an official form
a continent away.
What a terrible idea
to tell them everything
to give them my books
to give away thoughts
that initiate my breath
Read on, hoping for
another line that
invents the kind
of caress that
can make you forget.
_
extra hour of daylight,
half hour before kids,
come home--
I make up courtesies.
Every place is all
papers and books
(and prayers)
And I'm always telling
my date again.
No. Nothing personal
allowed--
unless it's already on
an official form
a continent away.
What a terrible idea
to tell them everything
to give them my books
to give away thoughts
that initiate my breath
Read on, hoping for
another line that
invents the kind
of caress that
can make you forget.
_
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Encircled
We drew a lot of circles in class today because of Martha Nussbaum and the Stoics.
But it reminded me of another Greek:
Euclid
But it reminded me of another Greek:
Euclid
(Vachel Lindsay)
Old Euclid drew a circle
On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn greybeards
Nodded and argued much
Of arc and circumference,
Diameter and such.
A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon.
On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn greybeards
Nodded and argued much
Of arc and circumference,
Diameter and such.
A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon.
Friday, March 29, 2013
This is how...
I need to put this out there, to counteract Diaz's somewhat simpering performance on The Colbert Report this week, and remember that he's a MacArthur my kind of genius.
(From Diaz's Twitter feed in November 2012
http://twitter.com/JunotDiazDaily/status/268774844273934336)
_
Monday, September 24, 2012
Old Things (2)
I picked up from my old house the black corduroy trench I’d left behind. S didn’t have to save it for me, since the house papers are long signed and it has no real monetary value. But I'm glad it was saved. That I have it. It’s always made me feel sophisticated. Miss Selfridges. Ten years ago it cost me less than 20 GBP. I know because I never spent more than that on one piece of clothing.
And although it still quite warm now, it reminded me of wearing it back to my rooms on my way back from the Žižek talk the evening the snow started unexpectedly flower-like and light.
And how you called me on my new cell phone. I must have given you the number because refusal would have been ruder than necessary. Because you asked although you shouldn’t have.
You said—“Are you out in that thin black coat of yours.”
And I tried to act as though it were ok for you to call me on a cell phone. And you acted as though there were nothing unusual in telling me that you were worried about me calling me to check on me on my walk home in the snow.
You said—“How was your talk?”
And I pick from Žižek’s talk the one thing I thought you needed to hear. “Žižek says that if you tell someone you love them then the dominant emotion implicit in that statement is selfishness because you want to hear it back.”
You make fun of Žižek. I bristle. You imply that Rushdie is a philanderer. I am non committal.
We ring off.
_
Friday, March 23, 2012
To Kill a Mockingjay
In 2010, ten-year-old At (Li'l A) told me I should read The Hunger Games because it was postcolonial and feminist and I would like it.
I'm glad I did.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Sex and Stones (on Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone)
Abraham Verghese is a huge talent. He's saved and improved the lives of more people than I've ever even met, probably. And he knows more (about medicine, certainly, but also most other stuff) than I do. The new book--first novel--is an intense, politically questioning, resonant, transnational saga. The emotional yearning and sexual tension in the novel is immense. I loved it.
And I hated this:
In every account of sex, the women seem to sacrifice themselves. In both encounters that the plot revolves around, I wasn't sure if I were reading about coerced sex/rape: one woman has had a clitoridectomy and seems startled by the experience; another woman gives in to the fondling of a man she idolizes because he is in a drunken panic. Both women are younger and less privileged in a variety of ways including social position, education, and race. Unlike many other literary authors, Verghese is not averse to writing about sex (at length, even). So why then is the sex never playful and honest? Never HAPPY? Why is sex repeatedly the ultimate sacrifice a woman can ever make.
What is this shit?
Verghese's novel begins with twin brothers in the womb and ends with the an endorsement of a father-son connection. Whichever way you look at it, that's male centered (for the bros). Which would explain why all (all!) the women in the novel occupy subservient positions as mother figures (who sacrifice lives--literally by dying in childbirth or by neglecting their health and careers) or as sexual objects (those who share sex freely are typed as servient sex workers or literal servants; alternatively they are the sullied/undeserving siren who betrays).
Can it get worse?
Yes. Wait till the women die--in honest-to-goodness childbirth or of consumption. Some punitively patriarchal novelist could have written this... in the 19th century. I won't think about the acrobatic coincidences and biblical / spiritual / numerological rationalizing that occurs in the book--Verghese's writing can compensate for most of that. If there had just been one female character I could identify with or even one (one!!) female colleague who wasn't subject to elaborate sexualization and with whom the male characters had a respectful relationship, I'd have bought the book.
With more than just my money.
__
And I hated this:
In every account of sex, the women seem to sacrifice themselves. In both encounters that the plot revolves around, I wasn't sure if I were reading about coerced sex/rape: one woman has had a clitoridectomy and seems startled by the experience; another woman gives in to the fondling of a man she idolizes because he is in a drunken panic. Both women are younger and less privileged in a variety of ways including social position, education, and race. Unlike many other literary authors, Verghese is not averse to writing about sex (at length, even). So why then is the sex never playful and honest? Never HAPPY? Why is sex repeatedly the ultimate sacrifice a woman can ever make.
What is this shit?
Verghese's novel begins with twin brothers in the womb and ends with the an endorsement of a father-son connection. Whichever way you look at it, that's male centered (for the bros). Which would explain why all (all!) the women in the novel occupy subservient positions as mother figures (who sacrifice lives--literally by dying in childbirth or by neglecting their health and careers) or as sexual objects (those who share sex freely are typed as servient sex workers or literal servants; alternatively they are the sullied/undeserving siren who betrays).
Can it get worse?
Yes. Wait till the women die--in honest-to-goodness childbirth or of consumption. Some punitively patriarchal novelist could have written this... in the 19th century. I won't think about the acrobatic coincidences and biblical / spiritual / numerological rationalizing that occurs in the book--Verghese's writing can compensate for most of that. If there had just been one female character I could identify with or even one (one!!) female colleague who wasn't subject to elaborate sexualization and with whom the male characters had a respectful relationship, I'd have bought the book.
With more than just my money.
__
Friday, March 16, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Mindful Embodiment
Spent yesterday in a wonderful workshop on embodied pedagogy with Jen McWeeny, learning and brainstorming ideas on how to enable students to allow experience to count as learning. I want to use more of her work in class, especially the witness circle as a way of getting everyone in class to speak (feel invited to speak).
Today, wished my parents a happy wedding anniversary and brought out the old joke about how I was born a full six days before it. Mindful embodiment, indeed.
_
Today, wished my parents a happy wedding anniversary and brought out the old joke about how I was born a full six days before it. Mindful embodiment, indeed.
_
Sunday, November 20, 2011
PreOCCUPY
It was a weekend of extended socializing--dinner and drinks and friends, and a pub crawl, and a movie and a gallery opening.
It's true that the only money I spent yesterday was on UNICEF, and the only money I may spend today will be on utilitarian Indie art. Yet through it all, there's the outrage of knowing that students were being brutally beaten and terrorized on a variety of campuses for non violent protests. Of seeing the howling courage of untenured assistant professor Nathan Brown's letter demanding the resignation Chancellor Katehi.
So earlier this morning there were some hasty FB exchanges with a colleague at Antioch College. And now, there's one more thing to put on the calendar. A post-kid-bedtime meeting across the kitchen table to draft a teach-in on the #occupy movement across campuses.
_
It's true that the only money I spent yesterday was on UNICEF, and the only money I may spend today will be on utilitarian Indie art. Yet through it all, there's the outrage of knowing that students were being brutally beaten and terrorized on a variety of campuses for non violent protests. Of seeing the howling courage of untenured assistant professor Nathan Brown's letter demanding the resignation Chancellor Katehi.
So earlier this morning there were some hasty FB exchanges with a colleague at Antioch College. And now, there's one more thing to put on the calendar. A post-kid-bedtime meeting across the kitchen table to draft a teach-in on the #occupy movement across campuses.
_
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