Still In Brooklyn

2008-10-04T18:13:00.001-07:00

Books

2008-07-06T13:13:00.000-07:00

Visited the Strand for the last time before moving--I only went because Miriam and Andy were visiting and they wanted to go! And I didn't buy anything. On the rare book floor, they had two Algers, The Young Salesman, which we have at least three, probably four copies of, and one we don't have: Bernard Brooks' Adventures. Fortunately, Bernard Brooks' Adventures is one of the Stratemeyer Algers so I was not tempted.

Andy and Miriam told me I wasn't going to miss the Strand; Portland has Powell's. Thank god for Powell's, yes, but... the Strand is the Strand. Not as likely that I'll find a Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo program from the 30's at Powell's--the Strand had one yesterday, and I don't need to own it, but I got to examine it. I like the ephemera in the rare books room at the Strand. Portland has plenty of ephemera, true, but this is where I will be reminded of how much younger Portland is.

Packing packing packing

2008-06-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

I can say with some degree of certainty that I will never again pack my books in boxes which formerly contained Tropiway Brand Cocoyam Fufu Flour.

I am going to miss Brooklyn, and in some ways especially Bed-Stuy.

Hopeful...

2008-06-28T09:34:00.001-07:00

Been packing all morning, packing since school ended Thursday at 11 a.m. My house is full of boxes--including TEN already packed with books, and I've cleared just one bookcase completely bare. Plus parts of a couple others. Maybe two are completely bare--a shelf here, a shelf there.

Started writing about all of this here and it might've turned into something like the first draft of a real essay. Which makes me still more hopeful about getting back to Portland and writing more again, for reals. Of course, I'm also procrastinating actually putting more books in boxes. Plus it's summer. But yeah--hopeful.

Delpit postscript.

2008-06-26T13:39:00.001-07:00

Some kid keeps playing the recorder outside. This morning it was "Mary Had a Little Lamb," leading me to wonder if you could learn the recorder by the Suzuki method. Now it is more abstract.

But that is not what I wanted to say. Just what the immediate circumstances are.

In the last post I wrote, I described a "Lisa Delpit moment" I had in school the other day, but I didn't have time then to explain what I meant by a "Lisa Delpit moment." Delpit is an urban education scholar whose book Other People's Children taught me more about being a white middle-class teacher in an urban school full of students of color than anything else I read in grad school. It is telling that the book wasn't assigned in any of my grad classes in my New York City Teaching Fellows sub-standard graduate program, but rather recommended by a friend.

Other People's Children and Delpit's other writings, including an anthology she co-edited, The Skin That We Speak, have helped me figure out how to try to teach my students well, and led me to think differently and very carefully about the ways that our cultural differences lead us to approach experiences, hear what is said to us, and view education and its purposes (among twelve zillion other things). For example, from Other People's Children, in a chapter titled "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children": "Children from middle-class homes tend to do better in school than those from non-middle class homes because the culture of the school is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes--of those in power." She talks later about how the way students are taught sometimes "creates situations in which students ultimately find themselves held accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them."

The example I always think of, which may not actually appear in Delpit's work, is that of a young excited white teacher saying something like "Wouldn't it be fun if we all got out our independent reading books now? Come on everybody, who wants to READ?" and then when students don't get out their books and start reading, she starts writing names on the board and taking minutes off recess. But she never actually told anybody that it was time to read. She merely suggested that it sounded like fun, but if they disagreed with her, why would they get out their books? Then when they didn't think it sounded like fun, she punished her students for not following directions that were not actually explicated. If she had said, "It's time for silent reading. Please get out your independent reading books," then the directions would have been clear and consequences would have made sense because the expectations would have made sense.

Yes, I know Jonathan was maybe at least partly being a pain in the butt during his reading assessment just for the fun of it, and knew very well that he did not have the choice not to read the rest of the passage, but thinking lately about standardized tests (the school I taught at this past year had the lowest sixth grade test scores in Brooklyn), I am thinking again about what is built into middle-class culture, and needs to be taught explicitly in school to children who are not growing up in middle-class homes--at least as long as we live in a culture where these things are considered as important as this culture considers them to be.

I am not being my most articulate self right now. But the school year is OVER and I am almost relaxing--except that I come home from my last day of school to blog about school. Hmph.

Reading Assessments

2008-06-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

Had a Lisa Delpit moment yesterday when finishing up "running records" using the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project materials. I read the "Level N" introduction to Jonathan: "In this story, Brian and Josh are trying to teach Josh's dog named Arful to think like a cat. In this scene, the boys have gotten together at Josh's house. Please read aloud the first section. When you get to the line, you may read the rest silently--"

Jonathan interrupts, "If I want to? So I don't have to read past the line!"

I say, "No, you have to read the whole thing. Let's fix that: When you get to the line, read the rest silently. When you're finished reading, I'll ask you--you have to tell me--what you read."

Oh, clearly articulated expectations.

Lychees

2008-06-21T05:46:00.000-07:00

Sam and I went and bought lychees in Chinatown yesterday after school, and I complained about how they're still seven dollars a pound, and neither of us will still be living in New York by the time they get down to three pounds for ten dollars (of course, I get sick when I buy them three pounds for ten dollars, but then I get over lychees until the following summer, so...?). The lady selling fruit said something to the effect of "These are from Miami, ten dollars a pound. Chinese lychees, three pounds for ten dollars." Sam was briefly disappointed about lychees from Miami--just wrong. But he got over it.

June seems to be the best time to plan future visits and coordinate certain things: beach with Adri, lychees with Sam.

Not "Still in Brooklyn" for long...

2008-06-14T22:39:00.000-07:00

Driving around Portland yesterday, noticing things and thinking about writing them down, I realized that even though I haven't left Brooklyn yet, it was time to begin the transition out. Actually I've already begun that transition out. And now it's reached this place. The new one is (will be... that's the transition part, not being sure about the proper tense to use and all those sorts of things) this one and I explain here why it's called what it is. Anyway I try to explain.

Oh, liberal rhetoric

2008-06-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

In his "Okay, I finally have the democratic party nomination" speech, Obama gives lots of credit to Hillary for lots of things, even saying that, "When we transform our energy policy and lift our children out of poverty, it will be because she worked to help make it happen." Mr. Obama, sir, maybe we'll manage to transform the energy policy, but all our children will never be lifted out of poverty. You know that.

Is this me being too literal?

The United States will never be a country without poverty. Capitalism doesn't work like that. As far as I can tell, human beings don't work like that.

But his speech still made me cry and hope really hard for the things I think he might actually be able to accomplish.

Passersby

2008-06-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

Walking up Leonard, I pass an old lady and her old man. He is endearing but not spectacular in his cap and his blue satin baseball jacket, but she is stunning, wearing the most amazing lime green, almost fluorescent t-shirt with the hem fringed and knotted, and the sleeves slit into ribbons from shoulder to just above the hem, with her old lady upper arms visible in all their lumpy old lady dignity and spirit.

Al Sharpton on a Bike

2008-06-02T05:05:00.001-07:00

The part that made me laugh out loud was not the picture of Sharpton on a bike, although that is fabulous--it was Sean Bell's dad saying, at least according to the NY Daily News, "Justice is nice, but I just wanted to see Rev. Al ride a bike." Full article here (thanks for the link, Jenna!).

Subway Poems

2008-05-29T15:31:00.001-07:00

Two unexpected poems about subways! (I love google and the patterns into which it can sort information.)

Subway Wind
Claude McKay

Far down, down through the city's great, gaunt gut,
The gray train rushing bears the weary wind;
In the packed cars the fans the crowd's breath cut,
Leaving the sick and heavy air behind.
And pale-cheeked children seek the upper door
To give their summer jackets to the breeze;
Their laugh is swallowed in the deafening roar
Of captive wind that moans for fields and seas;
Seas cooling warm where native schooners drift
Through sleepy waters, while gulls wheel and sweep,
Waiting for windy waves the keels to lift
Lightly among the islands of the deep;
Islands of lofty palm trees blooming white
That lend their perfume to the tropic sea,
Where fields lie idle in the dew drenched night,
And the Trades float above them fresh and free.

Subway
Carl Sandburg

DOWN between the walls of shadow
Where the iron laws insist,
The hunger voices mock.

The worn wayfaring men
With the hunched and humble shoulders,
Throw their laughter into toil.

I especially love how McKay's poem--sonnet!--is so much about elements of the subway experience that don't exist anymore: those "upper door" windows (I assume he means the little ones that open at the top and hinge at the bottom?) stay closed, and I think that only the oldest trains even have them. The subway must have sounded so different, too. Before air conditioning.

Observed by Keight.

2008-05-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

Guest entry, a text message from Keight sent Wednesday, May 21, 5:56 pm:

Just passed three people walking really, really slow just south of washington square. Made me happy.

One of Many Reasons Why I Don't Play Dodgeball

2008-05-24T06:36:00.001-07:00

Mike's Dodgeball Injury
Originally uploaded by elissanelson

The best part is that Mike ended up at the ER getting stitches NOT because someone threw the dodgeball at him, but because he was running forward with the dodgeball trying to tag someone, and he slipped and fell literally head over heels, head first.

Fortune Teller on Grand

2008-05-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

The fortune telling/Avon products enterprise at the corner of Grand and Leonard has closed.

On the Grand Street side, there was a fortune teller painted on the door, garish and skirted and gypsy-ish. One would enter down a short flight of steps and through the painted door, except no one ever did, that I saw. However, the Leonard side of the business was always active. A walk-up Avon window, with the Avon sales lady inside, her gray hair set and curled, and always a customer gossiping, standing outside.

Now For Rent, Call Broker:

outdoors in the wilderness

2008-05-17T15:36:00.001-07:00

dangerous evil pest
Originally uploaded by elissanelson

Today I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge on a fieldwork trial run, then read my book next to the East River, under the Manhattan Bridge (Brooklyn side--Lauren looked horrified when I mentioned this, then I clarified and she was relieved). A dad and daughter were near me for a while, first sitting,then rock-hopping. The girl, maybe eight, asked "What's DEP stand for? It's on that rock."

Dad said, "It could be the Department of Environmental Protection."

She said, "It could be Dangerous Evil Pest."

"It could be that," he agreed.

Where I've Lived.

2008-05-14T15:44:00.001-07:00

Megan was giving me the rundown of how many places she's lived and how many people she's lived with, and I was inspired. Here is my tally. This is such a zine-y thing.

Chicago
Hyde Park
mom and dad
the townhouse next door to Greer
mom and dad and baby sister

Minneapolis
4849 S. Vincent (the first address I had to memorize, and a crappy duplex where, as I learned years later, the upstairs neighbors stole our electricty using an extension cord and I do remember when the upstairs toilet overflowed through our bedroom ceiling and Mrs. Core the babysitter panicked)
mom dad sister
201 Valley View Place
mom dad sister
do we count dad's apartments? Bloomington, Deephaven...
then he bought the house on 54th St.

Bard
four different dorm rooms (with crazy girl, then Brenda, then by myself)

Minneapolis
the apartment with Chris and Pauline

Seattle
that apartment in Maple Leaf with three people whose names I don't remember
the apartment in Fremont with Susan

back to Bard
Tivoli with Liz and Patricia, then with Liz, Lauren and Kate in the closet
Red Hook with LJ

Portland
the shack with insane cat (who may or may not count as a roommate--but pets are not otherwise included in the above lists [Apple Annabel the second, Casey, Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Charri Barri Buchi Pip Perri Pembo, etc.] so disregard in full count please)
northeast with LJ
31st and Burnside with LJ

Brooklyn
Franklin and Hancock with the Japanese craigslist roommate--Naeko, I think?
Hancock with Laurice (also a craigslist roommate but more too) and Ruby

Syracuse
that apartment across from Thornden Park with Tiara
Sarah and Hannah and Dan's house briefly, then...
Sarah and Hannah's house for two years (except for living with Laurice in there for the brain tumor summer, plus her roommate... whose name I don't remember)

Brooklyn again
Hancock with Laurice again
Hancock with Andrea
Hancock with Nick

next Portland again

So I've had 24 homes, and I've lived with 26 different people. Assuming memory serves, and assuming we count even those people with whom I lived relatively briefly (all of them at least a month...?)

Observed.

2008-05-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

Text message sent to Rachel on Sunday: "Wow--leggings like Sandy's in Grease!* Except in soho! Worn without irony!"

*Shiny spandex, for those of you who do not immediately have a visual image to accompany my cinematic allusion. I'm referring to "bad girl" Sandy, in the final scene.

More Mavis (& a little Flannery).

2008-05-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

Except I don't think she's Mavis. Ms. Gallant. Finally read the last three stories in The End of the World & Other Stories, partly because I'd just finished Play It As It Lays and wanted a couple stories before starting another novel, and partly because my Facebook profile showed me as currently reading eight books, which was driving me crazy--both because it showed up on the profile as "currently reading 8 books" and partly because of the frequent automatically generated emails asking me if I am still reading Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara, the Koran, and all these pedagogical theory books I am poking my way through and referencing frequently, but won't really have time to read till summer--plus until summer I need to lose myself in fiction.* And the occasional poem, but who can read a book of poems straight through beginning to end, even a little book of poems like Lunch Poems? I don't read poems like that, just like you wouldn't listen to your John Cage box set all in one sitting. At least I wouldn't.

Anyway. Ms. Gallant. The last paragraph of the last story in this collection is one of my favorite conclusions to any story ever, I think. (Though having said that, I'll have to go look at a bunch of others. Except not tonight. But curious to hear about others' favorite endings?) Anyway the conclusion is perfect in the context of the story ("In the Tunnel") and the way things are pulled together, and just how excellently it's about the first "adult" love affair, and that moment of being young enough to believe the first one is all there will ever be, and then realizing there will be the rest of your life and so many pieces to that whole life, love affairs just one of them. But one great line: "She was in love with his mystery, his hardships, and the death of Trotsky."

Also recently reread Flannery O'Connor's story "Parker's Back," because it's about a tattoo. I have been thinking about tattoos a lot, see. Anyway I think I really got "Parker's Back" on this reading (maybe my twentieth? thirtieth? I've had Flannery's complete stories in my top ten [top five?] since about the tenth grade) for the first time, not because of my tattoo, but because it clicked. Sometimes I forget that all her stories are about God and revelation, and then I remember and I am so impressed by her and scared of her all over again. No one else like her. Though Ms. Gallant is a piece of work, too--and I'll never get to read Flannery's complete stories for the first time again, but I still haven't read most of Gallant's.

*Hell of a sentence there, Elissa--you an English teacher or something?

My Wunderkammer

2008-05-11T20:04:00.000-07:00

...or Cabinet of Curiosities. Which isn't really a cabinet, but an assortment of random objects on shelves and window ledges and stuffed in the closet and under the bed.

I just finished Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Curiosities: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler--read at Molly Kalkstein's suggestion, not shockingly, since it is thoroughly related to our shared interest in ephemera, being a sort of history of/tribute to such things, and being a celebration of David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology (whose website is the most Victorian website I could ever imagine--though I hadn't realized I could imagine such a thing).

This got me started thinking about my own Wunderkammer, my cabinet of wonder, and my assorted ephemera. Hereby briefly catalogued and categorized. I'd thought at one point that I would update and edit, but since this is extremely incomplete in the first place, I doubt that will happen. I have more than what is listed here in every one of these categories. And here we go again, deciding what gets moved.

Books. (The primary category--may not seem to be ephemera, but read on. Note that this is a sampling; not all titles are listed.)
Countless volumes by Horatio Alger, Junior
Fruit Scones
Chansons de Frances, 1950, with built in xylophone and small wooden mallet
Where Are the Mothers? by Dorothy Marino, 1959 (Shocking how many mothers are working while their little ones are at school!)
The Delivery Men, by Charlotte Kuh, pictures by Kurt Wiese, 1929 (beautifully lithographed and featuring a milkman and his horse, an iceman, a push-cart man with fish, and many others)
Tierra Nativa, Libro Unico Para 3er Grado, Guyaquil, Ecuador, 1940
Here is New York City, 1962, stamped Property of Board of Education
Little Man's Family, a Navaho primer, Publication of the Education Division--U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, 1940
Standardized Textbook of Barbering, Third Edition, published by Associated Master Barbers of America, 1931 (signed Property of Hank Jangula, with his notes folded up and stuffed inside)
So many more. Also zines. Also magazines and random paper, including three issues of Partisan Review from the fifties featuring work by James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, H.L. Mencken, Delmore Schwartz, and their luminous peers; "A Question of Taste" pamphlet on the wonders of Miracle Whip, illustrated, from what looks like the thirties judging from the housewife's carefully marcelled hair; the similarly charming "Thrifty JELL-O Recipes to Brighten Your Menus: Desserts, Salads"; "Outdoor Edition GIRLS Lighting and Technical Data No. 4," 1952, less about technical data and more about GIRLS; and a program from an October 1897 performance of "Madame Sans Gene" at the Irving Place Theater, Deutiches Theater, Irving Place and 15th Street, New York. Oh, I miss that bookstore in Syracuse, and I will miss the Strand--but there is that fabulous thrift store on 82nd in Portland, with the best-organized book section of any thrift store anywhere, plus the Bins, plus of course Powell's. (Looking over what's listed here, I realize that this is not even hardly a thorough sampling; I didn't even mention the multiple Home Ec and Stenography textbooks, for example, nor the random 19th century self-published guides to everything...)

Ephemera That Cannot Be Categorized. (which seems to be redundant, but in the face of evidence, but I don't think it is)
Pale Blue Rotary Princess Phone*
A large E, found by Rana in the dump between Bard and Tivoli, presumably from a ChEvrolet
Another E, found on the street
Ten random medals and coins including Sears National Baby Contest 1934 Honorable Mention and COIN OF ANCIENT ITHACA ODYSSEUS commemorating the opening of the new building of the First National Bank of Ithaca, NY, May 1932
"take it or leave it!" board game, Series "B." Tag lines: "TRY FOR THE $64. QUESTION!" and "PLAY YOUR FAVORITE RADIO QUIZ AT HOME!" Categories: Football Teams, National Radio Programs of 1943 (you guess the sponsor; "Fibber McGee & Molly" is sponsored by Johnson's Wax, of course, and "Aldrich Family" is sponsored by Jello Puddings), Famous Pairs (Pelleas and Melisande, Aladdin and the Lamp, David Windsor and Wally Simpson, Salome and John the Baptist, Gilbert and Sullivan), Games or Sports (clue: spread, answer: pinochle), Capitals of Foreign Countries [footnote included in game: As of January, 1943], Famous Resorts (resort: Garden of the Gods, answer: Colorado), Synonyms (clue: beatitude, answer[s]: bliss, felicity, blessedness), Movie Stars (clue: Footlight Serenade, answer: Victor Mature, Betty Grable, John Payne), Jack Pot Questions (Q. What is white coal? A. A figurative expression for water power.)
Full set of Dewey Decimal Posters featuring the PEANUTS characters, copyright 1968, rescued from the library renovation at my last school

Catholicisms.
A genuine bottle of water from the grotto at Lourdes
Assorted other Lourdes memorabilia: t-shirt, mug, etc.
A lovely pale green wallet thrifted in Syracuse, empty except for a prayer card featuring a boy Jesus, a scapular medal of Saint Ann, and two medals of Mary, including one wrapped in a typewritten note from the Servite Fathers in Chicago explaining that the medal enclosed has been blessed and touched to a relic of the true Cross
A medal of St. Anthony, Patron Saint of Lost Things, found in a pair of thrift store pants, rubbed almost flat (I didn't buy the pants, but I did take the medal)
A black clay Virgin Mary from Mexico
The miraculous keyhole I found at a flea market, with blue and white paint on it forming an outline of the Virgin Mary (the lady gave it to me when I pointed out the clear apparition and asked how much she wanted for it)

Art.
Various maps
Two of Amy's paintings, stark, bizarre, and lovely
Donna's fabulous forest scene with blue dots
My great-grandfather Julius Thomley's painting of the family homestead in Minnesota, as it looked in the 1920's (painted from memory in the 1970's, when he was in his nineties)
SPACE POPS sign from Keight
Obama poster from Texas
The issue of Dance Index magazine with Joseph Cornell's Isadora Duncan collage on the cover
Three of Molly's prints

Photographs.
My grandmother as a young woman, sitting in a tree with her sister
The Nelson family seed and feed store in Eau Claire after it was hit by the train sometime in the...early 1960's? Late 1950's?
My father in college, shaking hands with Nixon in his official capacity as Young Republican
My father the hippie, standing on a Wisconsin hillside holding me as a baby
Countless old photos of people I never knew, some with names or places or a date scrawled on the back

*Mine is clearly a 20th century Wunderkind, with digressions into the 19th and 21st centuries, not counting a couple fossils and some rocks, undated but older than the rest of it.

[I started this post a couple months ago and finally gave up on ever completing it.]

Didion.

2008-05-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

I continue to love Joan Didion. Read all her non-fiction in one fell swoop last year, tried to read Democracy and couldn't get into it, but now Play It As It Lays is exactly the book I want to be reading, and I have a feeling that when it ends I will want to read another book just like it except there isn't. Maria talking about being a kid in Silver Wells, Nevada: "...(my mother's yearnings suffused our life like nerve gas, cross the ocean in a silver plane, she would croon to herself and mean it, see the jungle when it's wet with rain)..."

Eventually I'll write more than blog posts and facebook status updates again. Nice to be reading books that remind me why I want to.

The boa constrictor who swallowed an elephant, outside view.

2008-05-08T05:00:00.001-07:00

boa constrictor 1 cropped
Originally uploaded by elissanelson

Donna asked for an explanation of the tattoo, so here it is--for posterity, I suppose, though my sister did warn me that I'll spend the rest of my life explaining it.

In Antoine de Saint Exupery's 1943 novel The Little Prince, he opens with a story about a picture he saw in a book when he was six, of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. The picture is accompanied by an explanation about how boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it, and then they can't move, so they sleep for six months while they digest. This inspires our hero to make a drawing, his "Drawing Number One" (see picture). After completing it, "I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: 'Frighten? Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?'" He keeps trying, even making a Drawing Number Two, inside view, showing the elephant inside the boa constrictor, but he soon gives up on drawing and on "what might have been a magnificent career as a painter," realizing that "Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."

For the rest of his life, whenever our hero meets "one of them who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out, so, if this was a person of true understanding. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say:

"'That is a hat.'

"Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man."

So to answer your question, Donna, I guess it's a reminder.

Bus, overheard.

2008-05-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

On the bus home, two moms are talking and one of them catches my attention even through the headphones and the music when she says, outraged, "One little chicken was eight dollars! I said forget it, I'll get the one with the steroids," and they laugh.

Progress.

2008-05-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

Something great happened last week with one of my kids who's learning to read. He did something terrific. When it happened I was so excited, but then later I was thinking about it and I could remember the excitement and the pride but not the event, only that it was very small, not something anyone would have noticed except me--I'm not sure A. even registered it.

A couple days later, I remembered what it was.

When we started working together he'd always put a heading on the page, his name sloppy and the date written 5/5/08. One of the first things I asked him to do was write it out, spelling out the month. He groaned every time, but we talked about how we become better writers through every little bit of practice, and writing the date is a quick easy way to practice. He gets that, and I get why he doesn't want to deal. But on Thursday, I glanced at the heading and he'd written "May 1, 2008."

(Yeah, it was a different battle in February for multiple reasons, but hey--progress. It's one indicator, and I'm generally impressed with A. these days. I always have been, actually--when you can't read but you're interested and curious about the world, you pay better attention and notice more stuff than just about anybody else, your teachers included. And when it's all in your head, you can just pull things out and make fabulous connections that other people would need the book in front of them to notice. Any class discussion is better if A. is in[to] it.)

Observations in a coffee shop.

2008-05-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

Friday was my third consecutive after-school visit to the coffee shop near my school in Williamsburg during which the person at the table next to me was job-hunting on craigslist--further evidence, if any was required, that when you are hip, young, white, and new to NYC, there is only one neighborhood for you. The guy next to me on Thursday was looking at barista jobs & talking on his cell to someone about how hard it is to get a barista job in New York.

Looking out the window I see a guy skating down Lorimer, carrying a large piece of broken mirror with the beveled edge on the unbroken side painted black and gold.

Overheard at the counter: "I keep picking up this Tom Robbins book and just, like, laughing. I have to give up on Lolita and just stop trying to make it work."

the life I want

2008-05-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

In an entry in March, I quoted Mavis Gallant: "Journalism was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted," recognizing that a reader might think that the obvious parallel for me would be "Teaching was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted." I wasn't sure that was true, was pretty sure it wasn't, but couldn't figure out why the quote rang so true somehow. Well, how about: "Brooklyn was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted."

Though I have been making my "what I'll miss, what I won't miss" lists, and "what I'll miss" is much longer (and more tangible: Ali's Roti Shop, the Strand, Cafe Gitan, the Whitney and Calder's Circus...). Plus I spent a lovely gray morning reading Patricia Reilly Giff's All the Way Home, about a little girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 40's, walking distance from Ebbets Field and Prospect Park. Just as with the Algers, having my own Brooklyn makes all the books about this town so much better. Any place is like that--but there are so many books about this one. So I will move, and haul my books with me (although I have been culling! six bags of clothes shoes and junk hauled to Goodwill, three bags of books ready to take to housing works next weekend when the C is running on the F line, a French typewriter set aside for Eleanor...does anyone want my huge collection of random old tattered magazines, of no collector value but of much collager value? be in touch. pick-up ONLY.)

Amazing street find: oh, vinyl.

2008-04-30T16:13:00.000-07:00

I finally went through the crate of records I found on the street. Actually it was two crates of records, put out with the piles of trash that are always on the sidewalk in front of (between?) the Williamsburg Projects near where I teach (surrounding where I teach, really). I consolidated them into one crate and hauled them two blocks to school and up a flight of stairs, where they've sat under my desk for the past three weeks. But I went through them yesterday, and lugged a bunch home today. YAY! A lot of them are just the vinyl with no sleeve, tragically scratched up, but so far they're playing...

Here is the list of ones I've listened to and made choices about, to be annotated further as I keep listening.

in the YAY pile
the afro house of Irma--"Afrodesia" vol. 2 (2 discs, AWESOME)
Culture Class in New York City: Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77 (some amazing, some a little too experimental for me, 2 disc set and I'm sad to only have one of them, but happy to have one of them, especially acquired this way!)

transferred from "not listened to" to "YAY"
something that I finally figured out must be this by putting the song titles into google because the label is ripped up [I'm so not a DJ]
and another Crib Remixes with a ripped label (???)
Disco Dave & the Force of the Five MCS (one song, 1980, Label "Mix Master Mike and Disco Dave Records") This starts out almost cringingly old school but gets better--again learned, some interesting stuff through google (here)

in the "no" pile
Tambi--"The House Music Anthem" (single)
Attitude--"We Got the Juice" (1983)

transferred from "not listened to" to "no" (also known as "don't really need it"--I'm about to move cross country again, after all)
Tyrone Brunson--"I Need Love" b/w "The Smurf" (single)

not listened to yet, but moving to another pile eventually, possibly with annotation:
Ursula 1000--"Beatbox Cha Cha E.P."
Rick James--"Street Songs"
Bad Boys featuring K Love--"Bad Boys" single
Norman Connors--"You Are My Starship"
Just.Ice--"Put That Record Back On" (single)
C-Bank--"One More Shot" (single)
Eric B. & Rakim "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em" (single)
Special Request--"Salsa Smurph" single
"'Disco-fied' Rhythm Heritage"
Angela Bofill--"Angel of the Night
Soulmate--Summerland (single)
Sugarhill Gang--"Rapper's Delight"
DTrain "You're the One for Me" which I took because of the amazing cover, front and back--even though someone colored DTrain's teeth in with a blue ballpoint pen... (see pristine cover above)

and...
lots more that I don't have the time to write out now, but maybe while I'm listening to more I will continue the list... Obviously I know a lot of these records/songs/artists already, the question is whether they play and whether I need the vinyl. Oh, acquisitions. ARGH. Even those things acquired without expense--maybe especially these "amazing finds"--are more possessions to agonize over. And have I mentioned the impending move?!?!

...

This is the third large stash of records I've gotten in an interesting, random way. One day I was walking through my neighborhood and this huge old factory/warehouse on Dean had the doors open wide; some guy was selling the contents. I spent hours poking through hundreds of records, digging through junk... I culled and culled in order to only take as many as I could carry home [not to mention afford--but I paid hardly anything for all the vinyl I got that day]. I bought a lot of records clearly marked by "Linda as Smilie" and "Frances as Pinky" in ballpoint pen, proclaiming their love for Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones ("Hot Rocks 1964-1971" is masking-taped up and labeled "Linda Martinez {I got it in 1971}"), and Michael in all his manifestations from The Jacksons' eponymous 1976 release ("Keep on Dancing" and "Think Happy") through "Thriller." I also got some great salsa records in that warehouse: so much Celia, two by La Lupe, and "The Greatest of the Lebron Brothers," (with an amazing cartoon image of them posing as a basketball team--I couldn't find the image online anywhere) among others, as well as some random lovely stuff I still haven't learned enough about ("Los Grandes Exitos de Amalia Mendoza, 'La Tariacuri,'" and "Tonia La Negra interpreta a Augustin Lara," for instance). I imagine them as belonging to three generations: Linda, her mom (the salsa), and grandma (Amalia and Tonia La Negra). One of the best parts of things found is the stories, of course.

And we know I walked by that warehouse countless times after that, with more cash in my pocket, hoping for more records, and never saw those doors open ever again.

The last major acquisition was all the Ghanaian highlife records I bought in one fell swoop at the Salvation Army at Quincy and Nostrand: "A.B. Crentsil and the Super Sweet Talks, Int.," "Kunadu's Band," and a bunch more. I put back the pants I'd gone to the thrift store looking for, and just spent all my money on records, unheard--never regretted it.

Yeah, yeah. I know. Things I'll miss about Brooklyn.

Hopes and Dreams.

2008-04-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

When I move back to Portland, Oregon this summer (attach joyous if somewhat oddly inspired song & dance routine a la "Moses Supposes"), I have a lot of hopes. Employment, for example.* But right now I mainly want to find an apartment with level floors, so that if I spill my coffee by knocking it off the coffee table in the living room, as I did this morning, it will not create a small stream past the kitchen and down the hall.

*Huge thanks to everyone who's been so helpful so far with tips and advice about finding a teaching position in PDX--anyone else with suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Observed.

2008-04-29T04:20:00.000-07:00

A little boy on his scooter wipes out, shrieking--mom is sitting on the stoop, and she goes down the block to get him. Carrying him and the scooter back to the stoop, she says, deadpan, “Stop crying now, come here and sit with me, let’s wait for ACS to notice.”

On Lorimer below Broadway, in the grate of a first floor apartment's window, where the air conditioner will be in a couple months, sit two Styrofoam egg containers planted with seedlings.

Times Don't Change

2008-04-28T16:56:00.001-07:00

This photo on the cover of the metro section of the Times made me cry today. The little boy--and the expression on the face of the man carrying him. It's hard to see, but the sign the child is holding says "I am Sean Bell."

Mix tapes

2008-04-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

Listened to Claudia's mix tape from her high school boyfriend today while I did my taxes. Such a great idea to upload these to a website and have them accessible, in all their carefully curated glory, with their history noted as well... & like with a mix tape, it is a pain in the ass to fast-forward to the next song, so you have to suck it up and take it as the maker intended. This nostalgia for mix tapes absolutely dates me, and I don't mind a bit.

She like you?

2008-04-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

At the bus stop, three teenagers are talking about "...that new girl..."

Girl: She like you?
Boy: She took my hoodie.
Girl: Your purple one?
Boy: She had it on yesterday.

Junot Diaz and Francisco Goldman

2008-04-11T04:07:00.000-07:00

Actually went to hear writers talk of my own accord last week--and hope to go to another talk at the end of the month (April 29 at the Strand: Sherman Alexie and Peter Cameron). I must be getting over the MFA. Anyway Junot Diaz and Francisco Goldman had an interesting conversation about writing at the Grad Center at City College. The talk was supposed to be specifically about writing historical experience--and one of them (my notes suck) defined the historical novel as another genre of the fantasy novel, "pure fantasy." One of them--Diaz, I think--said that writing about history is like creating a Tolkien "subworld"--like "elves are this, dwarves are this."

They also talked about reading, and how reading is an individual practice; you do it by yourself unless you're reading to or being read to by someone else (one of the best things about being a teacher--both ends). But although most of us read alone, you learn how to read by, with, and from other people. I have lots of thoughts about that, especially lately--I grew up in a house full of books and full of readers, I was read to both before and after I learned to read myself, and the library was so essential to my life, probably more important than the TV--though I did watch so many hours of "Different Strokes" and "Facts of Life" as a kid. But I think I got told to put the book away and go to sleep or put the book away and look out the car window ("You're just gonna read a book, why are we even going on vacation, you could've stayed home and done that!") or put the book away and do my homework or the dishes or the laundry more than I got told to turn off the TV and do these things... though I also was told to get off the phone and ______, especially as I got older. But. Point being. I continue to be shocked by how many of my sixth grade students don't have library cards, don't read at home, don't have family members who take reading for granted. Reading is learned behavior, of course. I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to realize that the parents of my students who can't read also not surprisingly often can't read.

There was of course the question about how much Spanish is/should be/can be included in a novel written primarily in English, and neither writer gagged or groaned at it, which was thoughtful and polite and patient of them. Diaz said that he includes Spanish in his books like "adding pebbles to the back of English" and sometimes ends up taking stuff out if it seems to be breaking down meaning. He also noted that the Spanish itself doesn't tend to be a problem as much as all the different Spanishes, with slang, various vernaculars* and degrees of formal speech.

Diaz said, "Reading creates community" [wrote that down in my notebook but didn't note context, though it is part of the conversation about learning to read being a social activity], and and in answering a question about who he saw as the audience for Oscar Wao he said that a story is a collaboration between the person telling the story and a person who wants to hear it, and that real readers know how to work hard, and he trusts readers to do the work if the book is right for them. Also that "It's okay to lock some people out--just means there are words people have to figure out," and "a book isn't a piece of art if it's 100% intelligible to everyone." Which is so true--and the Spanish is intrinsic to the art in both their writing, though of course not the only thing.

*vernaculars? is that the plural? or is it a plural singular?

Subway Plans

2008-04-10T04:24:00.000-07:00

Weekend train, mom and teenage daughter, and as we pull into Broadway-Nassau the mom says, "She said if we didn't see her to get off."

"There she is," the daughter says. "She gonna be mad."

A young woman gets on with her son, maybe five or six. Mom says to the woman who just got on, "It was her."

The woman laughs, she's shaking her head. "That's why I called you so early."

The little boy is extremely focused on his PSP. The three women talk. I get off at the next stop.

Lunch Poems

2008-04-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

Finally bought Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, with my usual excuse: it's for school! And we are starting a New York City unit, but mostly I bought Lunch Poems for me, because I've wanted it for a long time.

I didn't know about his "Joseph Cornell," which I found online here when I went looking for "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul" so I wouldn't have to type it in. I haven't read anything about Cornell and O'Hara, but of course they would have had some contact...O'Hara seems to have some sympathy, some pity, but also some admiration for Cornell which makes me like O'Hara that much more. Cornell sounds like he was a difficult, awkward guy in social settings, and just generally odd. But O'Hara got the art, and O'Hara cared about art, so there you go.

Anyway I found that, but I didn't find the poem I was looking for. Here are the lines that are making me like it most lately:

but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night
wondering whether you are any good or not
and the only decision you can make is that you did it

...okay, except you really have to read the whole thing.

ADIEU TO NORMAN,
BON JOUR TO JEAN AND JEAN-PAUL

It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering
if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch
ah lunch! I think I am going crazy
what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up

at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch's
I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems
at Joan's studio for a new book by Grove Press
which they will probably not print
but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of the night
wondering whether you are any good or not
and the only decision you can make is that you did it

yesterday I looked up the rue Fremicourt on a map
and was happy to find it like a bird
flying over Paris et ses environs
which unfortunately did not include Seine-et-Oise which I don't know

as well as a number of other things
and Allen is back talking about god a lot
and Peter is back not talking very much
and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth's
although he is coming to lunch with Norman
I suspect he is making a distinction
well, who isn't

I wish I were reeling around Paris
instead of reeling around New York
I wish I weren't reeling at all
it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured

we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age
the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues
the Seine continues
the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all
the Bar Americain continues to be French
de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus
Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb
and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!)
and Irving Sandler continues to be the balayeur des artistes
and so do I (sometimes I think I'm "in love" with painting)
and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it
and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers and people
under them
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be
possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it

1959

Translation

2008-04-06T08:38:00.000-07:00

Also reading Anne Carson's translation of Sophocles' Electra, and as with Grief Lessons, I'm as fascinated by the commentary as by the text itself. The translator's forward has a great epigraph from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn/ Through the ashen grayness." Carson describes a translator as "someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow."

The chorus keeps trying to convince Electra to stop grieving her father and move on:

Not from Hades' black and universal lake can you lift him,
not by groaning, not by prayers.
Yet you run yourself out
in a grief with no cure,
no time-limit, no measure.
It is a knot no one can untie.
Why are you so in love with
things unbearable?

...but she wouldn't be Electra if she could get over it.

Captain Underpants!

2008-04-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

I read the first Captain Underpants novel yesterday. I didn't want to do anything else until I finished it, and then all I wanted to do was read another Captain Underpants novel. I read so much young adult and children's fiction, but somehow missed out on Captain Underpants; I've paged through a couple, but never got into them. My sixth grade students last year loved them, but the principal refused to allow them into classrooms*--that should've been enough for me to read the series. So when I saw the first one in a sixth grade classroom I picked it up. Now it is on my highly recommended list--for everyone, indiscriminately, but I suppose especially for readers who appreciate humor, comics, superheroes, flip books, and/or precocious fourth-graders who figure out how to get one over on the evil principal AND save the world [maybe the true reason Ms. C. didn't allow them in the classrooms!].

Our heroes, George and Harold, like to hang out in their treehouse and make comic books. Then--and this part made me joyous, as all current and former zinesters will understand--they sneak into the school office and photocopy their Captain Underpants comics, then sell their forbidden comics to their peers on the playground for fifty cents each. George thought up Captain Underpants: "'Most superheroes look like they're flying around in their underwear. . . . Well, this guy actually is flying around in his underwear!'" He is "faster than a speeding waistband... more powerful than boxer shorts... and able to leap tall buildings without getting a wedgie." He fights for "truth, justice, and all that is pre-shrunk and cottony."

The evil principal, Mr. Krupp, hates children, and especially hates George and Harold: "He hated their pranks and their wisecracks. He hated their silly attitudes and their constant giggling. And he especially hated those awful Captain Underpants comic books." Plots ensue, on both sides, and it is more marvelous than can be imagined--marvelous enough, clearly, to spark a series. I don't want to spoil anything--let's just say that the real action starts when Harold and George send away for a 3-D hypno ring, and it gets better from there. At one point George says, "'You know, up until now this story was almost believable!'"

* My previous school stocked the classroom libraries with a lot of great literature that didn't get read but supposedly impressed people from the region with how accelerated our scholar's program was. I sneaked good books to the kids, and developed a fabulous censorship unit. Anyway, we all know that turning something into an illicit activity might be the best way to encourage it, especially among early adolescents--I wish that had been my principal's thinking, though I probably still would have been annoyed with it.

Alger and NYC

2008-03-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

From before I learned to read until I was in high school, the New York City I knew best was that of the mid-1800’s, a city full of bootblacks and baggage smashers, where Christopher Street was way uptown and the wealthiest lived on Park Avenue—between Union Square and maybe the mid thirties. Central Park was “ a rough tract of land” with “no houses of good appearance near it.” You got to Brooklyn on the Fulton Street Ferry (two cents), and uptown on the Sixth Avenue [horse-drawn] cars (three cents). The Old Bowery and Tony Pastor’s were good for a night’s amusement, and Delmonico’s was the finest restaurant in town. (Alger made it clear that the Old Bowery and Tony Pastor's weren't quite high-class amusements, and that saving one's money was better than frittering it away on such fleeting pleasures, but it wasn't until more recently that I got the vaudville connection.) Barnum’s was a good place to take your kid brother, and if you were wealthy you would stay at the Astor House or the St. Nicholas hotel when you visited town. Poor people, especially the Irish, lived near Five Points, on Mott Street or Mulberry, or maybe on Leonard, where Tattered Tom lived in “one of the most wretched tenement houses to be found in that not very choice locality.”

My dad collected the novels of Horatio Alger, and his “rags to riches” stories written for teenage boys in the late 1800’s were my bedtime reading, and then, in grade school, they were the books I brought for silent reading in school. I also read on the bus and at recess, and under my desk in class. I didn’t just read Alger’s novels—I know the intimate details of the worlds of Laura Ingalls, Nancy Drew, the Pevensies (that would be Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter) and Anastasia Krupnik just as well. I read everything. But Alger wrote nearly a hundred novels for boys, with many more published under his name after he died, and I have probably read my favorites ten times or more. One of my favorites is his first, Ragged Dick, and since Dick spends the first eleven chapters showing visiting country boy Frank Whitney around the city, it’s a great introduction to their New York. The bit about Central Park above is from Dick’s tour, and Frank is disappointed: “’If this is Central Park,’ said Frank, ‘I don’t think much of it. My father’s got a large pasture that is much nicer.’” I just reread Tattered Tom, one of my favorites since childhood. More on that to follow.

Ragged Dick can be read online here, & there are also several contemporary reprinted editions available.

Life Philosophies and Language

2008-03-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

Related in disparate and not so disparate ways.

From a student's observation of a photograph and her answer to question 6 (What would your life be like if you lived here? For example, what language or languages might you speak? How would you dress? What kinds of jobs would people have? Why?): "My life would be alot of boring in it and just about farming and no shopping and I would speak country alot."

From Mavis Gallant's fabulous preface to her collected stories, 1996: "Journalism was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted."

- - -

Mavis Gallant also talks about Quebec, culture, language, learning the alphabet, her relationships to French and English and what they mean to her when it comes to reading and writing and speaking and memory--all of which ties in to a novel I recently finished, Amy Bloom's Away, the story of a young woman moving from Russia to New York in the 1920's, so much about place and identity and language [AND the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue which has been a recent fascination!]. Someone suggests that our heroine, Lillian, get herself not only a dictionary but a thesaurus, which becomes an important minor character in the story. In an early scene, Lillian describes the wedding she doesn't want, "...all of it costing serious money that Lillian can imagine much better spent on things a person really needs (requires, demands, claims, and also covets, craves, desires; Lillian's thesaurus is now her constant companion). The bookman sold her Webster's dictionary, fine and useful for what it is, and Roget's thesaurus, which has a little story for every word. This is like this, Roget tells her; this is related to this other; people on the street might say this like so; and then there is the antonym, introduced in 1867 by Mr. C.J. Smith, which is, sharply, exactly, and also completely not anything like that first word. Comfort: gladden, brighten, relieve, refresh, renew; idiomatically: to give a lift to. On the other hand: distress, perturb, bother, agitate, grieve."

The thesaurus and its clues about subtleties of language are also essential elements of Lillian's Americanization: "She'd told herself, A young woman in America would have breakfast now. She would have tea. A young woman hoping to see her boyfriend (her swain, her young man, and also her sheik, her crush) would wear this, would say that, would put her lipstick on like so. Lillian's life in Turov hadn't been a performance. She was a daughter, she was a wife, she was a mother. She was not acting like an anything then."

All wrapping back to my sixth graders, now in Brooklyn but not born here and not of here in any way that they've chosen for themselves (and at fourteen, they're an age to start fighting to make some kind of choices for themselves) with their two languages and their jarring connections to so much that is Nueva York, and what we are confronted with is the alphabet. There's an alphabet in Spanish and an alphabet in English, and maybe neither is all 26 letters to these guys because different letters are pronounced the same in different languages so how are you supposed to know which letter? Not like they ever learned the alphabet all that well in either language. And it's one more thing to make you different: you don't speak English and the words you say you don't say right, and the books mean something to them that they don't mean to you. And it's all them and you, in both directions: them and us.

Another experience my students don't have that means so much to me: I love when suddenly in a book is something about something you've been living with and watching up close, and you never ever saw it in a book before (except maybe you did but it wouldn't have stood out before now, because now is when it's foregrounded for you). Again, Gallant's preface:

"I was taught the alphabet three times. The first . . . I remember nothing about. The second time, the letters were written in lacy capitals on a blackboard--pretty-looking, decorative; nuns' handwriting of the time. Rows of little girls in black, hands folded on a desk, feet together, sang the letters and then, in a rising scale, the five vowels. The third time was at the Protestant school, in Chateauguay. The schoolhouse had only two rooms, four grades to each. I was eight: It had been noticed that I was beginning to pronounce English proper nouns with French vowel sounds. (I do it to this day, thinking "Neek' for 'Nike,' 'Raybok' for 'Reebok.' The first time I saw Ribena, a fruit drink, advertised in the London Underground, I said, 'What is Reebayna?' It is the only trace of that lacy, pretty, sung alphabet.) At my new school it was taken for granted that French and Catholic teaching had left me enslaved to superstition and wholly ignorant. I was placed with the six-year-olds and told to recite the alphabet. I pronounced G with its French vowel sound, something like an English J. Our teacher pulled down over the blackboard a large, illustrated alphabet, like a wide window blind. I stood in front of the blind and was shown the letter G. Above it a large painted hand held a tipped water jug, to which clung, suspended, a single drop. The sound of G was the noise the drop would make in a water glass: it would say gug.

"'The sound of G is gug. Say it after me. Gug.'

"'Gug.'

"'Everyone, now. Gug, gug, gug.'

"'Gug, gug, gug.'

"'What letter is it?'

"'G.'

"'What does it say?'

"'Gug.'

"'Don't forget it, now.'

"Whatever it was, it could never be sung."

More eavesdropping on Gay People.

2008-03-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

At the Strand, two very blond, theatrical (in all senses), very young men--boys?--are looking through the carts near the film and theater section. One says to the other, theatrically, of course, “Danny, what are you seeking?”

Corner of 7th Ave/W 4th right at the Christopher St. stop on the 1, he's on his cell phone and he says loudly, “You know what Oscar Wilde says...”

Eavesdropping by way of looking over his shoulder

2008-03-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

The guy next to me in this coffee shop is looking through the contents of a manila envelope: a bunch of index cards with ads for male escort services taped onto them. He's maybe early 40's, looks like he's done some serious drinking in his time, is not Williamsburg hip nor terribly gayish, though now [not surreptitiously enough at all] studying him in the context of the index cards, who knows, who can tell anything. All the cues shift so much. He's sort of middle-aged beer-bellied Abercrombie & Fitch, with that preppy almost military haircut, which could be lots of things.

Tourists

2008-03-17T03:23:00.001-07:00

On the 6 train downtown yesterday (so many tourists everywhere! spring break meets St. Patrick's Day, I guess?), a teenage girl with her mom and her aunt were standing, talking about how pole dancing is supposed to be the best exercise, and suddenly they are performing their own impromptu renditions of that fabulous pole-dancing-on-the-train YouTube video. Oh, dancing on the train. In all its manifestations, one of my favorite things ever.

"It's American art. You should like it."

2008-03-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Went to a Whitney Biennial member viewing hours event this morning, on a gray Sunday morning from nine to eleven--too early for a Sunday morning, especially after outer-borough food adventures last night (excellent Thai in Elmhurst, in honor of Adri and Jason). But I liked the idea of seeing the Biennial at a less insanely crowded time, plus they promised continental breakfast! Keight and I joked about lemon poppyseed mini-muffins and Lipton tea bags with tepid water--it actually wasn't too far off from that: coffee and tea (decent coffee and the tea wasn't Lipton), mediocre bagels quartered with single servings of Philadelphia cream cheese, butter, and jam. That's all. Keight, Constance and I waited nearly half an hour to get ours. Then we wandered a little, and it was decently uncrowded. I'm looking forward to going back on Wednesday to the event for teachers about strategies for bringing kids to see the show.

Favorite pieces on a first walk-through included a fabulous room by Eduardo Sarabia and another room with an installation by Lisa Segal (the Whitney site features a great page with bios of all the artists, but I couldn't find a list of the titles of the works included ANYWHERE, nor pictures of the works in the show).

I spent a long time looking at a piece by Ry Rocklen, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, trying to decide why I was so bothered by how flat-out ugly it was. If the museum guard standing near Rocklen's work was not a deliberate part of Rocklen's submission, he should have been. He was the best part. He watched me looking at the piece. I couldn't read the expression on his face, except that it wasn't the expression of the museum guard who thinks you're standing too close. I finally said to him, "Do you like this?" He shrugged. He said, "I work here." I said, "I know that." He said, "Art. American art. It is wonderful." He was Latino, with a strong accent, maybe in his fifties. I also think he was part of the show because he was not a Whitney guard, he had some sort of security badge on that was not Whitney-issued. "It's American art. You should like it," he told me. I shrugged and kept wandering.

On the Whitney site, Trinie Dalton says, "Ry Rocklen’s sculptures paradoxically reflect at once a respect for the Duchampian sculptural tradition and an anarchic rebellion against art historical constraints. Collecting cast-off objects from the streets, dumps, or thrift stores, he doctors and assembles them into readymade sculptures charged with an eccentric delicacy that gives them a second, more 'poetic' life." Keight especially liked one of his pieces, one we were referring to as "the bed of nails." But this one that irritated me, a big ugly presentation of a bunch of cheap discount-store art, faded from display in a store window (this is what I remember from the wall description)--I couldn't figure out what was interesting about it (besides the guard), or why I should want to look at it. & I have a special place in my heart for discount-store art--my contribution to Donna's mail art show was just that. & I can like art that could be considered ugly, just not art that doesn't seem to say or do enough, even when you read the label. American or not.

Obama's Pastor, Reverend Wright

2008-03-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

According to an AP story, "Obama Denounces Pastor's 9/11 Comments":

"In a sermon on the Sunday after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Wright suggested the United States brought on the attacks.

"'We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,' Wright said. 'We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.'

"In a 2003 sermon, he said blacks should condemn the United States.

"'The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing "God Bless America." No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.'"

Too bad Obama has to say he disagrees with these statements, just because he wants to be president. Sounds to me like Rev. Jeremiah Wright is just talking about some hard truths.

[on a somewhat related note, I think it's time for me to take this quote by Tupac Shakur off my "favorite quotes" list on my facebook page--I still think he's so smart and it still makes so much sense to me but every time I see it up there it seems like more and more of a weird thing for a whitegirl to post as a favorite quote, and more and more easy to misinterpret why I'd like it: "Procreation is so much about ego. Everybody wants to have a junior. But I could care less about having a junior to tell 'I got fucked by America and you're about to get fucked, too.' Until we get a world where I feel like a first-class citizen, I can't have a child. 'Cause my child has to be a first-class citizen, and I'm not having no white babies." -Tupac Shakur from http://www.veronicachambers.com/tupac.html ]

Leonard between Ainslie and Devoe

2008-03-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

I continue to be...overwhelmed? weirded out? by working in Williamsburg. I continue to be baffled by Williamsburg. Code switching is always fascinating--though I am never sure how much I do switch. I imagine I am seen either as slightly dorky young urban white teacher at my school, or, three blocks away, as slightly dorky aspiring/declining older hipster who now occasionally shops at the Gap (and blogs instead of making zines [?!?!]). Lots of tangents here. The age you are vs. the age you appear, & how the age you appear to be shifts depending on context. Anyway. This is not unrelated to how a grimy not very attractive nearly always working class neighborhood as long as it's been a neighborhood is now a grimy not very attractive somewhat working class and simultaneously grimy not very attractive extremely overpriced hipster neighborhood especially beloved by recent college graduates.

From a section of James Agee's 1939 essay "Brooklyn Is" (more on this fabulous essay to follow) that begins "All the neighborhoods that make up this city; those well known, and those which are indicated on no official map:

"Or Greenpoint and Williamsburg and Bushwick, the wood tenements, bare lots and broken vistas, the balanced weights and images of production and poverty . . . where from many mileages of the jungle of voided land, small factories, smokestacks, tenements, homes of irregular height and spacing, the foci are returned upon the eye, the blown dome and trebled crossage Greek church, and those massive gasoline reservoirs which seem to have more size than any building can: the hard trade avenues, intense with merchandisings of which none is above the taking of the working class: the bridal suites in modernistics veneers and hotcolored plushes, the dark little drugstores with smell like medicine spilled in a phone-booth mouth-piece: the ineffable baroques of gossamer in which little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven are clothed: Here and still strongly in Bushwick and persistent too in East New York and Brownsville, there is an enormous number of tall-windowed three- and four-floor wood houses of the fullblown nineteenth century, a style indigenous to Brooklyn, the facades as handsome as anything in the history of American architecture: of these, few have been painted within a decade or more, none are above the rooming house level, most are tenements, all are death-traps to fire: their face is of that half divine nobility which is absorptive of every humiliation, and is increased in each: many more of the tenements are those pallid or yellow bricks which are so much used all over Brooklyn as a mark of poverty: mixed among these many small houses of weathered wood, stucco, roofing: the stucco fronts are often Italian and usually uncolored, suggest nevertheless the rich Italianate washes; some are washed brick red, the joints drawn in white: or the golden oak doors of these neater homes, or the manifold and beautiful frontages of asphaltic shingles...."

He goes on and on. I love "intense with merchandisings"--I picture the dollar stores, the Korean fruit markets, the bodegas with all the candy in the windows that my kids bring in paper bags and eat for breakfast. Swedish fish, individually wrapped, mostly. There are also still plenty of cheap garish furniture stores, though there are fewer little drugstores, and hardly any with counters. But there will probably always be ineffable baroques of gossamer, for little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven (cherish and celebrate the graduations you will get to celebrate), also for Quinceañeras. A fabulous ineffable baroque of gossamer on the corner near my school, and a related one up on Grand--with the creepiest vintage mannequins in the window that I do not think have any intended irony to them.

I wonder what Agee would think of the garish plastic siding on so many of the two story buildings that must have replaced the death-traps to fire, with the ugly awnings often over their front door and sometimes over the windows too. But the ugly makes the pretty buildings look prettier, too, of course.

It's so weird to me that this hipster neighborhood is not even bordering but sort of mashed into the neighborhood where I teach, at a school surrounded by projects including the Williamsburg Houses, described by the WPA in 1939 as "the largest slum-clearance and low-rent housing project completed under the Federal Housing program (1939)."

But I started all of this to observe that this afternoon, as I walked up Leonard, from school to Fortunato's Bakery for biscotti, I passed some very small fake flowers carefully set in around a tree growing between sidewalk and street. It's spring. I am generally not a fan of fake flowers in general, but Brooklyn and Queens have brought me to a certain appreciation. I am nearly always opposed when they are enormous and out-of-season, or when it seems like there could be real ones for not a whole lot more work. But tiny fake flower buds in early March are sort of endearing, especially when you know they were probably "planted" by a little old Italian lady.

Footnote: Here's a link to a fascinating typo-ridden article I found when googling Williamsburg projects trying to figure out when they were built, about the "decades-long struggle between the Chasidim and the Hispanics of Williamsburg over access to low-cost public housing." No date on the article. Especially interesting after reading the Agee essay, though, which talks a lot about the huge Jewish population in Brooklyn (according to Agee, one sixteenth of the world's Jews lived in Brooklyn in 1939), but contains maybe just two references to black people (three if you count "the negroid breath of a molasses factory"--is there something to that metaphor that I don't get? A reference of some kind? Or is it just awful?), both concerning white concern over "'the infiltration of Negroes.'"

Approaching Literacy? (This entry will fit perfectly into my "White Teacher Saves Poor Children of Color in the Inner City" memoir.)

2008-03-04T17:13:00.000-08:00

D. kept following me around today, just being near me, and when I finally got to take him into a quiet room and sit with him, we spent an hour focused on lining up the plastic glow-in-the-dark letters I bought at a dollar store, saying each letter and the sound it made, then putting them in order, doing it again with a second set (gotta love the dollar store!), then thinking of words that began with each letter. He made it up to G on his own, and we did H through Z together. Sometimes he could say the name of the letter but not the shape, sometimes he knew the name of the letter but not the sound it made. Sometimes he knew the name of it in Spanish, or the sound it made in Spanish. When we listed words that started with each letter, he asked, "Okay Spanish?" and of course I said of course.

agua apple ano also aunt bebe baby boyfriend casa cat church car child catorce dinero Dominicana Dominican Republic escuela familia family father fourteen gold gato gatico grandmother grandfather girlfriend house hora home hola hundred iglesia junto job Justino justicio justice Katherine Kathy kitten luck lottery loteria loto money momento minute moment manana nina nino nana novio novia oro old older paper papel papa padre queen quince raza race Republica republic school suerte somos son sun sol tia tio tambien trece today thousand two hundred uncle uno vida vivir viven water x-ray xou years you younger young zero

He does want to learn to read. Of course he does. But who could admit that, at fourteen? You're admitting so much if you admit that.

More books. Too much emotion. No warning labels.

2008-03-04T04:22:00.001-08:00

Reading The Mother Garden by Robin Romm at home and When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers at school because I really have to figure out what to DO--okay, reading both in both places, really--not doing a good job these days of drawing any kind of clean line between teaching and the rest of my life. I feel like it's a school of nun teachers except we don't live together--we just all work and talk about work and email about work ALL THE TIME. But anyway. Slightly cranky lately--though not in the kids' direction, and had a conversation with a student yesterday about how "it's not fair" to be cranky towards the people who aren't the ones who made you cranky, whether you're a teacher or a student or a mom or a boss or a sister or a brother... I am hugely appreciating the kids lately. & that's something, a huge something.

But--crying over both my books.

Yesterday sitting in my classroom during homework help, after school, I read this to myself: "I can think of nothing that I do 186 days out of the year, in front of my peers, that I know I will consistently do poorly. Can you think of anything you do that qualifies? I gave up tennis because it was too embarrassing to constantly run to that adjacent court and retrieve my errant ball. I stopped aerobics class, for I never could understand that grapevine-turn-around-dip thing, and I got tired of the instructor standing directly in front of me, shouting, 'Cross-over now.'" I had a student in my classroom doing her math, so I cried that small way. I'd just finished working with one boy who wants to learn to read, and two others who wouldn't stay in the room, who kept running out and being brought back by other teachers and staff members, laughing at everything I asked them to do: Write your name, write down the title of this story. At the end of the day during a quiet private moment, I said to one of them, "Do you want to learn how to read?" He laughed. I said, "D., I'm serious. It's an honest question. Do you want to learn how? Please just think about it tonight." I've spent a lot of time since then wondering if I should have said that to him--but it is an honest question, though oversimplifying everything, and I don't know what the hell else to say.

This morning I read Romm's story "The Tilt," from the point of view of a young woman whose mother is sick and dying, and the young woman is sitting with her boyfriend's stepmom, Anna, thinking about how Anna is mourning her dead son by trying to hold on to him, spending her time trying to commune with the dead. The son, Milo, shot himself. "I want to ask her what she hears when Milo comes to her, when he materializes out of wind and light. Does he simply sit near her? Is it like she's pregnant with him again? Does he get lonely? Does he tell her why he did it? How the gun felt? What that moment was like when his finger tightened around the trigger? Did he think about Anna, the powdery smell of her neck, the drugged feeling of sleeping near her when he was small? Was it brilliant, that smash of pain? Did he see colors? Did he feel love and sorrow surge up in his throat and go soaring out of him? Was that what death was? No longer needing to contain these feelings in your body? When suddenly, all the splitting song inside you is you. You are--finally--no longer a container--you are the things that once were contained?"

In another of Romm's stories, a daughter apologizes to her dying mother for choosing the movie she'd rented, saying something like, "We checked on the box, it didn't say anything about a woman dying of cancer."

Grief Lessons

2008-03-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

Just finished Anne Carson's translations of Euripides--I wish there were more than these four. Such a fabulous combination of good stories tied perfectly to form, characters I know well but not quite in this setting (all of Greek mythology is like an enormous epic soap opera with recurring characters, with endless episodes told from every different point of view--you're like, "Oh, Herakles again, except this time he's just making a guest appearance in someone else's drama!" like if the Pirates of the Caribbean stopped off at Gilligan's Island [sort of]), and translations using language so well. The prefaces to each play are also fabulous--I don't remember ever savoring a preface like this. For example, who knew that aidos, the Greek word for shame, "is a vast word in Greek"? She talks about the different meanings and implications, saying in part that in Greek, "Shame vibrates with honor and also with disgrace, with what is chaste and what is erotic, with coldness and also with blushing. Shame is felt before the eyes of others and also in facing oneself" (163-164). Also, I continue to savor reading books that I will NOT be using (at least directly) in the classroom.

Amphitryon observes in Herakles:

Time does not know how to keep our hopes safe,
but flutters off on its own business. (lines 487-8)

Herakles ranting in his play:

I don't believe gods commit adultery.
I don't believe gods throw gods in chains
or tyrannize one another.
Never did believe it, never shall.
God must, if God is truly God,
lack nothing.
All the rest is miserable poets' lies. (1316-22)

A servant's wisdom in Hippolytos:

If someone who is stretched tight inside himself
talks reckless talk, best not to listen. (150-1)

Theseus in Hippolytos:

What human beings need is some clear index
of who is a friend and who is not--
a diagnostic of soul--
and every man should have two voices,
one righteous and the other however it happens to be,
so that the righteous voice could refute the unrighteous
and we would not be duped. (1009-15)

Mrs. Sheehan update

2008-03-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Sheehan is out on million dollar bail. Man, it's hard for me to think of her spending ANY time at Rikers Island.

real Chinese tacos (& teaching)

2008-02-26T16:26:00.000-08:00

Got home today after a long day--this morning, sleepless at 5 a.m., I gave up and got up and worked until...leaving for work. A good day: the ninth grade pull out group didn't say "Why we gotta work with a fuckin sixth grade teacher?" and some ninth graders who never do nothing did some stuff. Plus Dan got some work done with the other kids because I took the ones who distract the rest. Nice to feel somewhat useful.

Although I felt less useful trying to teach A. to read. Fingers crossed, patience rallied.

J. and D. did a little work in a pull out group. Amazing what some kids are capable of when you stand over them holding an enthusiastic whip, a.k.a. when they feel directly responsible for and engaged in being part of their own educations, if only because an adult keeps bugging them about it instead of letting them blend into the larger louder crowd. But not only because of that--also because they like having ideas and having those ideas recognized and responded to, but they can't focus enough to bring those ideas out when there's too much else going on (which there so is, always, especially in sixth grade with puberty descending), plus some of these kids just aren't the type to enthusiastically wave hands and share any kind of ideas related to school and books, even if they are percolating somewhere down there.

Anyway it was a good day. Even the dentist after work wasn't so awful. And I came home to Nick making soup and the house smelling really good.

He explained that the soup wouldn't be ready for a while: "I just put the beans in.”

Told him, “I had tacos before the dentist anyway, in case I couldn't eat after. Not real ones though. The Chinese ones.”

"Real Chinese ones? Not moo shu?”

"Real Chinese ones.”

Oh, Fresco Tortilla. (Even if you know about Fresco Tortilla, this article from the Times is worth reading. I first read it framed on the wall at the Fresco Tortilla near school.)

Austin.

2008-02-22T15:05:00.000-08:00

Oh, Tex-Mex. Oh, that stuffed fried avocado at Trudy's.

The fabulous Barack posters the guy at the coffee shop made, and he gave me one when I asked. Having grown up in Minneapolis and lived in Portland and Seattle and "towns" even smaller, I was not so shocked at his generosity, and his joy in my appreciation of his poster, but Ms. Adri NYC still is, I think. (Image is the poster up in my apartment--it says "SI SE PUEDE" and "TEXANS FOR BARACK 08".) Best souvenir I could've hoped for.

Mexican food and perfect tortillas and $1.50 breakfast tacos and telenovelas playing in the background.

Bees! There are still bees in Austin. (Seems like such a line out of a Bradbury story.)

BBQ. The Salt Lick. On Sunday-after-church (we didn't go to church, just admired the post-church crowd, babies, all of it). I didn't go with the all-you-can-eat, I just worked on my ribs (and that lovely slightly Asian coleslaw) and watched Jason and Adri go go go.

The river behind their surreal enormous apartment complex, and their two outdoor pools, especially the one shaped like Texas!

Lake Travis, a huge lake made from damming said river (we're studying China with the sixth graders--dams, dams, dams), and we drove way up the hill, and wandered somewhat. It was open and smelled good and I flipped over a funny looking rock. Lots of funny looking rocks. (I was sick, so my take on it here is appropriately mono-syllabic and vague.)

Dogs everywhere.

Cacti. Little ones. Randomly.

Thrifting and poking in random stores. I bought too many books, as usual, though as you would hope I was more selective than I would have been in NYC. One was big though. Really big. Hill's Manual of Social and Business Forms [1879: Issued by subscription only, and not for sale in the bookstores. Residents of any State desiring a copy should address the Publishers, and an Agent will call upon them.] It was only fifteen dollars, the most I spent on anything I bought in Texas. Of course, it weighs about eight thousand tons. But worth it. Worth hauling.) You can download a PDF of Berkeley's copy here, or just peruse it. But you know for $15 I had to have my own hard copy, complete with engraved cover and all the plates and illustrations... This may be one of the most useful books I own. Useful information includes the following: Specific directions and a twelve-lesson system for teaching penmanship in case I ever want to open a writing school ("The usual charge for a course of instruction of 12 lessons is from $2 to $5 per pupil"). Somewhat radical suggestions on Marriage ("Do not be afraid of being an 'old maid.' The disgrace attached to that term has long sense passed away. Unmarried ladies of mature years are proverbially among the most intelligent, accomplished, and independent to be found in society. The sphere of woman's action and work is so widening that she can to-day, if she desires, handsomely and independently support herself. She need not, therefore, marry for a home") including how to begin a love correspondence! Writing for the Press including subjects for local news (Accidents, Amusements, Births, Burglary... on through Sickness, Telegraphs, and Violation of Law), results of bad penmanship ("Especial pains should be taken, when writing for the press, to write legibly" since otherwise you may "seriously trespass upon the time and patience of printers and correspondents upon whom [you] inflict [your] penmanship"). Selections from the Poets, including William Cullen Bryant, Florence Percy, and Petroleum V. Nasby, as well as Marian Douglas' "The Motherless Turkeys": "The white turkey was dead! The white turkey was dead!/ How the news through the barn-yard went flying!/ Of a mother bereft, four small turkeys were left,/ And their case for assistance was crying" etc. Altogether a remarkable volume. Additional excerpts mostly likely to follow.

And last but not least: Miramar! Who really is a Texan, now. Pretty surreal.

Mrs. Sheehan

2008-02-20T17:56:00.001-08:00

On vacation in Austin, I get this call from Mike that is urgent and anxious, saying, "Call me when you can, please call." Since his sweetie and my good friend Tammi just fell down the stairs and is now housebound except for physical therapy for six weeks, I'm thinking, "Shit, what happened to Tammi now?!" so I call him right away, and he says, "Did you hear?"

"Hear what?"

"About Barbara Sheehan? From 346?"

He was talking about this. The warm, helpful, motherly secretary at the middle school where I taught last year and the year before, and where Mike and Tammi still teach.

Not in any position to feel anything but sympathy for all kinds of people in this situation. Family. Children. Mrs. Sheehan.

A lit thesis I will not write

2008-02-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

I loved Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, despite gossip about Diaz at Syracuse and despite Syracuse in general. The MFA mostly ruined me for contemporary fiction but not entirely, we are relieved to note. (Also, three years later, maybe I'm writing again! Besides blog entries which are helping get things warmed up anyway.)

There's something great about putting a book on reserve at the library, and then when it comes it's like a package in the mail.

I love how Diaz refuses to italicize the Spanish in his writing--I remember reading something by him about that a million years ago [tracked down at least one reference, a quote from Diaz included in the NYT 1996 review of Drown: "I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.''] and this book seems so completely written in his language, even more than Drown did. The ELL teacher at school read it, and he said he loved it because he'd never read a book that was written how people really talk. I kept thinking about who Diaz's audience is meant to be: sometimes he seems to be talking to people who grew up in the world of the book, and sometimes--though rarely--he seems to be explaining that world to his New Yorker audience. Not too often, though, and not too much.

There are lots of footnotes. I love footnotes. Especially footnotes explaining the Dominican history referenced, the side stories, the details that don't belong in the narrative flow of things. But there were places where I got annoyed by pretensions that snuck in, including at least one--maybe only one?--footnote about something that was in an earlier draft and got edited out for various reasons. Meta in a useless jolting way, reeking of McSweeney's. Plus toward the end there was a dumb metaphor involving "nightmare 8-a.m. MLA panels: endless."

But I love the specifics and the dorkiness and the references without explanation, whether Dominican slang or roleplaying games or comics or sci fi. This book has such a voice. And after I finished it I was thinking how much more Diaz has in common with someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer than he does with most contemporary [white American?] writers. Again, I'm not as well-read in contemporary fiction as I should be to be making such claims. But I was thinking that he and Singer have many of the same themes, even with a lot of common threads. New York (outer Brooklyn/far out NJ); tight knit immigrant communities, Diasporas, with so many connections to Back Home; wars and dictators and changing regimes Back Home; young male writers and intellectuals doing what they have to do to pay rent, but living their "real lives" outside of the job; and, entirely essential to both writers, an obsession with the ladies. Lots of players and affairs and romantic intrigue in these guys' books. There's religion, too. And families with all their burdens and obligations. All those generations with their different relationships to Back Home, to language and priorities and family and history and all of it. Gender expectations, secrets left behind (but usually not really left behind at all), myths and God and all the rest of it. Plus did I mention the ladies. So that's the thesis, somewhere in there.

Teacherly post script: If I were teaching college, or maybe even high school, I'd want to use this quote to talk about voice and POV and how much can be conveyed about characters (whether the narrator, character described, or both) in a few sentences: "At college you're not supposed to care about anything--you're just supposed to fuck around--but believe it or not, I cared about Lola. She was a girl it was easy to care about. Lola like the fucking opposite of the girls I usually macked on: bitch was almost six feet tall and no tetas at all and darker than your darkest grandma. Like two girls in one: the skinniest upperbody married to a pair of Cadillac hips and an ill donkey. One of those overachiever chicks who run all the organizations in college and wear suits to meetings. Was the president of her sorority, the head of S.A.L.S.A. and co-chair of Take Back the Night. Spoke perfect stuck-up Spanish." (p. 168, in case you write the thesis or teach not sixth graders).

Seen, overheard, etc.

2008-02-13T14:31:00.000-08:00

Huge Obama sign on the back of a waste removal truck on Fulton.

On the marquee at a storefront church down the block from Gorilla Coffee, in Park Slope: CROSSOVER YOUTH MINISTRY: MAKING JESUS FAMOUS.

Lady standing next to the chain link fence outside the Williamsburg Projects, talking on her cell phone, smoking, her kid (maybe five) next to her waiting impatiently. Her hair is all done up nice, and she's wearing a short very hairy jacket, maybe rabbit fur, with a big fluffy collar. She's also wearing those navy blue polyester uniform pants that are never flattering. She might be a security guard, or crossing guard. On her, the pants are really tight but oddly high-waisted, and the whole look is slightly discombobulated but still fabulous in a "so there" kind of way.

Text from Lauren: "Overheard: I said hey man I'm not gonna be a physicist I'm gonna be a PHYSICIAN."

Text from Gerry: "In e village. Mother with child named Gerry threatens to hit him in the face. Gerry is cute clearly. But bad mother."

Text to Rachel last year: "New game at IS 364: boys punching each other in the genital area, aka the 'johnny.' Known as Bang Cock, or as one kid explained, the capital of JAPAN!"

More movies.

2008-02-12T18:06:00.000-08:00

Tonight the random movie was The Group. With Devon! I am proud of myself for meeting up with a friend for a movie and dinner on a school night. Still trying to balance everything. (I am also proud that I've been writing a fair amount here, and it's not a teacher blog! Important to write/think/communicate about teaching, but also so important to have other things. Like random movies and books and adventures.) Anyway. I was obsessed with the 1954 Mary McCarthy novel the movie is based on--Vassar girls, just out of college!--when I was a Bard girl, just out of college. I bought multiple copies, every time I saw one at a thrift store, and passed them on. I tend to do that.

The movie doesn't follow the book so closely, plus it's funny to watch a 1966 movie set in 1933 that is so 1960's--based on a book written in 1954 by a woman who was ahead of her time. Sex before marriage, breast feeding, psychiatry--the issues are timely to all times, handled in a way that isn't quite timely to any of them. Plus it's got Candice Bergen and Larry Hagman in it (not only was he J.R. and Jeannie's master, but he went to Bard! who knew?! oh, IMDb), along with a zillion other actors and actresses who went on to be in every television show ever made (remember before IMDb when we were all just like "who the hell is he? I know I've seen him in SOMETHING!" but now you can look him up and figure out that he was in that one ABC after school special).

Also last weekend Lauren and I saw "Network." Very 1976, fabulous. I love Film Forum. The Sidney Lumet series is proving to be more fun than expected.

Chuck's birthday

2008-02-11T10:46:00.000-08:00

Today is (would be) my dad’s birthday, and before work I was listening to Bob Marley. I had to dig up Legend anyway because I wanted to put the live version of "No Woman No Cry" on a mix I’m making for Farah and Jim and their new baby, Eloise. I remember listening to this tape in my dad’s truck, over and over, starting from seventh grade when it joined our/my essential music oeuvre. I guess I was thinking about this song as sadder than it actually is, as a song of grief instead of comfort. Then I realized that’s because I’m thinking of it as a song for “my peeps who passed away”—but the Fugees album with their version on it came out that fall after my dad died, and I guess is one of the first albums I think he would’ve really appreciated that I never got to play for him, me being one of his “cool” daughters and him the “cool” dad I played “cool” music for, with an enthusiasm that wasn’t cool, really. Neither of us ever were—-not in the least (nor you, really, sister dear--though you probably came closer than I ever did, ms. indie guitar girl).

My music has gotten less cool, or anyway I'm more aware that it's less cool. I think my dad would be into all the old gospel I've been obsessed with, and he'd understand how I'm fascinated by this as a... secular obsession? to coin a term he'd appreciate. And we could talk about it. I'd like to talk to him about it. Plus I know he'd love my recent fascination with all things Johnny Cash and Carter Family--I have a couple Johnny Cash records from my dad's collection, though the eight CDs are from the library.

"No Woman, No Cry" is a song about remembering and anticipating—okay, this is not about to deteriorate into a line reading of a Bob Marley song. Enough. See quote at end.*

Anyway. Thinking about a CD for the new Eloise, I’m realizing, of course, how many of the songs you sing or dance to with little kids are love songs. Most songs are, of course, but…yeah. Three notable exceptions that were top sing-alongs when I nannied were Etta James’ “Pushover,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road," and Magnetic Fields' "Papa Was a Rodeo." The first is a kickass “fuck you, you can’t play me,” song and the second is a traveler song—much like “City of New Orleans,” which Farah wrote about Eloise’s grandfather singing to her, just like he’d sung it to Jim. (Okay, “King of the Road” isn’t MUCH like “City of New Orleans.” But--yeah.) "Papa Was a Rodeo"--okay, maybe it's a love song. Not debating that right now. Anyway can't argue it's a great sing-along, period. "Nashville Skyline Rag" is also going on the baby mix--I was going to make a case for that not being a love song, but I caught myself--just because it doesn't have words doesn't prove anything.

On the bus to work, listened to Abbey Road. The whole second half of that album-—side B of the record I grew up dancing to—-starts with "Come Together" and gets better from there. I still have my dad’s record. I’ll go home tonight and listen to the album again—or at least side B of the record I grew up dancing to.

*Good friends we have, good friends we have lost, along the way.
In this great future, you can’t forget your past;
So dry your tears, I say.

P.S. Bec, Derek, and the kid-to-come: you'll be getting your own version of the mix, of course. We go so far back with the mixes.

Observed on the Street: "Take It Slow"

2008-02-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

So this little girl, maybe eight, is waiting for her mom to quit talking to the neighbor they ran into on the street, and while she waits she is busting out in a dance clearly practiced, singing along with the video playing in her head: "I gotta take it slow, take it slow, when it gets too fast I'm gonna take it slow." She is rocking out, and I'm like, "oh, that's cute!" I left a message for my sister about it: "Better that than me and 'Material Girl' at the same age, right?" but then I google the song, and realize I've totally seen this video. The YouTube "video" is just a six-minute still, so I won't link it (couldn't find it anywhere else!), but the lyrics make the point. Not so much better than "Material Girl", actually. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that this would've been a much more disturbing song to dance to in the fourth grade talent show.

Overheard re. Weddings and Indians

2008-02-08T15:13:00.000-08:00

A table of attractive young blond people with Euro accents are next to me at a coffee shop that is only six blocks from the school I teach at, but is about thirty-five neighborhoods away. Or at least in another city, it would be thirty-five neighborhoods away--but this is NYC. Anyway, I'm in Williamsburg. At least there are coffee shops, and I can go somewhere during my lunch period that isn't the Associated Grocery or the Dunkin' Donuts, which were my options when I taught in Starrett. Anyway.

One of the men says, "I think I found my wedding ring."
A woman says, "Oh, you found what you want?"
"Yes, it's an Indian thing, not Navajo, another tribe...?"
"Sioux? Sioux? Sioux? Like you spell it with an x?"
"Maybe. And it has a blue stone. You know that blue stone?"
"Turquoise."

Movies: silent with monkeys, Romanian with a gory abortion, and biopic with Tina!

2008-02-05T16:20:00.000-08:00

This past weekend involved a lot of movies. Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness on Friday night with Miriam and Nick; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days on Saturday night with Miriam and Andy; and What’s Love Got to Do With It, crashed out at home on Sunday night. Impossible to rank or compare the three. Saturday was also supposed to include a Bert Williams double short with commentary at MoMA, but Miriam and Andy and I waited on the uptown A/C/E platform at 14th Street for a long time before wondering if something was amiss, then we walked all the way to the other end of the platform to read the ONE SIGN explaining that the E was running on the V from West Fourth, and by then it was pretty much too late. But we’d been dubious anyway, since it was two shorts introduced by someone who’d just written a book, for a total of a 75 minute program comprised of about a half hour of film and a lot of talking. The odds of the speaker being fabulous were slim, and the odds of her being awful were pretty good. I think the Jim Henson showcase at BAM was probably the only incredible program like that that I’ve ever been to--but of course, that was Jane Henson, Jerry Nelson, Carroll Spinney, and Jerry Juhl!!!* Big Bird vs. someone who wrote an academic book about a long-dead vaudville performer? So we went to the IFC Center and saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, an incredibly disturbing fabulous Romanian movie about an illegal abortion. About as far from a Bert Williams double feature as you could get.

What’s Love Got to Do With It was as amazing as Tiara promised it would be, and brings my recent library-sponsored in-house musician biopic festival to an end: Ray, Walk the Line, and Ms. Turner.* (Plus I’m Not There, which was not library-sponsored or in-house and may not count, being too meta or something.)

But Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness was… not the best of the three, nor the most entertaining, but… the biggest. A 1927 silent, accompanied by the fabulous Alloy Orchestra, it was almost a PBS special but not at all, or maybe it was the first original super-dramatic savage PBS special starring faux Laotians (played by Laotian actors, living a weird western vision of native life in the jungle in Thailand in the 1920's). The guy who introduced it said that directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack set out to make a “new kind of documentary” with Chang; “we’d call it fiction.” The same team made King Kong in 1933, and there does appear to be some kind of progression there.

I realized about half an hour into Chang that this probably would have been the first time most of the original audience would ever have seen live footage of so many animals, which explains why there’s so much of it. The mother of the family central to the plot (Chantui, according to IMDb) seems to have much more affection for Bimbo, the family’s pet monkey, than she has for her infant child. This could reflect western views about Laotian people, but more likely is just an excuse for more wildlife. That's what it seems like, anyway. The movie actually doesn’t venture too much into “savage” stereotypes, although we noted that the intertitles reflected the weird language of “savages” everywhere, including spaghetti westerns and Dr. Who aliens: lots of “O my brothers” and “O chief.” There were also plenty of seemingly random (though of course very deep) Buddha references sprinkled throughout. However, it was NOT Broken Blossoms;*** the Asian characters actually all appeared to be genuinely Asian! And they weren't stupid, or conquered, which was nice. The whole movie tried hard to focus on the relationship between Man and Nature, and it hit some good notes, in between the gratuitous animal footage.

So yeah—too much animal footage. The advertised elephant stampede and their preliminary travels are endless, although the baby elephant is cute. There are also too many tigers and leopards. Plus there is a mama bear and a baby bear, an anteater and a baby anteater, animals upon animals upon animals. It is a drama of the wilderness, I suppose. So many monkeys swinging around in trees, picking fleas off each other, knocking down coconuts… not a movie I need to see again, but I’m glad I saw it.

Now I’m going to read a book.

* the Jim Henson stuff is touring now!

** by the way--wikipedia's list of biopics is remarkable.

*** Broken Blossoms:

Lisa is over Kara Walker

2008-01-31T16:17:00.000-08:00

Too fried (and lazy?) to actually sit here and write like I said I was going to, I have been checking Facebook status updates, and then Lisa's effectively kept me procrastinating: "Lisa Alison Thompson is officially OVER Kara Walker and her 'imagined' reality. I've had enough...quit haunting me with your gap ad." So I go to YouTube, and there are no results for "Kara Walker Gap Ad," but searching just "Kara Walker" brings up a bunch of stuff including "mica's dance":

which actually even sort of makes me appreciate Ms. Walker more than I have been (after going to the show twice, first by myself, and then with the cranky Ms. Tompkins and the perpetually crankier LJ). But no Gap ad. However, there is another video on YouTube entitled, simply, "I Love Kara Walker," which would be painful except for the contrast--& okay, it is still painful:

It's almost too easy to embed videos off of YouTube. But it also one of the biggest joys of a blog, far as I can tell. Especially for someone like me who clearly, vis a vis my previous post, doesn't really get how to do this or why or something like that. I like zines better, being the old-fashioned girl that I am. Except that this is easier, no folding or mailing or visits to the post office. Plus, like I said, you can embed video.

But Lisa--are you making this Gap ad shit up? Is this me being obtuse and you have a better deeper sense of humor than me? Plus I'm a white girl so I just can't get it?

HELLHOLE

2008-01-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading HELLHOLE: The Shocking Story of the Inmates and Life in the New York City House of Detention for Women, by Sara Harris. Published in 1967 and very out of print, I came across this book when I went to the Jefferson Market library with my friend Erica, who hadn’t been there before. I gave her a tour, and in the basement, we spent some time exploring the Reference Collection of books about New York. An excited research librarian asked if we were doing research. We said no, just browsing—but we were browsing enthusiastically, showing each other pictures out of different books, reading each other bits, so he got in on the action and started telling us about some of his neglected favorites.

He pulled HELLHOLE off the shelf, “the only copy left in the NYPL system,” he told us, and read us the first sentence: “This book begins, logically, on February 20, 1965, when two eighteen-year-old girls, Andrea Dworkin, a Bennington College freshman, and Lisa Goldrosen, a student at Bard College, were dispatched to the New York City House of Detention for Women following their arrest in a peace demonstration at the United States Mission of the United Nations.”

We talked for a while, and he made the mistake of telling us that if we saw anything we wanted to read, he’d be happy to loan it to us, since these books are just going unread and unappreciated. So I walked out with HELLHOLE. Then I actually had to read it.

The New York City House of Detention for Women, referred to by inmates quoted in the book as “the House of D.,” was next door to the Jefferson Market Courthouse (same building as the library, different function) at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street in the West Village. There’s a great picture of it here. If you scroll down, it’s the picture captioned "Sixth Avenue, Northwest from West 8th Street and Greenwich Avenue, 1938," and the House of D. is the building foregrounded with Sixth Avenue and the elevated line in front of it, and Jefferson Market (the one with the tower) in the background. It's apparently the world’s only “Art Deco” prison, at least according to the internet.

Anyway the book is a piece of work. I’m curious to find out something more about Sara Harris, whose own “acquaintance” with the House of D. began in 1957 and consisted of four months working there as a social worker while researching Cast the First Stone, a book on prostitution in New York. HELLHOLE is part history of the prison, part case study of prisoners, and part social examination of the role of prisons in American society. The case studies are the best part, starting with a chapter titled “Here Are Vera and Me in the Nude When He Pulls Out His Badge,” about:

Name-Joyce Krans (Kranjewski)
Age-20
Education-Elementary School. Some High School
Marital Status-Single
Number of Times in the House of Detention for Women-Five. Has Four Sentences for Prostitution and One for Possession of Narcotics.

Joyce has blue eyes and straight blond hair, and is the daughter of a coal miner from Pennsylvania who lost his job when the mine closed. They moved to New York City when she was eleven, and it was all downhill for Joyce from there.

Harris also tells the stories of Bertha, Cora May, and Cindy Green, ages 46, 31, and 16, respectively, drawing some fascinating conclusions about women, specifically African-American women, citing such sources as her own primary research, Frazier’s Negro in the United States, and Kardiner and Ovesey’s The Mark of the Oppression. She notes that Dr. Lionel Ovesey and Dr. Abram Kardiner are “doubtless the two people in America today who are best acquainted with the terrible effects on Negro men and women of the reversal of roles between the sexes” due to their five-year psychodynamic study. She quotes them as attributing “the confusion of sexual and social roles among Negroes” to “’the arduous emotional conditions under which the arduous emotional conditions under which the Negro in America is obliged to live.’”

The book is impressively dated and well-intentioned. She also quotes Ovesey and Kardiner as saying that “’The defects of adaptation…together with their social sources, make a dismal picture of human misery, one for which it is hard to find a parallel. However, in spite of its defects when compared to white standards, we must not forget that, in the face of such hardships, it is a heroic achievement to be able to adjust and survive.’” And finally, “’The psychosocial expressions of the Negro personality that we have described are the integrated end products of the process of oppression. Can these be changed by education of the Negro? The answer is, no. They can never be eradicated without removing the forces that create and perpetuate them. Obviously, Negro self-esteem cannot be retrieved, nor Negro self-hatred destroyed as long as the status is quo. What is needed by the Negro is not education, but re-integration. It is the white man who requires the education. There is only one way that the products of oppression can be dissolved, and that is to stop the oppression.’”

Harris continues with a case study of Molly McGuire, 74-year-old Irish immigrant who grew up in “’the bloody oul’ Sixth Ward,’ the Five Points Area [which Nick and I think is probably officially Chinatown now, not too far from East Broadway], then and a long time earlier known as the most grisly neighborhood in the city, occupied mainly by descendants of Negro slaves, Irish immigrant families like Molly’s, and petty criminals whom Molly still designates by the names with which she first learned to identify them: ‘cats’ or ‘gooks’—the small-time madams she presently meets in the House of Detention; ‘bats or owls’—streetwalkers who work at night; ‘griffs’—young thieves, and ‘gips’—old ones.”

I have been writing an essay about Horatio Alger and how my knowledge of New York City as a child was based on his novels about street kids living here in the late 1800’s. Molly McGuire would have come to New York City in 1901, two years after Alger died, but she would have moved to the same Five Points in which many of his books were set, and basically become one of the kids he wrote about—though he wasn’t interested in girls, particularly, in any sense—and his moral tales could never have included young prostitutes like Molly, a “waitress-prostitute” first at De Vito’s Minetta House on Minetta Street in Greenwich Village from age twelve to sixteen, and then at the Bowery Glad House until she was twenty and too old. Besides, no Alger hero or heroine ever ended up on Skid Row. But Five Points would have been the same, whether the character fits into an Alger novel or not, and I realize now that most wouldn’t have. Harris describes the McGuire family apartment “on Water Street, the grisliest street in Five Points” as a “tiny, practically airless cellar room inadequately partitioned off from the larger cellar which contained fifteen bunks which were let out to both permanents and transients of either sex.”

I thought the section on Molly McGuire was one of the most interesting parts of the book, drawing connections between then-current experiences of “Negroes and Puerto Ricans” and earlier experiences of Irish and Italian immigrants, and describing the Bowery of the 1960’s, before luxury hotels and the New Museum. Harris is also detailing the final years of the people and the world that Alger had written about: “Between 1845—when the New York City Police Department was first created—primarily as a means of coping with Bowery derelicts—and 1855, the number of drunk arrests, mostly of Irish men and women, was 100,000. By the 1870’s, the number exceeded 40,000 Irish derelicts a year, and one out of every three arrested was a woman. Irish children as young as eleven years old were arrested in the 1870’s.” Harris continues with a description of the Bowery’s then-current population, a combination of “respectable old people living on their pensions or old age insurance, insane and feeble-minded people, cripples, blind beggars, prostitutes called ‘fleabags’ because they are inclined to be syphilitic, and a few elderly, egocentric Hobohemians.”

The last two case studies are of Louise Johnson, 30, one of the few high-class, college-educated call girls ever to do time in the House of D., and finally, Rusty Bricker, 27: “Every time you see Rusty she just got a haircut. Her mannish-cut red hair is constantly slicked down as tight as she can get it, and she smells of barbershop perfume. She wears new, resplendently bright (orange-brown with traces of yellow) men’s shoes, blue jeans but men’s jeans that button in front, a sickeningly green sweatshirt, and a thick, shaggy army jacket dyed brown in a vain attempt at matching the color of the highly shined shoes. Yet she’s a handsome woman, and would be even handsomer as a man, even though she’s drunk, reeking drunk, most of the time you see her. And she’s a mean alcoholic.”

This is when HELLHOLE gets odd and goes slightly soft porn, two hundred pages in. Harris tells the story of Rusty meeting “eighteen-year-old blond Patricia Mannis who ‘fell in love’ with [Rusty] a year ago when they were both in the House of Detention and who now lives with her in Greenwich Village.” We learn that a bulldyke—especially a “psychopath like Rusty” (and it is implied that bulldyke equals psychopath equals bulldyke) can have “domination over the jail” and “control the officers and the inmates.” After all, “they would seem to be more intelligent to anyone who holds shrewdness and secretive cunning and calculating canniness to be components of intelligence.” Harris describes Rusty as “sufficiently well endowed with these attributes” and many others.

In this section, we learn that some of the officers are lesbians! Rusty tells Harris that the first thing she saw when she came into the House of D. was “’Patricia, all that golden hair she’s got.’” But the second thing was “’this officer with red hair. And I thought to myself, you know I know her and I know that she’s gay because I’ve seen her at the Sea Colony, and when she passed by me, she gave me a funny look. Like she recognized me too and was scared. And her eyes, it was like she was begging me not to say what I knew. And I gave her a look back like “You’ll be my slave now and I’ll blow your whole scene if you don’t do what I want.”’”

Rusty tells Harris that intimidating gay officers and threatening to out them “is one way I become king of my floor in whatever jail I’m in. That is one way. And I am always the king, always the leader, in jail and out.” Most of the rest of the book is devoted to Rusty and those of her kind. We learn that Rusty’s mother died when she was only five, and her father was not interested in her upbringing, leaving it to his sister, a cold woman who wore too much jewelry and was always “over-made-up.” At fifteen, Rusty “became involved with Miss Madison, a lesbian teacher in her school.”

Rusty says, “’I first got to know her in gym. She’d always pay more attention to me than to the other girls. Then one thing led to another and we started out kissing, you know. It gradually ended up till we went all the way together. Then, one time, I stayed behind in the gym after everyone else was gone and I wanted her to give up the work to me, you know. But she was afraid. Well, then, she did it anyhow when I kept asking and asking her to.’” They are caught by the janitor and Rusty is pulled out of school, “’But I’d meet her anyhow. I’d sneak out to meet her. What I did, I’d tell my aunt I was going to a girl friend’s house.’"

However, “’Miss Madison wasn’t a straight les, you know. She turned out to be one of those bisexual bitches. And she was involved with this guy at the same time she’s carrying on with me.’” Miss Madison leaves Rusty for a man, so Rusty burns down Miss Madison’s mother’s house, sending her down a long terrible road that will end in the House of D. But first she is sent to a mental hospital where she is diagnosed as a psychopath, and then she goes to a school for delinquents, still only fifteen. “Here she found young girls, like the women in the House of Detention today, who were her natural and logical prey.” Rusty “pitted the girls against the matrons and was even able to pit some of the matrons against one another.” When she is released, she “becomes a vital, sought-after part of the Miami teenage gay crowd,” most of whom are “her acolytes from the moment they met her.”

Rusty survives by “petty pilfering” and, often “femmes and butches, working together, picked up tricks and put on circuses for them.” Rusty did a good bit of this kind of prostituting before she was seventeen.” She says, “Most times the tricks were old. Their dicks went hard watching us and we played with them if they asked us to.” Then she gets arrested for getting back at a trick who “tried to go all the way with me. We let him have it where it’d hurt—his wife.” In the workhouse, she gets “a butch haircut, and when I came out, I went all the way butch—started wearing men’s clothes.” Her father asks her, “’”Have you decided that you want to be a homosexual?”’” She tells him yes, because, as she explains to Harris, “’I had been out with guys a little bit so I knew the score on both sides. I didn’t want to be possessed. I didn’t want them domineering me. I wanted to be the domineerer.’” She leaves home and spends some time with Judy, a femme knockout in Delray Beach, until one night Judy’s mother comes to Rusty and begs Rusty not to see Judy anymore because she is making her gay. Rusty agrees to leave if Judy’s mom will give her “’travel expenses and some bread over.’” This conveniently leads Harris to a discussion of Rusty and other bulldykes “playing” with straight girls in prison, turning them gay and manipulating them, but according to Rusty, Judy had had a crush on Rusty “and was always begging me to come and stay with her,” so it seems that Judy’s mother and Harris seem to be blaming Rusty for something that wasn’t quite her fault—at least not this time.

Before Rusty makes it to the House of D., she spends time in L.A., specifically in Las Palmas where, according to Harris, “the fairies, surveying the streets for someone cute, and the bulldykes, doing the same, take over in the desperate hours after midnight.” In the Las Palmas Coffee shop, “primarily for teen-aged queers and those who want them,” Rusty meets Jenny, a “highly paid prostitute” who “took good care of Rusty for a short while. But like most lesbians outside of jail, she wanted variety in her love life. Once she and Rusty had poured out the intimate details of their lives, Jenny’s interest in Rusty took a nosedive, as did Rusty’s interest in her. She still liked her in bed—on occasion. But Jenny had other bulldykes. And Rusty found other femmes.” (We know that Harris’s expertise on the inner workings of the House of D. come from her four months as a social worker there, but she never explains her expertise or cites sources regarding her knowledge about most lesbians out of jail.)

Rusty's titillating life story goes on and on: “About two weeks after Jenny and Rusty became ‘tight,’ they separated. Rusty began going to private clubs in the hills, up twisting dirt roads where men dance with men, women with women. And to the leather bars with bright-colored murals on their walls, moving pictures of men and women wearing black leather jackets and wrestling realistically, their faces sexually aroused. Here she picked up with femmes and other bulldykes who threw weekend parties, usually planned in an instant on Friday and lasting at least until Monday. You went into locked bedrooms with girls you’d never seen before and stayed for half and hour maybe. And as the door opened to let you out, you glimpsed the girl who was coming to take your place with the one you’d been with.” But Rusty “became disgusted with Los Angeles” and leaves town, ending up in New York where “Rusty came to the ‘meat rack’ of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. This is a place that was recognized long ago as the magnet for lonesome men and women homosexuals from all over.”

Eventually Rusty ends up in the House of D., and at this point, Harris shifts the focus to a discussion of power structures among inmates within the prison, and another thirty pages of details about lesbian relationships in the House of D. This may further her cause of closing the House of D. and ending these abhorrent practices or it may not. Harris does say later, in another context, that “the colorful Rustys have a fascination that drab women, like the majority of those who land in the House of Detention, find hard to resist,” and that might explain the amount of space she devotes to them. However, Harris discusses Rusty’s “fascination” in the context of her argument that “the Rusty Brickers can—and sometimes do—hurt their ‘turned-out femmes’ irreparably. The femmes may be ruined for a life of heterosexuality.”

Harris starts Chapter 10, “I Love You, Baby, for Cigarettes and Candy,” by informing the reader that “the ‘hustle,’ the ‘racket,’ is closely intertwined with the patterns of homosexuality and the homosexual hierarchy in the institution.” She tells us that “The ‘racket,’ except in rare instances, is organized and controlled by the most masculine-oriented among the women, ‘bulldykes’ or ‘stud broads’ like Rusty, who are practicing homosexuals in the world outside the jail. The ‘stud broads,’ when they are outside the institution, often ‘mac’ it or dress in men’s clothes. It is possible to ‘mac’ it within the jail with only one item of ‘drag’—men’s undershirts, which are meant for imprisoned men and are made in the sewing factory and smuggled out by the inmates who work there. In addition to the ‘stud broads’ who dress in ‘drag,’ there are others who, like Rusty, can ‘take or leave drag clothes, not have to depend on clothes to make the man, you know. You can show what you are by the way you stand and sit and smoke your cigarettes.’”

We learn that “doubtless the greatest single affection among the ‘stud broads’ in the House of Detention is the close-cropped men’s haircut, ranging from a practical crew to the popular ‘Duck’s Ass.’ Since the House of Detention regulations forbid inmates to cut their own hair (they must request haircuts from the small beauty parlor specializing in frilly femme hairdos), desperate bulldykes steal razors or break light bulbs and use the ragged edges for giving themselves haircuts. In 1965 twelve bulldykes were punished for known infractions involving the pilfering of razors and the breaking of light bulbs.”

Harris explains that “The femmes, whose status, as in the world outside, depends on their physical attractiveness, are, with rare exceptions, definitely below the bulldykes in the hierarchical system. But they are, far and away, superior to the unaffiliated inmates. Except for the few of the unaffiliated who are so good-looking or whose crimes on the outside are so impressive the other inmates must respect them no matter what, it is only good sense to join the racket out of opportunism if not desire. Therefore, many inmates who are not practicing homosexuals outside the jail, and who, in fact, are repelled by homosexuality, seek it out here. They are known as ‘j.t.’s,’ jailhouse turnouts.”

“Rusty Bricker and the other confirmed lesbians are, on the whole, mistrustful and contemptuous of jailhouse turnouts. Being old-timers and well versed in prisoner and prison psychology, they know, within themselves, that many ‘turned out’ femme inmates, no matter how seriously in love they are with women while they are in the jail, will revert back to heterosexuality once men come on their horizon again. True homosexuals (whether or not they are psychopaths like Rusty) have, therefore, in truth, and certainly in their own minds, every reason for feeling vindictive and resentful toward inmates who ‘play’ in prison, rather than entering relationships as they themselves do because, as Rusty says, ‘Once you have a woman, really have her, you’ll never want a man again.’ And their vindictiveness and resentment enable them to use the turnouts for sexual outlet when it serves their purpose and for opportunistic and political reasons when those are appropriate.”

It would seem that “j.t.’s” are using people for opportunistic and political reasons as well. Not to mention sexual outlet. But what do I know. However, Rusty “constantly emphasizes” that “’These femmes are one kettle of fish, and Patricia is another. Because femmes in jail, except for some like my Patricia, aren’t worth your little finger because they won’t be any good on the outside, no matter if they do behave right here.’” Harris explains that “When Rusty talks of ‘behaving right’ in homosexual terms, she is not talking of one woman’s being sensually aroused by another, or of kissing, hand-holding, or embracing when these actions are not followed by overt sexual behavior. She is talking of relationships between two women involving, at the very least, kissing and fondling of breasts and genitals as well as apparent intercourse.” [Not a statement I’m even going to try to parse.] However, she continues that “Actually, some jailhouse turnouts are so moved by the sexuality they experience in jail that they change their sexual patterns after they leave jail. This is particularly true among the few inmates who turn out to be bulldykes instead of femmes. Some of them, like twenty-nine-year-old Florence Somers, actually ‘discover’ themselves in the jail.”

For more details, including the stories of j.t. Linda Lewis, an exotic dancer, and her butch, Topper; eighteen-year-old Jean Fontana and her butch Tony, who reminded Jean of her brother Joe; Dorothy Blue and her bulldyke Mickey Loeb; and Mary Thomas and Big Time Reed (who made Mary feel good: “I made her feel better than a man”), you’ll have to track down HELLHOLE for yourself. There is also a whole chapter devoted to “the true story of the relationship of Knocky Nelson and Lucky Lopez,” officer and prisoner, including a fascinating anecdote about how Lucky discovered she was gay at fifteen when her father brought her to a whorehouse and told her to wait downstairs while he went up with one of the whores. There happened to be “this cute whore there, she wasn’t any young chick exactly, but she pulled Lucky up the stairs with her and took her to bed. And that, says Lucky, was the last time in her life she ever played femme and let anybody give up the work to her. From that day on, she knew herself to be a dyke and she was the one who gave the work up to other girls.” [Another statement I will not attempt to parse—though it seems to me to run counter to most of what I thought I understood about butch/femme relationships…?]

The tragic story of Lucky and Knocky, including Lucky’s final dismissal of Knocky as one of those “jerked-up femmes” who deserves to spend the rest of her life in the House of D. because she is “too weak and sick to live on the outside” leads Harris nicely into her final chapter equating this cruel dismissal with Lucky’s psychopathy, and implicating us all by reminding us that “unfortunately, the citizens of New York and their elected representatives, through their inaction over the years, have done as Lucky would have them do,” namely cursed the poor women of New York City by dooming them to an existence in a hellhole. Her concluding sentence is a doozy: “The House of Detention for Women, as the life stories of Joyce Kranjewski, Bertha, Cora May, and Cindy Green, and Molly McGuire prove, will not be changed from the hellhole it is today—no matter where or how elegantly it is eventually housed—until the City Departments of Health, Welfare, and Hospitals take upon their shoulders the responsibilities they’ve been sloughing off—until the great city of New York, instead of resting content when its poor people are out of sight in jail mobilizes all its resources to attack the terrible poverty in its midst.”

Millions

2008-01-25T19:29:00.001-08:00

I watched Millions tonight after my root canal, having gotten it from the libary when Renee recommended it during a conversation about my trip to Lourdes and our mutual fascination with apparitions of the Virgin Mary and assorted other saints. Early on Millions had hints of cute-orphan-kid-life-lessons, but then it got weird and terrific and transcended that. Scary, really funny, true about grief and loss, and our Virgin Mother isn't in it but Joseph is, as well as Saints Anne, Nick, Peter, Clare, Ambrosio, Francis (of Assisi), and assorted martyrs. Plus our hero is in a "Nativity Play" (since the movie is charming and Irish--if it were American, he'd be in a Christmas pageant).

Huge plot elements also happen to be structured around the change from pounds to Euros.* It's a movie so much about money, and greed, and this could be as trite as cute-orphan-kid, but the closing scene manages to be one of the funniest white-people-bringing-hope-to-the-poor-people-of-Africa moments EVER. Maybe the only [intentionally] funny white-people-bringing-hope-to-the-poor-people-of-Africa moment ever? Probably not. But it is the perfect way to end the film, in large part because if it had ended with me weeping over orphan kid's dead mother, I would not have loved it nearly so much.

*Rana and I were actually in Ireland when that happened, randomly.

Eavesdroppings, etc.

2008-01-22T13:57:00.000-08:00

I had a diaryland page a few years ago that was all things I overheard or observed in NYC. Since then, I've been putting these into text messages and I did one tiny zine with a few of them, but mostly they've been waiting for me to do something with them. Something like this. So here's (some of) the backlog, including a couple guest observations:

seen on the L out to Rockaway Blvd:
White guy, Adidas shirt over Polo t-shirt, fake Jordans, Catholic bracelet of saints, Yankees hat still with the sticker on it, and a walkman that plays cassette tapes! He pulls out an assortment of tapes from his backpack, including Dolly and a Rhino guitarist comp, passes over Dolly (based on the photo? he doesn’t seem to be familiar with any of them) in favor of the Rhino comp, and you can tell he is really feeling the guitars.

Text from Constance: I wish you could hear the conversation that’s going on at the table next to mine at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Three middle-aged men developing a business plan for a brothel.

Overheard in Bushwick: “And when they built the BQE? Well, it went right through our house!”

Text to Megan: Across from me on the train either a really pretty boy or a really hot somebody.

Text to Lauren: Broadway Junction: Dark-skinned, solidly built guy with cornrows, maybe 35-40, wearing a big t-shirt with a painting of a teddy bear playing ice hockey. No indications of irony.

Woman on the train across from me, one word tattooed in the middle of her perfect slender 22-year-old upper arm, inch high script: SEXY. [I'm thinking about that arm at 73.]

Older Latina lady on the train, carefully made up, hair brushed back, dressed for work in jeans she hemmed herself, a black polo shirt, and a purple sweatshirt with a cartoon of a kid playing electric guitar.

from Rachel: So I’m in the midwest of course and in Madison someone tagged the bus station--they’ve written their little, I don’t know, gang or posse name, or even just their own name, but they wrote it on the bus schedule and did it in such a way that they didn’t obscure any of the info. It was obvious that they tried to do this and I thought it was so cute!

Michael and Janet and Miss Dunham

2008-01-19T08:41:00.000-08:00

Last night at Walter Reade, Yumi and I saw a program titled "Pop Video Artists and Hollywood Influence" which I vaguely knew would be about the connection between Hollywood and pop music. Searching the "Dance on Camera 2008-Film Society of Lincoln Center" site today I found a more thorough description,* but going into it I had no idea what to expect. It was fabulous. Curated and with minimal and intelligent commentary by Armond White (he wasn't excited to be up there with a mic hearing himself talk; it really was about the footage, and he knew his shit), the program featured, in this order:

"Jam" (Michael, 1992)
West Side Story, "Prologue" (1961)
"Beat It" (Michael, 1983)
Cabaret, "Mein Herr" (1972)
"What Have You Done for Me Lately?" (Janet, 1986)
Stormy Weather, Cab Calloway performing "Geechy Dan" (1943)
"Alright" (Janet, 1991)
The Band Wagon, "The Girl Hunt Ballet" (1953)
"Smooth Criminal" (Michael, 1987)
Singin' in the Rain, "Singing in the Rain" (1952)
"Black or White" (Michael, 1991)

I hadn't seen the video for "Alright" in probably fifteen years, definitely not since I'd seen Stormy Weather, and I was amazed by how closely the set in the video matches the outdoor set in Stormy Weather. I also didn't realize, until watching "What Have You Done for Me Lately," that Janet's dancing and Paula's choreography of course have more influenced my own dancing than Katherine Dunham's technique ever will--since I have owned "Control" since I was nine, and I grew up on MTV, but didn't discover Dunham until college.

However, my first exposure to Cab Calloway came early--Yumi didn't know what I was talking about (she's 25) but Nick is my age, and when I said, "You remember Cab Calloway on Sesame Street, right?" he just nodded.

*http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/doc08/program14.html [yes, my ideas about writing and presentation of language and ideas are extremely old-fashioned--there are generally no footnotes in blog posts, I suppose. too bad.]

Status Updates Aren't Enough

2008-01-19T08:18:00.001-08:00

I haven't made zines in too long, and I'm teaching sixth grade at a brand new public school, a start-up where we are trying to do everything right and making some impressive mistakes in the process, so the essays (not to mention the stories, not to mention the novels) are not getting written--there are lots of notes, lots of rough drafts, and no time to take them where I want them to go. Since joining Facebook for the online scrabble, I have been spending more time crafting my status updates, fitting what I want into the number of characters allotted--and my text messages read much the same way. So maybe this will serve a function currently going un(der)served. We'll see.