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Archive for the 'Books and Movies' Category

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Mary Rose Meets Thay

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Continuing my reading of Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The Barn at the End of the World, it seems to me that the radiant core of the book is this meeting she had with “Thay,” Thich Nhat Hanh, the head teacher at Plum Village, and the author of several books that have shaped me, including Being Peace . [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, What does it mean?, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

Buddhist communities

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

I always have a stack of books by my bed, and I am often reading several at once, though sometimes a book sits in the stack so long that it gets moved aside, ends up on a shelf, and languishes there for a year or two. So it was with Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The Barn at the End of the World. Somehow I gravitated to it once again last night and remembered why I’d been drawn to it in the first place. The author has a sharp sense of humor, the courage to create a life for herself unlike anyone else’s, and she threw herself over a cliff that has always fascinated me: she moved to Thay Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village, in France, and wrote (uproariously) about how that went for her. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, Where to plant myself | 4 Comments »

Dancing with Carolyn Heilbrun

Friday, April 13th, 2007

Carolyn Heilbrun’s last book, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, is a pertinent read for anyone on the cusp of life-change. It’s a collection of essays, some more engaging than others. I am very different from Heilbrun, and her experience doesn’t reflect mine. But I don’t find her saying what I’ve heard before. She’s opinionated, bossy, bravely self-revealing, tough, and original. She makes me laugh and wonder, and see myself more clearly, so I’m grateful to the woman in Costa Rica who suggested this book to the friend who told me about it; and I’m grateful to Carolyn Heilbrun for writing it. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies | 4 Comments »

Three Movies

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Finally the big mainstream movies of 2006 are coming out on DVD, so I get to see them at last. I rationalize my movie mania by telling myself it’s important to know the popular culture of my time, and I need to understand the metaphors my students relate to, but the truth is I’m just a shameless movie-hound. I’m most likely to watch movies (and blog about them) when I’m avoiding something I should be doing, and this weekend I have two sets of papers to grade, so here I am. And lo, I have enjoyed two movies I expected to hate, The Departed and The Pursuit of Happyness; and although I was prepared for the economic and political vision of Blood Diamond , and I knew it would be drenched in blood and horror because the diamond trade is, I didn’t expect it to have an intelligently written sub-plot that explores questions I am still asking myself, especially about Africa. [read on]

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The Nerve to Become an Old Woman

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

A friend sent me Carolyn Heilbrun’s 1986 classic, Writing a Woman’s Life. I read it when it was new, listened to Heilbrun talk about it at Smith. In reading it again now, I see that I owe Heilbrun and her cronies enormous gratitude. She/they shaped my habits of mind more than I credited, till now. Her analysis of literature and culture is as comfortable to me as old slippers. But that’s the point of my gratitude. I made her ideas part of my way of looking at the world, part of the way I have given voice to other women and created my living autobiography. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, What does it mean? | 1 Comment »

Continuing with Karen Armstrong

Saturday, March 24th, 2007

I’m still reading Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase. It’s taking me a long time. I read a few pages, put the book down, think, live, sleep on her words, wake, and read a few pages more. Armstrong is part of this moment for me, and I am as grateful to her as I am to my closest friends. She explores questions, like What is an authentic life? which have called to me for decades. She describes my own doubts and longings. Sometimes she sounds a little like Joseph Campbell, as here: [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, What does it mean? | 2 Comments »

Karen Armstrong and College Teaching

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

I’m still reading Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase, and I find myself laughing, crying, and re-reading paragraphs with the joy of having found (in books, as is often the case with me) a consciousness I recognize. She just puts it all out there–she describes herself as a failed nun, a failed academic, a failed heterosexual, and a successful high school teacher who hated that whole field of work; and out of all that failure she makes one stunning success–as a writer. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, What does it mean? | 2 Comments »

Ellen Willis & Janis Joplin

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

I’m packing for my little five-day spring break in Mexico, laying out clothes, cleaning house, deciding which shoes to wear, wondering if I will have trouble taking hand-cleaner on the plane, and grading mid-terms. To keep myself company as I ate my dinner of green beans and Mexican cheese, I opened my latest Netflix envelope and tossed a little documentary in the DVD: Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin: Nine Hundred Nights. I’ve always felt close to Janis Joplin. One of the characters I performed in my one-woman show in the 70s and 80s was a Janis/Kendall composite: neurotic and wild, fierce and needy, burning herself to a crisp, wanting to amount to something. If I had been less responsible, more talented, less fearful, more abandoned; if, in other words, I had been someone completely other than I am, I’d have been her. Maybe. Anyway, forget the documentary. What shocked me into a whole new state of attention (abandoning grading mid-terms and packing) was Ellen Willis, cultural commentator, writer, thinker: interviewed for the documentary. In the Special Features on the DVD there’s about an hour of Ellen Willis talking about Janis Joplin, the 60s, utopianism and its dark side, feminism in its early years, and other fascinating topics. I fell in love with Ellen Willis. I could never have been her. I’m not that smart. But I’m drawn to the sharp edge of her intelligence like a battered chrome bumper to a massive electromagnet. As soon as I’d watched these outtakes, I raced to the computer, googled her, and found out she just died this past November. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Politics, What does it mean? | 1 Comment »

Great teachers and mentors

Sunday, February 18th, 2007

The work of a great teacher is not to do but to see: to see where a student is going before the student does; and to en-courage the student to keep moving in her own (authentic) direction, whatever that may mean or cost. My first grade teacher was Agnes Grinstead Anderson, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. (I’ve chosen a link to an article written about her by a high school student; I think she’d like that.) Agnes taught me how to read in 1951, and she lived just one Mississippi thicket away from where I lived with my mother, step-father, and baby sister. Sometimes I ran away from the nightmares of my house, plunged through the briars and the undergrowth to Mrs. Anderson’s house, and hid there. Her daughter, Leif, was a year older than I and was my first childhood friend, but it was not Leif I went to visit. Agnes was my genie, my inspirer. Of course I didn’t know then that she was supporting her four children and a dysfunctional genius husband on a teacher’s salary and her own raw strength, or that the last thing she needed was someone else’s abused child hanging around her doorstep, but something in her shoulders, her eyes, and her words called me to my best self. I only knew that she saw promise in me, and her belief gave me hope. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Seth, What does it mean? | 2 Comments »

An Authentic Life

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

I begin by noting that Karen Armstrong moves me with her clear thinking, her rigorous scholarship, and her fine writing. Her book, Buddha, is a fascinating examination of the mythical foundations of Buddhism. Last night I started reading The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, and in the preface she explains that she joined a Roman Catholic convent and embarked on a seven-year attempt to become a nun because she wanted to “live more authentically than seemed possible in the world I knew” (xi). That grabbed me so powerfully I had to put the book down. What is an authentic life? That question is driving my intention to quit teaching in ten months and move to a Buddhist center. It is a familiar question–it’s the question that has driven most of my life-wrecking decisions: to bear and adopt children alone, to leave lovers, to pursue college degrees, to leave Smith College, to emigrate to South Africa, to leave Africa, to explore Portugal, to start this blog. . . . [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, What does it mean?, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

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