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

Hope Wins

Where to begin?  I was up and at the polls before they opened and there were 20 people there waiting at 5:45 am.  By the time they opened the polls in Woodside, where I vote (at 6:08, don’t get me started), there were 100 people there.  Excitement lit up the foggy pre-dawn darkness.

The machines were cranky as they started and the people in the 47^th district had to wait until the most experienced blue-haired old lady came and jiggled a lever on the back just so to get the machine back into order.  I was seventh in the 47^th district, 007.  You’ve seen the picture.

Teaching and grading papers all day there was a strange air of camaraderie and hope.  Spike’s dad put it into words as we watched our kids practice soccer last night before the results were in: “It’s like Nine-One-One, everyone has feeling of secret connection.”

Indeed, as the kids played soccer at McCarren Park two Hasidic men came up with their gloves and joined the Latino guys who were playing softball in the warm November evening.  Only in New York do you see Orthodox Jews shagging fly balls with strangers.

As Mason and I drove back to Queens NPR called Pennsylvania for Obama, and one of the wags said: “I can’t imagine a path to the Whitehouse for McCain that doesn’t include Pennsylvania.”  Before we got over the Greenpoint Bridge they were calling Florida for Obama, and Mason took my cell and excitedly texted Linda that news (and Dole’s SC Defeat).  I came home and ate with supreme hope.

During the day I got an email on my phone from a friend from the 70s who had lived with me in Boston and known me in my messenger days.  We had been through a fair amount together and he contacted me out of the blue as a way –I assume– to reach out of his white New England life and celebrate with a dear old friend (of color).  I had similar calls and emails from Australia, Ireland and Northern California.

This impulse, this digital coming together is, for us progressives, like coming out after a storm.  The last 8 years have been hard.  Personally, I have felt “occupied” like I did as a young non-white man in Boston in the 70s.

So these contacts made because of the HOPE of the Obama campaign feel especially good.  To be reminded of the good and decent whites who were my dear friends during the horror of bussing in Boston in the 1970s, the people who reminded me that I was a man, a friend, a  person of value “un-adjectivized” (not a black man) has begun the thawing.

Before Mr. Obama’s election I was still in my shell.  I was a bit jaded and cynical about friends from the “way-back-machine” contacting me and asking me to drink the Kool-Aid.  I didn’t want to HOPE because I didn’t want to be disappointed.  I have been stand-offish.  But their naïve enthusiasm was touching.  It reminded me of going to anti war marches and Pete Seger concerts with my parents in the 60s.  I don’t think that the 60s, in light of the Republican avarice we’ve lived through from 80 onward, were all that great.

SO last night, and all day yesterday I felt like we had finally become a nation again.  I felt the possibility of Human Companionship.  On September 11^th, 2001 we all receded to our livingrooms to watch our lives and country on television.  We got the “Dulce et Decorum Est” romantic version of America.  All of those grand Ken Burns PBS documentaries seemed more real than playing baseball or listening to jazz.  I feel like our nation slipped into a massive communal state of DuBoisian double consciousness, alienated from ourselves by our image of ourselves as something else.

When Spain was attacked on March 11, 2004 the nation came outside together.  After 9-11 we went into our living rooms and isolated.  They re-established their humanity in the most basic way.  I have been jealous of that European land for these four years.  Yesterday we came out.  We came out in the millions.  We got a 9-11 mulligan and we chose to participate instead of isolate.  The contacts from Europe, Australia, California and Vermont are contacts from our higher place.  America can stop fearing.  We can HOPE again.

One of my colleagues has called this the moment that America becomes Post-Colonial.  We have stepped (a little bit) beyond the colonial and imperial traditions we’ve inherited and begun to live up to our constitution.  The whole world is breathing a sigh of relief because we can choose someone who has a vision of a greater America that doesn’t have the 1945 and 1992 unipolar American power in mind.  “We don’t have to subjugate/ in order to be great.”

America has returned to the dream by electing Mr. Obama.  From Dakar to Dushembe, from the steppes of Mongolia to the factories of Viet Nam there are people who are seeing the America of FDR, JFK (neither of whom were angels), the America of hope and individual opportunity, the America of the Great Society, the America of freedom to be (not to earn), for the first time.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

The Kids Right Now

4/21/2008 5:57 AM
Here is another gem from Lennox to keep with the “Daddy remembering is like fish talking” zinger that she announced at the park the other day. Speaking of Mason “pulling the girls legs,” or teasing, about something or another, Lennox observed, when he exclaimed “I’m joking,” in a deadpan tone with the slightest roll of the eyes: “a joke is when people laugh afterwards.” Miss Lennox is quite the witty little thing and really enjoys saying things that make people laugh.
Now Mason is a witty guy, his ability to frame things in new ways with his excellent 11-year-old vocabulary is legendary. It began when he was younger than Lennox when he tacked onto one of his parents’ bromide about “when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade,” the coda “and sell it!” at dinner one night. He used to get so angry when Linda and I would crack up at something he said, some little witticism (which I cannot remember any of right now [see “fish talking”]) because he thought we were laughing at him.
Chandler, never much of a joker, is the best linguist in the house. She saves her parsing for two main categories of utterances: requests and commands. She can detect, with annoying and unerring accuracy the slightest hint of resentment, bossiness or command in the day-to-day talk of a house. “Put water in the pitcher before you put it back in the ‘fridge,” is a statement where the tone, syntax or intention can embed an insult potent enough to stop the morning in the tracks. “I would do that but you cannot just boss me around like I’m some sort of nitwit. I have my reasons for not refilling it, and the way that you ordered me will NEVER get me to do it. I’m so mature that we might as well have restarted the Hattfields and the McCoys up for a century of good Appalachian vendetta: hillbilly omerta in Woodside.
When we think to frame our utterances in the form of requests, “Chandler would you change (meaning clean) the guinea-pig cages today?” “Sure” she’ll reply. But in that request, framed in a way so as not to rankle Honey, Rocky and Buttercup’s “mommy,” is enough wiggle room for her to not do it until bedtime; her chores become late night filibusters against bedtime. All day long, as we politely remind her that the cages need attention we are parried, feinted and dodged with grammatical explications, “I said I would, and I will, just not right now.” Chandler’s quiver is filled with arrows that any semiotician would be proud to use. Her ability to “lawyer” will be wasted on the law because with the silicone slickness of her linguistic abilities and the cudgel of her willingness to take offense remains untouched by discipline in the old-fashioned 50s sense (most recently enacted in the 1970s on the Brady Bunch), which she reminds us came with primitive behaviors like corporal punishment.

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.

Kiko Rides Again

Here’s the latest installment of Kiko’s Tale, because I haven’t posted anything in a while. He’s back, our delivery guy, (if only your intrepid scribe was as dedicated and regular as Kiko). Here Kiko meets another aspect of the City Cycling world, a character named Croak. There’s more the pipeline, though if I don’t start getting some feedback… (It’s hard to keep going without hits and feedback, of course it is possible that it sucks.)

And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.  IF this link doesn’t work you can search “Kiko” on this blog and feel your way back to the beginning by hitting “previous entries” two or three times.

Once The Blue and Gold Line had caught them Mike taught Kiko about riding in a pack, swapping places at the end of the line, and talking about how to figure out where the wind was coming from and how to fid the best place to draft off of people in the pack. By explaining, without actually executing, mike told Kiko the basics of working your way to the front, climbing the grapevine, and, again, holding your line in a pack, which took equal parts nerve and skill.

As they were breaking up for the day Mike, impressed as much by Kiko’s teachability as his natural skill and stamina, went to the van he had brought the bikes in and got Kiko a set of cycling togs, a pair of shoes (with pedals) and a helmet. He explained a bit of the rational for wearing tight colorful clothes, using the Blue and Gold Line as an example. He pointed out how the Jeans and T-Shirt made him look less able, and how “the kit” (the cycling term for uniform) would cut down on some of the resistance (social and physical), and asked him to come meet him the next week at the same place. 

When they met the next week Mike had a new guy with him. His name was Croak and he looked vaguely familiar to Kiko. He was thin and mean looking in spite of the affable smile that rode beneath the pencil thin mustache on his beige skin. Croak was obviously a black man, though his skin was the color of a paper bag and he had no hair to speak of. Kiko could just make out the outline of a receding hairline in the microscopically barbered hair that was left on his skull. He wore a faded Campagnolo hat that had odd creases ironed into it on the back of his head that reminded him of the soldier’s hats back home. His gaudy “kit” advertised an Italian banking concern in florescent colors from his shoes to his hat and gloves everything matched; the bike and handlebar tape even sang the praises of Tuscan-low-rate-mortagages.

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.

Prophet Housing

12/18/07 04:56:38 AM

So our new lives in our new apartment have started. I took Chandler to meet Aneka at 46^th Street on the seven train. We were there so early Chandler has renegotiated for an extra 10 minutes of sleep today. I was a work by 7:30 and If I continue to do this I’ll have time to go to the gym in morning. Apparently Lennox and Mason’s drop off also went well. Linda and I went to Costco to buy a TV, which I think we’ve put off in the hopes that we can buy the kids more of what they want this “holiday” season. Funny thing about that ironic use of quotation marked holiday.

I found a copy of Khalil Ghibran’s The Prophet (that I had bought on telegraph avenue used) and in it was a bookmark. The page it marked was the Prophet’s response to the Mason. “’Ironic,’ thought I, it is addressed to my son.” But the opening line is “Then a [M]ason came forth and said speak to us of Houses” (34). So, since I spent the evening unpacking my seemingly endless supply of things and assembling them I was intrigued by the synchronicity of the bookmarking.¹ This is the electronics (and modern) version of feathering my nest. We’ve got to get all of the twigs and grass just right so that the chicks and their parents will all fit comfortably. I imagine a bird’s nest of wires, surge protectors, USB cables and transformer power lines in which we comfortably cuddle together. (God, how I digress.)

The first few “stanzas” were pure anti-city, and I’ll include a bit here as an illustration: “Would the valleys your streets and the green paths your alleys… [and] In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together” (35). These nods to the bucolic piss me off. Besides the fact that the human condition is social, and there would be no wilderness if we spread people out like that, even in 1922, I just want to dissent a bit further on this romanticization of the bucolic.

(Digression Alert) I remember one week when Scott and I lived on Maui. This was before we got food stamps, in deed it might be why I got food stamps. We had “no visible means of support” and we had alienated those off of whom we could beg. But there was a mango tree and an avocado tree that were in season near where we were camping. We could fill ourselves nicely on these huge trees for the cost of a climb. Guavas, I think were also ripe in a pasture a couple of miles away. Before seven days had passed I was crazy and hungry though my stomach never went empty. There is a reason that we are a social and agrarian species. The hunter gatherer thing is too much work. (I think it is also why we are omnivores, but that is another rant.)

Then the prophet gets to why I am writing this now:

Tell me have you [peace, remembrances and beauty] in your houses?

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.

Though its hands are silken, its hear is of iron.

It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeers at the dignity of the flesh.

It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.²

Verily the lust for comfort murders the the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

But you, children o space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. (36)

Thanksgiving Inflation

11/23/07

So Wednesday we went to see the Balloons blown up for the Thanksgiving day parade over by the Museum of Natural History. This is the second year that we’ve done it and I hope it becomes a family annual tradition. There were clock-management issues and Lennox was carried off and on for the last mile. But let me start at the beginning.

The evening started with a subway ride to the upper west side where we waited for about 20 minutes to get a seat at La Caridad. The food was, as usual, great and I had it in my head that it was Friday and consequently had a hankering for Bacalau. I have anew favorite dish there because they brought me, perhaps as an act of mercy, huevos mesclado con bacalao with red beans and yellow rice. I might stil have to go there tonight, the real Friday night for the Bacalao Guisado, but that is another story. We all had our usual favorites: chuletas fritas, arroz amarillo y frijoles negros, aroz amarillio con camarones, aguacate, platanos maduros, cebollas y ajo (mas ajo por favor). I like to eat at La Caridad because no one ever wants desert or walks away half full.

Because we are moving we had an errand to run before we went to the balloons. We went up to Aunty Odella’s house to see the wood floors that she installed over the linoleum of her Mitchell Lama apartment. This was a beautiful warm fall evening walk up Broadway to 92^nd street. I love to walk about Manhattan and see all of the people out. This is one of the reasons, I think, that we wanted to move our family to New York. Walking in Manhattan is a grand parade of the mad rush of humanity that is New York.

The families, couples, singles, and lonelyhearts parade cheek and jowl with servant class, homeless, shopclerks and underclass in an interesting pastiche of humanity found only in major cities with pedestrian cultures. I think my favorite are the lone wolves who parade around on the New Upper West Side, tied to a neighborhood they no longer fit in with or understand by their rent-controlled leases. When we walk around Queens we get a different sort of diversity, but that is for a different entry.

The kids, though seemingly unaware of the parade of humanity in all of its nuances, watch and learn from these excursions. I think it is important to expose them to the life of Manhattan because they can see people living in the complex harmony of this city. When we take them to Paris or Barcelona or London (which I hope we do) they will see much the same thing in different flavors. There is nothing like the grand stroll in a major metropolis.

As we walked after Aunty Odella’s (Auntie Mame in this tale) down Columbus we started to see the exodus of families kids from the inflation. The closer we got the more there were with their faces lit up in amazement, or red with temper tantrums. Restaurants were full of kids being fed whatever was handy, pizza, foccacio at upscale restaurants, sandwiches from delis and Mickey-D’s was packed. This was the opposite sort of mismanagement of kids’ evenings. We went and got them good food first, while others had their kids done and fed them whatever afterwards. The classic kid management issue: too tired or too hungry. You cannot avoid it unless you are a Von Trapp type operation with rigid discipline and absolute obedience. Such families are said to exist in Utah and Alabama where conditions are harsher.

Lennox was staggering with exhaustion but the sight of the Balloons perked her up a little bit. When she saw the first few balloons she was excited, but by the time we got to the giant Ronald McDonald laying prostrate before a 20′ earth in some sort of weird tableau of globalization she was through.

http://gothamist.com/

She gamely endured the rest of the balloons, that we all find amazing (the Koons silver weather bunny was my favorite this year) and continued her bleary eyed forced march with as much dignity and good attitude as you can expect out of a kindergärtner who had gone to school 15 hours before.

In the crowd there were a few characters worth mentioning. There were the two “models” tall women with lots of make-up and perfume who wore super high heels that Chandler drew my attention to. In the crush of we dowdy breeders they seemed particularly out of place. I don’t think that Chandler noticed that the women were probably closer to my age than hers and seemed a bit long in the tooth to be clacking along in designer wear on precarious shoes with war-paint on. Right after they sashayed away from us in the crowd we saw a grandfather there with his kids. He had a full white Santa beard at least 6” long, a strong hard Christmas belly, an infectious white ethnic laugh and a Harley-Davidson-Viet-Nam-Vet type vest. Mason gestured with his mouth to get Chandler to recognize Santa in his civvies and they shared a wry laugh together as Santa snapped a picture of his grandkids with their haggard parents. I think that the trip to the Balloons was Sargent-Major Santa’s idea, but I could be wrong.

I think most important for me was watching the very tall father with bright red hair seethe repeatedly between clenched teeth “There are going to be serious consequences for this. There will be dramatic punishments for this behavior,” and a few other impotent bromides in a Möbius strip to his two tall think red-headed kids who were delighting in the spectacle of Schreck. I have been that tall gangly wannabe ruler of my children. But on thanksgiving eve, I was not. We had a wonderful time.

Class, Class, Class

 

ENG101

Well here I am grading a stack of papers that don’t seem to match each other in terms of style, content, skill level or even assignment (though that might be because they put them on the wrong piles on my desk). While the ideas are great, and most of the writing is passable, I am disheartened by the wide variety that my “open assignment” has garnered. When I assigned only critical papers instead of creative papers I knew just how to respond, but here, now I am “perflummoxed.”

I am giving suggestions (writing margin and end comments) that go in many different directions. For some they are grammatical and others structural (language and paragraph corrections) while for others my comments are stylistic and imaginative (“write a thesis that describes the rat’s attitude in the poem”).

The freedom of this assignment is making the paper a lot more fun for most of the students, but going through these low stakes first drafts is a lot of work. When I decided to retreat from my impulse to have the papers all critical analyses of the poem “The Message” I naively thought that everyone would suddenly “get it” and have higher skillsets. Sigh. It is especially hard since there was supposed to be an interim draft due on Blackboard where I could just comment on the content.

ENC101

I gave the class back their first ACT exams yesterday and I have to say that I really like the rigidity of the ACT exam in light of the first three paragraphs that I wrote here. While I was disappointed when I turned over the covers and discovered who I passed and who I failed, I have to say that I am optimistic. By reviewing the ACT criteria with other professors and reviewing the materials in the “book room,” I think I know what each of the “lost sheep” will need to do to succeed (pass).

The research plans that I’ looked at and returned yesterday also show a lot of promise. Of course about half were late, so I might just have the best of the bunch.

ENG225

This class is sharp. Of course I wish that I had more writing to confirm my opinion of their verbal skills. I am impressed by their responses to Phyllis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano. They are very mature in terms of their responses to these, honestly, fairly dry texts. I was particularly impressed by the close reading that they did of Wheatley’s poems. NICE.

When we got to Frederick Douglass’ 1845 yesterday there was a “clicking into place” of the class understanding. Wheatley and Equiano, neither of whom stylistically fit the “common understanding”of African American literature, suddenly made sense when the students read Douglass’ sentimental slave narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. This is, in my opinion, the beginning of modern or contemporary Black Lit. The ability to make the connection between pre-abolitionist literature and the late-enlightenment works that preceded it is, I think, a break-through for the students.

And I love Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative.

Kiko Meets Mike III (& Astoria and Red Hook Pools)

Yesterday we did the grand tour of the premier public swimming pools in Brooklyn and Queens. We started at the Astoria Pool, which I believe is the first in the New York Parks system. There is a good passage on it in The Power Broker, and it figures prominently in Salk’s search for the Polio Vaccination also, though I don’t exactly remember how. The pool is huge and well maintained, with the exception of the diving platform and pool, which are closed with a hurricane fence around it that sports a sign, “danger thin ice.” In many ways the pool is still like is was when it was built in the 1930s, huge locker rooms, a grand pool, great views of the Triborough and Hellgate bridges straddling the East River, and the two platforms for the Olympic flames from when the pool was used for tryouts once upon a time. They even had a snack bar. There were stadium-like benches on two sides wide enough to lay your towel out on, which is where I spent a lot of time reading Killing Pablo. I started reading the book about the US government assassination of Pablo Escobar. I had started it last summer, and thought I’d keep up with my Colombian Theme after Rosario Tijeras. Lennox was able to walk in and spent much of her time holding her nose and “swimming” underwater. She had a blast, and the gradual deepening made it so that she could get to the right depth and “swim.” Glorious!

Red Hook Pool was just about as crowded, though smaller, so there might have been fewer people. The entire pool is too deep for Lennox, and that presented a problem for her (& us) that had a nice resolution. The pool is chest deep (4 feet?) and is a bit cold, but you can swim anywhere in it. Red Hook pool has a part separated for lap swimmers, which is great. When I called Astoria pool larger, it might only be in surface area, not volume. Here in Brooklyn, in the shadow of the behemoth Park Slope, there were tattood hipsters aplenty. I wish that I was more cynical so that I could make a snarky comment about how “pure” Astoria was, with less Manhattanites, but it was really nice to have the mix at each pool. There seemed to be more young people (of the courtin’ and sparkin’ age) in Brooklyn, but the family vibe was strong at each pool. One negative note about Red Hook: the locker room is mostly taken up with a weight room and while my son, brother, 3-year-old niece and I got changed in the men’s Locker Room one of the workers (white guy, balding, in a Parks polo shirt) watched us from about 3 feet away behind the barricade that separates the weights from the lockers. As my brother said, “now I know what it must be like in prison.” Another Negative about the Brooklyn pool (are you reading Marty Markowitz) was that it closed 15 minutes earlier than the posted time (so that the workers could leave early. While the Astoria Pool asked to see the lining of my suit, to prove that it was hygienic, and did so brusquely, they did so professionally, without the sense of domination that the Red-Hook guard did. All-in-All, not Bad.

Bikes are fast. Holla at me. Here Kiko continues to re-meet Mike, which is how things start to happen in a linear way again. I want to speed up the pace. And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.

Mike, who had been looking for Kiko for the month or so since he had first been passed by him, got up out of his saddle and chased him up the bridge in the dark. It was difficult to catch him, but once Kiko realized Flaco on the thin bike was trying to get his attention he eased up and let the North American catch up and ride astride him. As he caught his breath Mike looked at the bike Kiko was riding, “I don’t know how you go so fast on all of that junk.”

Puzzled Kiko responded with interest about Mike’s razor thin bike and its specifications: “that bike it no weigh much, how much?”

“Oh, about 20 Pounds,” mike responding humbly, and a bit embarrassed thinking about how much it must cost per pound: with two full water bottles, he thought.

“My bike maybe two of yours,” Kiko went on chatting for politeness sake.

“Yeah, and even if you didn’t have the basket, tape and –are those zip ties?- that erector set you’re riding would be heavy.”

Missing the put-down, “Señora Choi, my boss, she buy for me and let me ride it home,” explaining his gratitude, “save me $4 a day!”

“Where d’ya ride from?”

“Ha-May-Ee-Cah, by Suphin Boulevard”

After a few minutes of small talk, as they descended the bridge into Manhattan Mike got to the point, “So Kiko, I race bikes, and I think you’d be good at it, would you like to try?”

“Race? Me? On this?”

“Well, no, and you’d have to come learn how, and I could lend you a bike that you’d do better on,” like a teenager asking for his first dare he babbled on, “and there’d be all kinds of other things. Where do you work? What is your phone number? How can I reach you?”