by Lucy S.
I finally listened to all of my old cell phone messages and deleted some to make room. Not much room. I can't bear to delete many of the messages. I can rarely bear to hear them. My phone service makes me make my way through the old ones to get to the new ones, so I hardly listen to any messages and that means I don't delete even the new unnecessary ones till months go by and people scold me for denying them space to leave messages.
The first is from Catherine in May 2009. She invited me to join them all for one last round of photos and some time at the coffee shop near campus once frequented by her son and other grad students, and herself as well sometime during her grad student years that began in her late 40s. Her call called me back to the education that I'd fled or been forced to abandon or just set down for a while, depending on how I think about it. Whatever it was, I took the call that May day at the park and rushed to make it in time.
I talked Justin into going with me. He even took a few photos so that the professional photographer could also join the rest of us in a photographed memento. We were there to remember Catherine's son one last time. He mentally broke down near the end of spring semester 2006 and died endangering himself. A year later, she and his father launched a scholarship in his name and asked me to write a piece for the book about him, so I did. I didn't know him well. I was writing to provide a glimpse of the Andy we knew in class that last semester. Others who knew him much better - mostly his fellow grad students and his own family members - wrote far more. And before some of the grad students went off far away with doctorates in hand, Catherine asked me to join them for another remembrance.
I can't erase that message from Catherine.
Next is a message from my uncle Alto. It's from August 2010. His voice is already altered. The ALA or Parkinson's variant or whatever the hellish neurological disease was supposed to be was already slurring his voice and weakening him, and I hear hurt - I always hear hurt - in his voice. I wonder if I called him back that same day or waited another day because I thought I didn't have enough time right then for a long call, and our calls were always so long.
The next is from Alto again, October 2010. He's saying he wants me to know he's gonna get me the money he borrowed, that he'll have a thousand of it in January and February. Then there is another message from October saying something similar, so I must have not called him back that day or the next and he must have felt anxious to make me believe that he really would do it.
It wasn't my money. It was my kids' money. It was $2000 that he borrowed for a desperate attempt at an alternative cure, and I could never have said no if I had any way to get a hold of that money. My kids said yes afterward, too. I don't have the call recorded, of course, when he asked. I'm proud that I said yes right away, and proud that I said it was fine when he kept deferring the partial payments, but I'm not proud that when my dad finally went there that following summer, I asked if he could ask Alto if it was okay to get one of the checks. I was feeling guilty for lending out my kids' money. My dad did get $500 of it.
But it makes me sick that I asked. It was the one time I failed my uncle. I like to pretend that I didn't fail him and didn't care about the money, but for some reason in that summer week of 2011, I had my dad ask. And then my uncle asked me why my dad had asked him, and if I had thought he wouldn't pay me, and i felt such a horrible shame and felt an apology that could not be spoken because it would only have hurt my uncle more.
By then I knew that my uncle hadn't borrowed the money for a treatment, but to try to keep his daughter Isabel from losing her house -- but we never spoke about that to each other. I was hurt on one level that he'd lied to me because he knew I could never say no to helping him try something that might save him. And on another level, how could I really be upset when he'd done it to help Isabel? He probably feared that I'd say no if I knew she'd overspent and was in trouble. We all partly failed each other over that money, and we all came through to some extent.
He paid me the rest when he was dead. My Aunt Dolores said he'd insisted she promise no matter what to pay me back, to pay the kids back, out of the insurance money. He'd told me that I knew he'd never hurt the kids. And there that too tender story sits in his messages on my phone.
There are three messages from my father, Alto's twin, and my dad sounds so strong and healthy, and now I have to preserve these messages, because I have learned to be afraid of loss.
And there are two from the friend of my life, Gloria, and again, I will let them remain.
And there is one from my friend Amir during a particularly hard time from an airport.
And two from my friend Jiji, now on the other side of the world.
Tonight I finally removed the ones I didn't need on there. If I get some from my kids or my mom or other dear friends or Carmen or Johnny... I may have to live without space for messages on my cell phone anymore.
If only I could move these messages somewhere safer than where they sit on hold on my current cell phone service.
I keep written messages, too. Letters, cards, emails filed under the name of the friend or family member, as if I could hold our fused life moments and atoms of us ourselves alive forever in the messages.
I wish I had even one email from Roscynda. And we have no remaining trace of her voice – nothing. I want to hear her again. How did we all let that happen?
So I keep my messages. I give them their undisturbed space, waiting, unseen and unheard for months and years. Then I read or listen again. Old and new lessons get learned. They re-sear me, or musingly trace themselves; hurt is acute again from our small and larger failings (mine, people I love, the amorphous society’s), and it’s tangled up with forgiveness. Or mainly, I just miss the message-speakers so much. And then I don’t care if we would do better this time; I only care that we existed and exist together.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Loving Our Lives (and 'the Revolution')
by Lucy S.
I had a sort of debate recently about the role that "academic leftists" can play in "the Revolution." I'm glad I had it because it, in tandem with various recent experiences and my thoughts over the past several months (and also past 4 1/2 years since I went back to school), helped me know where I stand. I'm burned out on self-styled "radicals" who are themselves products of at least some time in college and whose rhetoric reflects a sort of academic-activist persona, while at the same time, they have such disdain for what we do in these colleges and universities. Their position seems to be that we who teach are uniquely responsible for not bringing on the Revolution. As someone new to teaching (and still so idealistic about it) - and as someone with a low income who struggled for years - this irritates me, but my personal situation isn't the point. What bothers me is this need to attack the work of people who are trying to do what they can in their own lives and sphere of work. And what bothers me most is the impulse to unravel what is already being attacked by the Right because it isn't perfect enough - to hurt people whose work pushes against capitalist logic and sometimes shines a light on what could be, if we transform the system.
But I have some sympathy for those who interrogate academia and its teachers because I have felt a version of this myself at times. I have swung between intense idealizing of what is possible in education and so much anguished anger that our institutions in this country haven't done better. I have asked some of the same questions. Why is it that most of the people who run things have college degrees - have been exposed to all these progressive, powerful ideas - and yet go on to run things in ways that hurt so many humans and other beings? That is basically what I asked and tried to explore in the directed study paper I did my first semester back at the U, when I returned to finish my B.A. I think that those kinds of questions are worth asking and trying to answer.
But the answer is not that academics are in a stated or even in-practice kind of conspiracy to keep everyone else down and keep knowledge away from the masses, as some of these supposed radicals assert. The answer is not that college teachers just aren't suffering enough, and if they had to go back out and work for Walmart or whatever other shitty job, they would somehow FEEL their class-consciousness and anger on a deep enough level to MAKE that Revolution happen NOW, damn it. For that matter, 75 percent of college teachers are not tenured, have little hope of ever being tenured, and are often living on terribly low wages working most of their waking hours. But FEELING upset and even speaking or writing about it does not in itself bring on a Revolution.
People who think that suffering 'more' in itself makes someone more 'revolutionary' deeply misunderstand the nature of the structure of capitalism. And when they attack other workers who they should be enacting solidarity with, they cause more fractures that make mass collective efforts more difficult. They spread a stupid form of envy - a kind all too similar to the envy Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to elicit when he held up their state workers as examples of people who had more than the lowest paid workers there. Competing for who has it worse is a race to the bottom. And U.S. workers can't "win" that competition, because they still have it better than so many of the lowest paid workers or the destitute around the world. So these pointless efforts to pretend to have a morally superior position based on having less "privilege" than another U.S. worker are destructive. They participate in the Capitalist strategy to always play workers against each other. They imply that moralism is the answer, when it is the structure of capitalism that creates these disastrous effects.
I am not going to compete with people for who has experienced the most misery or who is most exploited. I am not going to chase misery to attain some kind of purism. It's sick and it's counterproductive. I am also not going to organize with people who think that any solid gain in real people's lives is somehow a sell-out because it's "only" a "reform" and not the Revolution. This either / or thinking is childish and it reveals a lack of deep concern with actual people's lives. If our lives RIGHT NOW do not matter, why would any future person's life matter? We all only have the lives we have. We should be doing all that we can to make them matter, and to try to help other people to also have good lives. All of this can be done as part of our push to transform the system.
People who believe that finding some happiness stands in the way of the Revolution - people who believe that we must all somehow suffer "equally" as if such a thing could be possible - people who believe that if anyone is not suffering enough, that person won't enact solidarity with others and push for better - these people end up embracing a kind of masochism. How would they propose to fight for better job conditions and living wages for people if they believe that when people achieve those gains, they will be less likely to oppose capitalism? I believe that fighting for better lives and actually winning some gains moves people forward. But if they believe that relentless misery is the path, then that logic means they should do what they can to be sure that everyone lives in the most awful conditions possible. Then whoever survives can bring on the Revolution, right?
So for me... there has been a certain shift in my thinking. Not so much in my actual personality - I have always laughed a lot, been absorbed in following my interests, tried to live in ways that made me happy on a deep level to the extent that those choices were available to me. But there is a shift in my ideas, and maybe it will mean a shift in my writing. I don't mean to say I'm going to start writing sappy self-satisfied gratitude journals or write a bunch of empty 'positive-thinking' stuff. I will be as outraged and anguished as I have always been about the decimation of the planet, the corruption, the pain heaped onto so many people by an elite class that lives off the backs of others AND by a system that makes almost all of us in this country live off of the backs of even more exploited people. But I am not going to literally or metaphorically slash my wrists open to lay myself out on some altar of misery as if that would somehow shame the system or would make others who do care and who do suffer somehow FEEL enough pain to 'DO' something. No... I am going to do what I can to take care of myself and others.
Yesterday was the birthday of the great poet, writer, and activist Audre Lorde, and while she was living with cancer, doing her best to stay strong and stay alive, she wrote (in A Burst of Light):
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
That is true at all times in our lives, not only when we are trying to fend off a terminal illness. Caring for ourselves, individually and collectively, should be the foundation for what we do.
I have been talking about Thoreau with my students, and that too has deeply affected me lately. Thoreau has always kind of 'saved' me. I love his writings. Near the end of Walden, he wrote:
And thus, at the risk of sounding trite and self-satisfied, I am going to admit to myself and others that I love and cherish my life. I feel good waking up most mornings. I feel excited for the day. I love the people in my life, and I am absorbed by so much of what I do. But even if I were working some of the lousy jobs I did in the past or were horribly stressed out and unhappy with my situation, on some level, I hope I would love my life and other people's lives.
I’m still thinking about what that means. How can we be expected to love our lives if they’re miserable? It seems that Thoreau is telling us to love our very existence – to love whatever it is coursing through our bodies and consciousness that means that we’re alive, right now, and to attend to that with all the curiosity, sorrow, care, and joy for all that we see, feel, and understand through the unique experience of our one life. For me, that is why I teach, write, study, plant gardens, walk, and embrace my relationships with people I like and love. The Revolution I hope for is one that will be made by people who are driven by love for our lives. Maybe any collective effort to change our workplaces, our education systems, our laws, our society, our relationships, and our personal situations – maybe the way for those efforts to move dramatically forward is for them to be forged out of that love for our lives.
I had a sort of debate recently about the role that "academic leftists" can play in "the Revolution." I'm glad I had it because it, in tandem with various recent experiences and my thoughts over the past several months (and also past 4 1/2 years since I went back to school), helped me know where I stand. I'm burned out on self-styled "radicals" who are themselves products of at least some time in college and whose rhetoric reflects a sort of academic-activist persona, while at the same time, they have such disdain for what we do in these colleges and universities. Their position seems to be that we who teach are uniquely responsible for not bringing on the Revolution. As someone new to teaching (and still so idealistic about it) - and as someone with a low income who struggled for years - this irritates me, but my personal situation isn't the point. What bothers me is this need to attack the work of people who are trying to do what they can in their own lives and sphere of work. And what bothers me most is the impulse to unravel what is already being attacked by the Right because it isn't perfect enough - to hurt people whose work pushes against capitalist logic and sometimes shines a light on what could be, if we transform the system.
But I have some sympathy for those who interrogate academia and its teachers because I have felt a version of this myself at times. I have swung between intense idealizing of what is possible in education and so much anguished anger that our institutions in this country haven't done better. I have asked some of the same questions. Why is it that most of the people who run things have college degrees - have been exposed to all these progressive, powerful ideas - and yet go on to run things in ways that hurt so many humans and other beings? That is basically what I asked and tried to explore in the directed study paper I did my first semester back at the U, when I returned to finish my B.A. I think that those kinds of questions are worth asking and trying to answer.
But the answer is not that academics are in a stated or even in-practice kind of conspiracy to keep everyone else down and keep knowledge away from the masses, as some of these supposed radicals assert. The answer is not that college teachers just aren't suffering enough, and if they had to go back out and work for Walmart or whatever other shitty job, they would somehow FEEL their class-consciousness and anger on a deep enough level to MAKE that Revolution happen NOW, damn it. For that matter, 75 percent of college teachers are not tenured, have little hope of ever being tenured, and are often living on terribly low wages working most of their waking hours. But FEELING upset and even speaking or writing about it does not in itself bring on a Revolution.
People who think that suffering 'more' in itself makes someone more 'revolutionary' deeply misunderstand the nature of the structure of capitalism. And when they attack other workers who they should be enacting solidarity with, they cause more fractures that make mass collective efforts more difficult. They spread a stupid form of envy - a kind all too similar to the envy Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to elicit when he held up their state workers as examples of people who had more than the lowest paid workers there. Competing for who has it worse is a race to the bottom. And U.S. workers can't "win" that competition, because they still have it better than so many of the lowest paid workers or the destitute around the world. So these pointless efforts to pretend to have a morally superior position based on having less "privilege" than another U.S. worker are destructive. They participate in the Capitalist strategy to always play workers against each other. They imply that moralism is the answer, when it is the structure of capitalism that creates these disastrous effects.
I am not going to compete with people for who has experienced the most misery or who is most exploited. I am not going to chase misery to attain some kind of purism. It's sick and it's counterproductive. I am also not going to organize with people who think that any solid gain in real people's lives is somehow a sell-out because it's "only" a "reform" and not the Revolution. This either / or thinking is childish and it reveals a lack of deep concern with actual people's lives. If our lives RIGHT NOW do not matter, why would any future person's life matter? We all only have the lives we have. We should be doing all that we can to make them matter, and to try to help other people to also have good lives. All of this can be done as part of our push to transform the system.
People who believe that finding some happiness stands in the way of the Revolution - people who believe that we must all somehow suffer "equally" as if such a thing could be possible - people who believe that if anyone is not suffering enough, that person won't enact solidarity with others and push for better - these people end up embracing a kind of masochism. How would they propose to fight for better job conditions and living wages for people if they believe that when people achieve those gains, they will be less likely to oppose capitalism? I believe that fighting for better lives and actually winning some gains moves people forward. But if they believe that relentless misery is the path, then that logic means they should do what they can to be sure that everyone lives in the most awful conditions possible. Then whoever survives can bring on the Revolution, right?
So for me... there has been a certain shift in my thinking. Not so much in my actual personality - I have always laughed a lot, been absorbed in following my interests, tried to live in ways that made me happy on a deep level to the extent that those choices were available to me. But there is a shift in my ideas, and maybe it will mean a shift in my writing. I don't mean to say I'm going to start writing sappy self-satisfied gratitude journals or write a bunch of empty 'positive-thinking' stuff. I will be as outraged and anguished as I have always been about the decimation of the planet, the corruption, the pain heaped onto so many people by an elite class that lives off the backs of others AND by a system that makes almost all of us in this country live off of the backs of even more exploited people. But I am not going to literally or metaphorically slash my wrists open to lay myself out on some altar of misery as if that would somehow shame the system or would make others who do care and who do suffer somehow FEEL enough pain to 'DO' something. No... I am going to do what I can to take care of myself and others.
Yesterday was the birthday of the great poet, writer, and activist Audre Lorde, and while she was living with cancer, doing her best to stay strong and stay alive, she wrote (in A Burst of Light):
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
That is true at all times in our lives, not only when we are trying to fend off a terminal illness. Caring for ourselves, individually and collectively, should be the foundation for what we do.
I have been talking about Thoreau with my students, and that too has deeply affected me lately. Thoreau has always kind of 'saved' me. I love his writings. Near the end of Walden, he wrote:
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.htmlI can think of critiques of this advice. There is poor, and then there is POOR. Gazing from an outsider’s perspective on the lives of destitute people, Thoreau’s solutions sometimes reveal an insensitivity to the realities of their lives. But they simultaneously reveal such an acute sensitivity to those same people living those lives. He sees value in our lives as they are, rather than only as they would be in some perfected situation (which we never arrive at). We do not have to see ourselves as pitiful. We can experience joy and beauty in some of our lived moments; we can be attentive to joy and beauty so as not to miss them.
And thus, at the risk of sounding trite and self-satisfied, I am going to admit to myself and others that I love and cherish my life. I feel good waking up most mornings. I feel excited for the day. I love the people in my life, and I am absorbed by so much of what I do. But even if I were working some of the lousy jobs I did in the past or were horribly stressed out and unhappy with my situation, on some level, I hope I would love my life and other people's lives.
I’m still thinking about what that means. How can we be expected to love our lives if they’re miserable? It seems that Thoreau is telling us to love our very existence – to love whatever it is coursing through our bodies and consciousness that means that we’re alive, right now, and to attend to that with all the curiosity, sorrow, care, and joy for all that we see, feel, and understand through the unique experience of our one life. For me, that is why I teach, write, study, plant gardens, walk, and embrace my relationships with people I like and love. The Revolution I hope for is one that will be made by people who are driven by love for our lives. Maybe any collective effort to change our workplaces, our education systems, our laws, our society, our relationships, and our personal situations – maybe the way for those efforts to move dramatically forward is for them to be forged out of that love for our lives.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Postponing Postponements, or: Writing for Now
by Lucy S.
At umpteen random moments, I could write the best blog post ever, or the article I mean to finish (or start), or the book I have started so many times (but not 'for reals'). There is never enough time to plunge my mind into it, but how can this be true - and I tell my students that none of that is true, that they must not wait for muses and inspiration, that they must "just write," but this isn't quite true for me. I am not that kind of writer. I can just write and write a bunch of mediocre observations and same-old-feelings with nothing to them, but what is the point of taking up all of our time in doing that?
And yet, I still feel as though I'm not quite 'there' yet - not at that place and time where great writing might occur - and then I decide to just go ahead and step into the stream of postponements to at least say SOMEthing for now. And maybe that is what writing and teaching and any kind of labor in life is.
This weekend I'm rushing to finish the poetry anthology I'm putting together for this class, which I want to be somewhat different than the one for last semester, and it will just be whatever it can be with the time I can give to it. And before yesterday's class, I was looking up what I could on Willa Cather and on the Homestead Act and the migrations to the Plains in the later 1800s and whatever else I found that connected to her novel O Pioneers. I told them about how the nature of capitalism demands perpetual expansions of some kind for its markets, and places for some of the burgeoning population to move out to in order to defer confrontations between poor or working people and the capitalists who rely on them as a labor force. What I had wasn't good enough, but that was all the time I had. And it will be something like that for Monday. I will feel a deep well of terror inside again all semester, which I will manage to put to sleep sometimes. Like some other beings, it sleeps best when there's a lot going on around it - pleasant buzzes of conversations and physical movement and maybe some music - and it wakes up crying and anxious when things get too quiet.
But quiet is precisely what I need to prepare to teach, and to write, and to read. Yet I go to write - even now - and think of everything else I should be doing - and I think that maybe this - whatever 'this' is in that moment - is a postponement of the 'main' work I need to focus on - and I stop and go to that - but that is often just another postponement of some other 'main' work I should be doing - and I now have such a hard time staying with one thing to finish it. Yet somehow, work does get done, including this writing. I sometimes write through the urge to postpone what I am doing, or the urge to stop postponing the other thing I mean to do, and just push long enough to let something come into a full enough state of being to be 'done.'
In other news: a big union has come to town (or sent some organizers dedicated to the adjunct cause). And I can think of reasons why the effort might not be perfect, and how we might postpone rushing in, but I signed on. We have to change so much about higher education in this country, and about education as a whole.
In other news: my department gave me two classes to teach for fall! Double what I'm doing now, but not quite. They're two of the same, so the readings will be the same. I'm hoping I'll be fine. If not then, when would I ever be fine? Or is being fine ever the goal anyway?
In other news: my cousin might lose his third try to get disability income under Social Security. I'm tempted to erase that and skip anything about that topic, because he doesn't understand enough about the process, and I can't understand from far away. But I know he emerged from that California state prison after 17 years with diabetes, high blood pressure, and Valley Fever. I know he goes to one or another doctor or medical clinic almost every week. I know his blood sugar was in the 300s the other day for reasons he doesn't understand. I know he struggles to breathe at times, and has had pneumonia five times in the year since he got out of prison. I know he can't work any kind of regular job. I hope he gets the SSI this time. I almost want to tell him to hold off and send me the forms so I can check that they're done right this time... But he says there will be less than ten days to get them back, and I don't know if I'd do it right, either. I would like to know why our government agency acts like a corporation trying to keep as many as possible from getting disability income in a game they play, knowing some will give up.
In other news: we got the daughter of one of my cousins into a place. It was a joint effort. One of her friends, another single mom, said she'd move her two little girls into her bedroom so Nicole could rent the other bedroom of the two-bedroom apartment. Nicole is trying to get her two little boys back and couldn't do so until she had a place to live. She had been homeless for over a year. She needed $1300 to get in ($650 for rent and $650 for deposit), so some of my family and friends pitched in and we put in the other $790. I had made up my mind that if nothing else, we would get this done. I don't care if it's not the Revolution or is only a private solution. I only knew that I could not stand for her to lose her kids simply because she didn't have a place to live. And so I figured, screw all that "if you give a man to fish" stuff when the person's lying on the ground about to pass out from starvation. Just meet someone's needs and figure out the other stuff later. Anyway, I am sick of so many slogans.
In other news: I'm trying to figure out how to move back to California, and it feels so daunting at times to pull it off. Why was it so easy to just pick up and move years ago, and why is it so hard now?
I wish I could do it the same way I might write a book - packing a set number of boxes a week, moving them over to a new place - but that isn't all that akin to how I'd write a book anyway, at least not just that. Some things must be done in bursts when the time doesn't feel right at all, followed then by some consistency, followed by more bursts, with it all teetering on the edge of the permanent postponement called disaster - until some barrier is passed and we finally know that even if it's grueling, this will happen. Or the grueling part will be over, and I'll be in those last exhilarating hours. That happened before, when we were moving from Minnesota to California the last time. Driving through the mountains of Northern New Mexico, knowing we'd be in California sometime the next day, those joy surges finally overcame the exhausted numbness of moving out of the duplex rental on below zero days in January. It had seemed impossible, but there we were driving through the snowy mountains that morning, scattered pines on the land around us and ultra-blue sky encircling us from above, planning to stay one last night in Santa Fe before heading on toward home.
We are 5 / 24ths into 2014. I'm writing for now. It's all I have.
Back to the poetry anthology.
At umpteen random moments, I could write the best blog post ever, or the article I mean to finish (or start), or the book I have started so many times (but not 'for reals'). There is never enough time to plunge my mind into it, but how can this be true - and I tell my students that none of that is true, that they must not wait for muses and inspiration, that they must "just write," but this isn't quite true for me. I am not that kind of writer. I can just write and write a bunch of mediocre observations and same-old-feelings with nothing to them, but what is the point of taking up all of our time in doing that?
And yet, I still feel as though I'm not quite 'there' yet - not at that place and time where great writing might occur - and then I decide to just go ahead and step into the stream of postponements to at least say SOMEthing for now. And maybe that is what writing and teaching and any kind of labor in life is.
This weekend I'm rushing to finish the poetry anthology I'm putting together for this class, which I want to be somewhat different than the one for last semester, and it will just be whatever it can be with the time I can give to it. And before yesterday's class, I was looking up what I could on Willa Cather and on the Homestead Act and the migrations to the Plains in the later 1800s and whatever else I found that connected to her novel O Pioneers. I told them about how the nature of capitalism demands perpetual expansions of some kind for its markets, and places for some of the burgeoning population to move out to in order to defer confrontations between poor or working people and the capitalists who rely on them as a labor force. What I had wasn't good enough, but that was all the time I had. And it will be something like that for Monday. I will feel a deep well of terror inside again all semester, which I will manage to put to sleep sometimes. Like some other beings, it sleeps best when there's a lot going on around it - pleasant buzzes of conversations and physical movement and maybe some music - and it wakes up crying and anxious when things get too quiet.
But quiet is precisely what I need to prepare to teach, and to write, and to read. Yet I go to write - even now - and think of everything else I should be doing - and I think that maybe this - whatever 'this' is in that moment - is a postponement of the 'main' work I need to focus on - and I stop and go to that - but that is often just another postponement of some other 'main' work I should be doing - and I now have such a hard time staying with one thing to finish it. Yet somehow, work does get done, including this writing. I sometimes write through the urge to postpone what I am doing, or the urge to stop postponing the other thing I mean to do, and just push long enough to let something come into a full enough state of being to be 'done.'
In other news: a big union has come to town (or sent some organizers dedicated to the adjunct cause). And I can think of reasons why the effort might not be perfect, and how we might postpone rushing in, but I signed on. We have to change so much about higher education in this country, and about education as a whole.
In other news: my department gave me two classes to teach for fall! Double what I'm doing now, but not quite. They're two of the same, so the readings will be the same. I'm hoping I'll be fine. If not then, when would I ever be fine? Or is being fine ever the goal anyway?
In other news: my cousin might lose his third try to get disability income under Social Security. I'm tempted to erase that and skip anything about that topic, because he doesn't understand enough about the process, and I can't understand from far away. But I know he emerged from that California state prison after 17 years with diabetes, high blood pressure, and Valley Fever. I know he goes to one or another doctor or medical clinic almost every week. I know his blood sugar was in the 300s the other day for reasons he doesn't understand. I know he struggles to breathe at times, and has had pneumonia five times in the year since he got out of prison. I know he can't work any kind of regular job. I hope he gets the SSI this time. I almost want to tell him to hold off and send me the forms so I can check that they're done right this time... But he says there will be less than ten days to get them back, and I don't know if I'd do it right, either. I would like to know why our government agency acts like a corporation trying to keep as many as possible from getting disability income in a game they play, knowing some will give up.
In other news: we got the daughter of one of my cousins into a place. It was a joint effort. One of her friends, another single mom, said she'd move her two little girls into her bedroom so Nicole could rent the other bedroom of the two-bedroom apartment. Nicole is trying to get her two little boys back and couldn't do so until she had a place to live. She had been homeless for over a year. She needed $1300 to get in ($650 for rent and $650 for deposit), so some of my family and friends pitched in and we put in the other $790. I had made up my mind that if nothing else, we would get this done. I don't care if it's not the Revolution or is only a private solution. I only knew that I could not stand for her to lose her kids simply because she didn't have a place to live. And so I figured, screw all that "if you give a man to fish" stuff when the person's lying on the ground about to pass out from starvation. Just meet someone's needs and figure out the other stuff later. Anyway, I am sick of so many slogans.
In other news: I'm trying to figure out how to move back to California, and it feels so daunting at times to pull it off. Why was it so easy to just pick up and move years ago, and why is it so hard now?
I wish I could do it the same way I might write a book - packing a set number of boxes a week, moving them over to a new place - but that isn't all that akin to how I'd write a book anyway, at least not just that. Some things must be done in bursts when the time doesn't feel right at all, followed then by some consistency, followed by more bursts, with it all teetering on the edge of the permanent postponement called disaster - until some barrier is passed and we finally know that even if it's grueling, this will happen. Or the grueling part will be over, and I'll be in those last exhilarating hours. That happened before, when we were moving from Minnesota to California the last time. Driving through the mountains of Northern New Mexico, knowing we'd be in California sometime the next day, those joy surges finally overcame the exhausted numbness of moving out of the duplex rental on below zero days in January. It had seemed impossible, but there we were driving through the snowy mountains that morning, scattered pines on the land around us and ultra-blue sky encircling us from above, planning to stay one last night in Santa Fe before heading on toward home.
We are 5 / 24ths into 2014. I'm writing for now. It's all I have.
Back to the poetry anthology.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
The Stuff I've Learnt over the Years
by Sean S.
(Sean wrote this to me and at the same time, to put up on the blog. As I said on the intro to Ryan's post, I had asked them to give me some thoughts on the readings we've done over the years. I have to say, reading this made me smile and cry a little, in gratitude.)
Mom,
The stuff I've read over the years has been amazing.
The education has been amazing. And the books me, you and Ryan have read were impressive books. The book that really had an effect on me was 'The Shock Doctrine'. What I've learned from it was the whole shock therapy. That one woman who wasn't even doing anything but the CIA agency just had that doctor subject her to the shock therapy treatment. And Milton Friedman was behind the whole Chicago Boys and what they did in Chile. Then there was reading about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and how, afterwards, a bunch of those Capitalistic rich people took advantage of the destruction and built hotels. Even though it belonged to the fisheries but the capitalistic rich people took it. This book is quite interesting because it tells you a lot about the stuff you haven't heard or even knew about. These books me, Ryan and you have read were pretty happy, sad or dark.
And then there were the poems you've read. The poem I liked most is 'The House of Yemanjá' by Audre Lord. It is a very impressive poem.
To conclude everything I've learned over the years, well, I'm happy to say I've learned quite a lot from reading with you. I am thankful. We've read loads of books and poems whether they're fiction, nonfiction. It's been very educational. And plus, it's helped me an awful lot. Learning new things about world history. And the stuff we've read has been very interesting because some of those things that happened, happened. Like in 'Brother I'm Dying', that one president who was removed in the coup in Haiti. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
So, all of this has been very educational.
Mom,
The stuff I've read over the years has been amazing.The education has been amazing. And the books me, you and Ryan have read were impressive books. The book that really had an effect on me was 'The Shock Doctrine'. What I've learned from it was the whole shock therapy. That one woman who wasn't even doing anything but the CIA agency just had that doctor subject her to the shock therapy treatment. And Milton Friedman was behind the whole Chicago Boys and what they did in Chile. Then there was reading about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and how, afterwards, a bunch of those Capitalistic rich people took advantage of the destruction and built hotels. Even though it belonged to the fisheries but the capitalistic rich people took it. This book is quite interesting because it tells you a lot about the stuff you haven't heard or even knew about. These books me, Ryan and you have read were pretty happy, sad or dark.
And then there were the poems you've read. The poem I liked most is 'The House of Yemanjá' by Audre Lord. It is a very impressive poem.
To conclude everything I've learned over the years, well, I'm happy to say I've learned quite a lot from reading with you. I am thankful. We've read loads of books and poems whether they're fiction, nonfiction. It's been very educational. And plus, it's helped me an awful lot. Learning new things about world history. And the stuff we've read has been very interesting because some of those things that happened, happened. Like in 'Brother I'm Dying', that one president who was removed in the coup in Haiti. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
So, all of this has been very educational.
Thoughts on Our Readings Over the Years
by Ryan S.
(My youngest son, Ryan, wrote this. I recently found myself reflecting in conversation with him and Sean and in my intro to last month's post (repeated again for this month) where I list much of what we've read so far. http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2014/02/february-2014-with-my-learning-comrades.html. So I asked them to reflect a bit on their experience. Sean is working on his. Ryan just turned 17 in January.)
I'm somewhat lucky as far as my education goes, because with all the literature I have read with my family, and especially my mom, over the years I've gained a perspective on life and the way our society works, which I'm not sure many people my age have. I've learned the effects capitalism has on our world: how it's at a structural level the cause of many environmental problems, and is also the cause of much of the large-scale inequality that exists through-out the world. Because of the greed created by building whole nations around money, and the amount of control the people with the most money have, many alternative and equally effective sources of power (such as solar, wind, and to a small extent, hydroelectric power) have been largely turned down, simply because economic profits brought in from these alternatives is not as great. Meanwhile, the planet is rapidly deteriorating due to the heavy use of oil and nuclear power, simply for the sake of gaining more money, which will be obsolete and useless anyway if there's no planet for us to exist on.
The readings I've done over the years have also given me a large amount of insight into the large amount of racial and gender-based problems that, contrary to some's belief, is still heavily embedded in our culture. I also believe I have a better understanding of, and respect for the history behind human civilization than most people of my age. All of these opinions are based on personal experience of course, but I like to think I have a fairly good idea having known many teens over the years and having conversations with some about various political and large social issues that exist. Though I may not know as much as some of them with things like math, I feel as though I have a better understanding of broad issues and am able to empathize on a large-scale better because of this understanding. Knowing the things I do, I have to wonder why literature like that of which I have read over the years is not taught as widely in schools, seeing as it very clearly is not too advanced, and really has more value than much of the reading currently done in many schools.
(My youngest son, Ryan, wrote this. I recently found myself reflecting in conversation with him and Sean and in my intro to last month's post (repeated again for this month) where I list much of what we've read so far. http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2014/02/february-2014-with-my-learning-comrades.html. So I asked them to reflect a bit on their experience. Sean is working on his. Ryan just turned 17 in January.)
I'm somewhat lucky as far as my education goes, because with all the literature I have read with my family, and especially my mom, over the years I've gained a perspective on life and the way our society works, which I'm not sure many people my age have. I've learned the effects capitalism has on our world: how it's at a structural level the cause of many environmental problems, and is also the cause of much of the large-scale inequality that exists through-out the world. Because of the greed created by building whole nations around money, and the amount of control the people with the most money have, many alternative and equally effective sources of power (such as solar, wind, and to a small extent, hydroelectric power) have been largely turned down, simply because economic profits brought in from these alternatives is not as great. Meanwhile, the planet is rapidly deteriorating due to the heavy use of oil and nuclear power, simply for the sake of gaining more money, which will be obsolete and useless anyway if there's no planet for us to exist on.
The readings I've done over the years have also given me a large amount of insight into the large amount of racial and gender-based problems that, contrary to some's belief, is still heavily embedded in our culture. I also believe I have a better understanding of, and respect for the history behind human civilization than most people of my age. All of these opinions are based on personal experience of course, but I like to think I have a fairly good idea having known many teens over the years and having conversations with some about various political and large social issues that exist. Though I may not know as much as some of them with things like math, I feel as though I have a better understanding of broad issues and am able to empathize on a large-scale better because of this understanding. Knowing the things I do, I have to wonder why literature like that of which I have read over the years is not taught as widely in schools, seeing as it very clearly is not too advanced, and really has more value than much of the reading currently done in many schools.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
February 2014 with My Learning Comrades - Sean and Ryan
by Lucy S.
I'm going to leave up last month's post one more month. But Sean and Ryan are writing me something this time about their own thoughts about our readings all this time, so I will add that up here soon.
Sunday afternoon, and we've just finished Brother, I'm Dying by the great Haitian-American author, Edwidge Danticat. We've been reading a chapter a day for some time now, but today, I read the fourth to the last chapter, and we all wanted to go on. I kept reading, and we knew the only thing to do was to see it through. I started to cry on some parts, just intermittently. After the last words, when I closed the book, Sean said with strong feeling, "God! That's so sad!" Ryan said it was up there with the great ones, with Animal's People and other great ones, and Sean said, "Yeah!" and I nodded. I said, "Do you realize how few people your age have read that and all of the books and poems and other readings on our list?" "Yeah..." they both said, nodding, not placating me, but meaning it. I said, "So maybe you really have had a great education." Sean said, "Yeah, think of all of them - this one, Animal's People, The Shock Doctrine, The Moral Underground..." I said, "Go on this blog sometimes and look at the list, and let yourself think about each of the readings as your eyes take them in, and think about how much time each one represents, and how much you actually know from all those readings."
They have read other things, of course, but these are the ones we've read together that we could remember when I began listing these readings. And the ones that matter. There are far more movies, too, but I haven't tried to think much about making that longer. What I most care about are the books we read together. We don't even talk about them that much after each day's reading. But they bind us together, our travels through these books together.
I've been all over the place in my thoughts about homeschooling and public schools. In recent years, I've doubted my choices at times, thinking of them as maybe a retreat from the institutions that we should instead be struggling in - though there is ample evidence that working-class and poverty-class kids don't tend to fare too well in them, by and large. They tend to perpetuate the same class inequalities. But I am tired of thinking about it in those terms, tired of trying to arrive at a perfect answer. I only know that I've given my kids a moral education, reading these books to them, talking about the book a little during the readings, referring back to them, building in my kids a deep well of understanding, a way of seeing a larger picture of this world. They don't get falsely cheery interpretations that are meant to make them see their society and government as advancing further and further into some brightening light of benevolent progress. And yet they never become jaded in their responses to our readings. They're always moved.
Sean and Ryan told me I should read Brother, I'm Dying with my class, and I said, "I am! This coming semester!" They said they think the students will love it. I hope so. I hope they'll all actually even do all the readings. Sometimes I wonder if they'd get more out of their education if we all just sat and read together and talked about the readings afterward, and we cared more about their moral or ethical development than about producing another worker to take another spot in - the students hope - the professional-managerial class. But that's a topic for another post. Right now, I'm feeling thankful to my kids (all of them) for teaching me how to teach before I ever went back to school.
Books
Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Cather, Willa. My Antonia.
Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I'm Dying.
Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron-Mills
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas. Utopia
Nix, Garth. Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Roy, Aruhndhati. Walking with the Comrades
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle
Sinha, Indra. Animal's People
Skye, Obert. Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet. Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Short Stories and Essays
Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Cleary, Kate M. "Feet of Clay."
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "Crazy for this Democracy."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Hurston, Zora Neale. "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience."
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist."
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Wright, Richard. "The Library Card."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"
Poetry
Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Barghouti, Mourid. "Even Gods."
Barghouti, Mourid. “The three cypress trees.”
Berry, Wendell, "The Peace of Wild Things"
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston. "Mother to Son."
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Moore, Marianne. "Poetry."
Morales, Aurora Levins. "Child of the America."
Neruda, Pablo. "It Rains."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Are All the Break-ups in Your Poems Real?"
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee."Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Kottayam Morning."
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Movies
"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Man of La Mancha"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"
I'm going to leave up last month's post one more month. But Sean and Ryan are writing me something this time about their own thoughts about our readings all this time, so I will add that up here soon.
Sunday afternoon, and we've just finished Brother, I'm Dying by the great Haitian-American author, Edwidge Danticat. We've been reading a chapter a day for some time now, but today, I read the fourth to the last chapter, and we all wanted to go on. I kept reading, and we knew the only thing to do was to see it through. I started to cry on some parts, just intermittently. After the last words, when I closed the book, Sean said with strong feeling, "God! That's so sad!" Ryan said it was up there with the great ones, with Animal's People and other great ones, and Sean said, "Yeah!" and I nodded. I said, "Do you realize how few people your age have read that and all of the books and poems and other readings on our list?" "Yeah..." they both said, nodding, not placating me, but meaning it. I said, "So maybe you really have had a great education." Sean said, "Yeah, think of all of them - this one, Animal's People, The Shock Doctrine, The Moral Underground..." I said, "Go on this blog sometimes and look at the list, and let yourself think about each of the readings as your eyes take them in, and think about how much time each one represents, and how much you actually know from all those readings."
They have read other things, of course, but these are the ones we've read together that we could remember when I began listing these readings. And the ones that matter. There are far more movies, too, but I haven't tried to think much about making that longer. What I most care about are the books we read together. We don't even talk about them that much after each day's reading. But they bind us together, our travels through these books together.
I've been all over the place in my thoughts about homeschooling and public schools. In recent years, I've doubted my choices at times, thinking of them as maybe a retreat from the institutions that we should instead be struggling in - though there is ample evidence that working-class and poverty-class kids don't tend to fare too well in them, by and large. They tend to perpetuate the same class inequalities. But I am tired of thinking about it in those terms, tired of trying to arrive at a perfect answer. I only know that I've given my kids a moral education, reading these books to them, talking about the book a little during the readings, referring back to them, building in my kids a deep well of understanding, a way of seeing a larger picture of this world. They don't get falsely cheery interpretations that are meant to make them see their society and government as advancing further and further into some brightening light of benevolent progress. And yet they never become jaded in their responses to our readings. They're always moved.
Sean and Ryan told me I should read Brother, I'm Dying with my class, and I said, "I am! This coming semester!" They said they think the students will love it. I hope so. I hope they'll all actually even do all the readings. Sometimes I wonder if they'd get more out of their education if we all just sat and read together and talked about the readings afterward, and we cared more about their moral or ethical development than about producing another worker to take another spot in - the students hope - the professional-managerial class. But that's a topic for another post. Right now, I'm feeling thankful to my kids (all of them) for teaching me how to teach before I ever went back to school.
Books
Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Cather, Willa. My Antonia.
Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I'm Dying.
Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron-Mills
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas. Utopia
Nix, Garth. Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Roy, Aruhndhati. Walking with the Comrades
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle
Sinha, Indra. Animal's People
Skye, Obert. Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet. Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Short Stories and Essays
Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Cleary, Kate M. "Feet of Clay."
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "Crazy for this Democracy."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Hurston, Zora Neale. "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience."
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist."
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Wright, Richard. "The Library Card."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"
Poetry
Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Barghouti, Mourid. "Even Gods."
Barghouti, Mourid. “The three cypress trees.”
Berry, Wendell, "The Peace of Wild Things"
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston. "Mother to Son."
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Moore, Marianne. "Poetry."
Morales, Aurora Levins. "Child of the America."
Neruda, Pablo. "It Rains."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Are All the Break-ups in Your Poems Real?"
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee."Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Kottayam Morning."
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Movies
"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Man of La Mancha"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"
Coming to Terms with My Experience
by
Lucy S.
Tomorrow
the new semester begins. It’s the first
class of my second semester as a college teacher. I teach at a private liberal
arts school. A plaque outside the office I share with one professor this coming
semester says: “Professor Lucy S……” I’m
an adjunct, an “instructor” – but also called “Professor” by students.
I’m
trying to become that new identity. It feels like certain vital elements of who
I am have changed so quickly. A recap: Four years ago, I’d begun the second of
three semesters back at our huge public university to finish my B.A. I’d done
one other ‘round’ there – (fall 2005; spring 2006; spring 2007). I transferred
in 66 credits, most from the California community college I began when my
oldest son was two, some from another California community college where I took
four classes with him when he was fifteen and then seventeen. After years of
stretched out education, I graduated in December 2010. I didn’t know what I should do next with a
B.A. in English at that point. In
community college when my son was little, I’d planned to get a master’s and
teach college English. But during the in-between years, work in the academic
humanities became more precarious. I became more aware of the precariousness. I
also lost confidence on a personal level in some ways. I was in such a
different stage of life, too – permanently separated from my spouse, kids to
still care for, not up for the one-room- or couch-spot-renting I did in my
teens and fledgling adulthood, or the umpteen moves of my 20s and 30s (with kids
in tow), or all the “dues-paying” some people insist “young” people must do now
(with the meaning of “young” stretching further and further into adulthood).
But I took the leap and applied to a master’s program along with the full-time
fellowship at a local private liberal arts university. Then I kept planning
what I’d “really” do. Getting the fellowship stunned me. I began in September
2011, graduated in May 2013, and began teaching at that institution in
September 2013. So here I am.
I’ve
been trying for four-and-a-half years to understand my experience. The first
round at the U, I didn’t try to understand in these ways. I just knew I felt
depressed at times, and almost always felt awkward and alienated. I heard what
the situation was for would-be college English teachers, so I shifted to the
plan of teaching adult ESL, but soon I found out that job outlook was terrible,
too. And the seemingly uncrossable chasm between my life, my relationships, my
other forms of knowledge and wisdom before and beyond academia and, on the
other side, what I was doing in college – this chasm did things to me
psychologically that I couldn’t understand well enough. I just knew that I felt so
much better about myself when I wasn’t there. At the same time, there were
classes that taught me a lot, and moments I liked or even loved. Then I took
another leap in 2009 – went back – and it was all different. I connected to a small number of people who
made a profound difference in my experience, plus two of my kids were there at
the same time. I loved it enough to see it through. Yet the experience has disrupted
my sense of who I am – which is why I’m still grappling with the question of how
to understand my experience and what to DO with that understanding.
Sometimes
I think about how someone would “normally” be about 21 or 22 when graduating
with the B.A., and if they’d then continued along this same trajectory as me,
they’d be about 24 or 25 now. Then I sometimes rail against the pretense of when
these college educations supposedly “normally” occur. Even with the insistence from
so many sectors that people must get a college degree now to ‘make it,’ almost
60 percent of 18-24 year-old Americans were not in college in 2010. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 Or, from a 2011 article in The Atlantic: “Thirty-eight
percent of those enrolled in higher education are over the age of 25 and
one-fourth are over the age of 30. The share of all students who are over age
25 is projected to increase another twenty-three percent by 2019. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/old-school-colleges-most-important-trend-is-the-rise-of-the-adult-student/245823/ And still, in so many circles, people
perpetuate the fiction of college education as something that, for the “normal”
person, occurs right after high school. It is imagined as the final stage of
coming into adulthood. When it is merged with arrival at adulthood, what does
that say about the rest of us, who either don’t get college degrees or get them
much later? In the minds of all who believe a college degree makes someone an
adult in a way they can’t be without the experience, are we never quite adults,
or developmentally delayed adults, or are we some variation of the mature
American human? And what does it do to people who don’t go to college (at all
or at least not until later) to even partly believe this, or have others
believe it?
People
can pay lip service to valuing ‘many kinds of knowledge,’ including the kinds
gained by caring for babies and kids, raising them, homeschooling them,
managing to keep oneself and a family going through so many mishmashes of jobs
and living situations (without scams – without hurting other people), growing
gardens, moves, whatever else – but it is the college degree that so many
employers make into a gatekeeper, to get certain jobs or to take on additional
responsibilities. I know what it feels like to live through a large portion of
my adulthood without one. I can’t say what it feels like for every person, but for
me and quite a few other people I’ve known, not having one takes on huge sociological,
economic, and psychological dimensions that we can’t fully sort out. In
contrast, the multitude of adults in their 30s, 40s, or beyond in this country
would never find themselves kept out of so many jobs and blamed for their
economic distress because ‘after all, they CHOSE to not have kids.’ And even so, I’ve read umpteen articles by
some professional whining about being asked when that person is going to have
children when that person does not ever plan to do so and resents the idea that
this must be an event of adulthood. Okay, maybe “whining” is a mean way to put
it, and maybe people have a right to feel whatever it is they feel, and maybe
I’m just angry about my main point. Namely, I am sickened and hurt and angry
that people who do have kids and do not go to college or go much later – the
MAJORITY of us, by the way – are often blamed when they and their kids are
harmed by the system on multiple levels.
But
I didn’t go to college to make a lot more money. I knew my particular education wouldn’t do
that for me. I went primarily because I hungered so badly for what and how I
might learn there, and to be part of a community of intellectually,
artistically, creatively, and politically engaged people. But still, that means
that on various levels, I too believed I would grow ‘upward’ in some way
through the experience, and that the people I’d come to know there would be
‘more’ intellectual, artistic, creative, and politically engaged than would
generally be the case for those not there. And that is one of the huge tensions
inside my experience. I don’t know how to reconcile my anger and pain that
those of us who didn’t go or didn’t finish are so often seen as ‘less than’ and
not good enough at critical thinking – how to reconcile that with my love for
what I learned through the experience. Sure, I or others can say it is just ONE
way to those kinds of growth, and that there are others. But I chose to go the
college route ultimately. and I now have chosen to teach college classes. I am
confused about what I think of all this. Does what I teach now matter
tremendously? Is it life-changing, as I
hope it is? What does that mean for those who never get to experience anything
like it?
And
at times, I wonder how much good college education does people or our society
as a whole.
Why
have people with college degrees voted more conservatively than those without
them? (This flies in the face of some college-educated
liberals who insist that it’s the ‘dumb’ working-classes who make the country
so reactionary.) In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the less education
someone had, the more likely they were to vote for Obama over Romney (except at
the grad school level, when it tipped back to Obama). Here are the numbers:
% of
pop. Obama Romney
Some
HS
|
3
|
64
|
35
|
|
HS
graduate
|
21
|
51
|
48
|
|
Some
college
|
29
|
49
|
48
|
|
College
graduate
|
29
|
47
|
51
|
|
Postgraduate
study
|
18
|
55
|
42
|
|
The
college educated voted more conservatively because they voted what they
perceived to be their economic interests. People who made under $50,000 a year
voted 60 percent Obama, 37 percent Romney. People who made $50,000-$90,000 a
year voted 46 percent Obama, 52 percent Romney. And those making over $100,000
a year voted 44 percent Obama, 54 percent Romney. Isn’t it repeatedly
emphasized that those with college degrees generally make a lot more money in
their lifetime than those without them?
During
the Vietnam War, the people most against the war were people without a high
school diploma, followed by those with just high school diplomas… despite our
cultural story about all the anti-war college students. Those who didn't go on to college knew they were the
ones most at risk for being drafted to go fight that war.
|
I
hope what we teach now has a different effect than what was taught before, but
I don’t know. And I’d like to know if the wisdom that is connected to a college
experience lasts, long after graduation. What happens after these graduates
take their places in the professional-managerial class (if their degree gets
them there, which it may not, especially if they start off working-class or
low-middle-class)? In my paper for my directed-study class at the end of my
2009 semester at the U, I asked why most people who run things in this world
have college degrees, yet do such a harmful, short-sighted job of it? (At times
they do a vicious, even genocidal job of it.)
I still wonder. Marxist theory
tells me that their roles shape who they are. But then, where does that leave
me, as a college teacher?
On
a personal as well as scholarly level, at times, I think I’ll never really
belong in academia. Maybe I’ll never be deeply accepted by other professors
there who can’t understand my experience and frame it inside their own. At
times, I want to emphasize to them: I AM
NOT YOU. You haven’t lived my life. You
haven’t raised five kids, homeschooled them, lived in the situations we lived
in. And I haven’t lived your life. But
then I find myself wanting to insist: I
AM YOU. I too love these studies, and I too feel the insecurities of what’s
being done to higher education, and I too am a human being who wants friends,
who wants some sense of abiding, genuine community in these endeavors. Regardless
of to whatever extents ‘I am not them’ and ‘I am them,’ I can’t say I have it
worse. I know that too many find themselves struggling on low incomes and/or in
tenuous jobs, afraid that they can’t ever forge long-term partner
relationships, buy homes, settle somewhere, or have kids if they want them. And
even if I have it worse than some, what is there to be done with that? It’s not
a basis for relationship. I don’t want pity; I want friendship. And with
friendship comes compassion, trust, and some sense of equality. I go around in my
head about these thoughts at times.
When
I’m honest enough to begin to express some of this, people sometimes think it’s
an invitation to ‘explain to me how it is’ in some way. I don’t want those
kinds of conversations. I understand how they happen. I know the urge inside
myself at times to just tell someone what I think the problem and solution are,
because those may seem easy to identify looking in on a part of someone else’s
life. But that’s a false ease and a kind
of arrogance. People need to be listened to carefully if we’re going to weigh
in. I DO want dialogue, and I want mutual understanding. And mutual respect.
And
sometimes I’m so tired of thinking about these issues. Sometimes I just want to
think about and write about other people’s situations or broader problems, with
more research, more critical analysis. Maybe the answer is to just forget about
my own educational experiences and feelings.
But then I wonder if there’s any point to someone doing these things
later, like I did, if we can only be ‘behind’ in our education and work
connected to that. Or if my own experiences contribute significantly to my work
now, how do I draw on them, write about them, grow wiser about them?
Tomorrow
I go teach, and as I have mentioned in here a couple of times now, I teach at
an expensive private college that is ultra-traditional in its student ages, a
college neither my kids nor I can / would have been able to attend as
undergraduates. What I feel isn’t petty resentment about that. It’s confusion
over what to make of it or DO about it, if anything.
For
now, I’m thinking a lot about utopian impulses (drawing on Fredric Jameson and
Ernst Bloch), and how what goes on in that school and in my course constitute
one kind of utopian effort and practice. My own education has been an enacted
utopian impulse. If so many of us yearn to create spaces and experiences that
stretch toward something more perfect, maybe the thing to do is to direct the
urges more expansively and democratically, so that they reach outward to
embrace and welcome more people. I still imagine college classes where women
can nurse their babies – not segregated spaces, either – but right in there
with 19 year olds who have no kids – and people struggling to recover from
prison’s ravages can be there, too, and someone like my grandmother (who took
one college class in her life, with me), and a mix of people that look far more
like what our whole society looks like. I still believe that the meaning of my
experience is that so much of what gets studied there must be shared with all
people in society if it is truly valuable.
I've started reading a well-known book called Women's Ways of Knowing, written by two psychology professors, a research professor of human development, and a professor of the college of education and social services of U. of Vermont. These four women interviewed 135 women about their experiences in families, schools, and other institutions, and they let these in-depth interviews shape their own theories, in the same sense as we who write about literature have to let the text guide us, rather than trying to impose our own pre-constructed meaning onto a text. The book was first published in 1986 and then there was a 10th anniversary edition in 1997. In this 1997 edition, they begin with a preface that explains how they wrote this book - the many collaborative meetings for three to four days at a time together every two months, often at one of their homes with kids and/or dogs walking around them as they sat at tables or on couches, sometimes with one of their family members making food for the four of them.
I love the description of their process. This is for me how education should happen. It shows that of course people can talk about scholarly topics and work in the midst of kids and other 'messy' parts of life - something I've known from personal experience for years. The continued insistence that education happen instead in ways that function more like business boardrooms, places where 'of course' it would be 'highly inappropriate' for kids to be, always excludes caregivers. Not just caregivers of kids, but caregivers of the elderly or of those with severe physical or mental problems. But I love the description also because they talk about how the early drafts of sections by one or another were sometimes almost as bad as their freshman composition papers. They worked and worked, talking so much, going for walks together while talking more, talking in expansive terms about the project and more narrowed down nuanced terms, writing, re-writing each other's work, poring over the interviews, and they decided to make the book by all four of them without saying who wrote which sections.
I found out about this book because I'm also reading an excellent 2000 book called Women as Learners: the Significance of Gender in Adult Learning, which was in part inspired by the well-known earlier book.
I think the mix of fluctuating anguish, desperation, anxiety, resignation, awkwardness, self-pity, anger, confusion, humor, pain over real and perceived exclusions, resilience, somewhat euphoric ups (with all my new plans at various times) - I think all this comes from craving intellectual engagement, camaraderie, and challenge, and at the same time, from the deep connections I feel to the people I've been bound to during my life - and separations from both (the intellectual growth and participation as well as some of my relationships). Some of this makes me think of Virginia Woolf writing that if Shakespeare had had a sister with similar talents and aspirations, she'd have ended up killing herself. Woolf of course genderizes it - and it is grounded in gender, because of the ways even this society functions for women - but at the same time, it's not. I believe it has to do with people who yearn so badly to do something, to create, to engage with others who UNDERSTAND and feel similarly, but not in a way that leaves loved ones behind and leaves them with their own pain because of their stamped out yearnings and their own awareness of their intelligence.
***
Postscript: I started to write this the other day, and am now thinking it fits here.
I love the description of their process. This is for me how education should happen. It shows that of course people can talk about scholarly topics and work in the midst of kids and other 'messy' parts of life - something I've known from personal experience for years. The continued insistence that education happen instead in ways that function more like business boardrooms, places where 'of course' it would be 'highly inappropriate' for kids to be, always excludes caregivers. Not just caregivers of kids, but caregivers of the elderly or of those with severe physical or mental problems. But I love the description also because they talk about how the early drafts of sections by one or another were sometimes almost as bad as their freshman composition papers. They worked and worked, talking so much, going for walks together while talking more, talking in expansive terms about the project and more narrowed down nuanced terms, writing, re-writing each other's work, poring over the interviews, and they decided to make the book by all four of them without saying who wrote which sections.
I found out about this book because I'm also reading an excellent 2000 book called Women as Learners: the Significance of Gender in Adult Learning, which was in part inspired by the well-known earlier book.
I think the mix of fluctuating anguish, desperation, anxiety, resignation, awkwardness, self-pity, anger, confusion, humor, pain over real and perceived exclusions, resilience, somewhat euphoric ups (with all my new plans at various times) - I think all this comes from craving intellectual engagement, camaraderie, and challenge, and at the same time, from the deep connections I feel to the people I've been bound to during my life - and separations from both (the intellectual growth and participation as well as some of my relationships). Some of this makes me think of Virginia Woolf writing that if Shakespeare had had a sister with similar talents and aspirations, she'd have ended up killing herself. Woolf of course genderizes it - and it is grounded in gender, because of the ways even this society functions for women - but at the same time, it's not. I believe it has to do with people who yearn so badly to do something, to create, to engage with others who UNDERSTAND and feel similarly, but not in a way that leaves loved ones behind and leaves them with their own pain because of their stamped out yearnings and their own awareness of their intelligence.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)