Recently in arts Category
If you'll be in Lincoln this weekend, consider attending the screening of the award-winning documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, with a discussion led afterward by a local psychologist who does trauma work with survivors. Filmmaker Lisa Jackson, a survivor of gang rape herself, has won multiple awards for her documentaries over the past 30 years.
This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.
It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies: Women Changing the World. It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15. A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world.
Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:
This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.
It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies: Women Changing the World. It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15. A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world.
Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:
Film Discussion:
THE GREATEST SILENCE
with speaker Megan Watson, PhD, LMHP
Saturday, Feb. 27 - Film begins at 1:00
Discussion following film (approx. 2:20 p.m.)
Admission to the discussion is free and open to the public. Admission
to THE GREATEST SILENCE is at regular Ross prices.
Megan Watson is a psychologist in private practice who works with
treating immigrants, refugees, and torture survivors. Watson does
trauma work and focuses on culturally competent, holistic treatment.
Before its closure, Watson spent three years working at the FIRST
Project, a torture treatment center in Lincoln.
THE GREATEST SILENCE: RAPE IN THE CONGO
Winner of the Sundance Special Jury Prize in Documentary and the
inspiration for a 2008 U.N. Resolution classifying rape as a weapon of
war, this extraordinary film, shot in the war zones of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC), shatters the silence that surrounds the use
of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.
Categories:
So UNL's got fall break for two days, which means I've got time to catch up on grading and blog to you.
So lately I've been thinking about creativity and self-doubt. And the long-story-short of my convoluted, haphazard inquiry is this: Given that the world does not clamor for your art or mine, that the world does not beg for another book (when it publishes 250,000 a year in the U.S. alone), that the world wants you instead to feed the hungry, teach the uneducated, reverse climate change, maximize profits, and march on Washington--and meanwhile, the world wants to cut your pay and jack up your utility bill--given that you're slogging away in the midst of all that, and that no wildly adoring audience clamors for your voice and vision, how can you keep helping yourself make art?
A weird thing about blogging: sometimes when your brain has announced a theme-of-the-week, everything from the world comes sailing straight at it, on point.
An interactive sculpture by Miranda July:
Self-doubt will not devour her dreams.
Here's Jay Smooth's vlog on the little haters inside--which you don't need to view unless you happen to be subject to bouts of perfectionism, procrastination, or both:
(I'm having trouble embedding it, so just go here.)
And here's Mother Teresa's view (hey, this blog is nothing if not eclectic):
Keep making your art. This is a shout-out of love to you and your beautiful persistence. Maybe nobody needs your art, or maybe lots of people do. You can't know. Maybe the people who'll need it aren't even born yet.
The point is, you need to make it. It's how you're built. So keep on.
So lately I've been thinking about creativity and self-doubt. And the long-story-short of my convoluted, haphazard inquiry is this: Given that the world does not clamor for your art or mine, that the world does not beg for another book (when it publishes 250,000 a year in the U.S. alone), that the world wants you instead to feed the hungry, teach the uneducated, reverse climate change, maximize profits, and march on Washington--and meanwhile, the world wants to cut your pay and jack up your utility bill--given that you're slogging away in the midst of all that, and that no wildly adoring audience clamors for your voice and vision, how can you keep helping yourself make art?
A weird thing about blogging: sometimes when your brain has announced a theme-of-the-week, everything from the world comes sailing straight at it, on point.
An interactive sculpture by Miranda July:
Self-doubt will not devour her dreams.Here's Jay Smooth's vlog on the little haters inside--which you don't need to view unless you happen to be subject to bouts of perfectionism, procrastination, or both:
(I'm having trouble embedding it, so just go here.)
And here's Mother Teresa's view (hey, this blog is nothing if not eclectic):
If you are discouraged it is a sign of pride because it shows you trust in your own power. Your self-sufficiency, your selfishness and your intellectual pride will inhibit His coming to live in your heart because God cannot fill what is already full. It is as simple as that.(For "God," it helps me if I read "emptiness," as in the Buddhist sense of no-ego, or presence--which for me functions as the real, true ground of art-making--but hey, whatever gets you through the night. You fill in the blank.)
Keep making your art. This is a shout-out of love to you and your beautiful persistence. Maybe nobody needs your art, or maybe lots of people do. You can't know. Maybe the people who'll need it aren't even born yet.
The point is, you need to make it. It's how you're built. So keep on.
Categories:
Happy Birthday, Baby Grey! My son and only turns 21 today, and I'm wishing him all good things.
He's in the midst of his senior year of college. At the moment, he's just gotten back from protesting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and is trying to wrap his head around what he saw there.
When he was little, he made up the magical "Greyby number" (Greyby, of course, being a meld of Grey and baby), which was, if I'm remembering correctly, more than a billion and more than infinity. Why not? When our family would part or talk on the phone from far away, we'd say, "I love you Greyby number!"
If I said, "I love you to the moon!", he would say, "I love you to the stars beyond the moon!" And so on. You can just imagine.
Okay, back to earth. I've been attending way too many bureaucratic meetings this week, so I'm very grateful to my friends for three good links:
From writer Tanya Whiton, who sussed out my swoony admiration for Jane Campion (remember that tea-cup, shot from above?), this interview about Campion's latest movie (the one about Keats and Fanny).
From Sandra Cisneros, who first introduced me to Mercè Rodoreda--"the greatest Catalan novelist of our time and quite possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho," according to her translator--this piece about Rodoreda in The Nation. (Forgive me for sounding like an ad for cheap perfume, but if you like Jean Rhys, you'll love Rodoreda. Swoon.)
Lastly, for you denizens of Star City, my charming colleague Sonam Singh offers a heads-up about this Friday's opening at the Sheldon, "Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists." Maybe see you there!
He's in the midst of his senior year of college. At the moment, he's just gotten back from protesting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and is trying to wrap his head around what he saw there.
When he was little, he made up the magical "Greyby number" (Greyby, of course, being a meld of Grey and baby), which was, if I'm remembering correctly, more than a billion and more than infinity. Why not? When our family would part or talk on the phone from far away, we'd say, "I love you Greyby number!"
If I said, "I love you to the moon!", he would say, "I love you to the stars beyond the moon!" And so on. You can just imagine.
Okay, back to earth. I've been attending way too many bureaucratic meetings this week, so I'm very grateful to my friends for three good links:
From writer Tanya Whiton, who sussed out my swoony admiration for Jane Campion (remember that tea-cup, shot from above?), this interview about Campion's latest movie (the one about Keats and Fanny).
From Sandra Cisneros, who first introduced me to Mercè Rodoreda--"the greatest Catalan novelist of our time and quite possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho," according to her translator--this piece about Rodoreda in The Nation. (Forgive me for sounding like an ad for cheap perfume, but if you like Jean Rhys, you'll love Rodoreda. Swoon.)
Lastly, for you denizens of Star City, my charming colleague Sonam Singh offers a heads-up about this Friday's opening at the Sheldon, "Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists." Maybe see you there!
Hats off to Timothy Schaffert, who ran another great (downtown) omaha lit fest this weekend! I loved the setting--the cooler-than-cool KANEKO in the Old Market. Cody Lumpkin, a UNL grad student and compelling poet, did a beautiful job moderating the panel I was on with writers Amelia Montes, Belinda Acosta (about whom you've heard so much of late), Jeff Koterba, and publicist Lauren Cerand. We talked about options for meaningful and effective self-promotion in the age of Twitter to a huge, lovely, and gracious audience. (Jamie, please come by and see me! Yes, you! Yoga lady, drop me a line!)
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.
The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years! Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus! Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
Categories:
Because I owe some feedback to one of my graduate students, I'm just going to post a lightning round here. First of all, many thanks to all my students over the years, who've helped me learn--the hard way!--what works and what doesn't. Your feedback is helping me put the finishing touches on the workshop I'll be teaching this weekend at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference. But can creative writing be taught at all? Should it be? Louis Menand goes there.
Here's why I keep loving the work of Tayari Jones. When it comes to the humanity of her characters, she never settles for less. (Writers and aspiring writers, definitely read this.) Plus, her latest blog entry says that, after a hectic and tumultuous time, she has finished a draft of her latest novel, THE SILVER GIRL. Hurray! The excerpts I've seen have been beautiful and moving. We'll be looking forward....
Mystery novelist (and fellow West Virginian) Craig Johnson's first novel came out in 2005, and Viking's now publishing his fifth. (Is that humanly possible?) Having just handed off my global revision of THE DESIRE PROJECTS to a reader today, I love what he has to say on the issue of work ethic:
I kind of think of it as the blue-collar school of literature. . . . Never have I met a ditch digger who said, 'I'm just not feeling the ditch today, the ditch muse is not with me, I have to put my shovel down now.'But alas, it looks like he may have been using that shovel just a shade too often, stretching his bio to include a stint with the N.Y.P.D. Oops. Writers beware: Viking/Penguin may not fact-check you, but the New York Times will, even if they're just doing a puff piece on your cool house. (And do me a favor: when they do, try not to respond "petulantly," okay?)
This new exhibit of art by U.S. Islamic women looks fascinating; I especially love the idea of the Persian nesting dolls, above. Me encanta. Our visible image can look so different from who we are inside.
Lastly, for those of you worn out by explaining minority standpoints--re: gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, ability, religion, class, and/or you name it--to clueless members of groups on which you serve, take heart. When you're exhausted and/or fed up, know that you don't always have to argue your position to make a positive difference. You change the dynamic and the awareness just by being in the room. It may not achieve perfect results, but it's something. So take a breath, relax, and just show up.
And many thanks to those of you who wrote in privately to say how much you appreciated my recent post on Sonia Sotomayor. I'm helped by knowing it was useful. Sometimes I think political commentary isn't really the appropriate purview for a literary blog (so many people do it better than I can!), so it's good to know I'm saying something you value. ¡Gracias!
Let me get a little woo-woo on y'all for a second and just say that, according to the Ayurvedic calendar, the seasonal juncture ended yesterday. We're now officially in summer, the season of lightness, play, sweetness, and living out what the deep, introspective shake-up of spring helped us see. If you've been experiencing personal turbulence--and paying attention--now's the time for fruition. I hope you enjoy it!
Till soon!
Categories:
I'm so psyched about Justice Sonia Sotomayor, her fantastic record, and her excellent chances of being confirmed. As Jeffrey Toobin observed on last night's Daily Show, there have been 110 justices on the Supreme Court during the U.S.'s history, and 106 of them have been white men. It's about time. Sorry about the squeals she's provoking from the right, but folks rarely relinquish unearned privilege gracefully. Why the right is trying to scare people off the word empathy, though--and why Dems are capitulating--is beyond me. I wonder what George Lakoff would say. Progressives currently have power and the will of the people behind them. It's our turn to shape the discourse, and leaders should take the wheel in that regard.
Ain't I a princess? Disney's drawing fire for The Princess and The Frog, an animated film due out this December that features Disney's first black princess, Tiana. Oprah consulted, and parents are happy, but critics voice concern that the prince is not black enough (or not black at all) and that the princess spends a good chunk of the movie as a frog herself (in a divergence from the original).
I was wondering why, instead of reshaping a classic European tale (the film retells the Grimms' fairy tale but sets it in 1920s New Orleans), Disney didn't just look to either African or African American narratives. If I wanted to create a tale that highlighted a black princess/heroine, I'd start by looking at some culturally indigenous stories. Just a thought.
If you get a chance to see Examined Life, a documentary of public intellectuals gabbing and moving, go. It's more accessible than you might think, given the status of some of the subjects as high-powered theorists, and it's often humorous (intentionally or otherwise). My favorites were Avital Ronnell, who talks about anxiety and ethics (pointing out the way that Bush was notoriously un-anxious about the death penalty in Texas and various crimes against humanity since), and applied ethicist Peter Singer, who questions our moral responsibilities to one another vis-à-vis the issue of conspicuous consumption in front of Fifth Avenue's windows full of designer goods. (Singer's remarks actually helped me think through a chapter I'm revising, so that was an unexpected plus.)
Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the filmmaker's sister show up in the film, too, as does Judith Butler, who is much sexier than I'd guessed from her prose. (Of course, a doorstop is sexier than I'd guess from Judith Butler's prose.) Sharp hair, Judith.
Thinking about the Other is all over the documentary, so empathy, though not called that by the philosophers, was a theme. How do we design and implement a just society when people have such different capacities and values? How do we imagine our way across vast differences into another person's perspective?
Many thanks to Sonam, Amalia, Julia, and Jon for going with me and talking about it afterward, and to Sonam for dreaming up the outing in the first place.
Today's Grey's first day on the job at a bookstore in Austin, where he's spending the summer, so my mom-heart is all wondering about how it's going for him. Good luck, Grey!
With the end of classes, I'm getting just a ton of revision done. A character completely surprised me last night; I love it when that happens.
I'm so grateful to be a teacher and thus to have summers off. For three months a year, I get to live and work like a real artist, to dwell in the imagined, constructed worlds of creative projects. It's such a gift.
I think it's a gift back to our students, too, though. If we didn't have this concentrated, different sense of focus on our work, we wouldn't be able to do our work as well, and then we wouldn't have sufficient experiential knowledge when we teach. In fact, I wish university administrators really comprehended artists' processes better and would structure more "studio" time (time for jello-mind, time to write for hours on end) into the school year, so we could stay juiced up all year long, instead of sticking us onto committee after committee. I have a few scholarly friends who genuinely like committee and administrative work, and more power to 'em. I wish they could do it all. I'd like to just teach and write, teach and write, and then, for the summers, just write.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Ain't I a princess? Disney's drawing fire for The Princess and The Frog, an animated film due out this December that features Disney's first black princess, Tiana. Oprah consulted, and parents are happy, but critics voice concern that the prince is not black enough (or not black at all) and that the princess spends a good chunk of the movie as a frog herself (in a divergence from the original).
I was wondering why, instead of reshaping a classic European tale (the film retells the Grimms' fairy tale but sets it in 1920s New Orleans), Disney didn't just look to either African or African American narratives. If I wanted to create a tale that highlighted a black princess/heroine, I'd start by looking at some culturally indigenous stories. Just a thought.
If you get a chance to see Examined Life, a documentary of public intellectuals gabbing and moving, go. It's more accessible than you might think, given the status of some of the subjects as high-powered theorists, and it's often humorous (intentionally or otherwise). My favorites were Avital Ronnell, who talks about anxiety and ethics (pointing out the way that Bush was notoriously un-anxious about the death penalty in Texas and various crimes against humanity since), and applied ethicist Peter Singer, who questions our moral responsibilities to one another vis-à-vis the issue of conspicuous consumption in front of Fifth Avenue's windows full of designer goods. (Singer's remarks actually helped me think through a chapter I'm revising, so that was an unexpected plus.)
Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the filmmaker's sister show up in the film, too, as does Judith Butler, who is much sexier than I'd guessed from her prose. (Of course, a doorstop is sexier than I'd guess from Judith Butler's prose.) Sharp hair, Judith.
Thinking about the Other is all over the documentary, so empathy, though not called that by the philosophers, was a theme. How do we design and implement a just society when people have such different capacities and values? How do we imagine our way across vast differences into another person's perspective?
Many thanks to Sonam, Amalia, Julia, and Jon for going with me and talking about it afterward, and to Sonam for dreaming up the outing in the first place.
Today's Grey's first day on the job at a bookstore in Austin, where he's spending the summer, so my mom-heart is all wondering about how it's going for him. Good luck, Grey!
With the end of classes, I'm getting just a ton of revision done. A character completely surprised me last night; I love it when that happens.
I'm so grateful to be a teacher and thus to have summers off. For three months a year, I get to live and work like a real artist, to dwell in the imagined, constructed worlds of creative projects. It's such a gift.
I think it's a gift back to our students, too, though. If we didn't have this concentrated, different sense of focus on our work, we wouldn't be able to do our work as well, and then we wouldn't have sufficient experiential knowledge when we teach. In fact, I wish university administrators really comprehended artists' processes better and would structure more "studio" time (time for jello-mind, time to write for hours on end) into the school year, so we could stay juiced up all year long, instead of sticking us onto committee after committee. I have a few scholarly friends who genuinely like committee and administrative work, and more power to 'em. I wish they could do it all. I'd like to just teach and write, teach and write, and then, for the summers, just write.
Hey, a girl can dream.
Categories:
Congratulations and big hugs to Pine Manor MFA student Faye Rapoport DesPres, whose beautiful piece "The Diversion" is a finalist in Writer's Advice Fourth Annual Flash Prose contest (hurray! woohoo!), and to Macondo workshop participant Beatriz Terrazas, whose piece, "When I Found My True Name, I Found My Identity," was published by Dallas's GuideLive and is available here. It begins,
It's always a thrill when former students succeed. I love it that these two mujeres are finding audiences for their creative voices. Abrazos, Faye and Beatriz!
Hey, I have been getting some caca from more than one friend about not blogging often enough, so lo siento, lo siento, but right now I am a one-woman grade-a-thon. Luckily, the papers are exciting and varied in Latino Studies (lost colonias, worksite raids, the latinidad of Roberto Clemente, Selena y Shakira, the Juárez femicides).
In ENGL 258B, Autobiographical Writing, the students have to send their final, revised pieces out for submission to national undergraduate literary journals, so those assignments are coming in tomorrow complete with cover letters, envelopes, SASEs, and so on. It makes the whole process a little more real and exciting, I think, for the students to know that someone other than just "the teacher" (yawn) will be reading their revised pieces. And one student last year actually got hers published!
In the midst of my stacks of papers, we made time to go see Son del Llano ("classic Cuban son and salsa") last night. They were playing at Lincoln's legendary Zoo Bar, and it was so refreshing to listen to them: it's the kind of musica my Dad used to play (vinyl, por supuesto) when we were little--along with Johnny Mathis and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, naturally.
Who knew Lincoln, Nebraska would have an old-time son band? Stranger than fiction. You can give them a listen right now, or you can come on out at seven o'clock on May 29th to the DelRay Ballroom down in the Haymarket and dance all night for just ten bucks.
And speaking of dancing all night, I received a CD in the mail the other day from the fledgling Oberlin band Dos Mil Días de Fuego, and I just have to say it: my mother's heart about burst with pride. Was that my kid, sounding all like a grown-up man, rapping in Spanish? Those smart, political lyrics? I tell you, it made my week.
And what's more, the CD arrived on one of those mopey blue What has it all been for? days, too (which are pretty frequent, let me tell you, LOL, toward the end of the semester). I sat there listening with tears in my eyes, a long-distance mama, thinking, This. This is what it has all been for. For this smart young artist, articulate, bilingual, full of passion and power.
(And let me just send a shout-out of thanks to poet & Oberlin faculty member Kazim Ali, who worked with Grey on his January-term project analyzing contemporary formal poetry and writing new lyrics. Working with that child takes patience--I say this with love--so Ali must have the patience of a saint. Respect and gratitude.)
These gorgeous songs are the pudding that the proof is in. I can't wait for them to be stream-able for you.
A name tells a story. It embodies a unique history that can be rewritten with the movement of a single letter. Take one out or put one in, and just like that, a name takes you in a direction you weren't meant to go. This is most true for those of us who have lived outside the mainstream, who've at one time been the "other." I should know.To read the whole thing, click here.
It's always a thrill when former students succeed. I love it that these two mujeres are finding audiences for their creative voices. Abrazos, Faye and Beatriz!
Hey, I have been getting some caca from more than one friend about not blogging often enough, so lo siento, lo siento, but right now I am a one-woman grade-a-thon. Luckily, the papers are exciting and varied in Latino Studies (lost colonias, worksite raids, the latinidad of Roberto Clemente, Selena y Shakira, the Juárez femicides).
In ENGL 258B, Autobiographical Writing, the students have to send their final, revised pieces out for submission to national undergraduate literary journals, so those assignments are coming in tomorrow complete with cover letters, envelopes, SASEs, and so on. It makes the whole process a little more real and exciting, I think, for the students to know that someone other than just "the teacher" (yawn) will be reading their revised pieces. And one student last year actually got hers published!
In the midst of my stacks of papers, we made time to go see Son del Llano ("classic Cuban son and salsa") last night. They were playing at Lincoln's legendary Zoo Bar, and it was so refreshing to listen to them: it's the kind of musica my Dad used to play (vinyl, por supuesto) when we were little--along with Johnny Mathis and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, naturally.
Who knew Lincoln, Nebraska would have an old-time son band? Stranger than fiction. You can give them a listen right now, or you can come on out at seven o'clock on May 29th to the DelRay Ballroom down in the Haymarket and dance all night for just ten bucks.
And speaking of dancing all night, I received a CD in the mail the other day from the fledgling Oberlin band Dos Mil Días de Fuego, and I just have to say it: my mother's heart about burst with pride. Was that my kid, sounding all like a grown-up man, rapping in Spanish? Those smart, political lyrics? I tell you, it made my week.
And what's more, the CD arrived on one of those mopey blue What has it all been for? days, too (which are pretty frequent, let me tell you, LOL, toward the end of the semester). I sat there listening with tears in my eyes, a long-distance mama, thinking, This. This is what it has all been for. For this smart young artist, articulate, bilingual, full of passion and power.
(And let me just send a shout-out of thanks to poet & Oberlin faculty member Kazim Ali, who worked with Grey on his January-term project analyzing contemporary formal poetry and writing new lyrics. Working with that child takes patience--I say this with love--so Ali must have the patience of a saint. Respect and gratitude.)
These gorgeous songs are the pudding that the proof is in. I can't wait for them to be stream-able for you.
Wild congratulations to UNL grad student Danielle Luebbe, who won the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest with her beautiful essay, "Palm to Palm." It's a gorgeous piece, and the honor is more than merited. I can't wait for Danielle's work to start finding the audience it deserves.
And under the category of Extremely Hard to Believe Yet True, the second place winner of the Atlantic Monthly contest was Kelly Grey Carlisle, about whose work I've waxed rhapsodic on here before. Unbelievable. UNL's creative writing program: kickin' ass and takin' names. (Do you think the department would go for a t-shirt with that motto?)
Who Does She Think She Is? refers not to Danielle and Kelly--though they should be rocking chutzpah galore right about now--but to a documentary about women artists and the persistence of gender bias in the art world. It's showing at the Ross this Thursday evening at 7:30, and director Pamela Tannerwill be there to discuss it. I think I'm going to take my Little Sister Amara, who's pretty good with a paintbrush herself. Go here to watch a trailer and learn more.
My mom used to ask me that question angrily when I was little: "Who do you think you are?" It always baffled me and hurt me. Her anger made me feel small and frustrated.
I know now that the question was intended to express her indignation that I'd gotten above my place, that I'd talked back, "gotten smart" with her. But then, the question was an existential stumper. Could you think you were someone you weren't? Who did I think I was? I'd stand there dumbly, taking her literally, lost in thought, confused and yet fascinated by the possibilities.
The only correct answer, to my mother's mind, was probably, "Who do I think I am? I think I'm sorry. Very, very sorry." But I'd usually spin mentally off into some six-year-old version of cosmological, ontological inquiry and just stand there with my mouth open--not fruitful for mother-daughter relations.
I grew up to be sort of shy, quiet, and insecure--something I'm still outgrowing, slowly and with effort. I've never quite felt the dangerous uppityness my mother was sure I possessed. But I favor uppity women, and I hope Danielle and Kelly revel in a little well-earned uppityness today.
Congratulations, Danielle and Kelly! Hurray! Woo-hoo!
And under the category of Extremely Hard to Believe Yet True, the second place winner of the Atlantic Monthly contest was Kelly Grey Carlisle, about whose work I've waxed rhapsodic on here before. Unbelievable. UNL's creative writing program: kickin' ass and takin' names. (Do you think the department would go for a t-shirt with that motto?)
Who Does She Think She Is? refers not to Danielle and Kelly--though they should be rocking chutzpah galore right about now--but to a documentary about women artists and the persistence of gender bias in the art world. It's showing at the Ross this Thursday evening at 7:30, and director Pamela Tannerwill be there to discuss it. I think I'm going to take my Little Sister Amara, who's pretty good with a paintbrush herself. Go here to watch a trailer and learn more.
My mom used to ask me that question angrily when I was little: "Who do you think you are?" It always baffled me and hurt me. Her anger made me feel small and frustrated.
I know now that the question was intended to express her indignation that I'd gotten above my place, that I'd talked back, "gotten smart" with her. But then, the question was an existential stumper. Could you think you were someone you weren't? Who did I think I was? I'd stand there dumbly, taking her literally, lost in thought, confused and yet fascinated by the possibilities.
The only correct answer, to my mother's mind, was probably, "Who do I think I am? I think I'm sorry. Very, very sorry." But I'd usually spin mentally off into some six-year-old version of cosmological, ontological inquiry and just stand there with my mouth open--not fruitful for mother-daughter relations.
I grew up to be sort of shy, quiet, and insecure--something I'm still outgrowing, slowly and with effort. I've never quite felt the dangerous uppityness my mother was sure I possessed. But I favor uppity women, and I hope Danielle and Kelly revel in a little well-earned uppityness today.
Congratulations, Danielle and Kelly! Hurray! Woo-hoo!
This article on CNN.com, "Growing Hate Groups Blame Obama, Economy" (not to mention the rejuvenated media platforms of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh) capstoned my long, rude awakening from my post-inaugural glow. Turns out, white supremacists--whose ire, as the article mentions, has been fueled by Latino immigration over the last decade--have found a great "visual aid" in Obama's presidency. Membership in racist hate groups has shot up as dormant racists, feeling threatened, come out of the closet to declare their sick rage. So much for pundits' premature assertions of a post-racial, post-racist society.
The photo that ran with the CNN article was taken here in Nebraska last year, and it gave me a sickening thud in my stomach.
I guess, as much as this shocks and disgusts me, it does help me understand the surprisingly racist perspectives of a small minority of my students at UNL. If they were exposed, even today, to this kind of nightmare scenario in their childhoods--and/or to the chronic stream of racist rhetoric that surely accompanies it--then it's no wonder they struggle with the viability of Latino lit or the fact that some people think affirmative action is a good thing. Sad.
The persistence of violence in the world, of prejudice and hatred, has always mystified, pained, and angered me, pero my only contribution against it has been involvement in anti-racist, anti-sexist education (and raising a passionately pacifist child--who sent, by the way, this link, in case you are interested in signing Avaaz's petition to establish a Commission of Inquiry, as some U.S. Senators have proposed, into citizen wiretapping, torture, detention, and the use of secret prisons in the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." Go here if you'd like to read and/or sign it.)
I always wish I had more power to change things. Sure, we can be the change we want to see in the world, and that certainly helps, but sometimes I wish for more.
"Out of fire grew narrative," writes Alice Sebold in her excellent memoir Lucky, which we're reading in Autobiographical Writing this week. In chapter 3, she gives us background about her life before she was raped as a first-year college student. The burned houses of her childhood suburban neighborhood function as objective correlatives for her post-rape state of mind. She describes walking, as a young child, through a house that had burned one night. Because she wanted to save the family, she constructed an imagined story in which they got away. She used her words and her imagination to invent a different ending: one she could bear, one that met with her ethical approval, her sense of rightness. "Out of fire grew narrative," and out of the devastation of her own rape grew the story she tells in Lucky, which counters dominant cultural narratives about rape, victims, justice, and recovery, all in a lucid, often surprisingly funny style.
"If you're a writer," says Sandra Cisneros, "then the most important political work you can do is to write."
James and I saw Waltz with Bashir at The Ross this weekend, and if it's at a theater near you, all I can say is, See it. It's brilliant. It's an autobiographical, animated film about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the massacre of Palestinians, with Israeli knowledge, by Christian Phalangists.
But it's also just as much about the workings of memory, trauma, conscience, and invention, which it probes and problematizes in a conflicted, complex, honest, self-aware way. The writer/director was an Israeli soldier who was there at the invasion of Beirut as a young man, and he doesn't, at the beginning of the film, understand why he can't remember particular events. He interviews men who were there with him or men who served at the same time to rebuild and jog his memory.
There's plenty of material for gender criticism in the film, but I'll leave that analysis for to others to perform. (Classic binaries, Woman as Freud's oceanic, etc.) For now, I just want to tell you that it's exquisite, brilliant, gorgeous, and powerful--and I don't usually lavish the adjectives on stuff that extravagantly--and that the ending works like a knockout punch. (I hear the New York Times review spoils the ending, so don't read it before you go.) There are also moments of profound visual beauty. It's a hauntingly lovely, terribly disturbing film. Out of fire grew narrative.
The photo that ran with the CNN article was taken here in Nebraska last year, and it gave me a sickening thud in my stomach.
I guess, as much as this shocks and disgusts me, it does help me understand the surprisingly racist perspectives of a small minority of my students at UNL. If they were exposed, even today, to this kind of nightmare scenario in their childhoods--and/or to the chronic stream of racist rhetoric that surely accompanies it--then it's no wonder they struggle with the viability of Latino lit or the fact that some people think affirmative action is a good thing. Sad. The persistence of violence in the world, of prejudice and hatred, has always mystified, pained, and angered me, pero my only contribution against it has been involvement in anti-racist, anti-sexist education (and raising a passionately pacifist child--who sent, by the way, this link, in case you are interested in signing Avaaz's petition to establish a Commission of Inquiry, as some U.S. Senators have proposed, into citizen wiretapping, torture, detention, and the use of secret prisons in the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." Go here if you'd like to read and/or sign it.)
I always wish I had more power to change things. Sure, we can be the change we want to see in the world, and that certainly helps, but sometimes I wish for more.
"Out of fire grew narrative," writes Alice Sebold in her excellent memoir Lucky, which we're reading in Autobiographical Writing this week. In chapter 3, she gives us background about her life before she was raped as a first-year college student. The burned houses of her childhood suburban neighborhood function as objective correlatives for her post-rape state of mind. She describes walking, as a young child, through a house that had burned one night. Because she wanted to save the family, she constructed an imagined story in which they got away. She used her words and her imagination to invent a different ending: one she could bear, one that met with her ethical approval, her sense of rightness. "Out of fire grew narrative," and out of the devastation of her own rape grew the story she tells in Lucky, which counters dominant cultural narratives about rape, victims, justice, and recovery, all in a lucid, often surprisingly funny style.
"If you're a writer," says Sandra Cisneros, "then the most important political work you can do is to write."
James and I saw Waltz with Bashir at The Ross this weekend, and if it's at a theater near you, all I can say is, See it. It's brilliant. It's an autobiographical, animated film about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the massacre of Palestinians, with Israeli knowledge, by Christian Phalangists.
But it's also just as much about the workings of memory, trauma, conscience, and invention, which it probes and problematizes in a conflicted, complex, honest, self-aware way. The writer/director was an Israeli soldier who was there at the invasion of Beirut as a young man, and he doesn't, at the beginning of the film, understand why he can't remember particular events. He interviews men who were there with him or men who served at the same time to rebuild and jog his memory. There's plenty of material for gender criticism in the film, but I'll leave that analysis for to others to perform. (Classic binaries, Woman as Freud's oceanic, etc.) For now, I just want to tell you that it's exquisite, brilliant, gorgeous, and powerful--and I don't usually lavish the adjectives on stuff that extravagantly--and that the ending works like a knockout punch. (I hear the New York Times review spoils the ending, so don't read it before you go.) There are also moments of profound visual beauty. It's a hauntingly lovely, terribly disturbing film. Out of fire grew narrative.
Categories:
