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This week I have mainly been getting my head wrapped around scansion, Latin poetry, and greco-roman mythology. I've been teaching mythology ever since I started the Latin gig, so that hardly needs work (it's just interesting), but it really has been a long time since I seriously got involved with Latin poetry. It turns out that as long as it's not P. Vergilius Maro or Q. Horatius Flaccus, I rather enjoy the stuff. Still, poetry requires an extremely flexible brain, something that my students find difficult. They desperately want language to be black and white, they want there to be hard and fast, above all correct answers. My own theory of understanding poetry (in any language) revolves around the following: look at what it actually says, slowly about what that means, and let the sound of it tell you what it feels like. Or, as Elvis Costello says in the live track of "All This Useless Beauty" that he did in 1996, "People are always asking, you know, what does that song mean? And if I could say it in other words than are in the song, I would have written another song, wouldn't I?"
That's just how poetry works.
So, yes, I've been living in a world of poetry, thoughts, books, manga, and graphic design (mostly my long-standing obsession with lettering) fighting for supremacy. One book I picked up last weekend and truly enjoyed was Craig Thompson's Carnet de Voyage. (I took a passing glance at Blankets a few years ago in a bookstore, but it hit too close to home: person with artistic sensibilities, growing up relatively poor and fundamentalist in Wisconsin, goes to bible camp... um, I think I'll pass.) Half book signing tour through France, half solo voyage through Morocco, it was beautiful, painful, and funny. There would be these points where I felt such raw emotion well up in me, and then he'd diagram how a camel shoots out these hard ball-like turds while it's moseying through the desert.
***
On the social side of things, I'm rather enjoying meetings and happy hours with the JET alumnae association. There are a lot of things at work that make me wish I had more time on my hands, but I feel good about participating in this because it means that I'm building up a social life in Boston. A REAL LIVE SOCIAL LIFE. It's amazing really. And they are really nice. I'm on the socially committee and once school prep winds down next month I've been handed the newsletter. It makes me feel happy and useful. These are two emotions I need to keep to the forefront especially in this shitty economy with nearly everyone I work with wondering, am I going to lose my job after this school year?
Yup, that's pretty much where life is at.
That's just how poetry works.
So, yes, I've been living in a world of poetry, thoughts, books, manga, and graphic design (mostly my long-standing obsession with lettering) fighting for supremacy. One book I picked up last weekend and truly enjoyed was Craig Thompson's Carnet de Voyage. (I took a passing glance at Blankets a few years ago in a bookstore, but it hit too close to home: person with artistic sensibilities, growing up relatively poor and fundamentalist in Wisconsin, goes to bible camp... um, I think I'll pass.) Half book signing tour through France, half solo voyage through Morocco, it was beautiful, painful, and funny. There would be these points where I felt such raw emotion well up in me, and then he'd diagram how a camel shoots out these hard ball-like turds while it's moseying through the desert.
***
On the social side of things, I'm rather enjoying meetings and happy hours with the JET alumnae association. There are a lot of things at work that make me wish I had more time on my hands, but I feel good about participating in this because it means that I'm building up a social life in Boston. A REAL LIVE SOCIAL LIFE. It's amazing really. And they are really nice. I'm on the socially committee and once school prep winds down next month I've been handed the newsletter. It makes me feel happy and useful. These are two emotions I need to keep to the forefront especially in this shitty economy with nearly everyone I work with wondering, am I going to lose my job after this school year?
Yup, that's pretty much where life is at.