Goodbye to the Summer / Back in Class

Rutgers undergraduate Paul Robeson
with fellow football players

On Tuesday, I resumed my old new fall rhythm. "Old," because I have been teaching for more than a decade now (though last year started at Rutgers University in Newark's campus); "new" because instead of my usual gearing up for hopping on a plane to return to a different home and readjust to a different city, I returned to my routine from last fall, and via public and bipedal transportation alone, was standing in front of my class, opening the semester.

As I was riding to campus I realized this past July marked the first time in 13 years--since 2000--that I had spent a continuous year at home (work-related trips excepted) in New Jersey. My prior dozen years weren't itinerant as Erasmus's career, of course, nor comparable to the experiences of numerous friends and colleagues, who have hopscotched all over the country for short-term and longer-term gigs, but it did sear into my consciousness that September equalled leaving home, whether for part of a week (as when I commuted to Providence) or a sizable chunk of each season.

Acclimation to the new rhythms perhaps accounts for why, for the first time in my career, I did not feel the blizzard of nerves that usually overwhelms me before my first course meeting. I still sweated through my clothing, got through only half my notes, and did not copy enough syllabi given the number of students who (since I have tended to assume that they will download it in advance, and my classes have tended to grow at Rutgers after the first week, rather than shrinking), but the flow of teaching went more smoothly, and felt less wracking too.

This was the case even though I am teaching a new preparation, "Foundations of Literary Studies", a required course for English majors, but I am excited about the opportunity to guide students through the material. As part of our first class we read and talked about two of my favorite poems Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Archaic Torso of Apollo" and Gwendolyn Brooks's "we real cool," and this weekend they will read an essay by Terry Eagleton before launching into the first nonfiction prose work (they are reading that genre, as well as poetry, fiction, drama, and graphic literature), The Travels of Dean Mahomet (which is free online at the University of California Press's website, if you want to check it out).

Another aspect of the fall is greater departmental responsibilities with one of my university homes. With two of my colleagues, including my chair, in African American and African Studies on sabbatical, I have been named as acting chair till January. I undertook a great deal of work related to this temporary post this summer, but there are still some major tasks to complete before December rolls around. One unexpected result of my spring AAAS teaching was an email I received this summer from a drama student at the Université de Lomé (in Togo) who has studied some African American literature, and had downloaded my course syllabus and inquired about some of the texts. I responded, sending him an essay by Richard Wright, but we have continued corresponding, and he passed on the names of some of Togo's leading poets, fiction writers and playwrights, only one of whom I'd heard of, so I look forward to delving more deeply in Togolese literature.

It's still difficult to believe the summer is over, even if not officially. This was one of my most productive writing summers in a long time. I completed a number of larger prose projects, one of which I continue to call a story but really is a novella, several of the others more clearly long short stories. Earlier in the year, as I was riding on the subway back from the Countee Cullen tribute event at Woodlawn Cemetary with Patricia Spears Jones and Rowan Ricardo Phillips and talking about having written a draft of what was essentially a novella after 10 years of intermittently leading the novella half of the year-long creative writing sequence to my Northwestern undergraduates, Rowan diagnosed my approach as "empathic composition." I think this is right in part; there is also the small window of the summer (this one without any travel) to complete anything, so I believe I successfully pressed rather quickly out of the scant grapes available.

I also finished revising and refining, with A Bolha Editora editors Rachel Gontijo Araújo and Stephanie Sauer the translation of Hilda Hilst's Letters from a Seducer, and cannot wait to see it in print later this month or early next. I wrote and delivered a short paper on the process of translating it, and perhaps I'll publish this at some point. The book will open, however, with a beautiful introduction by Princeton professor and Brazilian literary and cultural scholar Bruno Carvalho. I'm especially proud that I was able to accomplish this while teaching, though it would be wonderful to receive a fellowship to aid in future larger scale translations.

With the intense focus on my own writing and preparations for this fall I was unable to blog as frequently as I like. I hope to resume posting a bit more frequently. I still have unfinished posts in the queue, including a short tribute to Seamus Heaney, whom I have the honor of having kept from a good night of sleep--I'll say more about that soon--and perhaps some reviews, though my efforts in that area have tended to appear elsewhere (Drunken Boat among other places). Here's an exciting, productive fall for all J's Theater readers--and by "exciting," I do not mean another hurricane or tropical storm. Sandy was enough for a lifetime, or two!

Recent Events from Around the Horn

Over the last few months, weeks or days I've been following a few stories from afar. These include:

The riots by and attacks on undocumented African migrant workers in Rosarno, Calabria, southern Italy (photo at left, EPA). The workers, paid almost nothing for their work and living in slave-like conditions outside the town, protested by rioting after a Togolese immigrant was shot at, with a pellet gun, by an unknown gunman or gunmen. A number of the immigrants, as well as many locals, were injured in the subsequent conflagration, which rocked the streets of Rocarno. Some locals beat the protesters with tire irons, and another tried to run over an immigrant with a bulldozer. (Rosarno is just across the Straits of Messina and up the Italian coast from where C and I were in Sicily.)

Update: The Africans have either fled or been out of the town to immigrant detention centers, and locals are celebrating. According to the New York Times, the mafia are suspected culprits.

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The deadly attack by separatists against the Togolese soccer team, in Cabinda, an oil-rich breakaway region of northwestern Angola (that I have written about in some of my fiction, strangely enough), just before the start of the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament, which has not been canceled. (The World Cup will take place in neighboring South Africa later this year.) Three Togolese have died, and eight members of the team have been injured in the attack, in which separatists machine-gunned the Togolese buses as they were passing through the area. Team captain and international star Emmanuel Adebayor, pictured above, was not injured but was badly shaken along with the rest of his teammates. Bizarrely, the CAF (African Football Federation), along with Angola's president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, are saying that tournament games will still be held in the Cabinda region.

Update: The Togo team has, unsurprisingly, withdrawn from the tournament, which will neither be postponed nor canceled. According to NBC Sports, "In a telephone interview with AP on Sunday, Tiburcio Tati Tchingobo, minister of defense in the self-declared Federal State of Cabinda, denied his Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda forces, or FLEC, were responsible for the ambush. He said that whoever was responsible was sparked by a level of frustration that could lead to more violence."

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Unde the current economic crisis the funding situation for higher education is increasingly grave at a number of institutions, especially public ones, which has led some academic officials to push for increased privatization and neoliberal policies. Faculty and students have not taken it sitting down.

-Faculty members were on strike at Oakland University.
-UC Berkeley faculty and students led a 3-day strike that faculty and students across the UC system signed onto and the Governator's threats against California's once trend-setting system are being taken very seriously.
-Students at UC Santa Cruz occupied a building to protest tuition hikes and budget cuts.
-Protesters occupied a building at San Francisco State University.
-Graduate students went on strike at UIUC.
-There is a New School in Exile site to address ongoing problems at the New School University

In addition, students at the University of Maryland protested the ouster of a popular diversity official; Howard University students protested slow paperwork that has led to problems; University of Pittsburgh students protested the G20 summit taking place in their city; and students and faculty at the University of Vienna have protested funding and other issues, sparking solidarity protests across Europe.

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This drama about Harry Reid's reported comments on Barack Obama's candidacy. Though inartfully stated (off the record, no less), I don't think Reid was being racist nor was he incorrect, and certainly I had heard many black people I know say similar things. ("Negro dialect" is a bit antiquated, though, Senator Reid.) Seriously and unfortunately for me to put it so bluntly, but if Obama spoke even like Jesse Jackson, say, and were dark-skinned, I think he'd have had a harder time as a candidate. I should add, however, that I think the larger issue of Americans' increasing comfort with politicians of color, especially black and mixed-race politicians, and Obama's political and oratorical skills, cannot be understated, and it's a tribute to the American people that we took a tremendous leap throughout the 2007-8 primary season and, most importantly, in November 2008. As to where it's gotten us is another question.

Update: Of course now the GOP's chosen and currently out-of-control minstrel, Michael Steele, is trying to exploit these remarks. As did Liz Cheney this morning. I say consider these rancid sources; no more needs to be said.

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Commercial real estate in New York is finally meeting Great Recession reality. There are "920 football fields" worth of office space sitting unused. Meanwhile, as I witnessed all fall, longtime stores and restaurants (including the 92-year-old Café des Artistes and Manhattan's oldest soul food restaurant, The Pink Tea Cup) are being shuttered because landlords refuse to lower rents or cut deals. New York has been through this scenario before: some refuse to learn.

Also, the Stuyvesant Town boondoggle has collapsed. What was to be the transfer of Manhattan's largest pocket of middle-income housing into the hands of the luxury market is now an official FAIL. My questions include what is going to happen to the 20,000 tenants now?

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Buy me, I'm going to be better than the rest!

Apple very well may be launching yet another pace-setter with its iSlate (iTablet?), which is allegedly slated to appear on January 27. There are all sorts of predictions about what its specs are, what it'll look like and what software it'll possess, and though it's unlikely I'll be getting one anytime soon, both because I usually like to wait until Apple gets these things right, cool as they always are, and because I can't afford another new gizmo, I am dying to see one up close. By which I mean, pick one up, play with the screen, and be mesmerized by yet another offering from the Apple product family. Given the suggested debut date of this delightful device, I'll have to go to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue before my graduate class that night to inspect one, though something tells me that store will be more mobbed than it usually is. That is, if it really does appear in Apple Stores that day. We can hope, can't we?