Summer Class

I am still trying to settle on works for this summer. It could be The Secret of Roan Inish, as I said before, or Pan's Labyrinth. If the latter, the element of political intrigue enters in, and the first work can pursue that too. But the only other work I have taught before (I useful thing for summer classes) is "Roman Fever," Edith Wharton. It's a short story about a personal secret involving a child, albeit a grown one, and a cracking good tale.

Closer

As the house creeps closer to being ready for us, I am filling in all the details in my imagination. What will I toss, and what will I bring? The old toaster oven? The microwave? Perhaps it is time for them to go. I want to give away the bbq, as there is no place for it, and truthfully, I was afraid to use it. It has barely been touched. Unlike most men, R wanted nothing to do with it, and I think Jeremy feels the same. Besides, in his apartment, shared with three others, there is no room for it, and he will be moving into our new place next year, into the little bachelor's pad downstairs, a small bedroom and bath, with a neat little patio off the room. It's too small to cram in that bbq, and besides, we're right across from the pool, which has bbqs of its own.
So if anyone close wants that bbq, please let me know. You'll have to come and get it, but you are welcome to it.
Sickness seems to be haunting the place among the workmen. The handyman, Dan, has a terrible flu. He smokes and is overweight, so it has hit him hard. He asked me how I stay so healthy. I told him yoga. He isn't going to do that.
The floor guy spoke to me yesterday. He has a bowel obstruction, a tumor. He had an emergency procedure yesterday to remove it, and it may be cancer. Besides that, he is rather addled by a car accident, and perhaps by the chemicals he uses in his job everyday.
I cannot be concerned about my house when the people working on it are so ill. I just hope they are okay.

Tyrants are All the Same

Contrary to the sentiments of Lev Tolstoi, in my favorite novel, Anna Karenina, all dictators seem to be alike. Look at Kaddaffi. Who could stop looking at him, he is such a nut, and yet so shrewdly effective at enforcing a total control of power for 42 years. He dresses like a diva, talks like a moron, but rules cruelly and meticulously.
His compatriots in North Korea follow the same pattern, and extend their megalomania beyond the borders of their own countries to others that they, in their dangerous and unhinged fantasies, imagine to be hanging on their own every word. As with their Libyan brethren, these rulers have no compunction about wiping out every soul that populates their border, if it helps them to hold on to power.
The Cambodian Kmer Rouge were just such individuals, fueled by a crackpot ideology and ruthlessly efficient in their control and enforcement.
There is something about total power that unhinges the human mind in a way that is diagnosable, a kind of psychosis. Surely, someone should give it a berth in the dictionary of mental disorders.

Dream

Last night I dreamed I was visiting my friend Linda in Philadelphia. Linda has an animal rescue in her apartment, and at any time, she will probably have a dozen animals in that large one room place up on the 6th floor. In my dream, she was living in a ground floor place, much larger, and had a back yard with lots of puppies and kittens. Then I was riding on the subway, aware that things had changed so much I didn't know where I was, and this was dangerous.
I guess the poem put Philadelphia back into my head.

Summer Class

I have to order the books for my summer class, a Writing 1 class with the theme of secrets, and perhaps involving children. I decided to go with the film The Secret of Roan Inish and What Maisie Knew. I'm looking for one more book. Any suggestions? It can be any genre, even a poem.

A World In Flames

Like everyone else these days, I turn on my radio or T.V. news not knowing what I will hear next. It seems that a good quarter of the world, far away places I have always thought very distant from myself, not the least because they belong to the arab world, and I to the Jewish one, have begun enduring upheavals the like of which I have only read and do not in my lifetime recall.
Once, when I was an undergraduate, I studied the European Romantic period, and this reminds me of the days I read about, when revolutions fanned across the continents, and new nations, like our own, were established.
I cannot help but to be excited, and to hope for those people that the world will truly change in their favor, even though, at the same time, I realize that this change will not necessarily favor us, since some of these countries hold large amounts of oil and the dictators favored Israel, while these new governments may not, may turn against us, and perhaps with reason, for siding with dictators and being the indirect agent of their oppression for so long.
I remember too the election in the West Bank and Gaza that brought Hezbollah into the picture there. This is the chance one takes with democracy, and ultimately, it is a chance worth taking, but it can be waylaid when any one party brought into power stops the process cold. Remember Russia, right?
I have been thinking too of the dictators who have been featured lately in the news, and remembering Nabokov's and Chaplin's characterization of them. Yes, they are buffoons. Even Idi Amin, the cannibal. They are all, in their insane ideosyncracies, cut out of the same cloth.

Avoiding Papers

I've got a stack of papers waiting for me, and I know I've got to get to them, if only because I'll get drafts this evening at CSU.
I wrote that poem partly because the house we just bought comes to me care of that house, the one in the poem, the one I grew up in. I wanted to acknowledge how influential that place has been in my life, and continues to be, despite my desire to escape it.
My father once said "No one will ever love you but your parents," and I would reply, "Then God help me." I was thinking that if that was the best I could do for love, I was in trouble. But by the end, things had improved of course, and I understand what my father, in his typically spiky way, was trying to communicate.