Articles tagged ‘ Books and Movies’

Articles Tagged ‘Books and Movies’

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

That was quite a break. Actually, I was deeply immersed in writing the piece I alluded to weeks ago, the piece that was bringing up all my inadequacies. In the course of preparing that piece, I read a great stack of books about Argentina and several about South Africa, including Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night, about which more in a moment. Finally, the writing project is done, for now. Today, for a break, I watched a movie (on DVD, of course, the only way I ever watch movies now): IN MY COUNTRY, in which Juliette Binoche plays an Afrikaner opposite Samuel Jackson’s American (much easier role). The film, based on Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull , which is sitting by my bed but which I haven’t yet started reading, wiped me out. [read on]

Posted in About Africa, Blogs and Blogging, Books and Movies | 1 Comment »

Poetry break

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Speaking of balance, it isn’t wise to yield continually to my greed for knowledge and to keep stuffing my head without stint. As Stephen says, the suitcase can become too heavy to carry. I go back to a few beloved, familiar poems to read again and to hold against the noise of ideologies: [read on]

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

Taking it in

Friday, January 19th, 2007

This has been a week of astonishment. School began. An ice storm hit Texas. We mailed out the first edition of The Midnight Special. Manko landed two jobs (hooray for Manko!). Meanwhile (how is this possible? where do the hours come from?) I have been reading Nunca Mas, and tonight I just watched, paused and re-watched key moments, and watched yet again two films: La Historia Oficial(The Official Story), filmed in 1985, about the years immediately after the Argentine catastrophe; and Estela Bravo’s documentary, Fidel. Where have I been all my life? What have I been doing? The depth of my ignorance is stunning. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Manko, What does it mean? | 5 Comments »

A Dirty War

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

Where were you from 1976 to 1983? What did you know, in those years, about the “war on terror?” This was a war, its leaders said, to protect homeland security; a war for family values, Christian values, and clean-living innocent people, against enemy insurgents, terrorists, subversives, non-believers, homosexuals, Jews, Communists, union organizers, and radicals in universities and the arts. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Politics, Prisons and Prisoners, What does it mean? | 7 Comments »

New Year’s Eve

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

I got all the papers graded. I’ve laid out five of the eight pages of The Midnight Special, I’ve realized that maybe the piece of writing due January 31st can be easier than I envisioned, and I can’t bear to think about the next round of classes. Instead, it’s New Year’s Eve, a time I love to reflect on the gifts of the passing year and to hold the whole planet in my heart with gratitude, compassion, and tenderness, so how could I not blog this day? [read on]

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Books and Movies, Manko, Seth | 6 Comments »

Watching X-Men in a room full of cons

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Last night John and I had the end-of-semester holiday party with the prisoners in our writing workshop. We brought a movie (two movies actually, though we only had time for one and a half-hour of the other), and they gave us a holiday card with messages like, “Thank you for my little oasis of sanity.” The story of how we ended up with X-Men is worth telling, and the experience of watching that movie with this particular group of men was wrenching. [read on]

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

House of Sand

Saturday, December 16th, 2006

Early yesterday evening I watched the Brazilian film, House of Sand with my friends Ruth and Gerri. They hated it. Gerri thought it was “amateurish.” Ruth found it slow and thought the time changes were awkward, the character switches gimmicky; she became restless and paced around her living room, waiting for it to be over. Some friend I am. I hung on to the last minute and am still haunted by the slow power of the film, by its visual gorgeousness (not since Daughters of the Dust have I seen such composition), and by its questions: given life’s impermanence, what can we hope? what exactly does it mean to “make a life” in the harshest possible circumstances? [read on]

Posted in About Africa, Books and Movies | 1 Comment »

Why continue?

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

Reading or listening to Eckhart Tolle , I fall silent. As Tolle observes, ego generates pointless activity, useless words. Why speak (or write)? What is there to say? Tolle questions the usefulness of thinking, feeling, and doing. Better to BE, and be part of the seamless all. That should be joyful, powerful. Instead there is this feeling of loss, confusion. I don’t mind that; I look at it. It is neither joyful nor sad. Lost. The voice of the blog falls silent. “She” (the voice) has lost her amour propre and doubts she has anything worthy to say. Worthy–that old song. Judgment arises and with it discomfort. The person who uses the pronoun “I” is disoriented, groundless, accompanied by old habits of self-judging. As this disorientation continues, I notice some sadness (the “pain body” perhaps). What will take the place of the old yawp? There was an exuberant energy in blogging, a feeling of connection with “unique visitors” on the journey at the same time. Travel notes. Now, troubled by the possibility that on some ultimate threshing ground, nothing in my life could possibly have meaning for anyone else, there is disconnection, isolation, uncertainty, as though I were suddenly dropped off in the middle of a swamp in a fog. Beautiful lighting effects, strange echoes, everything indistinct. I make my little noise. This blog. The keys on my computer echo in the quiet of my apartment. In the near distance, beyond the trees and on the surface of the expressway, I hear the roar of traffic. Around the block, at the mall, there is Christmas music playing and the slap of debit cards being swiped. I have lost the way. How interesting. Now what?

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Books and Movies | No Comments »

The Joy of Deleting

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

Yesterday I was full of sadness. Inadequate sleep, a change in medication for migraines, end-of-semester weariness, and holiday blues each contributed its flavor to my little cup of bitter melon tea. I felt sorry for myself, and although I tried to lift myself out of the mire of ego and use my personal sadness to connect with others, I basically ended up sucking my thumb. I’d spent Friday night watching Akira Kurosawa’s beautiful film from 1952, Ikiru, and I’d started listening to an audio version of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. I wanted to say something about Kurosawa and Tolle, and I hoped to get myself out of the funk, but it didn’t work. So this is the wonder of cyberspace. I just went back and deleted that whole post. Wiped it out! Yes. Hit delete, left that moment lying in its mire, and moved on. Ah, so much better. Some moments in life are better deleted. I don’t, however, want to delete Ikiru, which stays with me and haunts me with its beauty and tender, faint optimism. I not only watched the very slow progress of the two hours and twenty-three minutes of the film, I then turned on the commentary and listened to an insightful film critic talk about the shots, camera techniques, actors in the film, and social and political context of Japan in 1952 as I watched it a second two hours and twenty-three minutes. Today I continue listening to Tolle, alternately falling asleep to his voice and then waking up (really waking up) and laughing out loud at my own hilarious struggle with what he calls “egoic mind,” particularly in the realm of the roles I play as teacher and parent. Instead of trying to write more, I am going to listen to Tolle some more, drift and dream, probably fall asleep again, and wake to watch the vivid yellow and deep purple pansies on my balcony blow against the gray sky on this quiet afternoon.

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

The Woolfs and other pleasures

Monday, November 27th, 2006

A rare and generous student quite unlike any other I have taught in my long life made me a gift of his copy of the latest issue of The New Yorker today, and I spent the next hour (while he and his fellow students labored over essays on Whitman) delighted by some fine writing about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas but completely arrested by an article on Leonard Woolf. I was surprised to notice that I’d never given much thought to Leonard, having devoted considerable attention to Virginia. I thought of him, if at all, simply as Virginia’s caretaker and the co-editor of the Hogarth Press. So this opening quotation from Leonard took me by storm: “Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing.” He continues, “I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.” Oh God, yes. Leonard Woolf was much more a counter than I am; I have not calculated the number of hours I have spent in perfectly useless work; but I can say without question that it feels to me as though I have ground through 200,000 hours of it, and it lifts my spirits to know that Virginia’s husband felt that way too. There is something perversely cheering about this. So much of what we all do is perfectly useless, which gives us permission to have a much better time doing it, or doing less of it, or escaping from it. If I hadn’t been doing what I was doing, what would I have done? Read all of Proust, perhaps. I still want to do that, and I was reminded of it just today by someone who has not wasted so many years in regular salaried employment as I have. The other thing that delighted me in that article is that Virginia decided to marry this man without knowing how to spell his name. She wrote to a friend, “I’ve got a confession to make. I’m going to marry Leonard Wolf.” How many times have I corrected my students’ misspelling of Virginia Woolf’s name? I find it hilarious that she misspelled it too, and that dovetails with the pointlessness of correcting my students’ spelling, and that leaves me with this pile of Whitman papers to grade: another eight hours of pointlessness, at least. Oh, why did I ask my students to write them? Whitman would have preferred me to send them out to play in the rain. But if I just sent them out to play in the rain, how would I grade them on that, and how would they earn these credits they need to earn in order, they think, to get better jobs and make more money, doing perfectly useless things? I just can’t get the veil of Maya to stay in place today.

Posted in Books and Movies | 1 Comment »

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