C'est la fin (du terme/quartier)

The quarter has barreled towards its end and I am now in recovery mode, having felt more than a little flattened beneath it. At a certain point I had to impose mental triage and this blog, unfortunately, lay moribund on the gurney.  In addition to my usual commuting routine and a heavy traveling schedule from the very beginning of the year (classes began on January 3, and I had to attend a conference that first weekend) and to an exacting departmental committee assignment and my fulfilling and demanding graduate and undergraduate advisory and supervisory work, as well as delightful non-work-related projects, like the Roussel play, I taught two classes, the gateway introductory fiction workshop and a required course for senior creative writing majors.  Both demanded a tremendous amount of effort, mainly because of the mountain of reading (I assign multiple initial exercises, online threaded discussions on assigned texts, two short story drafts, and one revision in the intro fiction class, and in the senior class, I require a creative autobiography, weekly tweets on Twitter, a book review, a creative essay on one of six books I assign, an in-class report on one of the many articles I post, and a final paper or interview-with-analysis), but one of the immediate pleasures of both is being able to witness the development of the students' tools, artistry and confidence in the former, and the mastery of skills in the latter.  What was true for previous intro fiction classes seemed even more so for this one; a number of the students made evident imaginative and technical leaps in second drafts, which made me nearly start cheering every time I registered this as I read them. I always try to point this out in my typed comments, and sometimes I worry the students may think I'm being too enthusiastic and praiseworthy, but it is heartening to see a student whose first story tacking closely to her autobiography imagining, in her second draft, the lives of people much older, or different, or from a very different chronological period, and structuring the story with greater assurance, understanding how to create characters who come to life on the page, realizing what details will unlock the narrative in ways others would not, and so forth. As I read the final drafts this past week and weekend, what struck me repeatedly was how far some of the students had gotten, how much they had grown, how, in every case, they advanced--have advanced--beyond their earliest efforts, the tiny 1-3 page exercises, they first submitted to me in January.

With the senior majors, one of the most important things I left with was a feeling of hope for the future of literature, and hope and happiness for their own future projects and work, in and around the literary world. At various points this course left some graduating students with a mild--to serious--sense of gloom about the changing US literary landscape, but this year, perhaps because so much remains in the air--and poet and Northwestern University Press rights manager Parneshia Jones reminded our class during her wonderful visit that in the publishing industry as in life "things change every single day"--and so many tools are now available to writers, editors, potential publishers, all of us, more than one of the students told me that they felt "hopeful," that they could make a difference, that they would pursue careers as writers of every possible type and genus, as publishers and editors, as scholars and critics, and in roles perhaps not yet fully conceived or named, by anyone, as things moved forward. I am looking forward to seeing what they do, and they know they will have my support always.

For the required senior major class, "The Situation of Writing," I debuted three new books: Dunya Mikhail's Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (Elizabeth Winslow, translator; New Directions, 2009), a memoir (of sorts) in verse, of the Iraqi American poet's life during the Gulf and Iraq Wars; Judith Ortiz Cofer's Woman In Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer and (University of Georgia Press, 2000); and David Shields's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010).  Of the three, I think the one that provoked the least discussion was Mikhail's, perhaps in part because of its form as two long poems, the first more lyric than narrative and quite abstract as opposed to documentary, which required that the students--or any reader--think about what might constitute a "diary," how trauma and personal experience might be recorded and translated into lyric form, and what war poetry, or poetry written during and in response to war, might look like, all of which were challenging, to say the least. That said, the form also proved liberating from some in the class, and led students whose usual approach might have been a prose essay or creative nonfiction to write longer poems as their response.  The formal approaches of Shields' and another book, Adrienne Kennedy's People Who Led To My Plays (Theater Communications Group, 1996), also appeared to have a liberating effect on the creative essays and final projects, so while there were quite a few to read, their inventiveness (alongside their quality) made each a pleasurable task.

I sometimes think a version of the "Situation" class ought to be offered to all MFA, MA and PhD in creative writing students since it broaches many of the topics that writers not only should be thinking about but have to consider if they want to make writing a career, but from what I can tell, such courses remain a rarity. Which is a shame, but it also underlines how unique and unusual the experience the university's writing students, especially the majors, really is, and how much they are exposed to in addition to the extensive training in writing they undergo by the time they graduate.

End of the Quarter + 3 Moleskin Drawings

So much to say but so little time to say it. The quarter is finally over, grades are in, and it is time to thank my students for a great fall. The two classes were a lot of work, but as always I learned as much, more perhaps, as I taught.  One of the joys of teaching a literature course, especially one that you do not teach every year, is reconnecting with the texts in it, and I particularly love any opportunity to teach courses in which I can include work from across genres.

In my African-American literature class, we did read poetry, fiction, plays, essays and talks, and theoretical and critical texts, and we also listened to some music and watched three films to enrich the conversation.  And a conversation it was. I had never before taught Aimé Cesaire's poetry, so it was a new addition, as was the poetry of Bob Kaufman, Stephen Jonas, Ted Joans, Nikki Giovanni, and Carolyn Rodgers.  One new element of the class that I'd never tried before, but which appeared to work well and really engage the students was to have them create or expand Wikipedia pages, using original research, on topics related to the class. This resulted in several new pages and some expanded ones.

In my graduate fiction writing class, it was fascinating and encouraging to see about half the students submitting novel chapters or beginning them, and I hope they all will complete a draft if they can, not only for the experience of writing a novel, but to have something to revise so that they might ultimately be able to publish it. I also took a thematic tack with the readings, which I structured under the rubric of "Writing(s) on the Edge," and we read texts that thematically (for the most part) dealt with limits, barriers and boundaries of various sorts. I returned to assigning a novel for the final text for the term, after several years of critical works, and the students all finished Lionel Shriver's 400+ page, disturbing but unforgettable novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, after having read short stories by Lorrie Moore, Chimananda Ngozi Adiche, Anthony Doerr, and others. They all had purchased the American addition, which included a postscript describing the ordeal Shriver went through to publish the book, whose success utterly reinvigorated her career.  For anyone interested in hearing Shriver discuss the book and her work in general, this 2009 BBC World Book Club podcast is a fine introduction.

Now it's only a few weeks to prepare for the new quarter (which starts January 4) and the MLA conference, continue with my own writing projects, catch up on sleep and emails, and try to read the 10 or so books I've had to put off for the last three months.

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While scanning in texts for the upcoming quarter, I found myself scrolling through my notebooks for specific material for one of the courses, and came across the following Moleskine notebook that, I realized, I'd taken with me to Cuba.  Over the last year I've mostly turned to my iPhone and iPad for drawing, but on this trip, I saw that I had done a bit of sketching, so I scanned in these three pages (one of which was from a later event, the Fire & Ink III: Cotillion conference in Austin, Texas) which included bit of artwork.

I'm most interested in the coffee plantation plan I drew at the top of the right page. I had forgotten about that, but then remembered that my motivation for drawing the layout was because I'd written a story in which I was trying to visualize a Caribbean coffee plantation, and wasn't sure about the spatial layout, though I'd envisioned it pretty close to what it looked like. This map nevertheless allowed me to correct my misimpressions.

One of the museums we visited was the Museum of Literacy.  Images of Fidel Castro, as I need not tell anyone, can be found all over Cuba, but I liked one of the photos of him participating in the literacy campaign, which was one of the Revolution's first post-victory successes, so I drew him in an iconic pose, which he has repeated countless times at rallies throughout the years. The gentleman beneath him is Conrado Benítez, a "mártir de alfabetización," who died at the hands of anti-literacy forces.

This drawing is of a young man who was at the Austin conference. The text surrounding it comprises notes from one of the panels  which, I think, scholar Jafari Sinclaire Allen headed up.  I told him I'd drawn him, but I did not get his name, and so am/was unable to send the drawing to him. Perhaps he'll see this, though it really may not look that much like him, meaning he wouldn't recognize himself in it. Or maybe he might....

The Hiatus

Well, September is nearly over, and I haven't blogged for weeks. A huge part of that has been returning to Chicago and Evanston to teach, part of it derives from ongoing projects (writing, university-related activities, etc.) that have left little time to do anything beyond tweeting, email, and reading others' blogs, and part of it is not being able to keep up with the fast-barreling train of current events, many (most?) of which I want to write about, but.... At any rate, I hope to start blogging a bit more soon.

Board after my first class, Topics in African-American Literature: 20th and 21st Century Black Avant-Gardes, last Tuesday

Classes (Nearly) Over + 2010 FIFA World Cup

Classes have (nearly) come to an end. Or rather, this is the final official week of classes in the College, though I still have one more class to teach next week, during reading week. (We'll be discussing the final three student novellas in workshop.) Now that it's over, I can shout from the blogtops Conceptual Art/Writing class exhilarated me; I feel incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to teach the class, and to have been able to do so with students who were willing to step out, as it became clear, on what sometimes initially appeared to be shifting ice. By which I mean, to be looking at, thinking about and creating work--and whose exemplars--that remain under tremendous contention.  The class served as an intellectual transfusion for me, as it required me to think through a genealogy that was indistinct, but discernible, and put it together, in coherent fashion, for the class, while also making clear that this was only one reading of the history of this constellation of art forms. (It helped too that we have the graduate level Poetry and Poetics Working Group, because its conversations informed those in my class.) Now that I've done it, I feel I have a much clearer and deeper sense of conceptual art's history, its origins and antecedents, and its relation to and phantasmal presence in other canonical and non-canonical artforms. As I was saying to a friend, I feel capable now of reading backwards, before the coining of "conceptual art," to see conceptual practices in many different places and forms. (This was also the first time that I've taught the work of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Goldsmith, Rob Fitterman, Mendi + Keith Obadike, and many others.) The students all created 6-8 projects, grounded in language and its possibilities, and it was a delight to read them, and imagine how the ones containing the possibility of performance might be realized. One student proposed realizing them--performing some of them--during the assigned exam period, so we'll see how that turns out. At any rate, the class, like the other one I'm teaching, represents one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching, which is transmitting knowledge to students, watching them learn, grow intellectually and create knowledge, and learning from them in the process.  And who knows, down the road another Yoko Ono or Marcel Duchamp might emerge from this experience.
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The 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in two weeks, on June 11, running till July 11, in South Africa. This is the most watched sporting event in the world, and this is the first time it'll be held in Africa, with the host country leading a group of 32 national teams, including prior winners England (1966), France (1998), Italy (1934, 1938, 1982, 2006), Germany (1954, 1974, 1990), Brazil (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, 2002), Uruguay (1930, 1950), and Argentina (1978, 1986), and stalwarts such as Netherlands, Japan, Portugal, Mexico, Denmark, Cameroon, South Korea, and, interestingly enough, North Korea. Though the opening matches, pairing South Africa and Mexico, and Uruguay and France, will be held in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively, subsequent matches will be held all over the country, culminating in the third place match at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, and the championship match at Soccer City in Johannesburg.



The 1994 host of the tournament, the United States, will also field a participating team this year, having made it through the qualifying rounds for the North/Central American region to finish first, with 20 points, just ahead of Mexico's 19. The US ended up in the Tournament's Group C, which also includes one of the tournament's best teams, England, but also Algeria, which barely edged into first place in its Africa Group 6 matches, over Gambia and Senegal, and Slovenia, which finished second to Slovakia in its European Group 3. Getting by England (ranked 8th in the FIFA World Rankings) will be the US's (ranked 14th) major challenge, and few online commentators I've read give the US team much--any--chance of achieving this. Yet the US team had one of its best summers in 2009; in the Confederations Cup, the US ended up in Group B, with Brazil, Egypt and Italy, yet after losing to Italy (3-1) and Brazil (3-0), the US came back to finish second in its group, and reached the semifinal on tie-breaking goals, surpassing Italy. In the semifinals the US beat Spain, then atop the FIFA World rankings, 2-0, losing to Brazil in the final 3-2, though they were up 2-0 at half-time, and had the game in hand.  They must capitalize on any leads in South Africa, and do everything they can to keep the ball out of their defensive area, which is where they're far and away weakest.

The 23-person World Cup squad, recently finalized by coach Bob Bradley, comprises a number of veterans from the 2008 campaign, in Germany: star goalie and Everton (English Premier League) mainstay Tim Howard, forwards Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey (above left), midfielders DaMarcus Beasley and Michael Bradley, and defenders Oguchi Onyewu (at right) and Steve Cherundolo. Newcomers include Jozy Altidore (the 20-year-old sensation who scored a hat trick against Trinidad and Tobago in a qualifying game), Robbie Findley (top of article, right), José Francisco Torres, Ricardo Clark, Maurice Edu, and surprise picks Edson Buddle and Herculez Gomez. In a little remarked change, nearly 1/3rd of the US team are black, and 1/2 of the team are either black or latino, a first for the US.  The forward and midfield core are especially strong, and can hang with some of the best teams (except perhaps Brazil, Spain, and Portugal), but the US's defense remains an issue. Unaggressive play and defensive mistakes have doom the US, as does the absence of players competing in the world's top leagues, but the latter has gradually changed, and the US's own major league, the MLS, has gotten stronger with each passing year. If the defensive corps can keep mistakes to a minimum, they do stand a chance with Donovan, Bradley, Altidore, Findley, and Dempsey going hard.

It'll be interesting to see if host country South Africa gets a boost, as has often happened; France (1998), Argentina (1978), Germany (1974, as West Germany), England (1966), and Uruguay (1938) have won the tournament when hosting it, and most recently, Germany finished 3rd in 2006 and South Korea finished 4th in 2002 when serving as hosts.  Moreover, the multibillion-dollar new stadiums and infrastructure the South African government has built have been controversial in a country still suffering from severe gaps in income equality, and the threats of terrorism, violence and crime are also pressing. Just recently, on May 25, the Colombian team, which had not qualified for the tournament, were robbed in their 5-star Johannesburg hotel of about $2600 in money and other personal goods. South Africa has repeated assured visitors that it has security and safety issues under control. Let us sincerely hope they do.

I will be certainly be watching closely and rooting avidly for the US and other teams, including Brazil. My prediction for the finals: Brazil 3, Portugal 2.