#HamiltonNerds

I should show my students

_

Inspiration

Found this on NuNu's school-issued laptop.🤓😍

(It says, "Alexander Hamilton wrote 51 papers in the span of 6 months, you can write ONE.")

_

Imprint

I am the serotinal student

clasping ideas between breaths

clamping lips around knowledge

i touch a thousand books

i read them all


-

The World Turned Upside Down

Until we saw Hamilton last year in Chicago--I hadn't really paid a lot of attention to the phenomenon. I *loved* the rap form, the function of the cast, was happy for Miranda's MacArthur Genius award... and all of that. But I was afraid that it would be a bunch of bad rhymes or some twee hagiography. So the show was such a pleasure and a relief. And now we just can't stop listening to the soundtrack all the time.

I was looking for tickets to the touring company at the Wharton Center and they seem to have very little information. It's almost funny, so that's not the reason I was in tears to "It's Quiet Uptown" after I dropped At off at college this morning.

It was tough coming home to an empty house after such a crowded weekend. The crappy weather and the drippy roof aren't helping.
_

He Takes his Spike Lee Seriously

O Momentous Day

Off to see 

the wonderful

Homecoming

_

When a Banker Says...

that they work with families 

on Detroit's Eastside,

they deserve their own 

thank-you copy.

_

Between Us and Ta-Nehisi Coates

One more reason this week's going to be terrible for us...

Both of us 

had put a copy of 

Essence Magazine's commemorative issue on the Obamas

in the other's surprise

Christmas stocking...

_

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.

First Writing Project Together...

Saved as a Google doc with the super-serious title "BigDogandPuppy Project."

_

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.

Such a Great Feeling...

When you find the perfect textbook

for your students

(and you're thanked 

in the Acknowledgements)

_

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.

_

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)

_

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.

_

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

(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. 

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)

_

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.

_