Professor J's Place

This is for you, Mrs. G! (And for me and Susan and Heidi and any other Joni fans out there.)

I am sitting here while my Composition I students struggle over an in class essay on the wonderful " Everyday Use ," by the glorious Alice Walker . They are having such a hard time. I know they will do their best. I know they will come to an understanding of the different values of the sisters. I know they will love Maggie and her mother. I have yet to have a student really identify with Dee. This surprises me, because I did. I don't mean that I totally disrespected my mother and my sister(s), although the sisters might tell a different tale, but there were times when we spoke a different language. There were also times when I was so full of myself and my grand ideas--so full of my feminist struggle--that I did not give credit to the woman who raised three girls by herself--to the women my sisters had become. I certainly gave them lip service, just as Dee has appreciation for the "folk art" her grandmother had quilted. But I neglected to accept what they we...

Early this morning, I had one of those teacher dreams. I was in my Algebra II classroom, it was the final weeks of the semester, as it is now, and I was utterly unprepared. After a few minutes of winging it and going over the homework, I decided to let my class go early. Normally, that is cause for student celebration. But today there was an angry student who complained that he had learned NOTHING all semester. This was not surprising to me as I am an ENGLISH teacher who never took a math beyond the required Algebra I and remembers nothing of it beyond the abject terror and her temptation to offer sexual favors to her teacher in exchange for a passing grade (thank God that wasn't necessary--he was not an attractive soul, poor man). Anyway, I apologized to the poor student who only wanted to learn something, and I awakened in a cold sweat two minutes before my alarm went off. Ah, November; it makes a teacher want . . . . . . some encouragement.

That Tom DeLay is a brilliant thinker. Did you know that if it weren't for legalized abortion we would not have a problem with immigration? Think about it.

This morning I was listening to an interview with Joni Mitchell on the Tavis Smiley show. Joni was talking about creativity, sensitivity, and her unusual aura, when I got an overwhelming urge to find one of my mother's prints, frame it, and put it above my desk so I could see it everyday while I'm working. This is a print she made in 1989--It is a self portrait. I first found this print this summer (three years after her death), when I was getting ready to move. There was a large container underneath her bed with dozens of prints and drawings I had never seen. I was blown away by this image. Mamma loved birds. We often had finches in our home (I still have our last two), and she fed wild birds as well. When I found this box of prints, I was amazed by the number of bird allusions in her work. Painting herself with feathers is particularly telling, I think. Here's one just for fun: Later, when I got to the garage, I found some of her plates for printing. This piece of paper w...

Here's to remembering that MUCH of life is glorious. Thanks Zenmomma !

Diving Into the Wreck Adrienne Rich First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I h...