Into the Wild Wood and Home Again

I f inished reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna (2009). It is a truly remarkable tale, one that focuses on the complicated relationship we have here in the US with artists (all creatives, really) who are political, and with political artists. And yes, there is a distinction to be made there. She tells the story of a young man, Harrison Shepherd, born of an American father and a Mexican mother, and his complex relationship with people, artists in particular, and with his own inner struggles. He becomes a writer who is then excoriated by the government during the 1950s "Red Scare," all because he had worked for noted Mexican artists (Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo) and other communist revolutionaries (notably, Trotsky) as a young man living in Mexico. The press is easily led, people begin to shun him (even his closest male friend and his neighbors), and he becomes a ghost of himself. Even his publisher, who had made a lot of money off his work, canceled their relationshi...

Today's plan is upended; Holly has the flu. Poor bean can't catch a break. No basketball today-- and there's only one more next weekend. I was going to take her to practice then out for a special treat. Instead, I'll go get her some meds.  She will probably miss tomorrow's CCD session too. Things are never that easy, are they? So, instead of a fun Valentine's Day treat with my best girl, I'll be doing groceries, laundry, and cleaning bathrooms. Woo. At least they'll be done. And G and I had a great dinner out last night for V-Day, so that's all good.  I might rent a movie online tonight to watch; I've been very curious about Hamnet , and I see it's nominated for 8 Oscars. I should give it a look. A couple of years ago, I watched the movie Ophelia , which is loosely based on the doomed and ultimately suicidal female "love interest" of Hamlet's, and it was nice (she didn't drown herself in this film, and she is portrayed as a ...

Childcare issues in the United States are at the forefront of every parent/grandparent's mind. Today, Holly's teacher is out sick, so her entire class has no school-- but it's not a snow day, so I am going to work. Her father will be taking an unpaid day off to stay home. There are no babysitters-- people work. The entire situation just throws things into high relief: what are we, one of the wealthiest nations in the world, doing to working families? And I mean that literally. Doing TO , not doing FOR . Years ago, when women didn't work outside of the home, I suppose it was easier. But today, women do work. Most have to. And so do most grandparents. I recall years and years ago that the retirement age was a lot lower-- grands have to work until 67 (my age group), and the government wants to mandate it to be 70, or even later. There is a huge gap that the GOP is not discussing-- or wait, they are-- that statement about grandparents filling that role made by JD Vance stil...

I listened to a discussion/ power point presentation by a doctoral candidate whose research is focused on the lives of New England women during the Civil War, as evidenced by their letters. Her presentation was about on par with some of my students' work; yes, she's done research, but her suppositions are not necessarily supported by the letters, and her discussion was a surface analysis of her topic. I wish her well, but I'm really disappointed that it was not more enlightening. All she kept going back to was the fact that women had it financially hard (though the state of Maine had a process by which women with dependents could get assistance), they missed their husbands, and letters were a comfort.  Well, yeah. But ... I was hoping that her discussion would dig a lot deeper into the letters themselves, and not focus so much on her own assumptions about the lives of the women writers. I was looking to hear things like Abigail Adams' letters.  O well. Research being wh...

Snowing again. Sigh. We went from -22 on Sunday night, to more snow.  I'm reminded of the poem by Wallace Stevens, " The Snow Man ," which begins, "One must have a mind of winter" and then ends "And nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."  The poem is one long sentence, broken into five three-line stanzas. Because it is one sentence, it contains, quite literally, one admittedly complex thought. What does it mean to "have a mind of winter," and why is it necessary in order to ponder the almost koan-like concept of "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."  What is not there can be taken literally: we can see what is missing in the landscape, especially if it is a familiar one. But to behold "the nothing that is" might take a little longer. What is that? What does it look like? I imagine the snow covered terrain, the unusual humps and slopes of things now lost to sight. Is tha...

Well, we had a two hour delay due to extreme cold. That made for another slightly confused day, but we managed. My creative writing kids are working on free verse poetry for the next couple of weeks; we started with prose poems. They seemed totally game to give it a shot. Today, we'll work on an abecedarian-- not really a fully free verse poem (but then, neither is a prose poem), but they are both good transitions from the form poems we have been invested in of late. We'll get to some wildly odd stuff soon enough.  The APLit kids are back in their shells, it seems. We read Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon" and they had no response. I mean NO response. Cracking this nut is getting harder and harder. I still need to finish reading and assessing their first round of essays, and then this one is going to be due on Friday. The focus is on the function of the narrator, primarily. We'll see how it goes. They are not really a particularly inquisitive or imaginative b...