In honor of Cecily...

I visited a website today and gushed all over the keyboard when I found that its owner was going to a performance of Verdi's Aida. I remember first listening to that masterwork during my freshman year at Crane. I was seventeen; I'd just started my vocal training in earnest, but I was dead-set against opera. "I'll sing any art song," I told my teacher, "but none of that opera crap."

But a conversation with my mother revealed a startling truth: my grandmother was named for an opera. I had just started to wonder about her, just started asking questions about her life. I never knew her. I was curious, and so I listened to Aida, searching for some connection, some way to have my grandmother speak to me.

She didn't speak. She sang.

Well, it was really Leontyne Price, but there was a message there. I listened to the most beautiful aria -- Numi, Pieta. Aida is an Ethiopian princess, captured and made a slave by the Egyptians. She has fallen in love with a young warrior, Radames, who returns that love. Radames is chosen to lead the next battle against the Ethiopians, and he prays for victory so that he can ask to marry the radiant Aida. As he leaves, Aida cheers with the rest of the Egyptians, praying that he will return victorious. And then she realizes what that victory will mean: the capture of her father, the Ethiopian King, and the destruction of her home. "Shall I wish him victory? Even now I see the blood of my brothers, staining his hands." So she changes her wish, asks the gods to burn it from her lips. She prays for Egyptian victory instead, until she remembers that Radames might suffer or die. In anguish, she prays for pity from the gods of her youth, knowing that what fate decides will mean the death of someone she loves. "Gods," she sings, "Have pity on my suffering. Have pity."

I can't tell you how that aria affected me (well, I guess I can -- and am). I was only seventeen, but I got it. Love moves us, sometimes in the completely wrong direction. Sometimes we fall in love with people we shouldn't. Sometimes we're not strong enough to meet the price of loving. Sometimes we commit terrible acts upon the very people we adore. It's passion that undoes us, and passion that saves us. We're human, and so very small for all of our swaggering. All we can do is pray for pity, pray for compassion and understanding. Pray for grace.

I think of that power, that prayer. I think of Aida singing, helpless with love, longing and fear. I think of amor fatal, tremendo amor. Fatal love. Tremendous love. I think of my grandmother, and I feel such pity.

But I also feel grateful. After all, she gave me my voice. She gave me such wonderful, terrible gifts.

Boogie Oogie Oogie (Till We Just Couldn't Boogie No More)

This weekend was a bust. I got next to nothing done, but I can't exactly complain. I had fun. Scholar and I went out with some friends on Saturday night, and I got down with my bad self. I had three Capt-n-Cokes and two shots of some purple stuff that tasted mostly Vodka and slightly grape. I danced my booty off (but somehow ended up with someone else's fat booty the next morning. I hate it when that happens). We haven't done this in a long time, so it was worth the extreme catch-up I will have to do this week.

As a side note, Scholar is quite a dancer.

Middle School Reverie

By popular request, I am updating my blog. I didn't realize that I had let it languish for so long, but I make no apologies. I was buried under books. Before you get all jealous on me, please remember that these aren't snuggling books. They are very heavy and they have sharp angles. They are teaching books. Gah! Gag! Argh!

It's the end of the fourth week of class. I'm officially way behind, and officially slacking (c'mon, now, you knew I would). But I have to ensconce myself in a cubicle today and catch up, because I have seen what's ahead. The next few weeks are killer. How fun!

As I peruse the manuals on teaching, the guidebooks on philosphies and adolescent psychology and all that rot, I notice that something significant is missing. Where are the books on books? Are we supposed to know what 7th and 8th graders read? Yesterday one of my professors told us that we were the "experts" in our speciality area. This made me shudder -- expert? I'm an expert on all aspects of English now, am I? Has she not noticed that my grammar is rusty, and I frequently end my sentences a preposition with? I dangle modifiers by their thumbs, and I split infinitives (in two. With a cleaver). How do I qualify as an expert?

Well, I love to read. There's that. I've read a lot. So I can confidently walk into my 7th grade classroom and discuss Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, and (dammit) Faulkner. We can read poems by Hardy and Donne, and we can explore the sexual nuances in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Oh...wait. This is middle school. We're not allowed to talk about sexual nuances. So what the hell do they read in middle school?

This has not been covered in any of my coursework thus far. I can take an elective on Adolescent Lit, but not until next semester. I would really like to get a curriculum list or something, so I can see what I'll be using. Not because I'm interested in advance lesson-planning or anything like that. No, it's self-preservation. Because I strongly suspect that I haven't read any of the books I'll be required to teach.

Try to remember what you read in middle school. Difficult, eh? I tried, and it made my head hurt. I know I was in an Enriched English class (from which I was later ejected due to extreme lack of work) . I remember reading Watership Down, The Incredible Journey, The Bridge to Terebithia and Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember short stories: "The Most Dangerous Game" and "The Monkey's Paw" and "The Cask of Amontillado." I don't remember poetry. I don't remember drama.

I do remember loving what we did. The reading part, the discussing part, the analyzing part. The grammar part sucked. And that's my other fear: how am I going to teach something that causes me to cringe in terror?

I'll tell you what, though -- I refuse to fake it. I'm not going to be one of those teachers who smiles through her teeth and says she loooooves participles and adverbs, and parses verbs in her sleep. I'm not going to pretend that every word ever written and bound into a book is sacred. In college, I took an Intro to American Lit class with a bunch of fresh freshmen and an adjunct who dared to tell them that "great literature should make the top of your head explode, just like Emily Dickinson said."

And those fresh-dopes dutifully wrote that quote into their notebooks. I, the supreme super-biotch that I am, raised my hand. "So if Hawthorne doesn't do that for me -- if he doesn't make me explode -- then he's not a great writer?"

She looked at me in horror. "No, no. I don't want you to think that." The upshot was, she assigned us all an essay on "What Makes Great Literature Great" and everyone in the class despised me. I found this very amusing, because I actually love Old Nat. I just didn't want anyone to try to tell me that Great Literature excites some sort of physical combustion within the reader. Some of it we still have to trudge through (see, a preposition! See how bad I am!). Some of it is worth the journey. I hated Heart of Darkness -- hated reading it. Loved thinking about it -- and still do.

So I'm not going to tell a bunch of twelve-year-olds that they're dumb if they don't love My Brother Sam Is Dead or (worse) Johnny Tremain. I'm going to tell them, "Read it anyway, and let's find what's valuable within it." And I'm not going to pretend that grammar drills are fun. I'm going to say, "Do them anyway, and see if they improve your writing. If they don't, we'll find another way."

I'm never going to lie to them, unless it saves me from some sort of bodily harm. That's where I draw the line, folks. That's the river they can't cross.

Academia

Today I ate lunch with four other graduate students. We discussed teaching, college, football and a host of other topics, and I had so much fun. I don't know if I've made it clear, but I love where my life is right now. What a difference from a year ago!

I know it's not the work, because I'm still volunteering in the same capacity for another agency. It must have been the place. I hate to say it, because it sounds so disloyal, but I think my friend was right: Plattsburgh was killing me. I need that intensity; I have to be engaged. I might be lazy, but I don't sit around. And intellectual stimulation is absolutely essential to me -- it's like the air I breathe. I crave it.

So much easier now to think about writing, to plan for the future, to dream about family and home and fulfilling career. It's close...very, very close. Just have to be patient a little while longer.

The workload, of course, sucks. No, no -- I'm totally lying. It's crushing and brutal and I LOVE IT. So now we know one more thing about me: I'm a closet masochist (as evidenced by the scarring on my wrists and ankles, and my penchant for candle wax).