Of Museums and Office Moves

Last week, we were told we would be in our current offices for several months.  On Monday, we were told we needed to be in our new offices by Friday or early next week.  Yesterday, we were told that the movers are coming Thursday.

As people heard the news, they said to me, "What are you going to do?"

To which I replied, "Pack."  People have looked at me skeptically.  I could almost see them measuring how many books remain on the shelf.

But I am my father's daughter.  I can pack up a bookcase in minutes.  My family never got far from its military beginnings.  We can be packed up and ready to go in very short order.

In fact, I was so convinced of my abilities to get packed that I continued with my original plan to go to the Rubell Family Collection, the wonderful field trip that my colleague arranged for her students.  On a day when I have more time, I'll likely post more pictures, but here's my favorite piece from yesterday:

You can't really tell, but it's a huge tube made of sheet after sheet of crumpled rice paper folded over hanging bamboo rods.

Here are some close ups.  This is the wall, taken from the outside:

and from underneath, looking up:

I entered the tube and felt an immediate peace.  I got a whiff of paper, like sniffing an old book that's in good condition.  I loved being surrounded by the cream color, by the paper.

The focus of the current exhibition is Chinese artists living now.  I learned a lot; needless to say, I'm not very familiar with contemporary Asian art, and very few people know much about contemporary Chinese art beyond some obvious names.

And then I returned back to the office, where I packed and packed and packed.  And it's mostly done.

Today I'll move all the files that are going with me to the file cabinet that's going with me.  I'll wipe down the furniture that's leaving.  I'll pry a sticker off my desk because it reminds me of a former friend and boss.  Hidden in a corner, the sticker proclaims that in the event of the rapture, this desk will be unmanned.  It reminds me that when I first started working here, there were more born-again folks.  They're mostly gone now.

When I look back on yesterday, will I remember the calm of the museum?  I hope so.  The day was bookended by people who are feeling all sorts of negative emotions about the changes that are barreling our way.

One of my colleagues asked me what time I'd be in today.  I replied, "The normal time, in the afternoon."  At her arched eyebrow, I said, "My reading pal still deserves our hour together."

Yes, the moving tasks will wait.  Last week, my first grade reading pal had showed the most improvement in one week that I've seen.  I want to build on that today.

Mepkin Abbey: Even a Monastery Changes

It's interesting to return to a place again and again.  I tend to assume that all will be the same, but even at a monastery, there are changes.

For years, this structure was our lodging--not exactly what you'd expect from a monastery:

But this year, there's a new retreat center.

It had a Zen-like feel that I wouldn't have expected at a Catholic monastery:

Here is a view of the room.

I could stay here and write for days and days!

There's a new chapel at the retreat center, but it's only used for individual meditation:

At first there were no flowers in the chapel that's used for worship.  But by Saturday night, these Christmas flowers appeared:

The wreaths were still up, which is appropriate.  We were there for Candlemas, which celebrates the presentation of Jesus at the temple 40 days after his birth, which in some traditions ends the Christmas season.

And there are new crèche scenes along the pathways.

Once there was an abandoned building:

Now there is a pottery studio:

Here's a close-up of the porch with the wheel:

And I confess that I peeked in a window:

Once the monks sold eggs, and now they sell mushrooms.  But I don't have a picture for that.  Retreatents aren't allowed to wander the farm section of the monastery.

I am trying to take comfort from this view of monastery changes.  It's a week of change at work.  Once I thought I'd be staying in my office for several months.  Yesterday I was told that I needed to be in the new office by Friday.

All that Enslaves Us

Yesterday I saw Twelve Years a Slave.  Wow.  It is easily one of the best movies I have seen in a long time, quite possibly one of the best movies I have ever seen.

I had heard so much about the movie's brutality, about how it was a hard movie to watch, that I almost didn't go.  But I asked an African-American friend if I really needed to see it, and she said, "You need to see this movie."  I asked if I needed to see it on the big screen, and she said yes.

And so, I went.  And honestly, after hearing so much about the brutality, I was prepared for something much, much worse.

I'm not disputing the brutality of the movie.  But it's no slasher film, not one of those films that eroticizes the violence.  I thought the moviemakers struck just the right balance of showing us the brutality of plantation life without showing it so often that we became immune to its horror.

One of the things that struck me was how hard it was to carve a life out of that land.  The film shows the process of converting trees into boards.  Even with slaves, it would have taken a LONG time to build those gorgeous houses.

I already knew how hard it was to pick cotton.  I spent my elementary school years in Montgomery, Alabama.  I remember a field trip to a cotton field where we picked cotton and separated it from the seeds.  I remember a teacher stressing that this kind of cotton production was so inefficient that it would have ceased, had not Eli Whitney's cotton gin come along to mechanize it all.

When the movie came out, I was stuck in my home office because my online classes had started, and they were on an accelerated schedule.  As I worked on grading first assignments, I listened to several NPR shows that discussed the movie.  I remember people talking about how they never really thought about how much brute force it would have taken to enslave people.

My friend and I had a similar conversation, where we both expressed our surprise at various people's surprise at the dark side of slavery.  We were surprised at how many people we've met who seem to have never thought about the inhumane conditions.   And these aren't people only a high school education.  No, I've been hearing highly educated people who somehow missed this chapter.

Maybe it's because it's U.S. history where we haven't wanted to hear about the dark stuff that made us a nation. Or maybe it's human nature to want to believe the triumphal side of history, not the bleak side.

I was also impressed with the movie as a piece of art.  All of the elements worked so well together, and I don't often find that.  Usually, there's something jarring that's not working, or several elements out of whack.  Not in this film.

If you want to find out more about the music in the movie, I highly recommend this article. 

I keep coming back to how fully the actors inhabited their roles.  The actors who played the slaves seemed genuinely terrified, not just people pretending to be terrified.  The first slaveholder seemed to be torn in realistic ways about what he needed--slaves--in terms to meet his bills.  The second slave-holder seemed genuinely psychotic.  And the scene of the slave market seemed much more realistic than similar scenes in other movies.

The movie did a great job in showing how everyone was caught in this economic machinery.  It made me think about how we all want to believe that we have power and agency, but we really don't.  And those of us who have more power and agency go through a lot of mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that we have no choice, that we're being as humane as possible.

When I heard the first slaveholder talk about the debts he had to pay, I heard my own voice talking about my mortgage as a reason for why I shop at cheaper places, why I make certain financial decisions.  My spouse pointed out that from our earliest days as human societies, the economic structure has been set up to help those who are most powerful, and it's a very tiny proportion of the population.

As I said when the movie first came out, I'm also surprised by how many people are in denial about how much slavery is happening right now.  In many ways, it's never been easier to own a slave.  In many ways, in first world countries, it's also easier to help a slave than it once was.  Several months ago, I wrote more about captivity narratives in this post.

My African-American friend said I wouldn't want to see this movie again, but I would.  It's a movie that bears watching and rewatching.  I'm hoping that it will do for current and future generations what Roots did for my generation:  to help us talk about slavery and to help us realize what slavery was really like and to help instill gratitude for all the ways our current lives are easy.

Don't be deterred by all the talk about the difficulties of this movie.  Go see it.  My friend was right.  We all really need to see this movie.

Sunday Snippets: The Desecration of the Trees and Other Farewells

--This is a movie week-end.  I had planned to see movies like Dallas Buyers Club before they left, but then I waited too long.  Then, when the movies were nominated for Oscars, a second chance!  So, yesterday it was Dallas Buyer's Club and today Twelve Years a Slave.

--Dallas Buyer's Club was a different movie than I expected.  I thought it would be darkly comic, and it was, here and there.  I didn't expect it to be quite so sordid.  My friend and I discussed why the characters were so keen to keep living when they didn't seem to have much to live for.  There's a scene where 2 characters discuss this very same thing.

--The movie reminded me that there are very ill people out there who would give ANYTHING to have what I so often take for granted:  a rather mundane life filled with daily joys.  A very ill person might happily trade places with me even during my aggravating days.

--We found out this week that a former colleague has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  So in many ways, this movie resonated in ways that it might not have if I'd seen it in November.

--The skeletal qualities of the actors did startle--those beautiful men transformed themselves into something scary.

--I drove by my old house on my way to and from the movie.  The new owners have cut down all the trees.  I understand why they didn't like some of them, but to chop down the mango tree?  Really?

--We got the tree as a seedling, when we lost a magnificent orange tree to a doomed effort to eradicate citrus canker.  But I'd feel the same sorrow if we'd moved into the house with a mature tree already there.

--On a lighter note, here's a wonderful blog post about Jimmy Fallon's last night on his very late-night show.  It's also a great meditation on joy.  Linda Holmes writes, "It's funny now — those words surprised even me when I reread them, because I had forgotten over the course of five years that I didn't know in 2009 that Jimmy Fallon even had an animating principle, let alone know that it would turn out to be joy, which is the animating principle of entirely too little of popular culture."

--Be sure to watch the clip with the Muppets.  If that doesn't make you smile, I don't know what will.  Holmes writes, "He staged his goodbye as a performance of 'The Weight' with The Muppets, which continues perhaps the best LNJF tradition of all: that of making really good, really strange choices that somehow, in retrospect, are perfect. We could have sat around trading ideas, the rest of us who don't live in that bubble, for a year, and we'd never have come up with 'he should sing 'The Weight' with The Muppets.' But now that I've seen it, I can't possibly imagine it being anything else."

--The Muppets never age; most animated characters don't age.  How would our view of aging change if we saw those creations age?

Making a Prairie: Farewell to Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin died on Thursday, and I found out from a Facebook post on Friday.  I keep almost all my volumes of poetry at work, and I looked for some Kumin to take home.  Apparently, although I liked her and taught a poem of hers here and there, I never bought a whole volume.

In fact, the book of hers that I like most is from the U of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living .  This volume shows the benefits of having other interests outside of one's writing.  I have no desire to own horses, but I've always loved the idea of a farm, and her essays show her delight in living in the country.

I also love the image that I have of her friendship with Anne Sexton.  They used to write in their separate houses while attending to their household duties as young wives and mothers.  They had their own dedicated phone line, and they'd often not hang up the phone and come back to talk to each other periodically.  They'd read each other their poems-in-progress as they worked, and they'd talk about their days, and they'd keep each other connected to the adult world, even as they cared for children.

Of course, I can't think about that relationship without being taken over by a sense of sorrow at the knowledge of Sexton's suicide.  But somewhere along the way, I glommed onto the example of Kumin as a poet who managed both sanity and creativity at the same time.

Younger poets and writers may have no memory of a time when it seemed that most famous/accomplished female writers had mental health issues.  When I was in undergraduate school, we didn't study many female writers at all, and the ones I knew about didn't seem to suggest that being a writer would help one's mental stability:  Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf.  Even the authors who beat their demons, or had no demons, the Brontes for example, died young.

Maxine Kumin showed us that you can have a suburban life and be a good poet. 

According to many people, she was also a fine teacher.  The New York Times had a great article about her which mentioned that she required students to memorize poetry, 30 to 40 lines of it a week:

“'The other reason, as I tell their often stunned faces, is to give them an internal library to draw on when they are taken political prisoner,' she told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans in 2000. 'For many, this is an unthinkable concept; they simply do not believe in anything fervently enough to go to jail for it.'”

 

In this week that brought us the news of brilliant artists dying too young (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), I'm glad to reflect on the fact that Maxine Kumin was with us for 88 years.  Again, I like an artist's life that shows us that we can live to a ripe old age, still creating solid art into our late years, still surrounded by friends and family.  May we all have that kind of good fortune.

My Post-Post-Structuralist Bookcase

I went to grad school in the late 80's.  There was a gulf between the literary theorists and the creative writers.  The MFA students had to take several theory classes, and most of them bitterly resented it.  The theorists weren't real happy about the presence of the creative writers.

The rest of us--we just liked to read.  We were in grad school because we wanted to continue living as long as we could in a world where we had time to read and people with whom to discuss great works of literature.

One day, a piece of graffiti made everyone buzz:  "Literature is the manure out of which the flower of theory blooms."

People outside of the English department world would shake their heads at how much debate that bit of graffiti generated.  I myself am still surprised. 

Some year, I expect to look back at current discussions of pedagogy and online migrations and wonder how we missed the bigger picture blooming just offscreen.

I've had those English culture wars on my brain as I've been sorting through books at the office.  I've had the luxury of a lot of bookshelf space, and in our new offices, I won't have that much space.  It's time to weed!

For the most part, I'll be keeping the slender volumes of poems written recently.  Out go many old textbooks--why did I keep them?  And yesterday, I started sorting through the theory.

There's a table where we're putting the stuff that we want people to have if they're interested.  I'm surprised at how quickly people take the books.  Of course, everything quickly disappears.

Do people think the books will bring some money or are they genuinely interested?  I hope they're taking them because they say, "What a treasure!"

Of course, they might be thinking they're getting a completely different book.  Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, for example--the person who grabbed that book may not have been expecting a post-structuralist classic.

If I had to define myself as a reader/scholar, I've always said that I'm a feminist first.  But I'm also a post-structuralist in many ways--I don't believe there's only one way to read a text, and I'm just as interested in what readers think as what the author intended. 

My bookshelves in the new office will consist of primary texts, almost all poetry.  No pedagogy, no creative writing theory books, nothing that's easily accessible on the Internet.  I want books of poems that will remind me of my higher calling.  I want texts that I can read when I only have a few minutes.  I want inspiration for my own writing.

The Poems We Keep on Paper and the Poems We Memorize

I've been sorting through books, lots of books, as it is time to cull the collection.  My new office will have limited space for books; I'm trying not to see it as a sign, but as an opportunity.  Why have I been keeping all these textbooks?  Especially since I can now find much of this work online--and who has been putting all these old works online?

Lately I've also been thinking how these lines get in my head and pop up at strange times.

As we participated in the worship life of Mepkin Abbey, which involves praying the Psalms multiple times a day, I expected to have the Psalms in my head much of the time.  That's how it's been during prior visits.

During this visit, however, I found stray lines of classic English poems in my head.  At first, it was lines from Coleridge and Eliot, those lines I played with earlier this year (see this post and this post).  Then I had the line, "Shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man."  I couldn't quite place the poem; at first I thought it, too, was from "Kubla Khan."  Then I remembered that it's from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

I've also had the Wordsworth line about laying waste our powers in my head.  And the Thomas Hood poem about the seamstress who is sewing a shroud as well as a shirt.

So far, they haven't swirled together into a new poem.  But they do work to provide interest and comfort at key moments.

It's why we memorize, after all.  So that those words will be there, even when the texts (whether on paper or via electronic resources) aren't.  One of my Mepkin friends was required to memorize lots and lots of poetry throughout her school years.  She can recite all of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  I'm jealous.

Of course, I have memorized lots of Bible verses.  I just wish I had memorized more poetry to go with it.

I've also been thinking about another type of poetry form, the hymn.  I often find stray lines from hymns weaving their way through my day.  Happily, they're usually hymns that I like.

My friend is coping with her mom who has Alzheimer's, and I don't want to blog too much about it, since it's not my story.  But my friend is wondering if singing hymns together might not be a way to establish a connection.

From that nugget, a short story idea is forming in my brain.

Alas, I cannot play with that idea right now.  I must go to work, where I will lay waste my powers with countless e-mails and sorting of old papers.  But there will be lunch with good friends, a sacrament of sorts.  There will be the joy of opening an old textbook and finding something like what I found yesterday:  "Interesting writing prompt:  discuss the insane narrator in 19th century British Lit."  There will be a nationwide call in which we discuss the redesign of our English Comp approach--that might feel worthwhile, or I might need shrieving afterward.

At least I have finished the webinar trainings that had to be done by the end of Feb.  I have completed the quizzes on how to protect privacy in an electronic age and how to help my team manage conflict.  Happily, my team of a department doesn't experience much conflict, so I haven't had to deal with the ugly behavior that was reenacted in the webinar--do grown ups really behave in such awful ways to each other?

I know that they do, and I feel lucky not to have to deal with that.

And maybe, just maybe, as I go about my day, a line or two of poetry will swirl together.  I need to get back to a writing rhythm.