Things I Learned This Week

Sing Sing, Faulkner, Joni, Delacroix, Pottery, and Poets

Influenza A is no joke. Stay healthy kids! Get your flu shots! Here’s what happened while I was trapped in the house and beyond.

I spend an entire Sunday in bed with Faulkner, and I must say, reading The Sound and the Fury made me want to cry. Not because it’s a beautiful novel. (It is.) Not because it made me miss—and not miss—the South I grew up in. (It did.) Not because it uses the n-word more times than you can count. (It does.) But the whole time I was reading, I kept thinking about how a woman would have never been able to publish a book like that. No one would have paid attention. No one would have suffered through the abstract literary forms Faulkner uses if he had been a girl. The whole thing made my heart ache. It’s a good thing that this nugget voiced by the oldest Compson child, Quentin, inspired Ralph Ellison to write Invisible Man: “That was when I realized that a n* is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.” There is so much history and pain wrapped up in this book. Gobsmacking.

Learning about many revolutions in Art History. I’m sure most of you saw the Les Misérables epilogue song being performed at the White House Governors Ball by the US Army Chorus. (Makes you wonder if you know who even knew what he was watching.) That theatrical scene was no doubt inspired by Liberty Leading the People, a painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 that toppled King Charles X. The uprising in Les Miserables happened a few years later during the June Rebellion of 1832 that was a failed attempt to overthrow the monarchy and return to the principles of the French Revolution of 1789. People famously barricaded the streets in a move that eventually caused the creation of Paris’ grand boulevards. This painting was so astonishing at the time that they immediately put it in the basement of the Louvre lest it cause a riot. Sounds like a plan. Getting painting people!

Movie pick for the week? Sing Sing. My son has been wanting me to watch this for a while, and in and out of the flu, my husband and I finally got around to it. Based on the true story of a theater company within Sing Sing prison, it stars Oscar nominee Colman Domingo alongside many real-life formerly incarcerated men who are alumni of the program. In my eyes, Clarence Maclin, who plays a fictionalized version of himself, stole the show—a really powerful film. Check it out.

Other than that, I spent the week rereading Hamlet, writing papers, limping to class, and binging the British program The Great Pottery Throwdown. It's like the Bake Off, but with clay. My quilting sits half finished while I obsess over the wheel, but it’s all good. Here’s to feeling well enough to do any of it. Anything to get my mind off the final MFA announcements that should roll in over the next ten days.

Plucking All I Want from my son’s playlist as it made me feel joy in these days of sickness and sorrow about the state of the world. Listen to Joni sing “I wanna have fun, I wanna shine like the sun / Wanna be the one that you wanna see / I wanna knit you a sweater / Wanna write you a love letter / I wanna make you feel better / I wanna make you feel free, hmmm.” I guarantee it will lift your heart for a bit.

Finally, last night, I went to a reading and conversation with beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye, my one-time poetry professor and friend Jenny Browne, and Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama on reconciliation and conflict resolution themes. It was a good reminder to be kinder to one another and to listen. I’m pushing myself to try and go out and see and be a part of as many things on campus as I can before I graduate. It’s always time well spent, and there is not much more of that time left. It’s an interesting era. My husband is a little over a month away from never working again. I am in the midst of a giant life change. I drive these streets, and I see parents of people my son went to elementary school with, and they seem so old. What does that say about me? Slow down. Be quiet. Listen. The time of rushing and doing is over. The time to create has arrived.

Quote of the week? Tuama just published a poetry anthology that included this poem called Poem by Langston Hughes that struck me as apropos of thoughts on being kinder and quieter.

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began,–
I loved my friend.

‘Til Tuesday kids. (Recently, it’s been more like Wednesday, so who knows!)

Burgin

(I’m finishing college at 50+, follow along and read my story here.)