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Articles Tagged ‘What does it mean?’

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Former Student Makes Good,Writes Back

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

I will call her Susan. I taught her at Smith College sixteen years ago, and when she sent me an email, a couple of days ago, I had to ask her to send me a photo of herself because I couldn’t quite remember her name. [read on]

Posted in What does it mean? | 1 Comment »

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 »

Peacetrain link

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

Slide show with music. Speaks for itself.

Posted in 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 »

Convergence

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Two blogs converge for me tonight: Inside Iraq with its first-person account of women trying to reassemble the body parts of their nephew (horrifying, but until we can find something more effective to do, at least we can bear witness), and Joan Halifax’s Blog with May Swenson’s poem, which frames the only question I can hold after reading Inside Iraq. [read on]

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

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 »

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 »

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