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.