Light at the end

About a month left...

When you want help with your final papers or anything like that, you know who to call!

email me with anything you need me to look at, or to schedule a meeting--
wesley.schantz@fulbrightmail.org

but try not to leave it until the last minute.

Much luck!

quiz!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Can you tell whose is this quote?

I found it particularely interesting (if you are not depressed by it, it is actually quite inspiring) think about it!

Tam

If you have time

This is my dream blog. We talked about it on Tuesday, and about declaring something, whatever it is, and then following through with the declaration. I wish you had all been there.

I know things are getting really busy for everyone, but the end of the year is in sight. Let's try to make the most of the time we have left.

- Tomorrow there's a bus leaving from the IPA around 7:15am to visit Florida for a chance to get to know students from the different CeRPs.

- Check out the Symposium on September 29th--you can still submit proposals, too.

- And come next Tuesday to the workshop. We're back in the IPA at last.

Memory......

I must have been around three to four years old, and I know that because I remember waking up in the smaller bedroom. This means that my sister had yet to be born. I woke up with the sun and my elbow itched like crazy. There was nothing really remarkable about that morning (except for the fact that the sun was shining in Portland), but I thought to myself, I'm going to remember waking up this morning. And I still do.

Sketches of my neighborhood

Right, Tam, first reading the first paragraphs of Jayber Crow (I need a haircut, too, I don't know if you noticed) and seeing how there's two things going on there--the old barber, the place described. And so the mental map, memory map, getting an image in your head, then starting to write about the place where you grew up, however you like.

Of course I've done this many times in the stories I used to write, but I can always start again:

My house is halfway up the hill, below the railroad tracks, above the sewers. My cat used to go sit in the sewers when it was rainy or cold, which I never understood. Why didn't he come in the house, when it was so much more cozy? Next door lived Bubba and Willy with their grandma, sometimes, and they were great at videogames and had lots of X-men lore. On the other side was Roddy, whose wife played Chopin while he sneezed so loud. Around the corner lived Greg and Donald. Greg's house was closer; our moms' gardens were on either side of the chain link fence growing tomatoes, corn, lettuce. Donald had the woods full of sticks and leaves and, we supposed, the occasional hobo from the trains. And beyond that, the neighborhood stretched to Old Town.

Now, to write as if we're anthropologists, historians, sociologists--an outsider, trying to define the same place from a different perspective, colder, analytical, academic:

How quaint, this American suburb from the 2nd half of the 20th century. Full of post-war security, overlaid with cold-war dread, but mostly uncertainty, that characteristic place-less-ness of the latter decades. Complacency, dull complicity in the global system from the comfort of a TV-glow hearth. There are streets lined with single family homes. Initially occupied by the white middle class employed in the suburban businesses or commuting into DC, these gave way beginning in the late 90s to an increasing influx of immigrants from Latin America, small business owners, as part of the transformation of Old Town and of Gaithersburg in general.

(Sorry I post so much. At the moment I just feel I need to move this video down the page so it's not the first thing you see here...)

Vocal Folds Revealed

My old house...

Today I went to my old house. Already, so incredibly old. I found a whole year of silence accumulated, with its 365 small days silence waits to tell all the emptiness that felt. Silences are small and gloomy. I swear I chat with them, until I could almost see them. I realized that at night they cry like children, for being so alone in the big house, I think. I thought a year was not much, but it is amazing how much time can do in a year.
I assure you - you already know - but you have to prove - that the time is so ruthless, so powerful. An empty house for a year, a vacant house once, so suddenly. A house with windows closed and sealed the door, filled with dark corners. And the patio, with plants that grow stubborn, foolish, unaware of absences, without realizing that no longer grow for anybody. Through all the rooms, I walked around the yard. It could smell the silence and darkness. I had to convince myself that it was the same house where I had lived for years. But, time erases everything - what a novelty. But when you say that, you do not usually think that everything is going to be erased. And yet, I find that house now, so empty of people as devoid of sound, so bereft of a voice speaking in another voice, without a cauldron on the fire to the mate, without a phone to ring, without someone call someone, without even one person to sleep and dream on a bed, not even two people who dream and do not sleep on a bed, cooking without a woman without a man caming and without a table set, no one reading, no music without the sound of someone who comes without a postman dropping letters, without a cat sleeping on the branch of the vine.
And then he realizes that this is the time, with its ability to empty in an instant what once was so packed.
At one point in the afternoon, when the silence began to bother me with its complaint - a little, in fact, beginning to feel sad - I became the distracted (left, I closed the door quietly and went outside, hurry. And I went to drink a coffee, and came to write this, I do not know why.