C'est la fin (du terme/quartier)

The quarter has barreled towards its end and I am now in recovery mode, having felt more than a little flattened beneath it. At a certain point I had to impose mental triage and this blog, unfortunately, lay moribund on the gurney.  In addition to my usual commuting routine and a heavy traveling schedule from the very beginning of the year (classes began on January 3, and I had to attend a conference that first weekend) and to an exacting departmental committee assignment and my fulfilling and demanding graduate and undergraduate advisory and supervisory work, as well as delightful non-work-related projects, like the Roussel play, I taught two classes, the gateway introductory fiction workshop and a required course for senior creative writing majors.  Both demanded a tremendous amount of effort, mainly because of the mountain of reading (I assign multiple initial exercises, online threaded discussions on assigned texts, two short story drafts, and one revision in the intro fiction class, and in the senior class, I require a creative autobiography, weekly tweets on Twitter, a book review, a creative essay on one of six books I assign, an in-class report on one of the many articles I post, and a final paper or interview-with-analysis), but one of the immediate pleasures of both is being able to witness the development of the students' tools, artistry and confidence in the former, and the mastery of skills in the latter.  What was true for previous intro fiction classes seemed even more so for this one; a number of the students made evident imaginative and technical leaps in second drafts, which made me nearly start cheering every time I registered this as I read them. I always try to point this out in my typed comments, and sometimes I worry the students may think I'm being too enthusiastic and praiseworthy, but it is heartening to see a student whose first story tacking closely to her autobiography imagining, in her second draft, the lives of people much older, or different, or from a very different chronological period, and structuring the story with greater assurance, understanding how to create characters who come to life on the page, realizing what details will unlock the narrative in ways others would not, and so forth. As I read the final drafts this past week and weekend, what struck me repeatedly was how far some of the students had gotten, how much they had grown, how, in every case, they advanced--have advanced--beyond their earliest efforts, the tiny 1-3 page exercises, they first submitted to me in January.

With the senior majors, one of the most important things I left with was a feeling of hope for the future of literature, and hope and happiness for their own future projects and work, in and around the literary world. At various points this course left some graduating students with a mild--to serious--sense of gloom about the changing US literary landscape, but this year, perhaps because so much remains in the air--and poet and Northwestern University Press rights manager Parneshia Jones reminded our class during her wonderful visit that in the publishing industry as in life "things change every single day"--and so many tools are now available to writers, editors, potential publishers, all of us, more than one of the students told me that they felt "hopeful," that they could make a difference, that they would pursue careers as writers of every possible type and genus, as publishers and editors, as scholars and critics, and in roles perhaps not yet fully conceived or named, by anyone, as things moved forward. I am looking forward to seeing what they do, and they know they will have my support always.

For the required senior major class, "The Situation of Writing," I debuted three new books: Dunya Mikhail's Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (Elizabeth Winslow, translator; New Directions, 2009), a memoir (of sorts) in verse, of the Iraqi American poet's life during the Gulf and Iraq Wars; Judith Ortiz Cofer's Woman In Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer and (University of Georgia Press, 2000); and David Shields's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010).  Of the three, I think the one that provoked the least discussion was Mikhail's, perhaps in part because of its form as two long poems, the first more lyric than narrative and quite abstract as opposed to documentary, which required that the students--or any reader--think about what might constitute a "diary," how trauma and personal experience might be recorded and translated into lyric form, and what war poetry, or poetry written during and in response to war, might look like, all of which were challenging, to say the least. That said, the form also proved liberating from some in the class, and led students whose usual approach might have been a prose essay or creative nonfiction to write longer poems as their response.  The formal approaches of Shields' and another book, Adrienne Kennedy's People Who Led To My Plays (Theater Communications Group, 1996), also appeared to have a liberating effect on the creative essays and final projects, so while there were quite a few to read, their inventiveness (alongside their quality) made each a pleasurable task.

I sometimes think a version of the "Situation" class ought to be offered to all MFA, MA and PhD in creative writing students since it broaches many of the topics that writers not only should be thinking about but have to consider if they want to make writing a career, but from what I can tell, such courses remain a rarity. Which is a shame, but it also underlines how unique and unusual the experience the university's writing students, especially the majors, really is, and how much they are exposed to in addition to the extensive training in writing they undergo by the time they graduate.

End of the Quarter + 3 Moleskin Drawings

So much to say but so little time to say it. The quarter is finally over, grades are in, and it is time to thank my students for a great fall. The two classes were a lot of work, but as always I learned as much, more perhaps, as I taught.  One of the joys of teaching a literature course, especially one that you do not teach every year, is reconnecting with the texts in it, and I particularly love any opportunity to teach courses in which I can include work from across genres.

In my African-American literature class, we did read poetry, fiction, plays, essays and talks, and theoretical and critical texts, and we also listened to some music and watched three films to enrich the conversation.  And a conversation it was. I had never before taught Aimé Cesaire's poetry, so it was a new addition, as was the poetry of Bob Kaufman, Stephen Jonas, Ted Joans, Nikki Giovanni, and Carolyn Rodgers.  One new element of the class that I'd never tried before, but which appeared to work well and really engage the students was to have them create or expand Wikipedia pages, using original research, on topics related to the class. This resulted in several new pages and some expanded ones.

In my graduate fiction writing class, it was fascinating and encouraging to see about half the students submitting novel chapters or beginning them, and I hope they all will complete a draft if they can, not only for the experience of writing a novel, but to have something to revise so that they might ultimately be able to publish it. I also took a thematic tack with the readings, which I structured under the rubric of "Writing(s) on the Edge," and we read texts that thematically (for the most part) dealt with limits, barriers and boundaries of various sorts. I returned to assigning a novel for the final text for the term, after several years of critical works, and the students all finished Lionel Shriver's 400+ page, disturbing but unforgettable novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, after having read short stories by Lorrie Moore, Chimananda Ngozi Adiche, Anthony Doerr, and others. They all had purchased the American addition, which included a postscript describing the ordeal Shriver went through to publish the book, whose success utterly reinvigorated her career.  For anyone interested in hearing Shriver discuss the book and her work in general, this 2009 BBC World Book Club podcast is a fine introduction.

Now it's only a few weeks to prepare for the new quarter (which starts January 4) and the MLA conference, continue with my own writing projects, catch up on sleep and emails, and try to read the 10 or so books I've had to put off for the last three months.

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While scanning in texts for the upcoming quarter, I found myself scrolling through my notebooks for specific material for one of the courses, and came across the following Moleskine notebook that, I realized, I'd taken with me to Cuba.  Over the last year I've mostly turned to my iPhone and iPad for drawing, but on this trip, I saw that I had done a bit of sketching, so I scanned in these three pages (one of which was from a later event, the Fire & Ink III: Cotillion conference in Austin, Texas) which included bit of artwork.

I'm most interested in the coffee plantation plan I drew at the top of the right page. I had forgotten about that, but then remembered that my motivation for drawing the layout was because I'd written a story in which I was trying to visualize a Caribbean coffee plantation, and wasn't sure about the spatial layout, though I'd envisioned it pretty close to what it looked like. This map nevertheless allowed me to correct my misimpressions.

One of the museums we visited was the Museum of Literacy.  Images of Fidel Castro, as I need not tell anyone, can be found all over Cuba, but I liked one of the photos of him participating in the literacy campaign, which was one of the Revolution's first post-victory successes, so I drew him in an iconic pose, which he has repeated countless times at rallies throughout the years. The gentleman beneath him is Conrado Benítez, a "mártir de alfabetización," who died at the hands of anti-literacy forces.

This drawing is of a young man who was at the Austin conference. The text surrounding it comprises notes from one of the panels  which, I think, scholar Jafari Sinclaire Allen headed up.  I told him I'd drawn him, but I did not get his name, and so am/was unable to send the drawing to him. Perhaps he'll see this, though it really may not look that much like him, meaning he wouldn't recognize himself in it. Or maybe he might....

The Hiatus

Well, September is nearly over, and I haven't blogged for weeks. A huge part of that has been returning to Chicago and Evanston to teach, part of it derives from ongoing projects (writing, university-related activities, etc.) that have left little time to do anything beyond tweeting, email, and reading others' blogs, and part of it is not being able to keep up with the fast-barreling train of current events, many (most?) of which I want to write about, but.... At any rate, I hope to start blogging a bit more soon.

Board after my first class, Topics in African-American Literature: 20th and 21st Century Black Avant-Gardes, last Tuesday

Classes (Nearly) Over + 2010 FIFA World Cup

Classes have (nearly) come to an end. Or rather, this is the final official week of classes in the College, though I still have one more class to teach next week, during reading week. (We'll be discussing the final three student novellas in workshop.) Now that it's over, I can shout from the blogtops Conceptual Art/Writing class exhilarated me; I feel incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to teach the class, and to have been able to do so with students who were willing to step out, as it became clear, on what sometimes initially appeared to be shifting ice. By which I mean, to be looking at, thinking about and creating work--and whose exemplars--that remain under tremendous contention.  The class served as an intellectual transfusion for me, as it required me to think through a genealogy that was indistinct, but discernible, and put it together, in coherent fashion, for the class, while also making clear that this was only one reading of the history of this constellation of art forms. (It helped too that we have the graduate level Poetry and Poetics Working Group, because its conversations informed those in my class.) Now that I've done it, I feel I have a much clearer and deeper sense of conceptual art's history, its origins and antecedents, and its relation to and phantasmal presence in other canonical and non-canonical artforms. As I was saying to a friend, I feel capable now of reading backwards, before the coining of "conceptual art," to see conceptual practices in many different places and forms. (This was also the first time that I've taught the work of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Goldsmith, Rob Fitterman, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and many others.) The students all created 6-8 projects, grounded in language and its possibilities, and it was a delight to read them, and imagine how the ones containing the possibility of performance might be realized. One student proposed realizing them--performing some of them--during the assigned exam period, so we'll see how that turns out. At any rate, the class, like the other one I'm teaching, represents one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching, which is transmitting knowledge to students, watching them learn, grow intellectually and create knowledge, and learning from them in the process.  And who knows, down the road another Yoko Ono or Marcel Duchamp might emerge from this experience.
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The 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in two weeks, on June 11, running till July 11, in South Africa. This is the most watched sporting event in the world, and this is the first time it'll be held in Africa, with the host country leading a group of 32 national teams, including prior winners England (1966), France (1998), Italy (1934, 1938, 1982, 2006), Germany (1954, 1974, 1990), Brazil (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, 2002), Uruguay (1930, 1950), and Argentina (1978, 1986), and stalwarts such as Netherlands, Japan, Portugal, Mexico, Denmark, Cameroon, South Korea, and, interestingly enough, North Korea. Though the opening matches, pairing South Africa and Mexico, and Uruguay and France, will be held in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively, subsequent matches will be held all over the country, culminating in the third place match at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, and the championship match at Soccer City in Johannesburg.



The 1994 host of the tournament, the United States, will also field a participating team this year, having made it through the qualifying rounds for the North/Central American region to finish first, with 20 points, just ahead of Mexico's 19. The US ended up in the Tournament's Group C, which also includes one of the tournament's best teams, England, but also Algeria, which barely edged into first place in its Africa Group 6 matches, over Gambia and Senegal, and Slovenia, which finished second to Slovakia in its European Group 3. Getting by England (ranked 8th in the FIFA World Rankings) will be the US's (ranked 14th) major challenge, and few online commentators I've read give the US team much--any--chance of achieving this. Yet the US team had one of its best summers in 2009; in the Confederations Cup, the US ended up in Group B, with Brazil, Egypt and Italy, yet after losing to Italy (3-1) and Brazil (3-0), the US came back to finish second in its group, and reached the semifinal on tie-breaking goals, surpassing Italy. In the semifinals the US beat Spain, then atop the FIFA World rankings, 2-0, losing to Brazil in the final 3-2, though they were up 2-0 at half-time, and had the game in hand.  They must capitalize on any leads in South Africa, and do everything they can to keep the ball out of their defensive area, which is where they're far and away weakest.

The 23-person World Cup squad, recently finalized by coach Bob Bradley, comprises a number of veterans from the 2008 campaign, in Germany: star goalie and Everton (English Premier League) mainstay Tim Howard, forwards Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey (above left), midfielders DaMarcus Beasley and Michael Bradley, and defenders Oguchi Onyewu (at right) and Steve Cherundolo. Newcomers include Jozy Altidore (the 20-year-old sensation who scored a hat trick against Trinidad and Tobago in a qualifying game), Robbie Findley (top of article, right), José Francisco Torres, Ricardo Clark, Maurice Edu, and surprise picks Edson Buddle and Herculez Gomez. In a little remarked change, nearly 1/3rd of the US team are black, and 1/2 of the team are either black or latino, a first for the US.  The forward and midfield core are especially strong, and can hang with some of the best teams (except perhaps Brazil, Spain, and Portugal), but the US's defense remains an issue. Unaggressive play and defensive mistakes have doom the US, as does the absence of players competing in the world's top leagues, but the latter has gradually changed, and the US's own major league, the MLS, has gotten stronger with each passing year. If the defensive corps can keep mistakes to a minimum, they do stand a chance with Donovan, Bradley, Altidore, Findley, and Dempsey going hard.

It'll be interesting to see if host country South Africa gets a boost, as has often happened; France (1998), Argentina (1978), Germany (1974, as West Germany), England (1966), and Uruguay (1938) have won the tournament when hosting it, and most recently, Germany finished 3rd in 2006 and South Korea finished 4th in 2002 when serving as hosts.  Moreover, the multibillion-dollar new stadiums and infrastructure the South African government has built have been controversial in a country still suffering from severe gaps in income equality, and the threats of terrorism, violence and crime are also pressing. Just recently, on May 25, the Colombian team, which had not qualified for the tournament, were robbed in their 5-star Johannesburg hotel of about $2600 in money and other personal goods. South Africa has repeated assured visitors that it has security and safety issues under control. Let us sincerely hope they do.

I will be certainly be watching closely and rooting avidly for the US and other teams, including Brazil. My prediction for the finals: Brazil 3, Portugal 2.

1st Day of Classes + Abramovic's Doppelgänger + Right Wing Liars & Code Pink

Returning to teaching after a short break is always easier than after a long(er) one. I'll say no more about my classes for now except that my performance of John Cage's 4'33", which I improvised on/using my computer (projecting the keyboard onto the hanging screen), and followed by giving students a double-sided copy featuring the first two versions of the score (cf. below) on one side and Cage's original commentary about the piece, along with a series of questions I sought to have the students answer at that moment and without a lot of thought, appeared to go over well. It also was the first musical performance I've given since adolescence (band).

What a quarter this ought to be.

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Speaking of conceptual art performances, I would have paid double to see this particular Marina Abramovic performance at the Met: what began this past Saturday, March 27, 2010, as another day of Abramovic's reprise of her marathon sitting-still-in-silence performance, "The Artist Is Present," turned into something quite different, when a young woman wearing her hair in a black knot over her shoulder, just like Abramovic, and dressed in a long blue caftan, like Abramovic, took her place across from Abramovic and, to the bemusement, awe, consternation, and surprise of other attendees, proceeded to mirror Abramovic's performance with a remarkable one of her own. She did not speak, she did not move, she did not nod off or rise to use the bathroom or anything else: for the rest of the day, she matched Abramovic's presence with her own, leaving only when the gallery closed and guards politely ushered her out.



The performer: Brooklyn-based artist Anya Liftig. The performance? "The Anxiety of Influence," a title she took from the eponymous book by critic Harold Bloom. Why did she do it? She explains her rationale and her motives to Tatiana Berg at Bomblog.  A quote:

I did feel like a transgressor but I love the subtle art of subversion—playing with ideas from the inside out. As I was sitting there, I felt like that was one of the strongest elements of Marina’s piece. She is attempting to “interact” with the audience, but really, the endeavor for empathy is one of implicit sadness, as we connect and miss one another. It is not meant to be read at face value. It also brings up the role of the artist, how they connect on an individual, emotional level with others when they are constantly being observed and commented upon by the masses held at bay by the guards.

(I'll let Liftig speak for herself, but this reminds me of Yoko Ono's famous "Cut Piece," to give one example, and the marvelous unpredictability of performance, particularly of the conceptual sort, and the role, with all its attendant possibilities and dangers, that other participants can play.)

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As for playing games with serious, grave consequences, and the disinformation campaign that currently plagues our political discourse, here's at least part of the reason why (the "mainstream" media are also a huge part of the problem):



(h/t via Digby)

As to confronting liars and criminals, Code Pink took some direct action this weekend, confronting fascistic propagandist Karl Rove as he attempted to spew his mendacities, now packaged as a "memoir," in southern California. Guess what? He fled.



(h/t via Crooks and Liars)

The 2nd Last Class of Quarter + Split This Rock Festival

Last week marked my second "end of the quarter," because the graduate schools' classes run an extra week, so after saying goodbye to my class of senior undergrads a week ago, I unfortunately had to reprise this on Wednesday with my smart and talented group of graduate fiction students.  This quarter I tried to loosely structure the readings along a trajectory that ran from very short (we began with microfictional stories by Melanie Rae Thon and Amy Hempel) to near-novella-length (our final story was Haruki Murakami's "Honey Pie"), and from realism (cf. Thon and Hempel above) to works that included elements of or were outright SFF (Nalo Hopkinson's long story "Under Glass" represented the culmination of this). For the last two weeks of the quarter I like to have the students read either a novel or a theoretical book, so this year I returned to James Wood's excellent though somewhat prescriptive treatise How Fiction Works (FSG, 2008), which, from what I could tell, the students found beneficial.  Throughout all my classes this quarter I taught the work of a number of authors I've never tried before, and they appeared to go over well. These include Jason Epstein, Percival Everett, Amy Hempel, Cristina Henríquez, Fanny Howe, George Saunders, Muriel Spark, Melanie Rae Thon, and Wells Tower.  Of course teaching new texts equals added work, but part of the joy of assigning new materials is that doing so requires that I must also read and think about different authors, styles, texts, than I've become used to. One of the other benefits of these new works is hearing the students' thoughts on them. The undergraduates' and graduate students' in-class commentary, critical papers and annotations, and creative responses, all served to illuminate these works in new ways for me.  Next quarter I'll be teaching works by authors I haven't before introduced into the classroom, including Vito Acconci, John Cage, Don Delillo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nathalie Stephens/Nathanël, and Andy Warhol, among others, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes over.

I do wish our break was longer, though, because it represents the only time that my mind gets a breather, and I'll have opportunity not only to read a bit for pleasure and leisure, and rejuvenation, but for my own work as well. Writing while teaching multiple fiction classes is always tough, and the abrupt return in January was even tougher than the usual post-summer transition. But such is the teaching life.

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I returned early this morning from my short visit to Washington to attend the Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation of Witness 2010, and I'm very glad I was invited to participate and able to attend.  The festival, first conveived in 2003 by poets opposing the Iraq War, and held for the first time as a full event in 2008, spanned 4 days and included readings, panels and workshops, a book fair, film screenings, and performances, and took place at venues throughout DC's U Street Corridor, including Busboys and Poets bookstore; the Thurgood Marshall Center; and the True Reformer Building; and in the Columbia Heights & Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, including Marx Café, Bell Multicultural High School, and the Dance Institute of Washington.  It even included a public cento, read aloud on Thursday at Upper Senate Park, to call attention to the misuse of public funds for war instead of for public education, health care for all, jobs, and other socially vital uses, that began with lines quoted from Adrienne Rich's  poem, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," from that eponymous collection. One of the things I loved about this conference was its atmosphere of political and social commitment, its very different cross-section of attendees from other poetry conferences (like AWP, for example), and the community-based venues. Also, with the focus not on networking or job-hunting but on social activism, people here (as at Adfempo, for example) related to each other on a very different, more relaxed basis.

My main contribution was contributing to a panel discussion that Reggie H. organized on the theme of Black LGBTQ Literary History and its relation to social activism. Other panel participants included poets Lenelle Moïse and Jericho Brown; Cheryl Clarke, one of the most important black lesbian poets of the last 30 years, was scheduled to join us but wasn't able to make it.  The panel tackled a number of issues, including the politics of our work and our work as political art; the ways in which we saw ourselves engaging in social activism; the question of non-traditional aesthetics and Black/queer literary canons; and dialoguing across boundaries. As part of my commentary, I drafted remarks towards a paper on "Translation as Activism," which I hope to complete and publish somewhere, and in the process of conducting research for it, I learned about the Translation and Activism: First International Conference, which occurred in 2007, at the University of Granada, Spain, and from which came a very important document, the Granada Declaration, concerning the necessity and importance of engaged, ethical, global translation and interpretation practice.

Our panel: Jericho, Lenelle & Reggie (Thomas Sayers Ellis, our photographer, at far right)

Tying the question of translation and/as activism back to Black LGBTQ literary history in particular, I cited the example of queer literary forefather and culture worker Langston Hughes, whose translations included the work of 3 quite significant literary figures during his lifetime: Federico García Lorca's play Bodas de Sangre, in 1933, 3 years before the great, gay Republican Spanish poet would be assassinated by right-wingers; Haitian anti-colonialist writer Jacques Roumain's novel Gouverneurs de la rosee (Masters of the Dew) in 1947, with writer Mercer Cook; and Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén's work, in the 1948 volume Cuba Libre, with Ben Frederic Carruthers. I went on to point out how in so doing Hughes was extending lines of dialogue and shaping discourse transnationally and transculturally, but also how his translations functioned as forms of social, political and literary activism. I also noted the work of Melvin Dixon, who devoted a great deal of his short life to translating the complete poems of one of the founders of Négritude, the poet, politician and activist Léopold Sédar Senghor, to suggest a more recent example.

Though we were an early panel (9:30am on a Saturday), at Busboys and Poets, an excellent independent bookstore I hadn't visited in years, we had good attendance, with a lively and responsive audience, and the fine fortune of having poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, one of the poets I've known longest, but also an accomplished photographic artist, take our individual and session photos.  Among the stellar roster of folks who came out to hear us were Redbone Press publisher Lisa C. Moore, fellow CCers Tara Betts, Randall Horton and Holly Bass, as well as Dan Vera, and Gretchen Primack, whom I got to talk to at length, a little later, about translation. I was very glad that Reggie conceived the panel and brought us together.  Afterwards, as I had the day before, I got to hang out with my very dear friend artist Victor Hodge, who probably should have been on a panel himself, given the thrust of much of his work.

Alicia Ostriker, Melissa Tuckey, Diana García, and Patricia Smith

After our panel I headed with Reggie and Lisa to hear the reading and discussion by poets affiliated with the brand-new volume Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing. (Despite the title, it has no links to the Fire & Ink Black LGBTQ group, which used this name first, or the three conferences they've organized.) Among the poets in the anthology who read were Patricia Smith, who as always performed a poem, without recourse to a text, that made me go "Wow!"; Martín Espada, whom I've known and admired since my Dark Room Writers Collective days; Alicia Suskin Ostriker, whose name I've heard for years but whom I'd never seen read; Melissa Tuckey; and two of the co-editors, Diana García, the author the American Book Award-winning collection When Living was a Labor Camp; and Frances Payne Adler.  Each read a poem from the book, and then talked about their experiences teaching social action writing, to students of all ages, and in various venues, from prisons to universities. Hearing each of their accounts, what struck me was how their political and social visions strongly shaped not just what they taught, but who and how they taught this material. What I also thought, as I have many times before, about was how the college and university setting is valorized as a site for teaching poetry, but how it constitutes only one of many spaces where dialogues about poetry, and art and its social importance and relevance, should be unfolding. Afterwards we checked out the book fair, where I ran into Chicago poets Toni Asante Lightfoot, and her lovely 2-year-old daughter, and Patricia Spears Jones, whom I hadn't seen (though she regular updates me via email) in a while.

One of the most exciting parts of the weekend was going to hear one of Cuba's greatest living poets, Nancy Morejón, at the Gala Hispanic Center, in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. I'd hoped to meet her when I went to Cuba last spring (around this time), but our schedules did not match up, so I was almost incredulous when I learned that she would be attending the festival. I met up with Reggie, and another friend, Herbert Rogers, a librarian and translator who knows many of Cuba's contemporary literary figures.  Morejón had read on Thursday, before I arrived, but she also had scheduled a public talk (which came to include a reading) on Saturday, so I was able to make it. Fluent in many languages, she graciously delivered her remarks in English, though she also agreed, at the request of audience members, to read several of her poems, including "Círculos de oro" (Circles of Gold), with its rhythmic near-refrain "andar y andar," and one of her most famous, "Mujer negra" (Black Woman), an iconic, haunting poem from the 1970s. Assisting her during the Q&A was Smithsonian Institution scholar James Early, a close friend of hers, and in attendance, it seems, were the head of the Cuban Interest Section (i.e., the ambassador), and a number of Cuban and US scholars and cultural figures who were very familiar with the current situation in the country.

Nancy Morejón, second from left, and James Early, beside her, with other notable figures who were in attendance

Among the people she cited during her remarks, which ranged from her remembrances of her participation in Cuba's very successful early 1960s literacy campaign, to her work as the head of the writers' division at the National Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC) and the challenges facing the new generation of writers, were, unsurprisingly, Nicolás Guillén, about whom she'd written quite a bit over the years, but also Langston Hughes, which felt like an affective and affiliative circle for the day, at the least, coming together.  The Cuban newspaper CubaDebate thoroughly covered the event, and you can read the Spanish account here.

The next Split This Rock festival will be held in 2012, so check out the site for more information about the developing program, how to attend, and other related projects. I hope to be there two years from now!

End of Quarter + DC Marriage Equality a Reality

Is it true that 9 weeks have passed since January 4, 2010? They must have, because the undergraduate quarter is over on Friday; next week is Reading Week, and exams and final papers and projects follow one week later.  Today was the final meeting of the "Situation of Writing" class, and I must say that I'll really miss the students in that class. Today we concluded our discussion by discussing articles on MFA programs by Menand, Delaney, and Greif; on Rick Moody's Twitter short story, the e-book truce between Amazon and the publishers, and on the old vision of hypertexts vs. new(er) ones; and on Rebecca Mead's New Yorker article on the twin Dickman poets (yes, that's their last name). We also momentarily touched upon graphomania and Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease, which I'll have to give more time next time, just as I think I ought to return to Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (other than Moretti's book on global literature, is there anything out there that's comparable and not weighted down by leaden theory?). There were a good many other things to discuss that we didn't have an opportunity to (though we ran the table on the syllabus!), but as I told them today, I felt like I learned a great deal from them, as I always do. We also had the final quarter meeting of the novella class, and they turn in the opening 10 pages tomorrow, but I'll be seeing them in all the old familiar places next quarter (the semester continues), so this isn't an ending, but a brief hiatus. My final class meeting is next Wednesday; I really enjoy these graduate writers, so it'll be hard to say goodbye to them as well.  After 7 years, I'm still not used to the speed with which a quarter zooms by; on the one hand, we always get a lot done in a short period of time, but on the other, I always feel like it's just too short.

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If you'd told me 10 or 5 or even 2 years ago that Washington, DC would allow same-sex marriage before New York City or State, New Jersey, or even states like Illinois and Washington State, I'd have said you need a wakeup call. But, the unbelievable is now, wonderfully, reality: in the nation's capital, marriage equality is a reality!  At DC's Superior Court, 151 couples lined up for marriage licences today. It's taken many years of struggle but this dream is now a reality, and, as I've said, it--legal equality--will eventually be the law of the land. But for today, let's celebrate this good news from DC!

Rocky Galloway and Reggie Stanley (from Rod 2.0 [http://bit.ly/cQNvY4])

J's Theater's Fifth Anniversary + Skyping in Class + N/olympics

Somewhere around the middle of last week, this blog reached its FIFTH ANNIVERSARY! It's hard for me to believe that five years have passed since I began writing here, in late February 2005, primarily as an experiment (a blog post every day, for a year), but they have. The posts have dwindled in recent years as I've had more heaped on my plate, but I always treasure the exchanges with readers that have occurred, and appreciate everyone who still is motivated, even occasionally to drop in.

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As I was originally typing this entry, I'm figuratively floating high above a certain midwestern city. I say this because I was able, for the first time, to seamlessly integrate Skype into one of my courses, and it worked without a hitch! As part of my "Situation of Writing" class, I thought it would be nice to have the course's current students speak with a fairly recent university graduate who's working in publishing, and one of them, poet, fiction writer and critic Jeannie Vanasco, graciously agreed to do so.  An assistant editor at Lapham's Quarterly, and and formerly worked for TriQuarterly, The Poetry Foundation, and the Paris Review, Jeannie also took this course when she was an undergraduate major (in both the poetry and fiction tracks), and I thought she might have some great and useful insights to offer the students.  She did. The hurdle I foresaw, however, was the technology; while I regularly incorporate a host of electronic and online technological components into my courses--from using Blackboard for discussion groups, as a library, and as a posting site, to subject-specific blogs in the past, to Twitter now--and while I have used PowerPoint slides and still images, and screened streaming films (we'll be watching Martin Ritt's great film about the blacklist period, The Front, starring Woody Allen, next week), and last spring even utilized lots of YouTube clips, this was the first time I'd tried Skype.  It worked perfectly. We were able to see Jeannie clearly and without any onscreen pixillation and few sync issues.  She also was able to hear most of the questions the students asked without a problem and her voice came through without distortion.  This has me very excited about using this for future classes, including one next quarter. I know it's old hat to some, but I felt like this was a huge step and am still very cheered by it.

+++

The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are now over, and, perhaps for the first time that I can recall, I didn't watch a complete broadcast of any events after the opening night stadium entry of the athletes; I may have caught a few snippets when changing the channels or clips on the news, but unlike in prior years, I didn't sit through hours of speedskating, bobsledding, the alpine skiing events, an ice hockey match, or any figure skating. When I noticed people tweeting about Johnny Weir's fanciful costumes, I had to look online because I'd missed the performance in real time.  I note my not-watching not to feel superior or register my alienation, though perhaps a bit of the latter is part of the mix, but just to point out how much I think my own interests and patience have changed. The narcissistic, jingoistic, and at times saccharine human-interest coverage of NBC's commentators, coupled with the tape delays for maximum advertising impact, were bad enough, but it also seemed to be the case that, despite the horrific death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Olympic Committee and games organizers were more interested in getting on with things than seriously and realistically addressing the problems with that venue and others (such as some of the alpine hills, where a dangerous bump at the bottom of the downhill course initially led to devastating crashes among the women's elite skiers).  Perhaps this was just my perception, and I realize a lot of money was riding on these games happening and not being delayed or postponed at all, a death or two or none. And I'm aware that any participating in lugeing or alpine skiing or any other similar sport realizes the perils involved.  I also realize that NBC, having paid billions, has the right to feature the games however they want, and if it's Bob Costas mocking countries' outfits or freestyling with mind-numbing digressions, so be it. Nevertheless,  Kumaritashvili's death and the daily athlete-and-medal hype, which extended into newspaper accounts, left bad tastes that I could not get past. (Yes, the US won the most medals, and Russia's poor showing has sent President Dmitri Medvedev into a tizzy; Canada, however, led in golds, a nice home victory.) I debated whether I should watch yesterday's Canada vs. US ice hockey final, and decided not to, only to learn that it was a thriller. But I don't feel I missed anything, even if the US had won. In 2 years the summer games will be in Rio de Janeiro and in 4 years time there'll be another Winter Games, in Sochi, Russia, and all of the hoopla that beset Vancouver will be forgotten, though, I hope, not Kumaritashvili and his very sad, preventable death.

Back to Classes

It's January 4, which means the first day of classes at the university. And so my micro-sabbatical is over and I'm back; we flew in a few days ago, set up the new apartment, which is bigger and not so far from the previous ones, I finished my syllabi, posted the first one (for today) online, and met the 24 very smart and talented souls I'll be teaching in one of the three classes I'll have in my "Situation of Writing" class this quarter. A required course for all writing majors (poets, fiction writers and creative nonfictioners, some of them dramaturges and budding journalists, all in the same class!), it looks at various aspects of writing, literary history and culture, the publishing industries, and so much more. It should be fun. As part of the course the students will be tweeting, so I'll post a link to their feeds when that's up and running.

On Wednesday evening I'll have my first meeting with my graduate fiction writing (MA/MFA) students, at the Chicago campus, so this will be another winter of racing from Evanston downtown after the sun disappears and the truly frigid temperatures appear. Lake Shore Drive is always a challenge between 5-6 pm, but the drive home, especially if snowless, is especially serene. And Michigan Avenue is just down the street and around the corner, so I'll have incentive to get downtown early and while away an hour or so if I can. As with the "Situation" class, I have taught some of these students before, but many are new faces, so I'm looking forward to meeting them and becoming acquainted with their work.

My third class doesn't begin until mid-quarter, as it--and its mirror classes in the undergraduate program's other tracked two genres, poetry and creative nonfiction--is the only one in the college that's still on the (old?) semester system; it's the second half of the advanced theory and practice of fiction class that all fiction majors and minors must take, and the students will be transitioning from writing short stories to writing a novella, to be revised several times before they submit a final version at the end of the school year (the spring quarter, or the semester), in June. Given the extremely heavy reading load--two parallel fiction classes, which I often carry--I may not be blogging as much as I'd like, though I've made a vow to try to be more regular, and break the law of diminishing returns that anyone viewing this blog's yearly tallies could quickly identify.

There is of course all the rest of the university business that needs attending to, which is to say, a lot of reading and advising and so forth. I intend, to the best of my ability, to continue the writing progress I was able to make during my short respite from June to about late November. It was a bit of spring after so much winter; so many creative buds began to blossom, and one of the things I hope to do is to continue to nurture them, so that by the end of this year I will have several more complete drafts of projects, i.e., books, my books, ready to go. That's only a part of what I'm hoping and striving for in 2010.

Commencement Day + Life Thus Far + Photos

Today is Commencement Day at the university, so I can now say to all of the students, mine and others', undergraduate and graduate, CONGRATULATIONS! I won't enumerate all the wonderful students I've had the opportunity to work with over the last few years who've finished up this June, but they've been terrific, and I wish them all the very best, in full confidence that they will all make their distinctive marks upon the world.

***

The end of the school year means my return home, and my unshakeable belief, despite years of contrary evidence, that I'll finally have some (more) time to devote to my creative work. This week, however, has proved that life always has its own plans for us, and this is especially the case when you own a home (or condo, or any other costly piece of real estate for which you're responsible for the upkeep). As I've noted on here before, a great deal--perhaps half--of my time spent at home in New Jersey has coincided with the presence of contractors. This has included the initial renovators and subsequent repairers--the painters, one of whom moved to Hollywood to direct films, another of whom coughed so badly that I thought his lungs would fly out of his mouth as he hovered on a ladder high above the backyard; the electricians, a gaggle that included one who set off sparks as he was installing a light and wondered why I looked ready to call the fire department; the plumbers; the succession of roofers, one of whom went mad and another of whom had the brilliant idea of covering our then-unlined chimney in chicken wire and stucco (we passed on that); a porch builder who promptly vanished from the tri-state area after some of the wood cracked within a week of his installing it; the doormaker-carpenter, the only sane and economic of all the doormaker-carpenters we've dealt with, who'd gone to MIT and produced work worthy of a prize; innumerable hucksters whose mercurial behavior made us wonder how they managed to stay in business at all; and so on--and others unforeseen, like the representatives from the private water contracting company our municipal water company, now privatized, employs. These skillful people not only cracked a 100-year-old water pipe once while deinstalling our water meter, but recracked it while putting it back in! And so now this pipe, which was dripping, is now seeping water, which a series of towels are sopping up. Every day this week, the water company contractor has assured me--promised me--he will show up "after 8 am," though that has meant 11:30 or not at all, if he "forgets." So today, after both C and I called first thing in the morning, I waited, he showed up, we chatted about the state of the pipe, he denounced Jersey City's placement of trees on the sidewalk and galvanized lead, we inspected the curb and learned that 100 years ago, the developers had thought through infrastructure placement quite well, and so now rather than shutting off the entire neighborhood's water supply, they may be able to target their efforts and fix this pipe (replacing it would be the best option). I am sincerely hoping they complete this sooner rather than later (and that, though I had to broach the subject, no lawyers have to get involved), since in adulthood no season ever feels more fleeting than the summer.

***

When we were packing up things in Chicago, C asked if we could spend a little time having lunch at the nearby beach. For all of my time in that city I've always lived in walking distance of one and, as past photos on here will attest, I've walked and snapped shots of them. My favorite time to visit them is when a heavy fog is blanketing both them and the Lake. We went and sat on a (not so comfortable but convenient) bench on the concrete walkway and observed people lying out on the sand, walking their dogs, dipping into the water, and basically enjoying a break from the drear of weeks of cold mornings and rain, and this got me thinking about how this essential feature of Chicago life is almost never portrayed on film or TV. When movies and TV shows depict contemporary Chicago, we see the skyscrapers, the immense suburban homes and the bungalows, the El, sometimes the (remaining) projects, some of the city's unforgettable cultural and architectural highlights (the Art Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, etc.), the baseball stadia (especially Wrigley Field), various restaurants (i.e., anything having to do with food), and the Lake.

But interestingly enough, rarely do they show the city's beaches that line the Lake for miles, from Rogers Park (Howard and Jarvis Parks) all the way south to the Indiana border (Rainbow Park and Beach). As a result, I imagine that many people, like C., are probably unaware that Chicago, like Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, San Diego, and Miami, just to name some of the more obvious US examples, has pleasant, sandy beaches, real beaches, at its doorstep. (In noting this I'm not suggesting that Lake Michigan is the same as either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, or that the sand or beach quality is the same.) Yet I have not met a single native Chicagoan, or anyone who's lived in the city for a while, even those resident far inland to the south, north, or west, who doesn't know about the city's beaches. I also didn't know how extensive or pretty the the beaches were for a good while.

This leads me to ask J's Theater readers, when you think of the cities and towns where they you or have lived, what are some notable aspects or features that everyone who's a native or a longtime resident knows about, but that are never depicted in films or TV shows? What are some of those major hidden elements of the city that might transform how people think about it? Please post a few of these in the comments, and append your name (or a name) in case screenwriters happen upon this blog page (not likely, but you never know).

***

And to conclude today's entry, a few photos from the last few months.


A late-night snapshot of artist in his studio in Rogers Park

Morse Avenue El (towards Lake Michigan)

Harris Sockel, the literature honors student I supervised, holding the students' cake at the lit honors celebration (part of his thesis topic is highlighted in the lighter frosting to the left: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. (He also was co-winner of the Best Senior Literature Major award: congratulations, Harris!)

Marvelous poet and scholar Evie Shockley, reading at the university

Election day a few months ago, Jersey City

The ubiquitous signs (in NYC and Chicago)

One of my favorite NYC statues, Gertrude Stein, in Bryant Park

Gray's Papaya in the West Village, recession special (and they were already a great deal)

Regresado

"More soon" turned into "nearly a month later." (Maybe I should retitle this blog "Notes from the Underground" or "Another Frequency".) I think this is the longest I've paused in my blogging since I began other than during this past summer, when I was ill, but that involved multiple surgeries and pain medication, while this hiatus has been the result of one of the rougher academic years I've had in a while. Winter quarter classes did officially end on Friday, and I already miss teaching the two I had, though the upcoming raft of revised short stories and final papers will ensure that I'll be in contact with the students at least for the next few weeks. But classes are never the issue....

***

For my literature class this quarter, I asked students to send me short commentaries from the critical journals they have been keeping. I posted these commentaries to a blog, Thinking Aesthetics (on Wordpress).

If any J's Theater readers have the time, please do browse through these short entries, and offer any short responses that you can. The students have posted on perception, Kant, Hegel, Winckelmann, horror, sentimentality, and pornography, with more to be posted soon.

I've tried the class blog format once before, but it's still a work in progress for me. Please note that the leap in topics is a result of the class's foci, not an desultoriness on the part of the students.

***

Back around February 20, right after my "More Soon" post, I'd planned to jot down some thoughts about the first month of President Barack Obama's tenure, but there was so much else to do, and...the result was silence. (I couldn't even manage to post quotes or poems or photos, things I've done in the past--my brain was just shutting down.) As we are approaching the two-month mark, however, I felt I ought to offer some thoughts before I looked up and half a year had passed.

It strikes me that Barack Obama has been consistently pragmatic, with moments of boldness and of caution coming in alternating fashion; on some issues, such as the immediate halting of the Bush administration's last minute environmental rule changes and his upcoming 2010-11 ten-year-budget scenario, which hews to his campaign promises in many ways (on health care, on taxes, etc.), and decelerating the discursive battle with Russia, he's show true progressiveness. On the successful but inadequate stimulus bill, his administration's move to try some of the Guantánamo and other "terrorist" detainees in federal courts while still holding on to some of the Bush policies that created these problems, and the piecemeal approach to releasing the Bush administration's outrageous "legal" memoranda that legimated torture, illegal spying and other unconstitutional lawlessness, and the draw-down of US troops from Iraq, he's proved to be cautious and Clintonian. On the relentless denial of the necessity of "nationalizing" the giant failed banks and his financial team's overall approach, his adherence to Bush's "state secrets" policies, and his failure to speak out forcefully for some nominees (like Hilda Solís or Charles Freeman), he's demonstrated not only a lack of will, but a bit of cravenness as well. On other issues, such as the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the US's relations with Cuba and more broadly with other hemispheric neighbors, and the "drug war," the verdict is out.

Although Obama's chosen avatar is Abraham Lincoln, and the daily tide of news underlines how badly we need a contemporary version of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so far he has operated like a combination of John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton. The youthfulness, vigor and clarity is Kennedyesque; the watered-down progressivism is Eisenhowerian; and the occasional double-talk and accommodation of GOP frames and talking-points verges on being Clintonian. In other words, he is tacking most closely, at least as I see it, to Ronald Reagan (though in reverse in terms of partisanship). This isn't the worst we could expect, but seriously, the president has got to take bold steps when necessary, despite GOP/MSM criticism, the timidity of Democrats in Congress and the party apparatus, and even public opposition when it arises.

On a symbolic level, his tenure so far has been exciting and energizing. In addition to the country being able to wake up every day and realize that we have a black president, we also can note Obama's seriousness, his engaging manner, and his candor, which we haven't witnessed in decades. He also comes across as real, especially whenever he leaves the White House, and fairly sincere. Someone enamored of his own ego, but also willing to admit his faults when he must. He isn't play-acting in the way that we had to endure from his predecessor; no fake ranches, no pseudo-cowboy swagger, and no lies wrapped as linguistic rebuses that only right-wing fanatics could resolve. Also energizing is his ability to change his plans as the circumstances demand; this fact, which he has demonstrated repeatedly so far, should encourage anyone that no matter how the next few years turn out, he and we will not stagger down we had. But there is a stubbornness, or inertia that appears at times to creep into the picture. Take the ongoing resistance of his chief financial officers, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, to change course. Their repeated shopping of a flawed plan as the economy devolves can only dismay, even if you aren't regularly reading the informed pleas from Paul Krugman and the dire prognostications of Nouriel Roubini. Yes, we could have predicted some intransigence given that Geithner is tied to Wall Street and was a party to its failed policies, and Summers's previous Treasury tenure exemplied a deregulatory approach whose assumptions have proved disastrous. But they work for someone who, as I noted above, is not rigid. So WE really have to make sure he hears that a change of course is necessary, right away--and it must come from us, the people who voted for him, since the mainstream media show they're incapable even of grasping basic tax policy, let alone the mathematics of a spending bill ($7.7 billion out of $410 billion is less than 2%, yet how often have you heard even a single talking head note this, and the ones who babble on Sunday morning talk shows are the worst). But this is nothing new. At least now we have someone in office who, with adequate pressure, will listen. But the pressure must be there, because it's becoming clear that the voices whispering and yelling into his and his administration's ears unfortunately do not have the country's--that is, the vast majority of the country's, and world's--best interests at heart.

***

I watched the Oscars a few weeks ago, the entire broadcast, despite having seen only one of the films--The Visitor--that received a nomination. I still haven't seen Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Resurrection Road, Doubt, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or most of the other films that merited some academy recognition, though I do hope to catch Milk and The Wrestler, along with a few other films like Madea Goes to Prison and The Watchmen soon. But I did catch Laurent Cantet's The Class--which was nominated for an Oscar and didn't win one--the other night, and will try to post a review of it in the next few days. I highly recommend it.

***

On a lighter note, I watched the World Baseball Classic matchup between the Dominican Republic and the Netherlands. In addition to being a beauty fest, it initially appeared as if, despite two first in errors by Dominican shortstop and Tampa Bay Rays star Hanley Ramírez, it would be a romp by Quisqueya. It turned out, however, to be a closely fought game that the Netherlands team, made up mostly of Caribbean players from Curacao, Aruba, and the rest of the Dutch Antilles, won, 3-2 over the Dominicans, who came back the next day to wallop Panama 9-0. I still think DR is the team to beat in Pool D, which also includes Puerto Rico. The USA won its first two games, a squeaker 6-5 over Canada (which lost to a Major League-packed team of Italian Americans, i.e., Italy, in its second game) and then a romp over Venezuela 15-6, and appears to be the team to beat in Pool C. Japan appeared to be the team to beat in Pool A, defeating China 14-0 and Korea 14-2, but Korea won the second contest and thus the pool, by a 1-0 score. In the final pool, B, Cuba and Australia look like the likely winners, though Mexico could pull out a qualification, but its team lost 17-7 to Australia, not a good sign.


Team USA after their victory over Canada (Frank Gunn/AP)

José Reyes and Nelson Cruz celebrating after their win over Panama (Fernando Llano/AP)

Korea's Kyung Oan Park hitting against Japan (Andrew Malana/MLB.com)

Snow + Mulled Wine

Sometimes I wonder if I'm going to look back on these past few years in Chicago outside of my classes as little more than a mostly endless avalanche of documents--not books of poetry or fiction or creative nonfiction or biographies written by others or even by me, etc.--that have to be read by a certain date and letters and reports and so forth that have to be produced by a certain date and endless meetings involving documents that have to be read and reports that have to be read and written and so forth, but I do know that one of the things I will not ever forget is the weather, which has never failed to surprise or stir me from the dumps. Of course there are other places where it can be in the 30s one day and 75 F the next, or in the high 40s one day and snow the next, or be cool near one's apartment and like an antechamber to the arctic just 25 blocks away and then merely chilly only a few hours later. Or so freezing and windy that you are sure you have died and are cast into you know where. But I don't live in those places and can't speak to them. Chicago's vagaries, however, I do know a bit. See for example the photo below, taken on Sunday evening.

By the time I snapped the photo, the snow had stopped. A cashier in the bookstore I'd dropped into mentioned that because of the less extreme weather earlier, he hadn't even worn a coat or jacket to work, and now wasn't sure what he was going to do. I suggested he call a family member or friend to bring a jacket, or a coworker heading in to work to lend him the same. I felt so bad for him that I almost wanted to go buy him a jacket myself. Unfortunately for both of us, whatever desire I had to carry out that altruistic act was dispelled when I saw the ticket nestled in the snow atop my windshield. I guess someone has to pay for all those appealing new banners across the cityLoop area congratulating our President Elect.

There was still a little snow on the ground but tonight the sky and snowless was clear as I walked from class to the El. I'd felt crappy earlier in the day but this evening class always picks me up. A group of students and I were heading west on Superior and one mentioned how much she enjoyed having a glass of wine when she got home from class, and the cold weather immediately made me think of mulled wine, which I will always associate with the Second Sun readings at Naïeveté Studios, and especially with Toni Asante Lightfoot (who is now the mother of Leontyn Ella Gbegan!!!-congratulations, Toni and Setondji!) and Krista Franklin. I suggested mulled wine to some of the students, a few of whom hadn't heard of it, so in honor of little Leontyn, and my great grad students, here's the recipe, from an earlier J's Theater, for mulled wine:

Mulled Red Wine (hat tips go to Toni A. L., Krista F. and James Earl H. and Donald A. for their delicious version).

MULLED RED WINE

2 bottles of merlot, red zinfandel or a similar wine ($5-9 range, not too cheap, not to expensive)
2/3rds cup of sugar or honey
zest from 1/2-1 orange
10 cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
1/2 cup of brandy or cognac (not too cheap)
+ non-reactive pot, muddler/spoon, non-reactive bowl/mortar, stirring spoon, mugs/coffee cups/warming cups.

1. Pour the red wine in a non-reactive pot (non-stick, tempered glass/Pyrex, stainless steel, etc.), and heat over a low flame. Avoid very cheap wines, since they grow unpalatable when heated, and avoid aluminum, which will react with the wine.
2. With a vegetable peeler, zester or paring knife, zest the orange, making sure to avoid the white backing of the peel and rind, since there's less flavor and it can be bitter.
3. Muddle (or mash with a pestle or spoon) the zest/peel, releasing the oils, in a non-reactive (glass, porcelain) bowl or mortar.
4. Add the zest/peel to the wine.
5. Stir in the sugar, making sure it dissolves, then add the cloves and cinnamon sticks.
6. Add the 1/2 cup of brandy or cognac (the better the quality, the better the taste--and it adds real bite).
7. Heat until the wine is steaming, but try not to let it boil.
8. Set it aside, let it cool, and then ladle it into mugs, and enjoy!

(And remember, if you have more than a glass, designate a responsible driver, hire a cab or hit the public transportation!)

Signal On + Memorials + Debate #1 + Brazilian Poets in Chicago

I'm back in the Chi, classes are underway. This fall's load looks to be a little lighter than the past few years, since I'm teaching only a graduate workshop and an undergraduate honors seminar, and I'm supervising just a few undergraduates and graduates, all of whom are sharp and talented as they come, so it should be an enjoyable quarter.

***

In the time since I last posted, nearly a month ago, so much has happened on many fronts out there in the wide world, but I do want to note a few things, starting with the passing of a few important people: the first is Reginald Shepherd, a poet I knew, though not well, but whose poetry and criticism I grew to appreciate a great deal. His early and untimely death still shocks me. On the CC list I wrote the following:

I remember his essay, "On Not Being White," in Joseph Beam's anthology In the Life, which annoyed me for a good while until I reread it and made an effort to understand where he was coming from.* I also remember when Reginald's first book came out and all the buzz around it, and how I excited I was to meet him for the first time back at one of the old OutWrite conferences in Boston, in the late 1990s.

He could be, to use Shakespeare's and everybody else's phrase, a piece of work, but he was certainly a brilliant poet and a lively critic. His passing is a real loss for Black, Black LGBTQ, and American poetry, but I hope he finds real peace.

His lyrical facility, the deep and relentless exploration of desire and yearning for love and acceptance that surged through his stanzas, his skill with metaphor and a particularly deft gift for the music of rhyme are all hallmarks I register when I think of his work. Without hesitation I can say that Reginald was easily one of the most important Black/gay poets to emerge over the last 25 years, and I'm very sorry that we have lost his voice. He was only 45, and leaves his partner, Robert Philen, and many family members.

Also, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican author, also passed away earlier this month. I met him once, at a reading featuring some of New York's important Latino writers that I helped coordinate at one of my former jobs. I wasn't at all familiar with his work, but hearing Vega Yunqué read and talk about his life and work, he struck me as a real treasure. Original, funny, feisty, cantankerous, and like so many, deserving of greater honors and attention than he ever received. After the reading I went and found some of his work, which reminded me in many ways of Ishmael Reed, not least in its caustic humor and social criticism. Like Ishmael, Vega Yunqué was a social activist, and played a key role in building and nurturing Puerto Rican/Nuyorican/Latino letters and arts in New York; he was one of the founders of the vital arts center Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side. He was 72.

Then there was the news of the tragic death of one of the most celebrated writers of the contemporary era, David Foster Wallace. I've taught his work a few times over the years, and consider his story "The Girl With Curious Hair" to be a comic masterpiece. I'm less a fan of his novel, Infinite Jest, which I admit I advanced only about 300 pages into, but whatever my thoughts about that work, I must say that Wallace was blindingly talented and offered one of the most influential, ironic takes on our society to be found in recent literature. A huge loss.

And then yesterday I read about the passing of one of the consistently superb actors--and activists--of the last half of the 20th century, Paul Newman, at 83. Very sad.

***

I watched the debate between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain last night. My own thoughts about the contest aren't important, because it appears that Obama achieved what was most necessary: positive reviews by many in the influential establishment media, and very positive reviews by independent voters and in quick post-debate polls. While I will definitely be watching the Vice Presidential debate between Joe Biden and the walking disaster known as Sarah Palin, I'm not sure if I can bear another Obama-McCain talkfest, especially if Obama, however successful his tactics, refuses to challenge McCain more and if McCain's rage and contempt have him seething like an old and overheating radiator.

***

One highlight of this week was the series of readings in Chicago by four noteworthy contemporary Brazilian poets, Maria Esther Maciel, Virna Teixeira, Paulo Henriques Britto, and Sérgio Medeiros. The poets, from Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza by way of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Matto Grosso do Sul via Florianópolis respectively, all appeared in the Brooklyn-based literary journal Aufgabe's issue no. 7 (2007), which featured a special section on Brazilian writing, edited by poet and translator Ray Bianchi. Ray also organized the readings, with Aufgabe editor E. Tracy Grinnell, and they took place at three different venues across Chicagoland: the university, the University of Chicago, and at Chicago's main branch Harold Washington Library in the Loop. Colleagues at the university, along with Litmus Press, the Chicago Poetry Project, and the Consulate General of Brazil in Chicago, all sponsored the events.

I attended the first reading, at the university, which my colleague, prodigious author and translator Reg Gibbons, had helped to coordinate and which he introduced. All four of the poets read either excerpts from longer work or a few short poems in Portuguese, and either they or Ray followed with English translations. One of the things that intrigued me was that two of the poets, Henriques Britto and Teixeira, both wrote in English as well as Portuguese; for Henriques Britto it resulted from his having spent part of his youth in Washington, DC, and he later told me that his first poetic language was English. Teixeira told me that she wrote in English when she was living for several years in Scotland, though now she wrote almost always in Portuguese. In the case of both poets, the English was idiomatic and lyrical, with Henriques Britto's more discursive and assured in its handling of rhyme, and Teixeira's grounded in concise and evocative imagery.

With regard to their Portuguese texts, I noted and asked about the differences during the question and answer session. Medeiros, who told me about a new language melding Portuguese, Spanish and Guaraní that was developing in southern Brazil (where he lives), read from a long poem that was both fragmentary and composed along the lines of what I would identify as the Language poetry movement's "new sentence." Maciel's briefer poems drew upon the rich homophonic, rhyming polysemous possibilities of Portuguese, which she contrasted with a few visually grounded prose poems. Teixeira's short poems moved from image to image, and, as became clear soon enough, were often inspired by works of art. The fourth poet, Henriques Britto, read poems in fixed forms: sonnets, a half-sestina, and a full villanelle. They sounded as adroit and nimble in Portuguese as in English.

When the writers spoke about influences, they listed many of the best known names in 20th century Brazilian poetry: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, the two de Campos brothers, Augusto and Haroldo, and Cecília Meireles. They also mentioned English-language authors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and the great modernists Wallace Stevens and, from a later generation, Elizabeth Bishop. In reading the poetry in the special section, I wondered about more recent national and international trends and influences, because a number of the writers are in conversation with them. Other questions during the Q&A touched upon the contemporary literary landscape in Brazil, national vs. regional trends there today, the presence and influence of literary journals (which Ray does touch upon in his introduction to the special section), and the problem of a readership for poetry. Three of the writers, I believe, are also university professors, though I didn't gather that any of them taught creative writing per se; that is, it seems, a peculiarity thus far of the English-speaking world (mainly the US, Britain, Canada, and Australia). Teixeira mentioned that she was a medical doctor, and the precision of her work, in retrospect, bore this out.

I attended a second round today at the Harold Washington Library, and got to hear all the writers read more of their work. Maciel read one of my favorite poems from the special section, a poem consisting only of a litany of single words separated by commas, which ends with "palavra" (word). It was titled "Palavras preferidas" in Portuguese, and "Favorite Words" in English. The translator managed to capture some of the richness of the original's sonorities and playfulness, but there is nothing like hearing "ferrugem" (iron) or "ruido" (noise) or "arara" (arara!) pronounced by a native Portuguese speaker, Brazilian or from Europe or Africa. It's almost as if paper's crinkling in the mouth as a song emerges. Lovely: amável!

The event was heartening on many levels, but I also hope it's a signal that more such events will be possible in the future.