Attached is a poem I began last night, revisited this morning (always beware the less-than-24-hour-turnaround!), after YouTubing Neil Peart, 'best drummer in the world', for Ben to be inspired, which he was. I know the 'entre nous'/'entry notes' kind of clash, and the format is kind of arbitrary, but it's fun to dabble. The Casanova reference is to Fellini's remarkable film, when the aging lover is finally smitten by a 'gift' given him at the Salzburg court; Walker Percy brings in the concrete image of 'carapace' to further his abstract dichotomy 'immanence v. transcendence'. Steinbeck's tortoise in Grapes of Wrath is one of the reasons I became a literature teacher.
Whoever is collating Karamazov/Woebegon Productions (Mom
), please throw this in the 'hmmm' bin! It's not artful, but it does describe in part my plodding journey...I'm on 'break' now, but have just finished hosting a minor conference at school that had its peak (for me at least) in a tour of Old Town. Joey really wanted to lead it as he knows more about Jan Hus, Golems, Charles Bridge et al than I do, and I benefited from his notes; he's skiing this whole week with his scout group, so it must feel nice to need/want to be in two places at once. Alas, he's growing up and busy...
The other thing I'm doing this break is presiding over my first online workshop, which has 21 participants and some onlookers from IB on high. Things are going well, and while I prefer face2face workshops, this contract helps toward the work-from-home directions I hope are more fully realized in years to come. Not that I'll become a troglodyte, I trust..
love to
you all, safe travels, watch some Bulls games for me,
Dan
...Obsessing, sorry-- when I sent this poem to Katerina (upstairs--the travesty of two computers) the format didn't transfer, so, reluctant to set it in stone, I'm sending the pdf. Again, the format is rather arbitrary, but I didn't want such a choatic page--ie, a turtle's meandering, not an ee cummings' grasshopper.
I'd sign off in the way Josh does (and I always appreciate), though I wouldn't want Emanuel to be my endorsement of Rahm, who brings a weird swagger into Daley's erstwhile office...
Dan
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