Things I Learned This Week

Bobcats, Tāp Pīlam, Höch, Incels, and Ethio-jazz

A little over a month until graduation! This year has flown by. There are so many things to tell you about, so let’s get on with it.

After visiting Texas State this week to audit a Fiction workshop with Lindsay Stern and meet with students, faculty, and program director Debra Monroe, I decided to decline my other Creative Writing MFA offers and not holdout for the final two waiting lists. Sooooo, *drum roll please* Texas State it is! Falling in love with San Marcos (which my husband says is like Austin in the 70s) and looking at houses, I feel pretty happy about the next three years. Plus, I’ll only be an hour away from friends and family. Change is good. My husband retires in a week, so the future is new for all of us. Ready to work (and not work)! The summer will be spent finalizing the edits of my finished novel and gearing up for another story I’m playing with. I’m hoping to leave the next three years with two more books in the can. It seems ambitious, but I’m ready. There’s no time to waste.

We’ve been reading Native American adaptations in Decolonial Shakespeares, so this week, we visited the offices of the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions established by the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation. They trace their roots to the aboriginal people who populated South Texas and Northeast Mexico, almost 60,000 of which still live here in Bexar County today. Their ancestors built the San Antonio Missions (by force and through cultural and religious assimilation), and the AITSCM was put together to stop the erosion of a culture that was often “othered” into one group with those of Spanish/Mexican heritage. Visiting was a masterclass on “cultural healing and empowerment,” namely advocating for Indigenous rights and supporting the community through the arts, family health and wellness, and preservation efforts like the Texas Heritage Project. Member Julian Ānua Reyes talked to us about Indigenous linguistics and his MA dissertation "Tzō Cap’ān" from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa on Coahuiltecan languages. Enlightening.

In Art History, the nods to female artists are few and far between, so I tend to dive in the rabbit hole when one pops up. Learning about the female artists of Dada, I got locked into German artist Hannah Höch, the mother of the photomontage. I’ve spent many hours cutting and pasting images from National Geo, as most art students and some artists have done, in homage to the queen of the cuts. She was notorious for being the only woman among the Berlin Dadas, as well as her rocky affair with sound artist Raoul Hausmann (highly recommend your own deep dive on this guy—his sound poetry is nuts). She was a gender-bending avant-garde artist around men who touted female liberation while at the same time demanding certain feminine bourgeoise traits from their mates. In the world of misogyny, if it quacks like a duck… She was a badass who used paper and puppets to change her culture during a period when the world was wrecked by war. Check her out.

I want to give a nod to the two main actors in Adolescence: co-creator/writer Stephen Graham, who plays the father, and Owen Cooper, who plays the adolescent. I can't say anything every media outlet in the country hasn’t already said, so I’ll leave it at this. This wasn’t a story about women’s rights or victims of assault; it was about the culture that creates angry men. It’s always existed, but it is even more insidious with the internet and cell phones. As the mother of a boy, I cried through most of the last episode. Must watch.

Speaking of… next week on my son’s college radio show, he’ll be spotlighting Ethiopian Jazz (Ethio-jazz). It is a great lineup, and I wanted to share with you the playlist because he fell into a bit of a rabbit hole himself. So proud of his curious mind. :) Tune in next Thursday at 9 ET if you wanna hear some music and history.

Quote of the week?

“You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)” — Annie Dillard

‘Til Tuesday!

Burgin

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