I, now thirty-seven years old

in perfect health begin
Hoping to cease not till death.

thinking about

these poems:

mark strand “keeping things whole“

may swenson “birthday”

h.d. “heat“

and

john keats “ode on melancholy“

there is something about absence or loss in each, but i am still working with them. what am i missing? grapes? voids? that the presence of one thing either highlights or obscures another? relations between things. joy or pleasure in the presence of loss or sadness? how do i make this clearer, for freshmen?

overheard at the broadway/houston subway station today

“it’s when you’re staring right into the abyss that you really know who you are.”

hilton als on elevator repair service

in the new yorker this week.

promoting creative time with pictures

the pedagogy lecture.

looks unassuming…

this small stack of papers have been blanketing all horizontal surfaces in my apartment for, roughly, a year. and has been coating all my thoughts for longer. there is no way that i can, just now, articulate the process of writing my master’s thesis. i had to learn not only the material, but also how to think.

here are a few observations:

1. no one writes academic papers alone. they would be flat. (thanks to my thesis advisor and my second reader and the english department at hunter college.)

2. learning how to construct a complicated, unresolvable and coherent(ish) argument means that you also learn how to think complicatedly, unresolvably and sort of coherently.

3. completing this project leaves you practically no better off than before (still looking for work), but vastly improved in intellectual capability. not that i am claimin to be an intellectual, only that i am claiming that the apartment of my mind is larger.

4. reading is one of the smartest things a person can do with her/his time.

teaching merce rodoreda to freshmen

i chose to teach, as an example of the short novel, la placa del diamante, by merce rodoreda. it is a decent length for a survey literature course; it is a fairly stylistically digestible modernist novel by a woman writer (i love virginia woolf; however, i am loathe to spend too little time on to the lighthouse. perhaps my thought that it is too complex to pass over quickly is shaped by  my enormous admiration of woolf’s ability to compress such  complex  associations into smooth prose. rodoreda is fun to teach. i’ll write more on it later; my student’s comments are worth sharing. my secondary reason for teaching this novel is that i discovered rodoreda while i was briefly living in barcelona and was surprised to see so little about her in english language criticism, and to find that few literature professors had heard of her. maybe next time i’ll teach mirall trencat.

nearly finished

my thesis.

so i’ll return to blogging soon; maybe more illustrated this time.

macbeth

i do get to see patrick stewart in macbeth. yay.

the sensuality of “diving bell…”

i read a review that noted it’s sensuality (probably more than one), but i found its sensuality limited to (extremely well-done) visuals. and now i am trying to remember which film did an excellent job (i can see and hear, in my mind, a scene involving hands and cloth.) stanley kubrick was excellent at creating sensation in the body (mostly repulsion) as is jane campion (am i the only one who thought in the cut was an incredibly sensory film experience?) maybe this is all just a question of taste, and i would not underestimate schnabel’s ability to create beautiful images.