Teaching Shakespeare

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena chases after her former love Demetrius, who wooed her and won her heart before turning his attention to Hermia instead. Helena cannot accept this. She chases after him for a good three acts, long after her charm has faded, professing love to the point where it becomes humiliating. She offers to be his "spaniel": "Spurn me, strike me, use me, neglect me," she implores, only let me stay by your side.

At this point, half my class sighs, "Poor Helena!"
"Poor Demetrius!" the other half argues.

We talk about love vs. obsession and the necessity of conflict in fiction; we make predictions about what might happen; and, God help us, we make real-life connections. Theirs are excusable; they are twelve. Mine are darker, buried, deeply embarrassing.

Because this is fiction, and because the conflict must be resolved, Demetrius eventually, unknowingly, submits to a magical enchantment whereby he's made to dote strongly, madly on Helena. The two couples (Helena and her brainwashed man, Hermia and hers) celebrate a joint wedding. How long will the enchantment last? Why not forever? No matter. This story has a happy ending, and that is why we call it a "comedy."

Icicle

You know the school is wasting money on air conditioning when, on April 12th, a student hijacked my scarf.

Yes, you read that right--I was wearing a scarf--WAS!--until it disapeared. The first one I ever knit. I am saddened by its loss and chilled by both the heinousness of the crime and the arctic air.

I'd be wearing gloves, too, if I had them with me.

Brrr.

On Advocacy

The premise: Children need an non-judgemental, "safe," adult figure they can turn to in order to talk about problems or life issues. Therefore, each teacher will be assigned 15-17 "advocacy" cases and meet with them thirty minutes a week.

The teacher next to me says: "I am not the person for this job. I am not warm and fuzzy enough. I don't care about their problems."

I say: "You do care about them."

She says: "I care about their math, and that is all."

She's right. I'm not that warm and fuzzy teacher, either. Nor do I want to be. Why don't we give them all kittens, instead?

Lessons Learned from the Cats

1. Any door that you witness being closed becomes instantly appealing, even if you were lounging happily on the couch before. It's the, "Wait, what's happening over THERE?" reflex.

2. It's ok to fight with your friends, but do it with your claws retracted. Catnip can cause errors of judgement in this case.

3. If you sit on someone's lap and purr, she'll be your friend forever; however, if you get overexcited and drool on her, she'll think you're gross.

Sometimes You Gotta Gobble

Spring heralds the coming of many things: Lovely warm breezes, budding flowers, longer days, rosy sunburned cheeks, flirtations, and, in my classroom, the animal noises start up again.

This year, the popular sounds are unidentified croaking frog noises ("grrruuuup"), bird whistles (this one will never go out of style), and "quack." (Periods of uncontrollable giggles, while not technically animal sounds, are popular as well.)

This morning: I am at my wit's end. One boy makes the frog noise. "Jonathan!" I hollar. "Hallway!"

He saunters outside and I accompany him, foot holding the door, one eye on the classroom. "Ok. You need to make animal noises? Now's your chance. Right now you have my permission to make whatever noises you want and get it out of your system."

He is silent.

"What, cat got your tongue? Go for it: quack, moo, bark, whatever."

Silence. After a hesitation, he lets out a small smirk, and a quick hiccuped "Gobble."

My class cracks up.

"Now can we please leave the noises in the hallway?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

Act Natural

In a recent "what your daughter should do with her life" conversation with my dad (his choice of topic, not mine), he mentioned that he thinks some of my digital photos are better than the ones he's seen in museums. "You need to put them in a book," he suggested. "I'd buy it."

Yes, but you're my dad, I responded. That's his job. I really think my parents would buy my junk mail if I stuck it in a frame and signed my name. (Sidenote: one UH studio art masters candidate recently exhibited a few junk-mail themed sculptures. One friend thought they were a little too "pollution is bad" preachy. I thought they were pretty. There's no pleasing everyone.)

Which is not to say that I'm not proud of some of the pictures I've taken. Digital photography makes it easy for someone with minimal training to take good photos. Andrew Brown of the Guardian Unlimited agrees (via Mom.)

I started taking pictures after I graduated college, when I realized that entire years had passed and I had no proof of their existence. The pictures, like these blog entries, follow no clear narrative or artistic vision. Last night in an exercise of poetic futility ("I'll never be as good as her; why try?") I read Louise Gluck's Ararat--a series of poems dealing with the death of her father. What struck me was how well her collections work as books: looping around and inside each other, each poem adding something new.

I have to assume that sort of clarity and focus comes with age and experience. Most twenty-somethings I know are trying in vain to find that one perfect career, failing, and then winding up frustrated and unhappy. Andrea, who is wise beyond her years, put it this way: Out of so many possibilities, you just have to pick one and say to yourself, "I'm going to TRY this for now."

Or, as we say in the teaching biz, fake it 'til you make it.

Weep More Deeply

I took a spontaneous spring break outing to Galveston today with my friend Matt, to celebrate the beautiful weather and our corresponding days off. Along the way we spotted a tag that looked like it said "Argos" (but alas, probably not). How funny, I thought, watching the small dog play behind it. It reminded me of this Michael Collier poem that, like The Odyssey, I have grown to love:

Argos

If you think Odysseus too strong and brave to cry,
that the god-loved, god-protected hero
when he returned to Ithaka disguised,
intent to check up on his wife

and candidly apprize the condition of his kingdom,
steeled himself resolutely against surprise
and came into his land cold-hearted, clear-eyed,
ready for revenge--then you read Homer as I did,

too fast, knowing you'd be tested for plot
and major happenings, skimming forward to the massacre,
the shambles engineered with Telemakhos
by turning beggar and taking up the challenge of the bow.

Reading this way you probably missed the tear
Odysseus shed for his decrepit dog, Argos,
who's nothing but a bag of bones asleep atop
a refuse pile outside the palace gates. The dog is not

a god in earthly clothes, but in its own disguise
of death and destitution is more like Ithaka itself.
And if you returned home after twenty years
you might weep for the hunting dog

you long ago abandoned, rising from the garbage
of its bed, its instinct of recognition still intact,
enough will to wag its tail, lift its head, but little more.
Years ago you had the chance to read that page more closely

but instead you raced ahead, like Odysseus, cocksure
with your plan. Now the past is what you study,
where guile and speed give over to grief so you might stop,
and desiring to weep, weep more deeply.

-Michael Collier

He's right, of course. I raced through my first reading of The Odyssey. But through coincidence, I did notice the tears upon second reading, when I took a semester course devoted to variations on the story. In fact, I wrote a paper on the role of tears in several authors' adaptations. So here, dear readers, is the line:

"But still he wept for his native country, trailing down the shore
where the wash of sea on shingle ebbs and flows,
his homesick heart in turmoil."

And this is what I was thinking about as I ate my ice cream and sat unprotected in the sun.

Beware

The Ides of March totally kicked my ass.

That is all.

"Are we there yet?"

You're not going to believe me, but I keep getting sick on Sundays. For almost--no, exactly a month now, I've had off-and-on fevers, sore throats, congestion.

I figured it out this morning, as I wearily obeyed another achey 6am wake-up. My body keeps thinking, "We get to sleep in tomorrow, right? Spring break? Yes yes? NO?!?! ::shut down::"

Friday, please come swiftly. I'm running out of tea.

Big Bag of Books Day!

One of my favorite events in Houston, besides the Art Car parade, is the Houston Public Library annual booksale. On Sunday, the last day of the sale, you can buy a bagful for $10.

Book Booty:

fiction--
Persuasion; Jane Austen
Rabbit, Run; John Updike
Postcards; E. Annie Proulx
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing; Melissa Bank
Ellen Foster; Kaye Gibbons
The Lover; Marguerite Duras
The Pilot's Wife; Anita Shreve
The Diagnosis; Alan Lightman
Corelli's Mandolin; Louis de Bernieres
The Corrections; Jonathan Franzen
Willard and His Bowling Trophies; Richard Brautigan
On Love; Alain de Botton
Daughter of Fortune; Isabel Allende

poetry--
Homecoming: New and Collected Poems; Julia Alvarez
Fathers: a collection of poems; David and Judy Ray, eds.
Into the Garden: a wedding anthology; Robert Hass and Stephen Mitchell, eds.

plays--
Complete Works 4; Harold Pinter
Our Town; Thornton Wilder
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Tom Stoppard
Murder in the Cathedral; T. S. Eliot

short stories--
Daisy Miller and other stories; Henry James
A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith
Complete Short Stories; D. H. Lawrence
Dust on Her Tongue; Rodrigo Rey Rosa


I find my book selections these days are heavily influenced by 1. Dr. Michael Olmert (de Botton, Stoppard, Pinter, Eliot); 2. my dad (Franzen, Brautigan, Proulx) and 3. Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran (Austen, James).

...and some tiramisu, please.

Ryan: Tell me something about yourself that I don't know.
Me: Well, it's not very exciting, but you probably don't know that I have a rare blood condition.
Lana: Oooh, ooh! I know this one. She has Mediterranean Anemia, and it doesn't really affect her but she's not allowed to "mate" with anyone who has it, or else it's a big deal. And if she's ever unconscious and goes to the hospital it will look like she needs iron, but she doesn't. So we're supposed to say, "Do NOT give her iron!"
Ryan: So, if Mary's in the hospital and they try to give her iron, I jump up and say "Don't! She's Mediterranean! Feed her olive oil!"

I used to write...

Searching for an old poem I had saved in an anthology, I rediscovered these pieces from my last poetry workshop. They were hastily constructed as part of a fourteen day assignment during which we had to write a poem everyday. I did, somedays. The rest I recycled. Here, in turn, are six (six!) poems about an ill-fated relationship, the little mermaid, a tsunami, street performers, Rothko, and the Microsoft Word paperclip.

The assignments were as follows:

1. Write a poem based on a freewrite
2. Imitate a poet (Louise Gluck)
3. Describe a work of art
4. Write a letter poem
5. Imitate a poet (Marianne Moore)
6. Choose a "non-poetic" subject

You should try it.

Pictures of You

Dear readers, this week/end has been a blur.

I found time inbetween goblets of beer, dinner parties, unexpected dates, dancing, chihuahuas, beads, naps, and missed bedtimes to update some old photo albums.

I did not find time to write captions, so if you don't know who these people are, you're probably not related to me.

Christmas


Birthday

Membership will cost you $170... and five cents.

Back when birthdays were still meaningful milestones, I was one of the first of my friends to turn 16 and start driving. This meant several things: 1. I could charter myself to and from my part-time job at the local library; and 2. I could charter myself and my friends home from school and drama rehearsals... as long as I was home before midnight.

I remember the first few months were pretty terrifying, despite a rigorous Maryland driver's education course (complete with "Chuck" who told me I'd have no trouble passing my license test if I wore a short skirt). I was especially paranoid of left hand turns and used to go out of my way to avoid them. I joked (sort of) with my friends that it would cost them a nickel for each one.

Since then I've grown more comfortable with left turns. Now I make them all the time, even sometimes when I'm not supposed to. Today it cost me a lot more than a nickel. Sitting in the packed courtroom, staring at the ceiling (You cannot cry in front of all these people!!), and thinking about how much I hate this city (as I often do whenever I interact with the government or it rains or it's hot), I randomly spotted a friend of mine across the room.

The courtroom shrank. I was no longer a foreigner or a criminal. It was a CLUB! A dammit-why-didn't-I-see-that-cop-oh-well-this-sucks sort of club.

On the other hand, one nice-looking man had his ticket dismissed for going 75 in a "660 mph zone". I wanna be a member of that club.

Vicarious disappointment

The bachelorette totally blew last night. After two months of devoting myself to what I KNEW was an awful, terrible, carricature of a reality show (and that's not saying much), and yet catching it from the very beginning thereby committing to hang in there until the bitter end...

after all that, and the anger of "no! you sent home the WRONG guy!" and then ruefully accepting the two men she narrowed it down to... ("ok, i guess he's nice, and just *mostly* boring, not completely boring" vs. "he's sort of charming... too bad he can't answer any question with a straight answer")

after i had accepted Jerry and John Paul, and got emotionally invested in their proposals, and watched the garish "men spill all" special and the two hour finale PLUS the "after the final rose" special....

She turned them ALL down.

I'm boycotting television.