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I'm so excited, like I always get right before classes begin.  So please forgive me, everyone else, but this post is dedicated to my fellow teaching geeks out there.

In my Chicana/Chicano Lit class, a new course for me, I'll be teaching these great books:

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya, a classic

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, which I've been teaching now for over ten years--it never wears out!

Borderlands/La Frontera:  The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa, which blew me away in graduate school (though I remember that it freaked out a few of my fellow grad students)--the title page of that early edition still bears my sweetly awed, breathless, scrawled note:  "the most amazing book I've ever read"

the anthology Latino Boom, edited by these great guys, John Christie and Jose Gonzalez, who also have a very helpful website on Latino lit

and the brand-new, still damp from the presses memoir by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Mexican Enough:  My Life between the Borderlines. 

By sheer happy accident, I ran across an advance copy of Mexican Enough  at the Pine Manor residency this summer, and I got hooked by just the first five pages.  It's a lark, a romp--but with serious brains.  Then--again, by sheer happy accident--I was lucky enough to meet Stephanie herself, very briefly, at Macondo, and I'll tell you what:  even on only a first impression, she's a way fun girl.  That carries over into her narration, so I thought her book would be a livelier intro to some of the cultural and historical material we need to cover than me lecturing at the front of the classroom.   We'll see if the ENGL 245D students agree!

I'm in love with the books for my graduate course in creative nonfiction, too, especially Telling True Stories (a brilliant craft guide, co-edited by Wendy Call, one of the terrific participants in our workshop at Macondo), Food & Booze, the collection from the journal Tin House, and a beautiful collection of essays, Never in a Hurry:  Essays on People and Places, by Naomi Shihab Nye, who (hurray!) will be our writer-in-residence here at UNL next spring. But I won't rave about them now, because I've got to finish thinking through my opening-day spiel. 

I'm reading Barry Lopez's Resistance, and I love the first story and the deep seriousness that it opens up.  Read it, read it. 

But--call me cranky--the rest of the collection just doesn't sustain.  At least so far.  Maybe it'll pick back up, but it's becoming just a shade monotonous, predictable, and the voices of all the fictional narrators are so similar that it's hard to distinguish them.  The first story's wonderful, seriously, but I'd rather just have imagined the rest.

I'm also reading the Bhagavad Gita again.  Like Arjuna, I'm feeling reluctant to charge into battle (another start-of-the-semester feeling), so I'm trying to listen up and see if Krishna will make any sense this time. 

On a totally unrelated note, I saw Bill Maher on Larry King last night.  My Dad used to love Bill Maher--he watched him religiously, if I can use that word in regard to anything Maheresque.  We don't get HBO, so I don't watch Bill Maher's show, but I must say, his interview with Larry King was refreshing.  You don't hear people speak so frankly in the public sphere very often.  Whether or not you agree with Maher's perspectives, his honesty and directness are bracing.  

I think he's the kind of guy that the best of the U.S. founding fathers--the best of them, mind you--would have liked hanging out with.  Little perceptible b.s., little perceptible spin.  There's a kind of unassailable vulnerability that comes when you just tell the truth about who you are and what you believe.  He has some of that, and it's refreshing because that's not a quality that makes it to prime-time very often.

Lastly, how is it that, according to a recent poll, McCain and Obama are tied?  Huh?  Hello?  What did I miss?  Nation, what's happening?

When my husband brought the Sunday New York Times home this weekend, I was so excited to see a piece from one of my favorite teachers and mentors in its pages.

"Beach Blanket Baja," by Helena María Viramontes, begins by delineating her family's class and ethnic position:

IN our East Los Angeles working-class neighborhoods of the ’50s and ’60s, no one thought of summer vacations or sleep-away camps as a possibility. . . .  My parents grew up in one of the largest and oldest Mexican-American communities in the nation. Immigrant belief prevailed, despite the fact that both Mom and Dad were born in the United States. We were poor, but it was a poverty that we were unaware of since everyone around us was the same.

Into this mix comes the "delirium" of a childhood vacation:

. . . [I]n 1964, when I was 10, my father announced that we were all to spend a weekend in Ensenada, Mexico, with José and his family.

My mother was, at first, skeptical: It would be no easy feat to transport a total of 16 people, the majority of them children, but Tío José had worked out a plan. He would drive his Pontiac, accompanied by his wife, Tía Lola, and his children. My father would drive Joe Junior’s clunky Chevy, and my oldest brother, Gil, would be in charge of driving our father’s white Ford pickup.

Gas and food? Everything was much cheaper across the border. Lodging? Camping under the stars!

Funny, frank, and unflinching about the economic woes she sees south of the border, the piece finally becomes a story about the nerve-wracking difficulties, the "anxieties" of "monstrous proportions," even for documented U.S. citizens, of crossing the literal border from Mexico back to the United States--an important thing to make vivid for readers across the country now that, as the Pew Research Center reports, "Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported," according to a nationwide survey of Latinos, and "Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos."

Thanks, Helena, for bringing it all to life.

My husband and I spent a big, hot chunk of today out canvassing door to door, getting voters to apply to vote early by mail.  It was so cool. 

The whole going-door-to-door thing--not to mention the fact that we got assigned to a gigantic trailer park--was sort of a flashback fest, but once I got over my jittery old self, it was really fun.

The best parts were when I got to talk to really elderly voters.  They were like, "Yes, this is great!  It's hard for me to get out."  In November, the weather in Nebraska can be daunting.  It was good to imagine them warm and comfortable at their kitchen tables, filling in their ballots.

Nebraska is one of the few states (two, I think?) that don't go all red or all blue in the presidential race, so individual voters have a little bit more of an impact.  We have three congressional districts.  Ours here in Lincoln (and stretching north and south) is the first, Omaha's region is the second, and western Nebraska is the third. 

Right now, folks are guessing that the second CD (Omaha) will line up for Obama in November, and the third CD (west) will go for McCain.  But the first CD (ours) is anyone's guess.  It's kind of up for grabs and could go either way--or that's what some say, at least--and it was cool to be out there helping people make their voices heard.

In other news, I'm working to get my syllabi ready for the new semester at UNL, which starts on the 25th.  I'm excited to be teaching two new courses this fall:  Chicana/Chicana Literature (I've only taught big-umbrella Latina/Latino lit courses before), and a graduate course in creative nonfiction.  I'm very psyched about both, but the planning is eating me alive!

I just read the opening whirlwind manifesto on the blog Streetheart:  Ethics of Graffiti.  The writing's good, and the anonymous author really throws down:

The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?

He/she's not pulling any punches; see for yourself.  I'm curious to see what comes next.

One of my favorite books to teach at Wabash College, where I worked for ten years before moving to Lincoln, was the inimitable Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?  I love this book.  I loved teaching it to first-year writing students, not only because Tatum's writing is wonderfully logical, organized, and crystal-clear--a great model for students--but also, and more importantly, because she explains issues of institutional (structural) racism and white privilege in ways that anyone can understand.  It made me feel happy to be doing peace and justice work in the composition classroom, instead of talking only about paragraph organization and comma splices.

My father loved the book, too.  I gave him a copy and told him how excited I'd been to find it (at the GLCA Course Design & Teaching Workshop for multicultural education, which I'd taken as a junior faculty member).  He read it and was annotating it; he told me that it clarified things that had puzzled and hurt him all his life.  I found it on his little stand next to his armchair after he died.

One of my favorite students at Wabash, a young man named Daniel Zeno, who's now in law school at the University of Iowa, just wrote to update his friends on the work that he's been doing this summer with Advancement Project, a policy, communications, and legal action group in D.C. that works for racial justice.  Along with several other initiatives, Daniel has written a blog post for the Advancement Project's blog, Just Democracy, called "Undelivered Promises:  40 Acres and a Mule in 2008," about the new suit filed by over 800 Black farmers against the USDA.

He writes:

The persistent unwillingness of the USDA to address these problems of racism and discrimination, combined with the many other examples on the federal, state and local government level (Did somebody say Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans?) remind us all that structural racism is still alive. Structural racism is a direct result of a history of racism in the United States and continues to deny people of color equal opportunities.

Go, Daniel!

The cover story of today's New York Times Book Review is a piece by Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, on Kathryn Harrison's new nonfiction book, While They Slept.  He examines the paradoxical way in which literature asserts the unspeakable-ness of traumatic experience while still speaking it:

The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling.  Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. . . .  Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator's guilt.

But who is the "we" in Pinsky's second sentence?  "Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs."  This assumed in-group troubles me, for many of us have been raped.  Or experienced incest, or been witnesses to killings (examples he goes on to mention).  Or, pressed by our nations into service as warriors, we have been the perpetrators of legally sanctioned murder.  Or we've grown up in the homes of such people, afflicted by the leftover traumas they didn't know how to cure.  Many of us would love to have suffered only the "smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs" of Pinsky's second sentence.

Pinsky quotes the chorus, speaking to Oedipus:

What madness came upon you, what daemon
Leaped on your life with heavier
Punishment than a mortal man can bear?
No: I cannot even
Look at you, poor ruined one.
And I would speak, question, ponder,
If I were able. No.
You make me shudder.

"I cannot even / Look at you, poor ruined one."

How do survivors of trauma cope with this invisibility--with knowing that they make the un-traumatized "shudder"?  How do they survive, not only the initial trauma, not only its aftereffects (which can last decades), but also the knowledge that they offend the eye and ear of the healthy civilian, that their unspeakable pain has rendered them unsightly? 

Though he gives a positive review to Harrison's book (the true story of brutally abusive, fundamentalist parents whose actions, ignored by the surrounding society, led to their murder by their son), Pinsky's attitude reinscribes the horror with which "normal" people often greet those who've traumatized.  The surviving daughter,

[a]t the age of 6 or 7, in an act of imagination that foreshadowed her achievement of surviving . . . created families of ghosts she would speak with, in the trees near where she lived.  [Author] Harrison suggests that these ghosts--creatures who are dead, yet persist--were a way for the child to mourn for herself, or for the lost selves and family that might have existed.

Different ghosts arise in an interview with Edward Tick, who counsels returning veterans, in the current issue of The Sun, "Like Wandering Ghosts:  How the U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers."   His attitude toward the traumatized is a more compassionate one:

Kupfer: Though you treat ptsd, you’ve said that it is not a mental illness. Why do you believe this?

Tick: We pathologize everything in this culture. We think anything that ails us must be a medical condition that can be treated. Veterans are angry or sad because they have been through horrors, but we say it’s got to be a pathology. This is exacerbated by a profound alienation between our warrior class and our civilian class, which have almost nothing to do with one another. We don’t even think we have a warrior class, and we don’t teach our service people to think of themselves as warriors, even though societies throughout history have almost all had warrior classes and reciprocal relationships between warriors and civilians. Soldiers have a responsibility to defend their country, and it is our responsibility as citizens to heal those who have put their lives on the line for us, even if they fought a war for the wrong reasons or for lies. And we’re not doing that.

Using PTSD as an inadequate but the best currently available term, Tick sees it as "an identity disorder and soul wound that has its source in moral trauma. It is also a social disorder arising from the broken relationship between our society and its veterans." 

If for "veterans," you read also "battered women," "torture victims," "abused children," "rape victims," and so on, then you'll have a sense of how potentially transformative Tick's view could be for our world, in which so many people are now traumatized by war, natural disasters, and violence. 

They need to be listened to and healed, not ignored, not invisible-ized, not disappeared. 

Tick writes:

I am still protesting the Vietnam War, and all war. There are two things we have to do as a culture to end war: One is to take full responsibility for our wounded. It’s not enough just to “bring the boys home,” because they aren’t boys anymore, and getting them home physically does not do it. We need to help them heal and help shoulder their burden. The other thing we need to do is take responsibility for the damage we have done to other countries and their people. I bring veterans to Vietnam to heal not only them but also the Vietnamese. Americans do not realize the monstrous damage we do with technological warfare. I want to bring that reality back home and educate Americans about civilian suffering in war.

Read the whole interview with Tick here. 

If you didn't see Barack Obama give his nomination-clinching speech earlier this week, it's worth 29 minutes of your time, and it's available on YouTube.  Not only did he speak to issues of healthcare, the war in Iraq, global security, energy, the economy, and the environment, but he did this educator's heart good when he said that we must "finally decide that in this global economy, the chance to get a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American. That's the change we need in America." 

The speech was terrific.  Obama finished with these remarks:

Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

My son and I hugged with tears in our eyes.  We're suckers for a good speech.  Especially one that can change history.

Hey, all you members of the adoption triad out there--or just you folks who like a romantic comedy with a grain of reality and brains in it--Then She Found Me is really good.  Helen Hunt, of Mad About You fame, directed, wrote the screenplay, and stars.  Other members of the cast are Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick (who's terrific as the clueless, self-absorbed child-husband), and Bette Midler.  Ben Shenkman (Angels in America) and Lynn Cohen (Miranda's housekeeper on Sex and the City) also have good roles.

The film, which has apparently been a labor of love for Helen Hunt, who's been working on it since 1997, is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Elinor Lipman, who shares her thoughts about its conversion into film on her website.  (Take note of the timeline, all you writers whose books have been optioned or who are hoping for that.)

I really like the way the film explores the sense of total upheaval that an adoption reunion can bring to your life.  As excited and hopeful as you may feel, a reunion is still like an earthquake.  It shakes everything.  The film captures those chaotic highs and lows. 

And it's not like the rest of your life just holds still so you can think about it and deal.  The movie does a good job with that aspect, which it represents in a nicely, realistically complex fashion.  I'm excited about the way Then She Found Me might bring a better understanding of adoption issues to a mainstream, non-adoption-related audience.

I really liked the unabashed inclusion of the protagonist's Jewish faith, too.  Seeing her spirituality presented seriously and with grace made me think about how often Jewishness is depicted in pop culture as inevitably allied with humor, from Woody Allen to Seinfeld to Curb Your Enthusiasm to Jon Stewart's self-deprecating remarks on The Daily Show.  As hilarious as those folks can be, I realized how rare it is to see anything different.  Good for Helen Hunt.

Though most elements of the film are quite strong, some of the dialogue delivery feels, to me, a bit too much like dialogue, not enough like real talk, but that's a minor quibble, and it only happens in a few scenes.  Overall, the movie's terrific.  Here in Lincoln, it's showing at The Ross, but only until this Thursday. 

If you go, prepare to think and be moved.

Do feminist writers--and women writers generally--get shafted in the pages of the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review?  Sarah Seltzer thinks so.  Read her piece "Hard Times" in Bitch to see if you agree.  

So Grey was whisked to Manhattan, chauffeured around in black sedans and SUVs, and put up in the "snazzy-ass" Hotel Mela, a four-star luxury boutique hotel on West 44th.  With the other students slated to be on the show, he went to Times Square and took a carriage ride through Central Park.

But after prepping his rationale for opposite-sex dorm rooms so that it would sound articulate on national TV, he never got the chance to speak!  LOL.  Check it out:  the mother, the future roommate Sam, and Disapproving Girl took up all the airtime. 

C'est la vie.  He got a wild behind-the-scenes glimpse at big media--on FOX News's dime, no less--and he's back on campus in time for finals. 

Which is what, after all, a mother cares about most.