Spring Ennui

Spring Structure View Lament

As I stand on the hillock behind my house looking over the gentle slope that rolls down to the stone wall that separates the cemetery from Woodside, I am filled with sadness because of the warm breezes that blow down the back of my neck. In the darkening sky I watch the empire state and Chrysler buildings jump to life I lament the warmth that I’ve been crying for all winter long; this the first winter of our puppy, Lucky. As the buildings get to full voltage on the horizon on the other side of the stone wall, graveyard and river the skies fall dark. Through denuded branches the empire state glows two flavors of pink in a spring cross-marketing promotion of breast cancer and brassieres. The Chrysler building arcs a bright deco-rococo filigree in the center of the mountain of Manhattan skyline. The brilliance of the verge of sky and city on that warming cold spring evening seen through the branches flogging the sky pulls at my heart. Soon the warmth will stimulate the branches and coax out the flush-lush green that will blot it all out. In a week, two, or a month I will stand above that brown stonewall topped with concertina wire and see nothing but trees and leaves. The obstruction will be celebrated far & wide. From the 7 Manhattan-ites will remark “how bucolic” it looks with all the trees & Tudor buildings. I will cringe thinking about all of the views the foliage has suffocated.
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I.
The picture of the building is cracked
Irregular lines and shadows of lines
Scribble in every direction, track
Crossing out the columned stone station

II.
Cops quickly passing a crenellated
Columned, staired stone castle
The cracks are crooked boughs
Of December trees, up and out gasping

III.
Long branches reaching for sun long gone
Zig-zagged boughs couldn’t dodge trucks
Cracked and reversed lay bare winter pain
Now I can see how summer shade is struck

IV.
The spring brings out cover to hide
The old “house.” The green pollution smears
The leisurely passing of what’s inside
The strength of the skeleton structure

After Winter Falls

After Winter Falls
Through snakey black trees
A hard world emerges
Out the grey windows

Folks, kids, dads, and moms
Love and hate and pain
Streets of hOpetemism
The course of city life

Branches separate
Branches unify
People living out
City life as humans

Spring buds out green life
Tinting strong lines green
Blotting out the lives
That run past the windows

Buds to leaves become
Hinting at the branch
That holds leaves up, out
Over and along

Bulbous leaves foam out
Green from everywhere
Lush plush green of lies
Life of lives to hide

See Cabaret at LaGuardia Community College

5/10/2008 8:00 AM

I went to see LaGuardia Community College’s production of Cabaret. Now I’m not much of a theatre aficionado, but I had a great time. I am strongly recommending that, should you read this before their run ends, you go and check the kids’ show out.

So when I went into the little theatre and heard Rashisda the Emcee start with the tune “Welcome,” which I had only heard John, the campy waiter from the Magic Pan sing before I was sold. I was ready for a new experience that resonated with the others, but was completely original. Ms. Rashida, in addition to singing well, moves marvelously, and her dance and stage presence was a fun thing to watch on top of the play. When she would do turns around the stage during different parts of the play she would invoke everyone from Groucho Marx to Cab Calloway (the swallowtail jacket didn’t hurt).

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention. Oh Yeah, And Will K. can turn, the little bit of dancing he did was amazing, in its octogenarian way.

I want to give a general shout out to every member of the cast, who I watched with constant interest. They were all wonderful to look at and hear, and I often found myself looking back into the chorus line and at the “extras” marveling at the wonderful courage and diversity of these LaGuardia CC students. Whether it was Mr. Footman as the cabby looking for his money, Jocelyn Catasus as Frauline Kost (cost) and her many sailor/suitors, Mr. Ochoa as the drag queen, or any of the lovely lads and ladies of the chorus line, there was plenty of multi-cultural-multi-talented “eye-candy.” I am far too repressed to admit how beautiful all of the young women are and too homophobic to admit the same about the men. I also have to say that I love hearing live music, and the production got a lot of mileage out of the horns, keyboards and drums they had tucked away above stage. This was a great way to Spend a Friday night, and I highly recommend catching it if you can.

Ernst, the Nazi who opens the play was a surprisingly convincing actor and I have to say, though his role of scoundrel was exposed in the second act, his bonhomie from the first act made him hard not to watch, even when he was the Nazi, in a krystalnacht redux, beating down Darryl Sorrentino as our Harrisburg Hero Clifford Bradshaw (who was good in his role as the idealist cuckolded by the torch-singer Veronica Palazzo as Sally Bowles).

The voices were all good, the show was really exciting, and since I had never seen any version of it before, neither the Queen Latifa version nor the Joel Gray jammy, it was fresh and I really wanted to know what was going to happen. Now, I’m not sure that having the plot spoiled by previous versions would have stolen anything from this show because, like I said, the music and actors were all really present and engaging.

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention.

I have to confess that I have never seen Cabaret in any of its guises before. I remember back in the 70s when it was a play and all of the theatre majors from Emerson College with whom I worked at The Magic Pan would go about belting out the tunes from the show while we did sidework. Then I recall the movie coming out and another surge of popularity, and hearing the tunes “Cabaret” and “Money Makes the World Go Around” floating into my pop-culture-world. I think there was a disco version of the $$ song (it was right about then that NY NY with Robert Deniro and Liza Minelli; Frank Sinatra stole the song from the film, but that’s another sad, sad, story).

It was a great pleasure to see Cesar Mack, a student from my ENG101, Professor Raven Blackstone and, most of all, Gail Mellow who is always there to support our students. IF you can, go ask any of them how they liked it, and I’m sure they’ll say that this show is a Must See.

Priceless (how advertising makes our lives better)

March 29, 5:43 am

Wow it has been a while since I wrote here. I’ve been surfing the ‘net too much and I wanted to include more writing in my life (even though I am teaching and I have the four preps, three of which are new). We were cruising along and I handed back the first batch of papers too my 101/103 when into my class walks L___. Odd, thought I, why is my wife in my class? I had no idea what was going on, or what sort of looking glass I was falling through.

M___n, she announced, was in an ambulance and on his way th NY Hospital. His teacher from PS150Q called en route saying that he had “fallen and hurt his ankle.” [This is getting too elaborate and wordy so I'm going to cut detail ruthlessly!] We ponied up and cleared out our offices for the day, taking home grading, electronics and other necessities of the post-modern life.

The drive into Manhattan was painless enough but it took a while to find parking. I got out as Linda continued to search for parking Like Diogenes for an honest man on the Upper East Side. I went and found Mason and Mrs F. and he was watching an episode of Star Wars (III?) with a strangely twisted ankle:

Lots of other things happened, not the lest of which was being treated like a nitwit by the hospital staff because I do not speak their version of “medical insurance bureaucratese.” Mercifully L. was there to translate, and they finally took the xrays (negative), gave mason some crutches, and released us (on our own recognizance). It was 4:30 when we were released and the parking rules had changed where we had parked. Our car had been stolen by the city for our lack of attention to detail and the need to make York Ave more passable for rush hour. We took a minivan cab back to Queens picked up C and LX at Grandmother’s house (“over the river and through the woods” [god I love minivans]) contacting the city about our car on our crackberries on the way home. No sign of our car.

We ordered out, zonked by the experience, too hungry to be nice to one another for the our it would take to cook the pasta or rice or whatever. Linda was on the phone and internet for a few hours trying to track down “big sticky” (our car). Finally she found it hiding under an alias (the Z had been written as a 2).

At 8 I left the house with my mp3player and a book to read for school (Jihad vs. McWorld).

At 8:15 I was on a 7 train heading out of 61st street towards Manhattoes.

At 8:45 I was at the Hudson river and 42nd street having enjoyed my walk through times sq immensely (I rarely get into Manhattan during the semester).

At 8:55 I was in line at the pound with the other towees, trying to maintain my cool in light of the histrionics of a particular middle aged BMW owner. I read for a while but the show was too good so I wrote a poem about my fellow (non-)travelers on my crackberry.

 

The pound is like the post office on hormones.
It combines the impatient lines and hopeless tasks
With the bullet proof decor and public service hygene.
The despair of an all-night McDonalds clings to the vending machines
And usurious cash machine beckon the broke to try
The cash cards of vasectimized bank accounts.

Many are here in the course of regular car driving lives
Here with dates and husbands, work kits and tools
There’s a nice kid with a yarmulke a marketing t-shirt
A shot glass and booze breath wearing $200 shoes
All of our cars have been taken to this pound
Only to be released after excruciating bureaucracy.
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Just before 11 (not bad really) I was called to a window and made to jump through another six flaming hoops of bureaucracy by a woman with Queens accent and a Costco wardrobe and body. The Z formerly known as 2 on our license plate made it so that we had to negotiate for another 15 minutes over some Oswaldo Guzman who lived back in California and was supposed to be retrieving the car (I’ll bet that’s the closest he’ll ever come to visiting NYC [if he comes I hope he leaves his car in Cali, we have enough]). There was something wrong with the printer at her station and it took 10 more minutes for me to be given the Charlie Bucket golden ticket.

The cavernous pier was a site to behold filled with late model cars of every stripe with layers of grime that made them look cadaverous, though they were the latest, hippest and coolest cars to a one.
My last message, before I was able to leave the waiting-room-purgatory was:

Mason hurt skating: ambulance ride to New York Hospital: $500
Car towed while in Emergency Room: $300
3 hours at the New York City Impound Yard: Priceless
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“The Message” (For Class Thesis Development)

The Message

Granmaster Flash and the Furious Five. 1982. The Message. 12-inch single (Sugar Hill SH-584).

 

Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs,
You know they just don’t care
I can’t take the smell, I can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkie’s in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away, but I couldn’t get far
Cause the man with the tow-truck repossessed my car

Chorus:

Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to loose my head
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder
How I keep from going under

Standing on the front stoop, hangin’ out the window
Watching all the cars go by, roaring as the breezes blow

Crazy lady, livin’ in a bag
Eating out of garbage piles, used to be a fag-hag
Search and test a tango, skips the life and then go
To search a prince to see the last of senses
Down at the peepshow, watching all the creeps
So she can tell the stories to the girls back home
She went to the city and got so so seditty
She had to get a pimp, she couldn’t make it on her own

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder
How I keep from goin’ under

My brother’s doing fast on my mother’s t.v.
Says she watches to much, is just not healthy
All my children in the daytime, Dallas at night
Can’t even see the game or the sugar ray fight

Bill collectors they ring my phone
And scare my wife when I’m not home
Got a bum education, double-digit inflation
Can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike at the station

Me on King Kong standin’ on my back
Can’t stop to turn around, broke my sacroiliac
Midrange, migraine, cancered membrane
Sometimes I think I’m going insane,
I swear I might hijack a plane!

My son said daddy I don’t wanna go to school
Cause the teacher’s a jerk, he must think I’m a Fool
And all the kids smoke reefer,
I think it’d be cheaper
If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper
I dance to the beat, shuffle my feet
Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps
Cause it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny
You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey

They push that girl in front of a train
Took her to a doctor, sowed the arm on again
Stabbed that man, right in his heart
Gave him a transplant before a brand new start

I can’t walk through the park,
‘Cause it’s crazy after the dark
Keep my hand on the gun,
‘Cause they got me on the run
I feel like an outlaw, broke my last glass jaw
Hear them say you want some more, livin’ on a seesaw

A child was born, with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smiling on you but he’s frowning too
Cause only God knows what you go through
You grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way
You’ll admire all the number book takers
Thugs, pimps, pushers and the big money makers
Driving big cars, spending twenties and tens
And you wanna grow up to be just like them
Smugglers, scrambles, burglars, gamblers
Pickpockets, peddlers and even pan-handlers
You say I’m cool, I’m no fool
But then you wind up dropping out of high school
Now you’re unemployed, all null ’n’ void
Walking around like you’re pretty boy floyd
Turned stickup kid, look what you done did
Got send up for a eight year bid
Now your manhood’s took and you’re a may tag
Spend the next two years as an undercover fag
Being used and abused, and served like hell
Till one day you was find hung dead in a cell
It was plain to see that your life was lost
You was cold and your body swung back and forth
But now your eyes sing the sad sad song
Of how you lived so fast and died so young

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”

In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.

I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”
A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens

Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer

The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River

The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology

Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out

Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos

Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam

Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by

Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency

When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass

The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths

Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter

Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built

By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood

This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.

Physical Therapy and Abu Ghraib

So I’ve been undergoing physical therapy twice a week for a while now. Some of you might notice the photo above from an earlier post. as I am stretched and pulled, massaged and exercised I am for period of ten minutes each time left alone in a cubicle with electrodes strapped to my ankles. My ankles are then wrapped in ice-packs and the power is turned on. This increases bloodflow to the recently “exercised” joints and I think is helping (I am getting better). During those lonely twenty minutes a week I have been composing poems on my crackberry:

As I lie in my curtain-cubicle
Stretched and stretching out
Upon the insurance company wrack
Tring to revive my ligaments

I feel the gentle surge
Of the curative electrodes
Taped to my lower extremities
As I stare up at the curtains

That separate me from
The other patients with
Other infirmities
Stretched shocked wrenched

Each of them must feel
The tears of their own flesh
Rehabbing looking up
At the fluorescent

Curtains that separate us all
Hanging from the tracks
That segregate walls
For our own lonely cures

Stretch (This one is a revision of the first that speaks more directly to an imagined interrogation instead of the isolation that I feel in that cubicle and in the medical world.)

In a hyper-clean cubicle
On a Plynth Three Section Table
Model sixty-four-eighty-five
Sold only to prisons and HMOs

Lies a man Bound by zip-ties
Lies a man who does not speak
The language of his “providers.”
He is to undergo “truth-therapy”

At the hands of a good Hoosier
Raised on corn and bologna
Jello, macaroni, potatoes and
Bread that you can make balls out of

As concerned about march madness
As he is with homeland security
He puts medical electrodes
On the depilated scrotum

Telling the patient patient in poor Urdu
What he is doing just like a real doctor
He explains the range using the LCD readout
Then he connects the wires

He illustrates the discomfort of the number two
With his military training school Urdu
The LCD reminds him of the scoreboard
At McCracken that Hoosiers venerate

Lost in thought he wonders about
The bracket he filled out in the px
And if there were any upsets in the first round.
Then he reads the first urdu question typed on the sheet

There in the hygienic curtained exam room
Two men speak in Urdu one of whom
Is thinking about college basketball
And the other of his flaming balls

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Update and a Quiz

1/26/2008 6:23 AM (sorry, this is a long one)

Yesterday, Friday the 25^th of January, 2008, Lennox came home with a flier about the upcoming 100^th day of school (2/7/8). She is encouraged to bring 100 objects: “Please help your child to choose 1 item and count 100 pieces of that item.” So last night Lennox was counting out 100 pennies from the penny jar and insisting on a “bigger, the biggest ziplock bag, because there are 100 I need to fit in here,” with characteristic eye-rolling, intensity and sarcasm. (The bag she wanted and got is big enough to fit her head in and use as a space helmet.)

I wish that 100 pennies still meant as much to me as they do to Lennox. I fear that Even Mason and Chandler have relegated the copper penny to the economic trash-heap, not worth bending over for unless they are heads’ up. Sigh, I remember when you could get three peach pits for a penny from the (unsanitary) jar on the counter of the corner store kitty corner from the Rice school on Appleton and Dartmouth Streets. A nickel would sugar up all of your friends for a game of baseball or ring-alevio (all-ee-all-ee-in-come-free). They have new and wondrous things in their childhoods, but my kids, trapped in this new city and new apartment, who haven’t discovered their peers and places, lack the independence that we had in 19-and-sixtey-nine. (God, I sound like Abraham Simpson!)

(MMMM-excellent coffee this morning)

Chandler is just loving her school. Everyday she comes home with another anecdote –that can’t wait- about the antic in her classroom. I wish that I had paid closer attention so that I could tell you of the antics of Abla, Chewmaka, Andrew, and Aniqa (accuracy). Mr. Binyaris had them write a poem in Math Class (so the “no-child” tests must be safely in the rear-view and they must be back to their usual talented and gifted antics). Rarely does Chandler come home when she is not excited about the day’s goings-ons, whether it is her latest 90-something exam, some difficult (and interesting) word problem, or some logical ditty that a teacher tossed to the class at the end of the day to keep them busy. So when I meet her, with her 30 pound back-pack (and I don’t think I am exadurating) I take the bag from her shoulders and the stories from her day and walk home in paternal bliss.

Mason is, I think, bored to tears by PS150. He listens to Chandler’s after-school update with seeming blasé-ness, but can always recount the characteristics of the players in her stories if asked. He can often answer the brain teasers that Cha-Cha has brought home, and he usually responds with stories of the incompetence and knuckle-headed-ness of his classmates. He is so ready for a school that challenges him that I can see it like an aura (or the curly half-fro he declines to cut that shoots tendrils towards heaven like a vine thirsting for knowledge).  He’s been home, sick with a fever, for the last two days and we’ve been keeping him from watching the Disney Channel the whole time.  I caught him reading The Outsiders in front of a tivo’d repeat of Zack and Cody (the one where they cut school and end up in a rock video).  When I came in the room he hid the book and pretended to be paying attention to the TV.  I need to remember this when I rag on them about watching too much Cathode Ray.

I’ve been teaching an API (ACT Prep Intensive) for seven days now.  It runs (or crawls) from 9:15 to 12:45 everyday.  I have given an ACT practice exam each day, and we are all really tired.  INTENSive is the right word.  They are so sick of writing body paragraphs, introductions, elaborations, re-writing criterions and examples that I hope none of them has access to guns.  And the worst part is that every time I give them a practice ACT Exam, which gives me an hour that I don’t have to drill, cajole, entertain or teach them, I have to grade it.  It is like a western, where the good-guy is forced to dig his own grave.  Practice exams are good, they teach them how to write a passing essay (or that they are not yet writing at a passing level), and they show the student what is missing from their essays.  But they all need to be graded.  I need to grade them.  I am paid to grade them.  Everyday I go home with 19 ACT Exams to grade.  Now I know the shortcomings of each of the writers six exams in, but I still have to read and mark all of these problems in the hope that they will start to stop making those mistakes.  I like to think of it as erosion, or the _____ (insert non-white-ethnicity here) water torture, but I’m not sure whether it is their compositional defects that are being eroded, or my sanity: drip-drip-drip.

 I spend so much time with them that I feel like we are all victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. I think we all have an unhealthy identification with each other over the stress of this exam and the 4 hours a day we spend together. I am even rooting for the students who don’t “play nice” (do as I say) to pass this exam. The plus side is that we are functioning like a cult; we are the fraternity of true ACT-Test-Takers (Western Queens Council). On Wednesday they will take the test and we will all miss our bank-vault-prison and the captors that put us there.

Today I was working on the Black Literature Series Committee’s Scavenger Hunt: Here is one of the questions I’ve composed:

 

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 Narrative

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the

(Choose one to complete the passage)

a. most hypocritical and avaricious, in the south.

b. meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

c. greediest and neediest of all Americans.

d. generally most Christian and charitable in all of this, God’s land.

 

I think I’ll try and exercise a bit before the kids and Linda wake-up, thanks for reading (and drop me a comment).

Feeling Whistful @ 48 (Whittier Poem)

Read ’til the end, where you get the payoff: For of all sad words of tongue or pen,/The saddest are these: “It might have been!

Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
Maud Muller, on a summer’s day,
Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.
So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune
He wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Yet oft, in his marble hearth’s bright glow,
He watched a picture come and go:
And sweet Maud Muller’s hazel eyes
Looked out in their innocent surprise.
A manly form at her side she saw,
And joy was duty and love was law.
Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only, “It might have been.”
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!“

Happy New You

 

12/31/07 05:35:55 AM

Where has the year gone? Has it gone into the trash heap or the archives; I’m not sure which. Into the archives is another beautiful year with a wonderful family. We’ve just moved into an apartment which seems to fit us better. We, for the first time, are in a home big enough for all of us (the second bathroom is key).

Here is an outline of the biggies I can think of this minute:

New House

We love our new house and are looking forward to finishing moving in. Three bedrooms and two baths is the right fit for us. Mason has his own room and it is big enough to send him to. Chandler and Lennox are working out the wrinkles in their new quasi-cohabitation. Generally permission is granted to cross the armistice line; especially since Lenna got her princess netting and pink rug. It is strange to be in a modern building and the view, as I look over the BQE and east into Woodside and Rego Park and watch the sun rise as I write this the sky and the contours of the land are enthralling to me. I love watching when the LIRR rolls out of Woodside on the way to Jamaica: a long silvery snake a half a mile on.

Family

 

I am still so in Love With Linda that it scares me. She is the model for everything beautiful and desirable in my life. I wish I could be with her more and, paradoxically, more like her. I am blessed to be chosen by her to spend these days together with her.

Chandler continues to thrive at the TAG school she’s in. She has a lot of homework and does it without complaint, though she looks at the confections of Cable TV as the just and right compensation for her work. At least is is mostly Disnified Pre-Tween Confections, though she will be a teenager on February 23^rd.

Mason and I survived the soccer season (he’s quite good) with me as coach, though he declined to play winter league indoors. Mason’s way with words continues to amaze Linda and I mostly because he is not the squeaky wheel. Out of -or out from under- the hubbub of the family Mason will make a wry comment that puts everything that we are all elbowing to the front to try and frame just so into context. He does so uproariously and seemingly without effort.

Lennox is growing up so fast in so many ways. Just like with her sister we are often fooled into thinking that she’s older because she’s so damned verbal. She is also sassy in a way Chandler can only dream of (and rue). So when she puts her hand on her splayed hip and rolls her eyes as she wipes stray locks out of her eyes explaining “whatever, duh!” we lose track of her age (5) and size (just right). We start trying to reason with the sarcastic teenager that she apes rather than the Kindergartener that she is. Needless to say we miss having Kindergarten across the street, but we’ll see how this move will effect our lives (passive aggressively I think the earlier wake-up and travel will be good for the family).

School Year

I loved my Fall 1 Classes and I am really enjoying the Lit Elective classes I am teaching. The Contemporary African American Fiction and the Black Lit Survey have been soul-expanding (as much as teaching a class can be). I love the students at LaGuardia CC. Teaching them is a dream come true. In many of their faces and papers I see myself struggling intellectually to come into my own. It is a humbling flashback when I see the same misunderstandings that I made in someone else’s paper. It is a merciful reminder of my current domestic bliss when I see the sturm und drang of youthful courting around campus. I look forward to working on my own intellectual and academic development this next year.

Amir’s Murder

The horror of Amir Hassan Reed’s murder this year has put a lot of things into perspective. I am so grateful to be alive, which I generally take for granted. I take life, mine and my beautiful family’s to be a given that shall continue along, but it “Ain’t Necessarily So.” I had taken it for granted that I would wake up to the same cast that I went to sleep with. It is rare that such a Cause Célèbre visits our lives, and I had often wished that my life would intersect with drama and fame. Sigh, I wish that I had marked my door with blood so this angel never came. What I found most annoying and titillating was the comments left on the SFGate site articles: people who knew the least seemed to make the strongest comments. This puts all of my “Willie-Neckbone-Expertise” into perspective: the more I think I know, the less I know.

48 Years

I turned 48 this December. I remember in 1974 thinking that it would be the year 2000 when I was 40. It seemed so abstract and distant (and of course I took it for granted that I would live that long). Well until this year I’ve held up well. During the spring my Achilles tendons started to act up (and I didn’t go to the doctor). In the Fall, playing soccer with Mason I tore up my ankle (and I didn’t go to the doctor). This December my ankle got infected and I went to the doctor. I will go to physical therapy soon because I really miss my morning runs through Sunnyside, Woodside, Maspeth and Long Island City. I’m feeling trapped by my infirmity in spite of the fact that I did go for a bike ride yesterday. Linda is sick this morning so I don’t think I’ll have that luxury.

Dreams

I still haven’t written the great American novel, but I have been working on a story. I haven’t published my dissertation, but I hope to. I want to do more original scholarship rather than just “willie-neckbone” out opinions on things I know little about. So I will continue to do as the Sanskrit Proverb suggests:

Look to this day
For it is life
The very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and verities of existence,
The bliss of growth,
The splendor of action,
The glory of power –

For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well-lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

Happy New YOU, Love Stafford.

Times Square Ikea (Rough Post)

12/21/07 06:11:58 AM

SO I slept late today and I have not particular interest in writing, but I’ll just update things. I guess that there is a lot of news. And if I get my flow on I’d like to write about the profound alienation that I felt shopping yesterday. First I was struck by how shopping at Ikea is like going to Disneyland designed for or by Martha Stewart. There is something comforting about going to Ikea. It is like the video section of Costco: the symbolism supplants the reality. The reality is that there are dozens of Hollywood movies of dubious merit there for vaguely affordable prices. The semiotic or symbolic value is that each of these DVDs represent two hours of sitting around and doing nothing but consuming ideas (of wealth, love, revenge, and power). In Ikea all of our houses and apartments, our living spaces recede to the semiotic, where they can be clean, safe and convenient with the purchase of some trifle or another. The prices, individually, are cheap, but the bill is always huge.

So the shoestand that will tame our jumble of shoes at the entryway represents, symbolizes, effects a tidiness that will never exist. When we look at the dishdrainer that is so under-priced and cool we never see the dishes that must be washed to make it functional heaped in a greasy cold sink. We don’t imagine the roaches that might run behind it (none spotted in our new house yet). And we certainly don’t imagine the underpaid third world worker who assembled them around dangerous machines at a dizzying speed. What we see is the affect that the cool Swedish showroom puts these gewgaws, trinkets, and gizmos in. When I buy a curtain rod from Ikea I hope that my house will get the “windowtreatment” of the Ikea showroom. I am not buying something to hold the curtain in front of the window I am buying the feeling of neatness, cleanliness, tidiness and service that the blue and gold of the Swedish standard (and helpful employee shirts¹) represent.

Ikea becomes a virus that I hope will infect my house. I want to catch the Martha Stewart cooties from the clean consumer experience. I don;t just want things, I want order and clarity. I want a domestic situation that will make me feel good when I am in my home. I want to live in this world where the dishes are always washed, the clothes always folded and people are always welcomed to come visit (and are duly impressed when they do).

Second, I hate the M&M Store. The M&M Store is branding and consumerism run amok. It is like Scott’s comments about the early MTV, it’s all commercials. Commercials for bands (Videos) mixed with commercials for products. Times Sq, in that regard, has become solipsistic; only the brands and chains are provable (or can afford the rent). I guess that in that regard Times Sq. has followed in its long traditions. First, it is the “crossroads of the world” as it was after WWII when it became institutionalized in the world consciousness (V.E. Day Kiss Photo). Second, it was always a party area, where the young folk would go out and eat, drink and make merry. Third, related to 2, is when it became a red-light district in the 70s and 80s; young people partying can often get seemy (remember the kiss photo had a sailor, a profession whose like to the “oldest profession” is legendary). I am sure that there are pierceling tatooine young burlesquers that will someday be respectable Kansan grandmas clicking their tongues at the behaviors that pleased them so much when they were young running around Times Sq. (or The East Village or Williamsburg). (OK, so I got on a little role here, but this is a great essay that has been free-written, but not really written.)

On Sunday the Bhatia Lin’s will be coming to NY for 4 days before a month in India.

1 a marked contrast to the red jerseys of underpaid Target workers, who seem the rawer and redder face of the globalization game.