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Snow in the villages!! Snow on the villagers!! We got about 5 inches or so, and J. and I had a lovely walk around the Turners Falls village this afternoon. Take a look at my festive pictures. Many of the locations about town are the same as the November 5th shoot, but now, new and improved with snow!
Here's one to get you started.
How are the kitties? Well, they're fuzzy! I know this because Lucy is even more of a "Velcro Kitty" since I'm home all the time. Here she is glaring at me because I was moving around too much at my desk, and not letting her get on my lap. I didn't feel like using a flash, so you can't actually see her glaring, but I like the effect anyway.
I thought of a good catch phrase for Martha Stewarts' The Apprentice TV show (which will end after 1 season.) She's been struggling with finding one as good as Mr. Trump's "you're fired," but she doesn't realize that she's had it all along -- "you're not a good thing."
First - a bonus in this weeks Montague Reporter includes both Gill's and Montague's police logs. I think I like this one from Gill the best:
11/12 - 11:02 p.m. Loose cow on West Gill Road. Contacted owners to remove same.
Just because a cow wants to get out and have a little fun on a Saturday night, does that mean she's "loose"?
Second, to bug ya'll back about buggin me about my light school load .... darlings, this is art we're talking about here. You can't rush it! You must free your schedule to free your mind! And, well, neener, neener, neener.
I forgot to mention that I will likely also audit this class, and maybe get some independent study credits for it at some point, if I do something creative with it.
491A-L1 Neruda in Translation 55756
Instructor: M. Espada M 4:00 – 6:30 pm
Same as Latin-Am 491A. This is an introduction, in English translation, to the man considered by many to be the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century. The poetry of Neruda is marked by a series of aesthetic and political metamorphoses, and the course is organized around the enormous diversity of the work: the early love poems, surrealism, the political poems, brought on by Neruda’s experience with the Spanish Civil War, the sweeping historical works best represented by his masterpiece, The Heights of Macchu Picchu, the humorous odes, the nature poems, and so on. The life of Neruda was also characterized by dramatic change, likewise charted throughout the course: from his career as a diplomat to his bitter years as a hunted political exile, from his acknowledgment as Nobel Laureate to his isolated death in the wake of the 1973 coup in Chile. Neruda was a witness to history, and special attention will be devoted to that history, particularly in terms of the Spanish Civil War and the Chilean coup. The course will also focus on the process of translation, and students will be encouraged to compare translations with one another, as well as against the original text. Students in this Honors course are required to write several papers, with an optional class presentation.
780/2-Imaginative Writing: Poetry James Tate
Tuesdays, 1-3:30
Workshop in the writing of poetry. Each week, a close reading analysis of poems submitted by the class and occasional poems brought in from outside. Attention to the way in which a poem works and how it comes together through its choice of images, rhythms and subject matter. Assignments in an anthology of contemporary poetry and supplementary reading. Enrollment limited to 10. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program in English.
James Tate is the author of Return to the City of White Donkeys, Memoir of he Hawk: Shroud of the Gnome; Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won the National Book Award; Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Willliam Carlos Williams Award; Distance from Loved Ones; Reckoner; Constant Defender; Riven Doggeries; Viper Jazz; Absences; Hints to Pilgrims; The Oblivion Ha-Ha; and The Lost Pilot, selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee and The Route as Briefed. His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and has been recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
777-Modern Poetry Ruth Jennison
Thursdays, 1-3:30
This course will survey American poetry from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Students will become familiar with the canonical generational account of modernism (Dickinson; Whitman; Pound; Eliot; Stevens; Stein; Moore; Williams). However, discussions will also take up modernism's "others" (including Crane; Hughes; H.D; McKay; Zukofsky). Against modernism's own "cult of genius," we will read our poets as exemplary participants in interconnected and sometimes antagonistic literary movements, coteries, political fronts and avant-gardes. These groupings will include, but are not limited to: Imagism, Constructivism, Colloquial Nativism, Epic Classicism, Symbolism, the Harlem Renaissance, the poetics of the Popular Front and Objectivism. As we take up these canonical and alternative literary genealogies, we will also attend to the historical and political coordinates which subtend and substructure the various ideological orientations and formal strategies of early twentieth century American poetics. To what aspects of capitalist modernity are modern poets responding? How do uneven developments in racial formation, politics, economics and culture provide the conditions of possibility for modernist poetry's contradictory commitments to precapitalist organicism and futural experimentation? What is the relationship between the production of new social subjects (the "new Woman;" the "new Jew;" the "New Negro") and the innovative languages of a modern poetry seeking transformation in art and life? Finally, we will survey to the critical construction of modernism itself -- from its initial solidification as "movement" by the "New Criticism" to its current restructuring by Cultural Materialists working in the "New Modernist Studies." In this overview of modern poetry's critical history, we will seek the answer to the following question: Why is literary modernism often the privileged site of new critical-aesthetic narratives of modernity's historical traumas and/or potentials?
Ruth Jennison is presently writing a book entitled "The Zukofsky Era" which elaborates an alternative genealogy of modernist poetics. In it, she constructs the historical, literary and theoretical coordinates of the materialist Avant-Garde constellating around Louis Zukofsky's "Objectivist" poetics of the 1920s and 30s. Her interests include American modernist and postmodernist poetics, the theory of the Avant-Garde, Marxist literary theory, and psychoanalytic approaches to subject formation and aesthetic form.
And, I will continue to get credit for my internship work.
I had a dinner party this evening, and the theme was comfort food. The menu: chicken and veggie pot pies (recipe courtesy of David Adam), mashed potatoes, butternut squash soup, and brownies, and misc items that people brought. It was a hit! I do believe fun was had by all (my fellow writers in the MFA program), and some people walked away with festive items to borrow -- some David Bowie CDs, a Richard Hugo book, etc. Me -- I'm still sobering up, but happy :-) Nothing quite like a carbo fest to perk up yer spirits! Tomorrow, I must write poems! Happy vibes to all who read this. Though I had fun tonight, I miss ya'll on the west coast!! --Janel
Hey, I'm getting the hang of these here internets. I've posted a bunch more photos from my fall-extravaganza-just-got-my-new-digital-camera photo shoot last Saturday. Here they are! ( ** NOTE - FlickR is acting weird right now, so this link actually shows you my Turkey Day photos ... I'll try to fix it.) You can even see them in a nifty slide show format. Here's one to suck you in. Sucker!
For several weeks the Montague Reporter has failed to include the police log, but to my joy, it reappeared in the latest issue!
10/30 5 stolen pumpkins! Subjects not located.
10/31 Cat in a tree! Reporting party said she would wait to see if the cat came down on it's own.
11/1 Kids were throwing apples near the Exxon! Juvenilles sent on their way.
Everyday- people still drive that shouldn't.
Lucy now sits on the Montague Reporter, exactly on the police log article. It's comfy.
Dave said I shouldn't be surfing the internet -- I should be taking pictures instead. So -- here by special request, is my front door (from inside my apartment.)
Say hello to Lucy! This is just a practice photo so I can get used to my camera/computer/internets interactions, but fun, nonetheless.
