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July 17

 

We're having heat, and my mother and Joel are arriving in the next two days, and I'm in the middle of what seems iike a tremendous amount of stuff going on-- preparing a manuscript, an agent interested in Love Palace, the issue of HSR, a probable drive to West Virginia. Why are we so busy? On the other hand, there are moments when I feel relaxedd-- it's me driving me.

Andy bikes whenever possible: came home after an early ride yesterday and was joined by Taxi:

 

 

July 11

 

Here’s the thing about emails: very very safe, but no body language or voice tone and no follow up questions. I’ve embraced it all, of course, and the other technological computer stuff I’m surrounded by, but there are losses. You are reminded when you read older novels and other narratives of daily life.

I'm reading Mary Lee Settle's memoir of her years during the Second World War in England in the WAAF as a 21 or 22 year old. Not the best written of her work-- fascinating but repetitive and depends on swoops of rhetoric and generalizations like  "one of that type of English lady who..."   Smoking and partying, conversation as entertainment. More boredom, at least among the upper classes, ennui among the lower in their repetitive tasks.

Today, we’re in a buzz cloud haze of messages and images. Sometimes I think it’s the technology depressing me. Sometimes I think it’s just weariness or a night of bad sleep, or maybe it's old age opening up in front like the mouth of a cave, sloping down, and surprisingly bright, but bright that loses some details.

Here's an interesting corporate take on the etiquette of email.

 

 

July 10, 2008

I couldn't get online last night and, to make a two and a half hour  story short, I found out from Verizon (our DSL provider) that Microsoft had sent out a recent automatic security update that was "interfering with some customers' ability to get online."  There were calls to Microsoft, there was disabling Zone Alarm, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but they did tell me, finally, how to uninstall the security update. I'm beginning to agree with Greg about how Microsoft really is the devil.

Meanwhile, Joel is about to make the next big change in his life: he's finishing up a year as a software engineer, coming to see us and visiting Israel, starting graduate school. See below for where. The view is of San Francisco from their window in the apartment they'll be leaving soon.

 

 

 

June 30, 2008

Well, I just finished a decent draft of a short story called “The Roy Critchfield Scandals.”   As usual, the hardest but most necessary part, especially in a short story, is to cut. HOWEVER! I have now officially found a great use for journals and blogs! I'm going to put my best outtake here!I took out one of my favorite passages in the story for slowing down the pace-- it'sll all philosophy and travel memories. So here’s the passage, which is in the voice of a woman named Ann Harding, who mentions both her late beloved husband John and her present boyfriend, Abe, who takes her to Europe:

 

One of the things John Harding taught me is that growing up means learning to live with many truths and many falsehoods in the same person, including yourself. So I try not to complain about some of the nonsense people believe at the First Baptist of Kingfield because there’s so much I value there: the words of the King James translation of the Bible, a fine peroration at the end of a solidly argued sermon. Old fashioned hymns that put you in the spirit whether you take it literally or not. I love the whole thing, although to be perfectly candid I consider it as much of an artifact as great painting or a bridge or the Parthenon in Greece which I hope to visit someday.

Or the Pantheon in Rome, which I have visited. Abe and I stayed in a hotel on our last trip overlooking that domed church that was originally a temple to the Roman gods, and is still called “All Gods” even though it’s a Catholic church! This amuses me no end, how people can keep the sense of the sacred but change what the thing is sacred to.

Mostly, though, that Pantheon was simply the most beautiful human-made building I’d seen up to that point in my life. The window in our hotel bathroom opened directly overlooking the dome, and in the evening, I pressed my face out at its huge dark curvature, nothing between it and my face but air. Voices and car horns came up from the piazza and someone’s apartment was nestled in next to the dome on the other side, and pigeons flapped rose up into the immensely dark blue sky.

Abe said "Let’s go eat, Annie," and I said, "Not yet. "

 

 

View of Clarksburg, WV by Jim Moore

 

June 28

Dear Friends:
      A few days ago I got caught by an unscrupulous social networking site called PAGII. It opened my entire email list and sent "invitations" from me to them. See Mark Blevis' blog entry here for more information. But please! Let's all pledge to ignore these invitations to be Friends with people unless we really want to be part of the social networking sites. I spent a lot of time sending out apologies-- so many that gmail froze my account for awhile on the theory I was probably spamming!

 

 

Here are some images I like by Randi Ward from her exhibit "Holdfast"

 

 

 

June 24

      I’m just back from a few days in West Virginia– had an excellent one day workshop with the Morgantown branch of the West Virginia Writers, George Lies and Mary Lucille DeBerry and others organized a just-right sized workshop with Robert Tinnell the screen writer and Robert W. Walker the novelist (both of whom live in WV now) and me and more. There were workshops, some critiquing, a panel, socializing– around 40 participants with that wonderful West Virginia mix of high school, college, retired and everything in between. I got to visit a little with Norman Julian and met lots of new people, all interesting– it took place at the Monongalia Arts Center.

The rest of the time I spent with Mom, who is rushing around getting ready to leave for a few weeks– she is going to Ohio with my cousin Harley, then she’ll fly to us to see Joel when he is in, then either I’ll take her home or she’ll go back to Harley’s. Not clear yet.

I’ll probably end up taking her, as, in spite of the grueling drive, I so enjoy just being in West Virginia with the blue haze on the intense green of the nearby hills with their choppy tree-topped summits– I can never describe those northern West Virginia hills: they are shorter than farther south, not so steep, still have some open fields. They always feel very close by, and the silhouette when the light is behind them is of a badly cut little boy’s hair: irregular and endearing.

 

 

 

 

 

June 12

I finally read a Christmas gift from Joel, I think-- Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It was very short, like an article in the New York Review of Books but with nicer pictures) I had avoided and dreaded this, but it is actually such a pretty book, and I think a lot of what I read is going to make more sense to me now– the temperature of water, the relative fragility of the arctic ice, how the drowning of coastal cities is maybe less crucial than weather patterns (and this month we've had a lot of severe weather). Why didn’t Gore get elected president? There would be no war in Iraq, we would have signed on to the Kyoto treaty, there would be two more reasonable people on the Supremes. Some of his sidebars were a bit much about his family, but he two interesting analogies: his sister dying of lung cancer apparently in her late forties or early fifties and the misinformation from the tobacco companies, and the relative success of the ozone layer crisis: governments CAN work together etc. etc.

 

 

 

June 10, 2008

We are in the middle of a major heat wave– the Accuweather report on the Internet has an alarming red thermometer with cartoon heat wiggles, and here in Essex County, NJ we had a power outage yesterday for six hours, 75,000 customers, and meanwhile ’m reading An Inconvenient Truth which I’m glad I’m doing as I had been dreading it, and it’s actually pretty simplified and straight forward and the pictures are too pretty to be really depressing.

I hope I don’t get caught in a blackout in NYC today, final writers’ group at Edith’s.

I had hoped for really intense work this week, too, my first week with days having NO teaching or meetings (Not many, but a couple). I’ve been trying to catch up, actually vacuuming the bedroom around the just-installed air-conditioner when the power faded, then went out. I took it as a message from the Powers That Be that I wasn’t meant to run a vacuum...

Last week I had a visit to a school in Jersey City, my regular Advanced Novel Workshop, Social Action Committee, Schools Committee, the North Wildwood Beach Writers Conference, AND my Jump Start Your Novel One-shot on Saturday. Plus Sunday was Ethical and the Sciaino family graduation party for Ryan and Anne. I hasten to add that there was nothing here I don't get pleasure and satisfaction from doing, but it was a lot, and I'll be going to West Virginia for a couple of days next week.

 

May 28. 2008

Hilton Obenzinger has a good summary of the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University sit-ins here. What has been so amazing to me is how much has been written, how much said, in general, but with a lot of emphasis on the suffering of the black kids at Columbia (more, I believe, than at Barnard? Is that true?). Except for the ones who have embraced their Jewishness instead/as well as. It did seem a little too mea culpa mea culpa to me, but then, I had just spent a year as a VISTA volunteer with at least some awareness of the intersection of race, racism, and poverty in these U.S. And in the years since, I've spent many years working for stable integration here in New Jersey, so maybe I dealt with the white guilt in my own way. The way Columbia Univesity treated black students in 1968 was a surprise, though-- I hadn't realized it was so racist. I guess the white people I knew were trying hard not to be racist, so I sort of assumed everyone else was too.

 

Lake Buel Trees

 

May 27. 2008

We've been at the lake for the long week-end, mostly bright and cool, and everyone spent time lying on the beach all bundled up and I shot up at the sky and got some trees. David took photos I liked of me and Andy: You can see we're bundled up but happy. Paula Hatch gave us tickets on Saturday night to see the Shakespeare & Company farce Ladies' Man, and on Sunday night we were part of the millions who went to see the next Indiana Jones. Sometimes it's good to be part of the crowd? I worked hard on the manuscript I've been finishing up, and not I'm looking at some busy weeks--when did June get so busy?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Illustrations by Rachel Burgess-- see more at her website.

 

5-21-08

You find so many nice things on the web-- Rachel Burgess is a young artist with a beautiful nuevo-Victorian style, at least in her books illustrations. Take a look at her website!

 

 

VIew from Sideling Hill in Western Maryland May 7, 2008

 

May 12, 2008

 

I gave the Sunday Morning platform at the Ethical Culture Society yesterday, and it went very well. It was called “We Were Your Children: Forty Years Later,” and it was a talk/discussion that centered on a couple of readings, the longest one coming from Hilton Obenzinger's memoir Busy Dying , the pages where he described how the SDS sundial rally on April 23, 1968 at Columbia University turned into the taking of Hamilton Hall and the big sit-ins and protests there. I Included a little bit from Trespassers and a bit from Cathy Wilkerson's memoir. Mostly it was putting everything in some context, including handing out a sheet with a timeline of events, some events, during the first half of 1968: Tet offensive, LBJ saying he wasn't going to run, Prague Spring, King assassinated, etc. etc. We were just a little part. The questions/comments were interesting, mostly very supportive, but included one saying how there had been so much other political work going on, and how annoying it was that Columbia University got all the media attention, and one who was in librarian school at Pratt Institute and how she and her co-students were terrified the student strikes would spread and get in the way of their education...

For an outline of the talk with some materials, click here.

 

 

 

May 10, 2008

Back from the long drive home from West Virgina. My mom is doing well-- took her cast off and is walking around smartly, taking biscuits to her doggy friends, etc. etc. We visited with Edith, also Margie Haresty. Made trips to Wal-Mart, ate out, and hiked around East Shinnston. Such green, everywhere, Sideling hill, Shinnston, and then back driving down Prospect Street.

 

Tomorrow is my talk on 1968 at Ethical Culture, and I'm nervous about it-- had trouble focusing on it while I was down there. Well, after this, I've a pretty low key, for me, span coming up. Looking forward to a good sleep, then get up and complete this-- a way to share, to put us all in a kind of perspective.

 

 

 

 

 

5-5-08 lettuce, radishes, turnip greens on their way up...

 

May 3

More gray-rainy (grainy?) days, but it is also getting densely green. Green beginning to close in overhead as the leaves come out, green underfoot in the yards, already ahead of us grass cutters.

 

This has been a wide ranging day. Andy and I went up to Montclair to the art show to see the pottery work by young Ethical Culture member Christopher Geissler, and ran into an artist whose work we have on the wall downstairs, Linda Adato -- the sweet "umber" colored "Morning Mail" with a radiator and a chair. Her new work is in color, and reminds me, when she does cityscapes, of Ella Yang , but Adato's are smaller, not oils, some she does now are monoprints, but also etchings. So that was nice, and Chris got interviewed for TV, and Andy bought a cup and a small pitcher. We ate, also in Montclair, at an interesting Turkish restaurant, Lalezar that I enjoyed a lot, drove up to Eagle Rock reservation, looked at the 9/11 memorial with its rather awkward old fashioned art, but a great view-- of fog mostly, today. Then to Garden of Eden, Andy's first visit, and he liked the cheese. And home, and we watched the Kentucky Derby and the Place horse, the only filly in the race, ran her heart out and broke her two front ankles and had to be destroyed. That was a really sad moment--you get excited for an hour because it's the Derby, and then there's this.

Sometimes your feelings are displaced-- or the surprise of the one poor horse dying for doing what it was bred and trained to do-- easier to feel than the 3000 names in polished granite.  3000 families' pain is much, much too much?

Someone on the radio earlier this week, was it WBAI's Armand Dimele's show? Anyhow, yes, I think it was, trying to distinguish between Buddhist style compassion where you feel for another's suffering and the kind of empathy where people feel someone else's pain to the point that the empathizer's suffering becomes the real point. That was so interesting to me--when we are young, we often suffer horribly over the terrible things in the world we are just learning about-- we literally ache with the other. But when you are suffering physically, or, say, mourning, it isn't necessarily someone who is groaning in concert with you that you want, is it? The program is here.

Boy, this blog entry sure has a lot of links-- I spend my time now combining writing and looking things up on the web, and then linking to them-- the new world.

 

April 30, 2008

The Community Coalition on Race had a terrific forum last night on Language, Stereotypes, & Communication, and Carolyn Hunt did a really super job of directing the actors she and Alysia Souder assembled. The table discussions were apparently quite deep– several people said they’d never have gone so far so fast without the improvisations.

I was personally deeply moved by the actors: Luis Marmolejo, Horace Jackson, Naja Selby, and Kate McAteer--- their human energy and skill. It occurred to me that, among other things, they gave the lie to another set of stereotypes-- about actors being narcissistic, can’t talk without someone writing their lines, etc. etc. They opened up so wonderfully to each other and to us, and added all sorts of good stuff to the material we gave them.

I especially loved the Evil Word fluid sculpture– wished for it to go on and on–brilliant idea to do several of them as positive/negative (the girl who seems to love being a ‘ho, the woman offended; the kid calling out to his friend “Yo, Nigga!” etc.) My only regret is that the town officials did not come out in force (some of them were there but I wish the others had come too). Another amazing thing: the whole evening was right on schedule, which almost never happens, James VanOosting and Sandye Wilson brief and strong, a full half hour of table discussions, and at the end, I think people felt energized rather than exhausted.

 

 

 

 

April 27, 2008

Rainy Sunday, and I finally had my moment of being seen last night: I read well from Trespassers Chapter 12, received much applause, laughs in all the right places, as they apparently got it, the SDS meeting I was describing. Women especially responsive. Once again I left early. This is part of my reputation, to leave early: sometimes there are complaints, but someone usually defends me: Oh, she has to catch a train. I'm the commuter, who of necessity misses things. Mary Gordon spoke of being different, a commuter at Barnard, having to go home, deal with family, how her mother saw her on t. v. praising Linda LeClair.)   As I left, people grabbed my hand, followed me out to speak. My fifteen minutes. So I got the glow.

I greatly enjoyed being part of it. I was invited to read at the Morningside bookshop , heard some sterling presentations, had the pleasure of reading on the same bill with Mary Gordon, Sharon Olds, Paul Auster, Thulani Davis (although I didn’t stay for all of Sharon’s or Thulani or Paul’s) plus James Kunen, Paul Spike, Bob Holman (what a trip! A performance poem on the ?? Other idea?? That is impossible to think?? All noises and jokes and gestures–wow. ) Also, Ntozake Shange , who sat beside me, has been ill, dressed up in purple dreads, flowing clothes, a walker, read two poems (although I could see she had more) and then left. Jonah Raskin’s piece was good. Hilton Obenzinger started it all off-- Paul Spike very emotional on his father and others. I felt like I got what I wanted

Good discussions and information today too: The Ethics and Protest Panel was interesting, but I especially enjoyed the youth panel with all the young people, mainly female, from Lucha which used a fishbowl technique around a big table-- we could have profited from that technique in '68.

I talked after with a young guy who belongs to PL (which got hissed whenever mentioned, and reminded me of the endless Choosing Up Sides and Smelling Armpits sectarianism that was the underbelly of all the good camaraderie and deep friendships. )

Other talks with interesting people: Judge Reichbach, James Kunen , whose book The Strawberry Statement remains in print– very nice unassuming guy, longtime writer for Time and several books. Also with Hilton, with Alan Senauke, who is one of Hilton’s close compadres and now a Buddhist priest.

Well, what can I say? It was good, it was powerful, the University itself perhaps the greatest delight--refreshing stimulating smells architecture cherry blossoms lights.

I’m glad I participated, was interested to observe myself being one of the ones who grabs at the more famous for a moment of contact instead of being the one grabbed at (as I often am in my small circle, or when I do workshops)–- have some regrets about my life, but not really ones I can blame myself for: wish I had been mentally healthier sooner, for example.

The real thing that happens is never quite what you expect.

 

 

 

 

         April 25, 2008

It’s late, and I’m back from Day 1 at the ‘68 - ‘08 events. The first panel I attended, the feminist one (Catherine Stimpson, Sharon Olds, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Grace Linda LeClair and more) and the law panel (Gus Reichenbach, Lee Bollinger, Ray Brown, Sam ??) were extremely interesting.

Speakers that were especially gripping to me included Grace Linda LeClair the “sex girl” of Barnard who got expelled for living with her boyfriend-- who did not, of course, get expelled from Columbia. She made front page news– and spoke about learning how that icon, “Linda LeClair the sex girl” was so unlike herself-- now a pleasant faced smiling woman with good speaking skills, a sense of humor, grown children, a career (I’m not sure what, but she has run capital campaigns, she says). Sharon Olds appears to be very nice, too– I think I’m looking forward to reading with her tonight.

At the law panel: Gus Reichbach I could have listened to a lot longer, telling about his struggle to stay in Law School, to get accepted by the bar. How nice that we have one of us as a Justice of the New York Supreme Court!   Also Ray Brown, very handsome and beautifully dressed, talked about the fact that his cohort was the first (at Columbia College, anyhow) to have a reasonable number of black students– total of 70 or 75 not counting Barnard.

At the black studies panel Thulani Davis told a wonderful story about her father, which I wish Andy's father Howard Weinberger had been alive to hear. The story is that her father, a light-skinned man, was studying for a Ph.D. at Columbia in the 1920's. The professors, he said, seemed to be avoiding him, and he assumed it was old fashioned racism, but then one professor called him in to his office and said, “Davis, exactly what are you?”

To which Mr. Davis replied, “Why, I’m a Negro.”

And the professor said, “Well thank God! We thought you were a Jew!”

Andy’s dad always said how Columbia was incredibly anti-Semitic– and I never got it, because it seemed that everyone I knew there (my roommates, the SDS people) was Jewish.

There was, however, a little more to her story: Later, when her Dad was working on his thesis, he was told he should start over with a new subject (was this engineering? Chemistry? Not sure) because there was some German doing the same research, and they couldn’t have a Negro beating out or shaking the glory. So her Dad left Columbia, and we can all relax-- they were racist too.

 

 

April 26

 

It was a very pure delight to be on campus yesterday sunny, cool. It made me at least partly want to be part of now, not to keep gasping over the old black and white photos of Ted Gold and J.J. and Rudd and all the rest. There were pink balloons all over campus, some kind of festival with food and games, people with little kids, all the lovely students tossing frisbees, showing their bodies off, playing baseball in the field with the red flag (which means you’re supposed to stay off the grass) Our graying group not the main event at all, and frankly, that is a good thing.

At the sundial, people reading off the deaths of all 90,000 victims so far of the Iraq war. They hit a gong for each death. This was all day, you’d come out to go to the next venue, and there were the pink balloons and the green lawns with frisbee players and some black and white antiwar banners waving in the breeze, people eating and strolling and the pink and granite buildings– and then the brass gong and softly amplified voices giving a date, “four American soldiers, one four year old Iraqi, in Fallujah...”  And then five solemn gongs.

At the law school, across the plaza, that huge chunk of steel in front of Law– twisted horses and hammers--a whole plaza roofing over Amsterdam Avenue that didn't used to be there-- reminder of how the university dominates up there. There was a rather elegantly dressed black woman from a tenants’ organization from Harlem who was heckling Lee Bollinger at the Law panel. She shut up when she was promised to be the first speaker in the Q&A– and of course Bollinger didn’t stay to listen.

 

 

 

April 24

 

This week-end marks the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University Sit-ins and strike: come to the panels and events! I'll be going up Friday and Saturday to listen to panels, see a few folks, push my book TRESPASSERS a little.

 

It’s almost nine-thirty and I am at my desk, cool breeze through open window, taking pictures of that incredible green outside, doing email, sending off Fiction I papers for drop-out students, no phone calls yet, putting stuff away, my non-computer desk looks clean (things are in neat piles, of course).

Last night a mini-crisis at NYU– someone was using our classroom! But they finally gave us one where they train ultrasound technicians– a big plastic torso of a pregnant woman, illustrative charts of menstrual cycles, four-month fetuses, etc. A good group, a little self-deprecating about their writing ability, but eager to try things, and very satisfying to me to see the changes in the work.
People choose their classes for a reason: sometimes there is less difference in what they’ve accomplished than in how they feel about their accomplishments.

 

April 19

Tonight is the first night of Passover, and we're having one of our All-Goyim seders. Well, there's Andy and maybe one other Jew. Joel and Sarah are in Los Angeles with her family, my mom is on her way to celebrate Harley and Faye's 50th wedding anniversary. It's a very warm, gently greening April day, and I'd like to curl up for a nap. Strange to think of how people are in so many places all at once doing many things, while I'm here in my office, casement windows cranked open, birds all excited about spring, me thinking about the Coalition Forum on Language, Stereotypes, & Communication coming up in a week-and-a-half, and also the 40th anniversary events coming up next week for the 1968 sit-ins at Columbia University --I don't know, I feel like I'm at the center of a web, or maybe not the center, but it doesn't matter because there are many centers, or many nodules, and all the threads are humming.

 

spring sky, my window

 

April 18

Well, it's been, as usually a busy roller coaster few days: Tuesday was Joel's birthday, and yesterday Thursday was my mother's 89th. I talked to her-- she went to the doctor and got essentially a clean bill of health and she'll be going tomorrow to Harley's for his 50th anniversary. Meanwhile, I spent her birthday going to New York for Rebecca Kavaler's funeral:. Rebecca has been a wonderful member of the writers' group for a long time, and Sharon Lynne Schwartz did one of the lovely eulogies, including reading some prose and poetry from her books with Hamilton Stone Editions , including the new and wonderful poems. Big hits to Hamilton Stone this spring, losing Rebecca and Rochelle Ratner as well. Before the service, as I was walking up Amsterdam on a really gorgeous sunny day, I was stopped outside a new Chipotle restaurant by camera people and an interviewer from Good Morning America to ask me my opinion of calorie counts on restaurant menus. And I got an email from Barry Zack this morning saying he saw me! Such a disconnect: my 30 seconds of fame (everything is speeding up) when my main interest was in Rebecca, her sons, writers' group friends, Hamilton Stone cooperative.

4-14-08

Here is a funny poem by Billy Collins about workshopping poetry.

April 13

We had dinner last night with Tony and Mary, such fun to be with them after so much time passed. We discussed aged parents and youthful offspring. Tony is going back to work as a principal after retiring! Ryan and Anne about to graduated respectively from Northeastern and Rutgers. I still miss having them across the street, that terrible storm of a summer when Joel left for college, they moved, and Charley Brown kicked the bucket while being boarded at the Maplewood pet store. That came up during our conversation, and I almost cried. Mary said, “Imagine how you’d feel about a dog!”

 

Magnolia Haiku

Magnolia blossoms
Sweet and potent hanging there–
Defiance of gray.

Grass suddenly green:
Magnolia time has arrived:
Pink backyard geysers.

 

http://www.eyecontactfoundation.org/

April 6, 2008

I've had two welcome days of being pretty much able to do catch up-- including a new issue of my newsletter, which I always enjoy getting out. I'm presently reading a couple of thing that are relevant to the upcoming commemorations at Columbia University, 40th anniversary of the Columbia sit-ins. It's also the 40th anniversary of the founding of Teachers & Writers Collaborative

 

 

April 5, 2008

 

 

Coming soon, to an apple tree near you....

 

 

 

 

A verse from Phyllis Wilson Moore

 

 

first frost--

jonquils bow

above the greening grass

 

 

April 3, 2008

A friend, who had been ill, died, but unexpectedly. This was the writer, poet, and great friend of other writers, Rochelle Ratner:

 

In Memoriam:
Rochelle Ratner

 

Rochelle Ratner's Home Page
Visual Work
(including the World Trade Center Photo above)
Prose:
From her new novel
Poetry:
issue no. 2, spring 2004
issue no. 5, winter 2005
issue no. 12, summer 2007
In the Salt River Review

 

 

 

 

 

March 30

 

Well, the Coal Miner’s Dinner for Ethical went off smoothly! Eleven paying guests (one less than originally planned) plus me and Andy. Butter pie was a big hit, as was apple butter. I had a song on Jack Wright's the “Music of Coal” about being poor and eating corn bread and pinto beans, which was part of the meal. We also sampled moonshine and pronounced it excellent! I made slaw using my mother's recipe,, pork chops (but grilled on the George Foreman--too many people for me to handle pas), fried potatoes, the three kinds of bread (sliced white bread, cornbread, biscuits), and then many pies. Everyone seemed to have a good time.   I did put out the bench at my mom's request, because her family only had chairs for the parents, but in the end, our guests preferred chairs!

 

 

March 26

 

Lilac crocus here–
Overhead maroon leaf buds
Pale scumble of spring!

 

 

March 22

My Shinnston friend Charlie Cowger, a professional artist (see his web page at http://www.charliecowger.com ), sent these neat photos he took of Shinnston. The big open photo is the view we used to see from what we called "Up On the Hill," and the one with the high school is Shinnston High School, Shinnston, West Virginia!

 

 

 

March 20

Spring begins, and also the the beginning of the sixth year of the war in Iraq. I didn't demonstrate yesterday in the rain; went instead to have dinner at North Square with the old mom's group. That isn't that the moms are old, but that we have been together 22 years or so-- since we had babies in Brooklyn (see photo) . It is always invigorating to be with them-- they all had another child after the ones we had together-- Evelyn had two more, so she makes up my singlet. Eva's Theresa is teaching for the first year in Canarsie; Maddie's Julia Kaminsky is in El Salvador, Nancy's Matt is working at a financial firm in Jersey City, Jody's Kate is teaching in Brookline. And Joel still deciding if it's continue to work or start graduate school! This time a year ago we were thinking about his upcoming graduation-- yes, yes, it goes fast, but also the things we worry about (and I suppose enjoy too) change so fast!

 

 

 

 

March 18, 2008

It is after all very close to spring-- St. Patrick's Day is over, and I had a busy day yesterday working at the Newark Museum with the Jersey City teachers, not presenting as much, but feeling more of a sense of what the thing is about-- I'm going back Monday to see how the hands-on art stuff goes.

AND!! I got home and had an hour or two before making a presentation with Marlon to the SO/Ma Board of Education-- and I planted peas! And the yard has lots of little crocuses hanging out in the grass which is always that unexpected end-of-winter green which reminds us that the grass never really dies and in fact grows whenever there's a break in the frost and freeze.

So, I had quite a day: work at the Museum, stuck the peas in the ground because it was St. Patrick's Day and supposedly he or some other saint will make 'em grow if you do it on the right day, and also sowed indoors in a cardboard egg carton some cabbage (which should have been done two weeks ago) and got some dinner, did the political thing-- everything but write and exercise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing around with the camera--self-portrait: everyone else in my family is in California or West Virginia. And the Parakeet won't hold still.

March 15

I went to New York yesterday and started off at J&R down at City Hall after coming in at the World Trade Center site: that is still an amazing, experience, how the first light you see after the tunnels is this vast stone and concrete pit, looking more crowded than a year ago, cranes, workers, the big sewage drains or other pipes studding the exterior walls, and then up, several levels, lots more work going on, and then you're out on the street with Century 21 blaring out its wares and the church yard of St. Paul's chapel.

Then I went to J&R to hold in my hands and type on the Asus eee, which is as cute as a button, with the keyboard very tight, to the point I have trouble imagining anyone really using it with hands larger than mine, so I was a little clumsy. Linux rulz, of course, and the tiny screen was remarkably readable. Really nice for $300. I want one But not pink or blue.

 

Then to the subway City Hall Brooklyn Bridge station a whitish gray day, all the New York people looking pretty withdrawn, dark colors, hurrying, and I was actually relieved to see one big girl striding by with lip jewelry, wearing an odd flared plaid skirt over baggy jeans, short sleeved tee shirt to show off some kind of braces or splints on her arms, decorative, not medical.

 

Then up to the East Side, a different world with très expensive little boutiques for toddlers, the the museum, all the little carts outside selling photos and original art, or at least craft. Lots of school groups and inside the Greek and Roman galleries, students giggling over the naked people. I wandered past various old friends, the Chinese vases, Syrian sculptures, Lady X, lots of Sargeants and Picasso's monumental Gertrude Stein, Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, and finally, not absolutely enthusiastic, went to this season's Big Exhibit, the Courbet ,

Which I didn't get into right away: it begins with a lot of showy, melodramatic self portraits of the young man, but gradually, as the sheer volume and skill and breadth of his work became obvious, I got more and more interested: he is, after all, the visual expression of what Zola was doing. The sex room was pretty funny, and titillating, including a little dark cul-de-sac with genuine French Picture photographs and his famous crotch painting Origin of the World (which, I should have guessed, if you goggle Courbet, comes up first and often. Then on to really wonderful landscapes and I particularly enjoyed his apples, painted along with a lot of trout when he was in prison for political activity in the 1870-71 Commune: spotted apples, more appealing to me that Cezanne's famous ones (that Joel famously critiqued at age 2 in Williamstown: "App-ul, Mommy! App-up!")

Also dogs, hunting, dying stags, especially winter scenes, just so much sheer splendor that I forgave him his self-dramatizations in his twenties. I'm sure he appreciates my forgiveness.

Anyhow, I had a nice lunch at the Petrie Court -- “organic” chicken and greens and some kind of special blue cheese and apple and a little bacon, also special and a dinner roll shaped like an upside down apostrophe. View of the park, eating on a stool overlooking all the people, white ladies of a certain age-- mine, lots of young couples too. I went back to Courbet again, looked a little more, bought the Phaidon   book as cheapest and easiest to transport. I don't really particularly need the big museum book with his long semi-specialist articles on more aspects of Courbet than I want to learn about right now.

So I had a really nice day, got home in time to use my off-peak NJT ticket and to finish some work. Talked to Andy and Joel,everyone in California excited about how Andy went rock climbing with Joel. Joel and Sarah were cooking some kind of very California-sounding asparagus and morel pasta for him.

 

March 10

 

I’m back in the swing, some kind of swing. It’s 9:12, and I’m at my desk at what would be an early hour, except that we’re on Daylight Savings, so it isn't early anymore. Andy leaves in the morning for his conference in SF, and I'm already feeling sorry for myself--he's going to see Joel and they're going to have all kinds o ffun without me! And everyone says, You could have come too!

Yesterday Jim White spoke at Ethical on “A Humanist Looks at Death.”   He gave several humanist answers to death: the negative one that the idea of a punishing/rewarding God doesn’t work for so many of us; then the one that we live on in our genetic issue, which is okay but minor for most people in the twenty-first century; then that we live on in our effect on people we know and love (and he detailed things he admired about his great grand and his grand and his mom). He also talked about the impact of martyrs– people who died in the civil rights movement, for example, including some of the less famous ones. That was the big thing, I guess, the impact we have, which we don’t even know all of, the spreading ripples in the water of humanity. Surrounding a lot of this was the preciousness of now because it is all we have. So he didn’t have anything new (I guess I’m still waiting for Humanist Heaven), but it was laid our powerfully. We have now: we have what people leave us and what we leave people– and he had a lovely image of each of us having a colorful thread in the great cloth of being and how our beautiful bright thread ends, but is still part of the whole thing, the fabric still strong.

March 6

I am still catching up from being away, a couple of hours of odds and ends including clearing out the dining room of all the clean clothes and sewing up the torn sheet from the guest room (but haven’t made the bed down there yet) and putting away all my travel clothes, at last– anyhow, if I could just do some writing I would feel very good, I think. It's amazing how many chores have to be done even in a household with no kids at home and me being a really minimal housekeeper. I've always been harrassed by the sheer length of the list: feed the parakeet, put away the clean dishes, clean clothes upstairs, in drawers, buy groceries, put on something to eat. And also, many of the things that began as exciting political events turn into chores: the institutionalization of the Coalition has meant fewer impassioned speeches about racism and more uploading information to the website and carrying flyers to the schools etc. Funny connection to all this: the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Columbia University sit-ins and strikes. There is a lot happening with that, including a spontaneous Sundial rally being planned (is it still spontaneous?). Back then, there were fewer details and more passion, although of course someone always had to do the details-- who made the peanut butter sandwiches when we were sitting in Low Library and Math Building? I remember I made a point of not doing it-- it looked like girl work, which I had scorned from earliest infancy, except of course one does do girl work in the end, or else nothing happens....

 

March 4, 2008

Back from the whirlwind tour of West Virginia and Pennsylvania in the rain! I drove today from Shinnston (looking magical in the early morning light on the amazing 3rd of March, which was superbly warm and brilliant with light unmitigated by leaves.

 

But today-- rain "heavy at times" as in hour after hour I drove to Wheeling to appear at Lunch with Books then home to New Jersey, listening to John McWhorter's Teaching Company Lectures on the history of language. Thankful to be home on one piece and really weary.

 

March 2, 2008

 

I'm in West Virginia after driving my mother down today. I'll be here tomorrow, then Tuesday on to Wheeling and then a long drive home. My big success was getting her DSL turned on! I am really proud of myself with that– it went pretty smoothly, the filters on the phones, ethernet, phone wires--wires all over the place, the modem, the excitement of the moment when I realized we were communicating with the internet. All this technology, and she likes email, but all she really wants to do is to lay out her collections of stones that look like faces and shells and other people's discarded boxes.

There was snow in the Maryland Allegheny front, the mountains Andy and I call the Ethnic Slur range because they all have names like Big Savage and Polish Mountain. Lots of light today, and out of the highest area, the fields bright tan with no snow. Ridges with straight thin tall trees lined up and light coming in a band between their thicker upper branches and their trunks against the hillside.

We ate at Jimmy's on the West Side of Shinnston, near closing time on a Sunday, and Jimmy was sitting down to eat with his sister and her kids and some friends. It felt like being in his living room: Mom had a pizza burger which wasn't a burger at all but an open faced sauce and cheese and pepperoni on a bun. I had the Rosie's special of course, big sausage patty with hot and sweet peppers and mozzarella. My fave.

Portrait of Taxicab, Pet Parakeet

 

February 22

 

Snowed in! Well, not really. That's Prospect Street from our house on the third floor with my Christmas camera set for bright-when-it's bright out.

 

 

February 21

Well, we’ve cancelled writers group for tonight because of few people and one member having a serious illness in the family. I was disappointed at first, because I look forward to writers group, which is really just for me, but of course I'm also thrilled not to have to go to NYC again immediately after teaching last night.

I had soup with Ingrid at Round the Clock, a wooden floored place very near Cooper Square where I teach. She is all excited about her daughter Stasha nearing term with pregnancy, and she talked about the inspiration she got from a memorial reading for Grace Paley, also things Grace said at a workshop once: First, tell the truth, in reference to memoir and not pulling your punches. Second, Tell the truth in reference to fiction, which I interpret to mean use that as a guide–what is the truth for this character, this situation,this plot? Grace also recommended going back in imagination (is that the same as "getting in touch with?") the voices of the community of your childhood. For Grace, New York immigrants, for me, West Virginia. But Ingrid grew up in various American overseas posts (Greece, Saigon) and wonders what her voices were.

We talked inevitably about the hundreds of thousands of people studying writing and hoping for glory if not money and also at the same time wanting to participate in this world of literature, of seeking the truth through stories.

 

 

Great photos of West Virginia mining towns, steel mills, and much more at Kevin Scanlon's site-- and an exhibit in Grafton, WV-- AND-- you are invited to the opening reception! Click here!

 

 

Feb 15

 

 

E.P. Thompson talks about what amounts to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in the context of social class in academia, which in early twentieth century Britain had enough similarities to race in U.S. to be of special interest now. Not the same thing, I hasten to add, but class lines then, marked by easily identifiable accent and dialect, were extremely sharp:

....The pure in heart may indeed be blessed: but they may also offer themselves as a fertile pastureland upon which the demagogue and the careerist may safely graze. It may be true and important to insist that we value men not by their class or educational attributes but my their moral worth: but if men – and especially if educationally-disadvantaged men – begin to value themselves too complacently in this way it can serve too easily as an excuse for the giving up of intellectual effort. My fellow tutors here will, I suspect, make the point: they know, only too well, the student to whom I refer. They may also know the tutor who has made himself accomplice to the giving-up, and who has been happy to accept the moral wort of his students in place of their essays. They may even have seen him, as I have, late i the evening, in the mirror. (E.P. Thompson, “Education and Experience,” The Romantics, New York: The New Press, 1997, p. 25.)

There’s another passage in the second lecture where Thompson, writing about Wordsworth and Coleridge and others, distinguishes between disenchantment and apostasy. The context here is the end of the 18th century and the very early 19th century when people like the Romantic poets were first enchanted with the French revolution, then to varying degrees horrified by its excesses, then often(and this is the part we rarely read) in serious political jeopardy in England for being Jacobins. There was major political repression as war broke out between France and England. Anyhow, Thompson makes some really interesting observations about how the honest changing of your mind due to historical events is one things, but denigrating your younger mind for its previous views is another thing altogether:

 

The theme of this lecture is apostasy and disenchantment. There is a difference between the two. My argument is: the creative impulse came out of the heart of this conflict. There is a tension between a boundless aspiration – for liberty, reason, égalité, perfectibility – and a peculiarly harsh and unregenerate reality. So long as that tension persists, the creative impulse can be felt. But once the tension slackens, the creative impulse fails also. There is nothing in disenchantment inimical to art. But when aspiration is actively denied, we are at the edges of apostasy and apostasy is a moral failure, and an imaginative failure....because it involves forgetting – or manipulating improperly – the authenticity of experience: a mutilation of the writers’s own previous existential being. (E.P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default?” The Romantics, New York: The New Press, 1997, p. 37-38.)

This is what I always feel about people who reject their entire past, whether they are poets like Coleridge or political figures like some of the neoconservatives. Wordsworth, Thompson makes the case, was a much more nuanced thinker, whose views changed gradually over many years.

 

 

 

 

Feb 13

 

Last night I stayed up later than I would have wanted because Andy turned on the t.v. and the whole wide screen tv was filled with sharp black and white Japanese images, big crowd scenes, vaguely medieval setting, two shlumpy peasant guys going crazy over finding gold, appearance of large handsome samurai without armor or sword-- anyhow, it turned out to be Toshiro Mifune in the 1958 Kurosawa flick Hidden Fortress, complete with a long spear duel and a princess in short pants with a bizarre screeching high voice and lots of heavy handed humor and amazing last minute escapes and stylized acting, and I really liked it!

 

 

 

 

February 12

 

California Dreamers! I wish I had been there! Left to right, Goro Kato, Christine Willis,
Sarah Zakowski, Joel Weinberger, Alex Kato-Willis, and in front, Lucille Willis

(More pix from Joel's visit to San Luis Obispo)

 

 

 

 

February 8

 

So it's late Friday afternoon, and , I did a little writing, a quick prep for the Jump Start Your Novel workshop tomorrow, went to have my ears cleaned and checked, and had my afternoon meeting at CCR cancelled, and I’m glad– went to Costco with Andy instead. Secret delight in pushing the cart until it seems to stop of its own accord, and I stared stupefied at the ranks of blue flat screens, the acres of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, the free samples of pork barbecue, frozen cheesecake, and shrimp salad, the stacked cases of water, the supersized bags of everything. I get mentally bloated, and somehow that relaxes me. It’s like my mind goes dull, and then I can start over. Bought a roasted chicken for dinner, will watch a movie probably. Could use more of the same.

 

 

 

February 4

I'm having one of my super busy weeks: five days of teaching, with meetings in the evenings. Still thinking about Joel and Sarah visiting my mother and my sister, still thinking about the AWP and the 7,000 writers and poets scrambling for fame and fortune, but meanwhile it's Super Bowl last night and Super Tuesday tomorrow, both of which events have been treated pretty much in the same way by the news media.

I'm doing three days with third graders in Butler, New Jersey. I had been expecting my new Fiction I class would not run, but it seems to have ten people and be up and at 'em. So that's Wednesday night, and Saturday I have the four hour Jump Start Your novel class, with Making Your Novel Happen starting next Monday! Whew! Altogether too busy this week, a meeting tomorrow night and Writers' group Thursday and I've been doing a lot of web site work for the Hamilton Stone Review which has a new issue coming up, and lots of ideas and actions, and tomorrow it's Hillary versus Obama. Just a little too much this week, although the following one seems to have a few more spaces for writing, which would be nice.

 

 

January 31

 

I was at my first AWP conference today-- New York Hilton, three floors of book tables, small and large presses, magazines, writing programs, famous writers reading, panels: I'm going to be on one tomorrow reading from After the Bell, the anthology of prose about schooling, teachers, etc. Many people there I knew, some I actually saw, others I just missed: at the Hamilton Stone table with Edith Konecky and Rochelle Ratner, saw Maggie Anderson, West Virginia friend and editor of After the Bell, Shelley Ettinger, Tayari Jones, Dahlia Elsayed from NJWP, people at The Writer, Suzanne McConnell just left, ditto Jayne Anne Phillips. I saw Willard Cook and Pamela Erens. I suppose, especially in New York, I shouldn't be surprised by the numbers.  7,000 participants, and they had to close registration-- at once a wonderful feeling, all those people who care about books and writing-- that what we do is serious, and at the same time the horror, the horror: they all are or want to be writers? And so many of them training more? Who will read what we all write? Young people from the programs, fragrant with ambition, old people with twisted mouths, self-involved, not having achieved all they wanted, ready to talk about themselves, not others. Double and tripling of exhilaration and dismay.

 

January 30, 2008

 

I finished another residency, this one at Wyoming School in Millburn. Fourth graders wear me out! It's good, though, to work with kids. So much smooth skin and bright eyes and all the silliness whenever they have the opportunity!   

Presidential race getting interesting: John McCain on the Repubs and Hillary and Barack for the Dems. Will all those guys out there vote for a woman or a person of color? Terrified they'll pick another Republican.

 

Taxi contemplating one of the objects of his affection

 

 

January 27

There’s sunshine today
On the bare branches lifting
Toward majesty.

 

January 19, 2008

Clammy, gray old day,
Tree branches bare, nickel sky–
So glad I’m alive!

 

 

January 17, 2008

My friend Phyllis Moore, the doyenne of West Virginia literature, is wintering on the Alabama gulf coast. She sent this poem with a picture by Jim Moore. They call the bird R. Sea Byrd, which will make sense to those of you who know our redoubtable West Virginia senior senator:

Winter on Little Lagoon

Each day,
a white heron claims
the same spot.

Like a whore
working a corner,
it waits for its prey.    

Phyllis Wilson Moore, 2007

Saturday, January 12, 2008

It’s going on eleven p.m. now and I finished a big manuscript I've been evaluating for a former student. And got a check for the next one up. I have taken on a lot of work this winter, not quite sure how it creeps up on me.

Still, it was Saturday night, and Andy and I watched a thriller movie while my mom finished one book and started another (she finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and started her second Harry Potter). We watched The Bourne Ultimatum, which is good of its kind, but, really, don’t men every get tired of identifying with being chased and chasing and shooting and getting shot and cut and banged and generally beat up and then chasing and being chased some more?

One nicely done scene has three people chasing through buildings in Morocco up stairs down stairs, leap from building to building, stalk, flee, with different throbbing music depending on whether the camera has cut to the stalker or the fleer or the all-out runner coming to save the fleer– it had a nice symphonic quality: fast fast pump pump slow slow minor key– fast fast fast. Basically what the whole thing was, various speeds, throbbing, flashing.

I was eating stoned wheat crackers with hummous and a glass of wine. We had had lunch late at Hunan Spring with mom for lunch specials, soup, rice and main course.

So a little intense relaxation, then back to preparing classes and other work.

January 7, 2008

I'm not doing much blogging lately-- I'm working on evaluating people's manuscripts and getting my mother's meds arranged and I need a hair cut and other annoying appointments, with my online class starting tomorrow and a new school with fourth graders on Friday! Yikes! Christmas vacation was not exactly relaxing, but certainly a different kind of busyness....

January 1, 2008

We've been out to a neighborhood open house today, saw several of the Village Colonials Neigborhood Association people, this after some hours of Andy working on the Coalition computers, cleaning up cookies and such things, and then Mom and I took a walk at dusk, very lovely, really, still Christmas lights out, red sky fading, houses with lots of people moving around in the lighted windows, Christmas trees, t.v.s, tables set. Then I worked on the big manuscript I'm going over, and I've got a fire flickering and the Christmas tree glowing for its last night.

And Joel and Sarah are in one of those metal tubes hurtling across Iowa right now, still three hours from San Francisco.

For archived blogs, see

July-December 2007
January-June2007

July-December 2006
January-June 2006 
Blog 2005
Blog 2004

 

 

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