My day, today: meeting with two students, prepping and teaching three classes, responding to several e-mails. And what else? Watching the news on television early this morning and, later, reading the news online and hitting refresh, and hitting refresh. The post I planned to make this morning is still a draft: I just could not bring myself to put it online.
It is difficult to think of making a blog post — or at least one far removed from current events — in the face of horrific news. And yet the world is filled with horrific news daily, and life goes on. With Boston, the news is especially close to my heart. It stops everything. And everything I can think to say about it can be thought and said by countless other observers.
In a class this morning devoted to Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, I played some relevant music from Bessie Smith. There are people, I said to my students, whose work is to perpetrate suffering, and there are people whose work is to create joy. Musicians are engaged in that second endeavor.
Music I have found myself returning to again and again this week: Mavis Staples, Nick Lowe, and Wilco rehearsing “The Weight.” I watched a couple of times when it came online last year. I don’t know what made me seek out this performance now. You might like it too.
The post I had planned to put online today concerns an episode of The Paper Chase with some great dialogue about education, love, marriage, and Earl Grey tea. I will post it next week.
Friday, April 19, 2013
A post for the day
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comments: 2
I loved that novel. I had never heard of Zora Neale Hurston, but our daughter was assigned that book her junior year in HS, and I helped myself to it after she finished. I always wonder how many people outside the South quite understand about bayous and pirogues--the shallow-draft dugouts that are poled, not paddled. " Progin'" refers to traveling the bayou in this manner.
I rooted out and read her other books, as well.
Looking forward to your delayed post. I love all of those topics except Earl Grey tea. I think it must be the oil of bergamot...
I remember the excitement when Hurston’s work was reissued by Harper Perennial c. 1990.
I like Earl Grey if it’s the right Earl Grey. My favorite is Republic of Tea’s Earl Greyer.
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