What hasn't finished
I'm back after too long a break away, but alas, I have been busy. My first summer classes ended on a celebratory note - sitting around the trendy and bare English facuilty lounge eating pizza, drinking beer, rum telling some pretty good stories amid several moments of stilted awkwardness. As expected once the buzz set in, strangeness dissolved.
I am sad that this class has ended. In part because it was an excellent class - a great group of people who I will most likely not ever get to mingle with again - but also because I know that the material of my next few semesters will be less intuitive. This is fine, and actually am quite hungry for it. But I will miss the workshops, the excitement of knowing that a room full of people are reading your work, and not just one professor who, I often imagine, is only paying peripheral attention anyways.
Nothing is as motivating as having an audience.
Like a variation of this recurring nightmare that everyone has had: standing on a stage, asked to give a talk, or perform in a play, and you are totally unprepared. You don't know the lines - no one told you that you were going to be up there until the last minute! How could you be expected to pull it off? But you do, if not you just wake up. I always wake up just after I have started to mumble something on stage, totally incoherent with long gaps of silence between phrases and their responses. In the dreams, I try to make it work, to see if if miraculously I can improsive my lines seamlessly and dazzle the crowd. But I only get quiet back, and not long after that I wake up. I abandon my audition at being brilliant.
In the dream, I try to make itseem like there is nothing wrong with this situation; that I know exactly what I am doing. To admit, to your subconsious audience of thousands (sometimes it's less a hundred) that it has been a big mistake, that they booked the wrong person, that you were only there for the free crackers - would dissapoint them. They are there already, and they are watching. Dance monkey, dance.
This is why I can write here on atleast a semi-regular basis and not in an actual journal. My attrocious handwriting just sinks into the page and never emerges for even the most casual re-reading.
In other news:
Last week my great aunt died. This is my grandmother's younger sister Eugenia who I stayed with when I was in Argentina doing the Dirty War piece. I hadn't known that she was in a nursing home. No one told me, until my mom did the day after she died, that her sons had argued about how she sould be cared for. Roberto, the youngest and the romantic of the family, had wanted to have her live with him so they could take care of her and she could be back in the house that she raised her family in. They were dying to do this. The other two brothers are both politicians, the older of which felt that it was his responsibilty to take control of the situation of his mothers declining health and lucidity. He put her in a nursing home; there apparantly was no dissuading him.
My mother said that Eugenia had become completely emaciated in the home. They would take out her teeth, but forget to put them back in, so she couldn't eat. She told Roberto and his wife Nancy once that she was sorry for getting sick at the table one day. She said that all she had was a stomach ache and that's why she threw up, and she didn't understand why she was being punished for it. She asked him to take her home, but he couldn't.
When I heard of her death, I felt an incredible need to attend the funeral. But in Argentina, since they don't embalm the bodies, she was buried the very morning after she died. She had been buried for hours before I even knew she was gone.
Eugenia used to write poetry when her eyes were still good. She had a box of photographs of her wedding, her hnoey moon, of her sisters when they were all young.
I wonder what has happened to this things.
While Sharing Carrots
Eugenia died yesterday, my mother told me today
As we ate carrots in the cafeteria. She died yesterday
and was buried this morning, early, before we had even
gotten to work. Before I had coffee at my desk, they had
already sealed dry, rocky dirt around her, as my mother
explained – emaciated – body. She had starved, almost,
because no one could remember to put her teeth back in.
It’s possible to eat three pounds of carrots in one day. But
you have to have teeth, and you have to have the stomach
for looking frankly at your palms once they’ve turned orange.
I am sad that this class has ended. In part because it was an excellent class - a great group of people who I will most likely not ever get to mingle with again - but also because I know that the material of my next few semesters will be less intuitive. This is fine, and actually am quite hungry for it. But I will miss the workshops, the excitement of knowing that a room full of people are reading your work, and not just one professor who, I often imagine, is only paying peripheral attention anyways.
Nothing is as motivating as having an audience.
Like a variation of this recurring nightmare that everyone has had: standing on a stage, asked to give a talk, or perform in a play, and you are totally unprepared. You don't know the lines - no one told you that you were going to be up there until the last minute! How could you be expected to pull it off? But you do, if not you just wake up. I always wake up just after I have started to mumble something on stage, totally incoherent with long gaps of silence between phrases and their responses. In the dreams, I try to make it work, to see if if miraculously I can improsive my lines seamlessly and dazzle the crowd. But I only get quiet back, and not long after that I wake up. I abandon my audition at being brilliant.
In the dream, I try to make itseem like there is nothing wrong with this situation; that I know exactly what I am doing. To admit, to your subconsious audience of thousands (sometimes it's less a hundred) that it has been a big mistake, that they booked the wrong person, that you were only there for the free crackers - would dissapoint them. They are there already, and they are watching. Dance monkey, dance.
This is why I can write here on atleast a semi-regular basis and not in an actual journal. My attrocious handwriting just sinks into the page and never emerges for even the most casual re-reading.
In other news:
Last week my great aunt died. This is my grandmother's younger sister Eugenia who I stayed with when I was in Argentina doing the Dirty War piece. I hadn't known that she was in a nursing home. No one told me, until my mom did the day after she died, that her sons had argued about how she sould be cared for. Roberto, the youngest and the romantic of the family, had wanted to have her live with him so they could take care of her and she could be back in the house that she raised her family in. They were dying to do this. The other two brothers are both politicians, the older of which felt that it was his responsibilty to take control of the situation of his mothers declining health and lucidity. He put her in a nursing home; there apparantly was no dissuading him.
My mother said that Eugenia had become completely emaciated in the home. They would take out her teeth, but forget to put them back in, so she couldn't eat. She told Roberto and his wife Nancy once that she was sorry for getting sick at the table one day. She said that all she had was a stomach ache and that's why she threw up, and she didn't understand why she was being punished for it. She asked him to take her home, but he couldn't.
When I heard of her death, I felt an incredible need to attend the funeral. But in Argentina, since they don't embalm the bodies, she was buried the very morning after she died. She had been buried for hours before I even knew she was gone.
Eugenia used to write poetry when her eyes were still good. She had a box of photographs of her wedding, her hnoey moon, of her sisters when they were all young.
I wonder what has happened to this things.
While Sharing Carrots
Eugenia died yesterday, my mother told me today
As we ate carrots in the cafeteria. She died yesterday
and was buried this morning, early, before we had even
gotten to work. Before I had coffee at my desk, they had
already sealed dry, rocky dirt around her, as my mother
explained – emaciated – body. She had starved, almost,
because no one could remember to put her teeth back in.
It’s possible to eat three pounds of carrots in one day. But
you have to have teeth, and you have to have the stomach
for looking frankly at your palms once they’ve turned orange.
posted by beef at 10:26 AM
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