happy winter!

happy solstice, chanukah, xmas, and all that stuff!

i hope it's happy for you, but what follows is kind of sad-ish, so bear with me

i haven't been online because this has been the hardest academic quarter i have had since i was a graduate student. the services and support at ucr are down to nothing, and i worked like a dog just to do the basics for my students in comp lit 17a (87 of em), and german 121 (8 of em). i read someone's dissertation, tried to help people get jobs, go to graduate school, get mfa's, and tried to keep my sanity. it was bad. i wrote hardly at all, and i was beginning to feel that i didn' have anything left to say.

then my stomach stopped working. my stomach hurt all the time, and i went to see a great nutritionist named eve who said "girl you are really messed up!"

i now am eating an almost entirely vegan diet, and i finally wrote a little story called SENIORS AT WAR which I like and makes me happy to think about.

it's weird not to be drugged by coffee or chocolate or wine. it's scary sort of. it's sad alot of the time, because i see what a mess this country is in, and how everyone is dragging the "big september thing" around with them as lilly tomlin says in I heart Huckabees.

two days ago i waited for my daughter to come back from oakland with her new bass guiatar. while i was standing at southwest arrivals i saw the boys coming through in their fatiques and carrying duffel bags. i cried when i saw them. the scalp shining through the stubble of their hair. the awkwardness of the people who came to greet them. pretending to be happy, but just relieved thee boys weren't dead and scared they WOULD be dead next time. but they couldn't say that. so they just things like "ok" and "good" alot. and they made stiff little gestures about getting the bags.

i keep thinking of a rumi poem i memorized because i asked my comp lit students to memorize one, and so i had to do it too. to show them it's like totally possible.

this is how it goes (from memory)

Listen, if you can stand to:
Being with the Friend means not being who you've been,
Being instead silence: a place, a view
Where language is inside seeing.

i have been in the process of not being who i've been for a while now. For 10 years or so, i've been trying to become someone else -- an artist, first of all, but after that, a decent person, an honest person, and a kind person. my wish for this coming year is that i can continue to not be who i've been, and be with silence in order fo find new words to say the things i want to say.

for all of us, i wish peace. and the ability to speak and do what we believe in. and, if we've got it in us, the ability to love despite disappointment. despite the fact that things aren't usually what we hope for, or even what they seem. because the truth is somehow much deeper and stranger than either the disappointment or the appearance. if i could grok and accept that i think i'd be a happier less lonely feeling person.

in a place where language is inside seeing.

here's to getting to that place -- the space of insight and outsight -- in 2006.

love
stephanie

finding richard, carnivale and the tar heels and easter

those tar heels! makes me proud to have gone to Carolina -- the way those girls and boys play basketball!!!! whooheee!

finding richard is an amazing film that really explains both richard iii and why american actors struggle with shakespeare as a dramatist. i think i will teach richard iii in world lit -- it would be a total challenge and something very new and it totally is connected to those dastardly people we have in office. oh yeah and the Iliad, and all the lit i can muster to tell the truth to tell it like it is in this dark time we live in. speaking of which -- carnivale -- what the heck is going on with sophie? i'm mystified. hope the show gets to continue -- it's great fun.

easter. my parents. dyeing easter eggs, going to church, my hat rolling down the street in the insane march wind as my father ran yelling after it -- HOLD THAT FUCKING THING ON YOUR HEAD NEXT TIME (so much for Christian modesty and purity of speech), and walking down 5th avenue afterwards like fred astaire and judy garland. chocolates, the harsh winds of new york spring, kazanzakis' Jesus, a Jew who was a visionary. Leonard Cohen writing about Jesus, "'let all men be sailors then, until the sea shall free them', but he himself was broken, long before the sky was opened. forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.'

but later in the same song there's this:

there are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
they are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
while suzanne holds the mirror

another jew who got that jesus was a rad rabbi who understood that jewishness -- as fab as it is -- isn't enough.

I am also leaning out for love and I will lean that way forever.

school of rock

Lillian and I tuned in for the last hour of SCHOOL OF ROCK. This movie makes me so happy to be a teacher who -- like the Jack Black character -- is only semi-talented but who has so much love for making art and that's what I bring to the table. I am not the smartest person in the room, or the most talented, but I am the person who has the big big love for literature and for making art with words and for anyone anywhere who cares about it. and i have the big amour and the respect for anyone who makes art, be it the groovy groovy guys from CREWEST making graffiti and showing other guys how to make it, or Incredible Erika Suderburg with her plaques and tiny photos and films, or the well known like Aimee or the not so well known like rick peikoff who lives in the little residence hotel near roxbury park and is one of the most incredible guitarists I have ever heard. It's a great feeling -- to not worry about being a genius or about being famous or about being whatever, but to be so very happy and grateful about being part of the conversation, and like victor hugo says, planting my little bricks in the ever growing towering tower of mad babel wordwork. our cathedral -- a temple of words.

teaching is THE BEST

Had such good classes yesterday. I wore my silly green t-shirt and we stayed outside the whole time, and I just LOVE my students at Pitzer -- I really do. They are so smart and special and interesting and they are deeply talented and young and just swell, as my mom and grandfather would say. then i had dinner with my adopted big sister Theda who is so kind and so smart, I just don't know what to do other than thank my lucky stars that I have her in my life. now I am drinking wine and watching X-Men 2, which is spectacular and I love Bruce Davison and the fact that Courtney talked about Willard in class. YAY!

ps -- my daughter Lillian is my favorite person. in the world.

chocolates

if we can have chocolates, we will never die, or if we do we will sail away in gold paper, little wrapped corpses filled with praline and not guts, almonds and not bones. we will tie ourselves up in ribbons and not shrouds, and we will live forever like my mother does, dead for 5 years and my mother in law who died a year ago this coming sunday and who never bought chocolates or anything unless it was on sale or had a coupon, and my dad saying hell, charlotte, if you want it get it, because god knows you can't take it with you. he'd laugh and get another shirt at brooks brothes, buy everyone another drink at the prineton club, where he wasn't a memeber but he kept on sneaking in and paying cash. and wonder of wonders, they made him a member anyway, thought he was a working class norweigan from seattle, and only was a C student at the U of Wash, which wasn't much of a school at the time.

but perhaps you can take them. I gather them up inside myself every day -- my dead family -- as i eat the chocolates and buy the retail, not holding onto it, not that, but letting it melt for a moment on my tongue. all of them -- my mother and my father and my bohemian russian grand-parents, the nutty aristo artistes with their dogs and their big old-fashioned luggage, and my grandmother saying in russian and german and french and italian -- you can't take it with you, but when you hold it for a moment isn't it so very sweetie sweet?

and charlotte will say at last, yes it is sweet and yes i will enjoy it, i will take the gift and live in the lap of at last luxury.

we salute you miss beauty queen of chicago, miss schtetl of 1949. of blessed memory. yes. sweet.

Mr. G rocks

just got finished with our class with tod goldberg, who is a bundle of energy and cuteness and smartness. He really connected with students, and is always unfailing gracious and warm. He had good things to say as well, and I'm thinking I should take both classes over to the library for a session of looking a literary journals. I feel lucky to have such good students and know such great writers who are helpful and kind. Damn it means -- back to work on the novel....

the matrix revolutions -- eeek

yikes that's a bad movie. i mean i find something positive in UNDERWORLD for Pete's sake. heaven's to betsy, as my mother would say, why couldn't we have stayed in the disco with the french guy, the martini olives, and the cute chick with the cleavage? (and of course Carrie Anne Moss -- who is fabulous). ANYTHING is better than that post 60's woodstock gone slightly sparkly and literally underground known as zion or Szion or whatev. my gosh that's a boring place, and yes those robots do look just like the ones in ALIENS. and the end is nonsensical. AWFUL.

on the positive side, it didn't rain today, and it was fun to hang out at home.

mood: yay-ish

got some writing done. i keep on coming back to this UNI story about a college campus which is in a bubble, in a post-apocaplytic kind of world, and the departmental survivors have all formed weird tribe, based on their disciplines. it's a bit insane and not very original (WE meets Riddley Walker meets a short story I read many years ago about a tribesman who goes to the ruins of Manhattan), but it's very fun to work with. rain rain rain. graffiti lecture on saturday. how fun is THAT? parents' day at pitzer was fun.

mood: HUNGRY

this blogging is quite odd... this public private foucaultian wish to confess for a public that one doesn't see. etc. i need more time for writing but i love teaching so much i get completely into it and it takes up all my time and energy except for watching carnivale and ghost in the shell, the series.

my friend gail is going to moscow to talk about schiller. how cool is that?

tod goldberg is coming to talk with my students. i love him. he is so funny and smart and such a great writer and an INCREDIBLE teacher.

the school buses have left and so has the cool, very stretched-out bus driver.

i am giving the parents a quiz in class. i wonder what they will think of this. perhaps there will be a parental rebellion -- which might be a very fine thing, actually.

i must eat food.

mucho work

much work to do. my idea for the uni project keeps prickling at me.... is it a novel or a short story? not sure. parents' day tomorrow at Pitzer. I can't remember if we had parent's day at Smith. we must have. my parents never came. i'm not sure whether i like that or not. hmm. i think it's ok actually. they wanted me to have my space in college. they certainly came to graduation and the dog jumped out of the window of the moving car when he saw me. awww.

5 yellow school buses lined up in front of the orthodox synagogue around the corner. the bus driver doing stretching exercises while all the kids' parents mobbed the starbucks. madness with cups and lids while the driver, calmly sticks one leg out and puts it on top of the mailbox, bends over. calm. bus drivers were never this groovy in my day.

first bloggish entry

Lillian has done an amazing job on my website. I love Cafe Psycho. The whole thing inspired a very weird piece called the professors are fighing. Not sure what I will do with it. We'll see.

The 5 dollar flannel pj pants are back at savon and this is important. it is also important that nivea soft, which I had to buy in France, is now buyable state side. this too is a lovely thing.

the thunder last night scared me. it seemed louder and somehow not as sharp but rather more apocalypic than usual.

I have a new character for my novel project. that is all. xoxo stephanie