Tintype of a dying boy. Photographer unknown.  Ca. 1860.





[Private Collection - do not reproduce without written permission.]

... I passed an old man on Washington Square North who was singing "As Tears Go By."  He wasn't raving, but just quietly singing to himself, walking along with his morning coffee and a paper under one arm. I found myself moved by the poignance of it - the old man singing the sweet, sad, song, the bustle of NYU's urban youth around all him, and me caught somewhere in between innocence and experience, still on the cusp of having my life back, still somehow deferred.

Here are the lyrics.  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote it for then-17 year old Marianne Faithfull back in '64.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?"  -Molly Ivins

Breast cancer has claimed yet another of that fine and too rare thing - a fierce woman liberal from Texas - leaving the world a lonelier, less clever, place.  She's with her dear friend, the great Ann Richards, looking down at us all - left and right - and declaring in true Texan fashion, "Bless their pointed little heads."

Two weeks before her death she wrote of the escalating Iraq war: "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!"'

Proud to be liberal, never ashamed of her lefty inclinations, always pragmatic, deeply moral but never a prude, and never ever elitist; her salty humor and folksy charm were a breath of fresh air in progressive politics, too often dominated by stiflingly pedantic mainstream Democratic voices.

Now dear, fierce Molly gets to rest - what happens next is up to us.

Sections went well on Friday.  We'll see how next week's quizzes go before I finally snap.  Think I was in a bit of a funk when I wrote the last entry.

Had a lovely time at friend Rachel's pie party last night.  Good to be out & social with school folks. Have a wee vino headache today - when it comes to $1.99 Beaujolais Villages, you get what you pay for.

Today: Library (maybe).  Room is a trainwreck, so that may take priority.

So, my first two weeks of teaching were a sort of wee bubble of optimism.  The kids didn't seem to be paralysed intellectually or otherwise, and the recitation sections seemed to be going o.k. But two quizzes and an in-class writing later, and I'm not so happy - the bubble, as it were, has burst.

Bottom line seems to be they just don't know how to read.  It's not that they're illiterate, nor necessarily that they aren't doing the reading, but they just don't know how to approach a text with a critical eye and draw some conclusions from what they read. And frankly I don't know how to teach them to do that.  They totally bombed the last two quizzes and the in-class writing was an abortion pretty much across the board. They know they didn't do well, but I'm now sitting here in office hours and no one is showing up.

Frankly, the private sector is looking real nice right about now. I don't know if I'm cut out for this teaching thing, I fear I haven't the patience. But too soon to rush to that judgement.  Too soon.

On the up side, got the new Scissor Sisters single a couple of days ago and am not unpleased. Ditto the new Killers.  Also saw Nouvelle Vague last night and really enjoyed the show.  Cabaret style performance is highly underrrated as far as I'm concerned.  The crowd, though, was horrible - eurotrash and snotty NYCers who talked through the whole show.  Wretched. Ladytron's playing next week and there are a couple of shows in October that I  want to see.  Hopefully won't be too bogged down with students and my own work (exam lists!!) to venture out a couple of nights.

In roughly 2.5 hours I will be in front of my first class of Freshmen.  I'm prepared - have all my handouts, did all the reading, have a little outline sketch of what I want to say & do. Still feel like throwing up. Fingers x'd - here I go....

Wow.  As of today, I've lived in New York for two full years.  Amazing.

On Tuesday, classes begin again. And for the first time in my life, I'm not going to be in student mode. I'm leading two recitation sections for a class called Conversations of the West: Antiquity & 19th Century. Now, this isn't really my first time teaching, per se - I have taught poetry workshops, and of course adult education/technical training at Qwest - but it will be my first time teaching freshmen, and I'll admit readily to a little leeriness about that. As I joked with one of my professors, "The last meaningful conversation I had with an 18-year old involved how much foam I wanted on my latte at Starbucks."

But it goes deeper than that. Since I turned 36 last week, I'll be exactly twice their age. They were born in 1988, the year in which I was a freshman myself at Colorado State. They have never lived in a world without CDs, have never owned a computer without a CD-ROM drive, have probably never lived in a household without a computer. More than half their lives, someone named "Bush" has inhabited the White House. The USA has been involved in Wars in Iraq for nearly a third of their lives. Eurythmics, New Order, The Cure, The Smiths, and Siouxsie & the Banshees are for them "classic" rock, if they've heard of them at all (they get their Cure via the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or, worse yet, Fall Out Boy). They regard Wikipedia as an authoritative text. They have never lived in a world without MTV or the internet. IM and texting are more natural to them than letter writing. I have actually no idea whatsoever what or even if they read for pleasure anymore.

All that said, I'm a little excited about the prospect of teaching these alien creatures. One of my professors said that teaching has kept her young - being in contact with a younger generation, however alien or strange they, their ideas, and their lifestyles may be. I hope I'm not so far gone from my own youth that I need that infusion, but I can see already how easily the complacency of thirty-somethingness can settle in - even though my lifestyle probably more resembles that of these kids than it does my career/spouse/kids-oriented peers.

Plus, I'm actually really excited about the syllabus. The 19th c. component is actually Moby Dick - so the prof has arranged the syllabus so we weave in & out of the novel, picking up the stuff Melville is referencing (Genesis, Exodus, Hamlet, Aeniad) along the way. Great way to read Moby Dick, and to get exposure to some of the classical stuff I missed along the way. I get to lecture on Hamlet in the context of 19th c. America, so that's going to be exciting.

So, anyway, I'm excited, and I have jitters. Normal I suppose. I guess I feel al little like the nervous bridegroom - my experience teaching as a gradual student will have a significant effect on whether or not I want to really be wedded to this career path I've chosen for myself. So call this a test drive - or to stick with the nuptual metaphor, shacking up. With freshmen.

So, all I've had to write about lately was the apalling heat, the unpleasantness of apartment hunting, and such. Rather than whinge, I didn't post.  The heat wave seems to have broken, we decided not to move, and the summer is wrapping up in a mostly satisfactory manner.  I'm tired, but I've finished the paper which I should have finished in May, turned in my MA thesis, got a bunch of stuff updated for our Colloquium and, though I'm in a generally kind of cranky and anti-social mood, I'm not whiny.  So that's a plus.

Had lovely pre-birthday oriented fun in Bushwick at my friend Mariette's house.  She & our friend Adrienne & I drank copious amounts of wine, nibbled on olives, cheese, and tasty New Jersey sweet corn, listened to my 9-hour "birfday" playlist, and just generally amused ourselves for hours.  Train home from Bushwick (M to the F) at 2:30 a.m. was less than amusing, but overall a wonderful evening with wonderful people, so good.

This week teacher training starts, which will be interesting.  I'm actually kind of excited for teaching, but we'll see how long that lasts.

In the interests of keeping with my New Positivism, I made a list titled "Recent Positive Things of Note" in my little moleskine journal.  Here is a sample:

• Bonnies Grill
• Celbrate Brooklyn concerts: Laurie Anderson; Erika Badu with Queen Latifah & Jill Scott
• The Cloisters w/ Ruth & Jen
• the Met w. Lenora & James
• Re-read The Exorcist
• Baltimore for Jennie's art openings
• Blanche La Brooklyn
• Hitachino Nest
• Fancy tacos in W. Village w/ Terese

I am having right now what is very possibly the best hummus I've ever experienced in my life.  If all hummus tasted this good, I'd be a hummus lover.