I have started full time at my summer job of keeping my little friends busy and safe. All I have to do is pay attention and go with their flow, and all is well. No paper work just being there for children and providing what they need. They have decided that Dr. Suess is great and have me reading the story of the pale green pants with no one inside them every day. We also have a great box project going, where each has their own special box and I provide materials for them to decorate it. There is one that has his moments, but I am definitely reaching him already after just one week so I feel pretty solid. So many calm moments of children just being and doing what is natural to them — learning about their world. Why do teachers think we have to interfere so much in children’s lives? Curriculum, I don’t need no stinking curriculum. I just need to pay attention and have a few ideas and some interesting materials. The children do the rest.
Short and Vague Review: 2666 by Roberto Bolano
I just finished a facinating novel by Roberto Bolano translated from Spanish, called “2666.” It is about so much that I could not tell you what it is about. It is written in the form of 5 novelas with vague connections to each other, some stronger than others. In the end I got the feeling that somewhere out in the future it all makes more sense, or maybe not. It is not very important. Like any good novel, for me, it was living a life in another skin, or experiencing the world from a slightly shifted dimension. I come back a little changed with a fuller understanding of life as a human being. Also I feel a little disoriented, like I only got some of what he was saying and maybe some of what he said by accident. I think the really good writers are not able to know all the levels contained in their work. There are shadows and reflections that are cast that they are not able to see. There are so many combinations of characters and symbols that interact with the reader that they cannot know what chimeras will hatch. I always come out of novels like this as if I have gone to a foreign country and my mind has not yet assimilated all of the strangeness and time of a different land. That is how I know it was a well written piece. It shifts my perspective and I see more of the human experience. The scope of what I have read has to linger because I am unable to process the whole experience on a conscious level. I am sure that bits of this novel will resurface in poems and dreams for a long while to come.
“I just love the music, and that English boy, he is very good.”
“Yeah I saw John Stewart interview him. I heard some people are upset about the title, you know “Slum Dog” is kind of a harsh term.”
“But, in India that’s the way it is, you know. They are treated like 4th or 5th class citizens. But we have our own ways of doing that here too. “
There you have it. Great music and the English boy is very good with a few harsh realities thrown in. Now I will have to see this one. We never get to talk alot at work as my Punjabi friend says, “A teacher’s plate is very full.”
I just finished Gilbert Hernandez “Palomar” a complete collection of his comic written and drawn in 80’s and 90’s. Wow! What a different universe he lives in. Most writer/artists who create serious comics seem to approach life from a perspective outside the mainstream. This is no Calvin and Hobbes or Doonesbury, which are great strips but are cleaned up for mass consumption. They appeal to a wider audience. Gilbert Hernandez is obviously not worried about offending people, which leaves his work wide open and fascinating. This book is not for the sheltered or prudish. He shows a world full of sex and violence, but along with that he shows of people struggling to maintain relationships and stay connected with each other. How do you hold a community together when in the end every person in that community is an individual. People come and go, help and use and hurt and abuse each other. How do you stay tied to a community with all the pain connected to it. Ugly stuff happens in life and Gilbert Hernandez shows the ugly and how it sometimes leads to beauty. He shows the value as well as the problems with interdependence and the bonds of family centered culture. He looks on it all with a neutral eye that accepts all things as worthy of observation and depiction. Some of it shocks, but mostly taken as a whole it is a good example of art that gives insight into our own lives, and expands the world of the reader. But, like I said before you will have to get past the shock. He does not put his ideas in a candy coated shell for just anyone to consume. He is looking for those who will dig in the dirt to find the rare and beautiful.
Another Snowy Bus Ride
I am writing with big black yarn covered fingers.
I am remodeling the house that contains my life, which is now called white ice world. I am constructing bus route hallways as my usual car and road hallways are useless.White Ice World includes many more people I will never know, or even see again, but it is warm in the bus part of hallway that with short walks slippery trudges through the gaps leads to rooms that I need to get to.
I am realizing that when White Ice World fades. I will want to use these hallways as well as the old ones that will clear in time. The gaps in the hallway will become pleasant pieces of the structure of my life house. Maybe in the spring I will start work on my bicycle hallway. Who knows my life house could grow to fill all the spaces between here and the places I travel to each day. For now this rattly, bouncing passage filled with strangers will do, and even provide interesting building material for the life house I am constantly constructing and remodeling in my mind.
Are you still the same person you were yesterday or last week or just a subtle changeling? If you lose your reference points in life (relationships, job, home, routine, people who know you) are you still the same person?
It is the feeling you get when you are on vacation in some strange place you haven’t been before, and you meet a person who is completely new to you, but you both totally understand each other. It could happen. Or you quit your job and get a new one and start interacting with a completely new group of people. Are you exactly the same around them as you were with the people you used to work with, or do you shift into a different self? And furthermore does any continuous you or me exist, or is it just an illusion that we are conditioned as members of a certain culture to maintain? I am sure that as a part of a different culture a certain person would behave and react to events differently just as certainly a person when placed in new surroundings and circumstances will change behaviors. Think of people who completely change when they get behind the wheel of a car, or at a party, or in the middle of a battle or intense competition. Which is the continuous person? I often hear people say, “That’s not like him at all!” Maybe it is more like him than the other stuff. I can’t even tell all the time about myself, so how can I know about someone else.
For more on this consult Franz Kafka, Huruki Murakami, Albert Camus among many others.
I am reading Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Murakami, a collection of 24 short stories many of which deal with these and other questions of our supposed reality, and it is making me think about who I am and what makes me who I am. Very interesting? Maybe not? But I can’t help it. It’s probably just me.
Leonard Cohen knew how to write a song. John Cale knows how to sing it, and the strings are a nice touch. I love to sing this loudly. It is one of the most soothing songs I know. The louder I sing the better I feel.
