And it was still hot

So in the C.A.R.E. package sent to me by Petra I pull out not just three vacuum packs of genuine COLOMBIAN coffee, there is a copy of Sendak's Wild Things. We are undoing the package during class, with my 9th graders, and I spot the book. Wow, I think. And none of them has ever seen or read it. So then I read it to the class, very dramatically, showing the pictures, ROARING the terrible roars, and GNASHING the terrible teeth, and so on, making them stand up and do a wild rumpus, and then I get toward the end of the book, where Max is lonely, and wants to be where someone loves him best of all... and suddenly I am starting to choke up, it is getting to me very deep, and I don't understand it, I can't tell why...

A few hours later now, I think was is a combination of things...

remembering how I would read the book with Thomas and Meredith

perhaps grieving that that golden time now lies so far in the past

missing friends and family

having sailed, like Max, in and out of days and through weeks and almost over a year to a land where Wild Things are... well, if not Wild Things exactly, then people with whom it is hard to connect, not through any failure on anyone's part but just because of langauge and culture, mostly though because of language

and then reaching the end of the book, where from far across the world Max senses that there are still good things waiting for him back home, so he gives up his job as King and sails back home, where for him there is comfort and familiarity and warmth

he finds his supper waiting for him

AND IT WAS STILL HOT.

It is a tale of forgiveness, Max is a prodigal son, who sins against the parent (making mischief, saying I'll Eat You Up) and then runs off on his own, only to realize at the end that it isn't really what he wanted, so he heads home and is forgiven and welcomed and has a feast prepared for him even before he gets there.

Nearly every job I have had has worked like this: six months to figure things out, one year to do it, then it is stale and boring and I need to move on. Right now I feel I am getting things done, I am through with the learning curve, I can function, I have a fair amount of control, and things are happening.

But a year from now, I will be more than ready to give up being King of all the Wild Things and happy to return to the night of my very own room, where, God willing

there will be a supper waiting for me,

and it will be

still hot.

no good deed goes unpunished

early friday morning, 3 sept 2010

so school started officially on tuesday with an evening opening program, which i skipped because i was in budapest with berci. he was to take an oral exam in english, i said let's go a bit early to visit this interesting market hall, whcih we did, so it was fun to look at and explore, then we went upstairs to the tourist scholock area and were amused by the chess sets and the knives and the tablecloths, and then... a group of Japanese tourists. So I say to Berci, go and say hello, oh no, oh yes, go on, no, what do you mean no go do it, naaah, look dammit you have been learning japanese and you have never had a single real conversation with anyone just internet drills and now is the time, naaah, why not, well i just err, look dammit they aren't going to eat you, naaaah, ok dammit if you dont i will....

so i went up to the tour leader, a gaijin, and spoke in engish (i had overheard her speaking a little english earlier) and asked if her group wouldn't mind letting this young man speak with them for just a few minutes, and so for the next five minutes or so they were clustered around him like bees on a spilled can of coke while he was wowing the pants off of them with his boyish charm and language skills.

of course he was happy that i had made him do it, and he did well on his english test an hour or so test, but i had problems with my knee and we were walking quite a bit and now i am starting to hurt . have been taking ibuprofin again, first time i have used it in months. will see an orthopedist today to see if i can get another injection in the knee. when i walk, i limp, and that throws my alignment out, and now my back hurts.

classes have started, and of course i am on my feet most of the day, moving, talking, pushing, cajoling, entreating, gesturing, etc etc

yesterday eve i had two guests, two students, joszef is getting prepped for a language exam next sunday, he wanted some extra time with conversation, so i said after school was fine//around 5 pm at my flat, then he called me around 4 and said berci would join us, so i went to the grocery store and bought some dessert and a bottle of ginger ale since i knew that it was berci's birthday (he just turned 18), so the two of them are at my place and we spend a good 90 minutes or so doing conversation practice with jozso, then things wind down a bit and jozso wonders if i can tell him what the lyrics are to some rap song he has found on you tube, and the next thing you know berci is asking me if i like this music, and he plays a clip filled with industrial noise, and i say no i dont, but then he asks if i think it is music, and rather than answer him i do a google search for cage's Two Minutes of Silence, and Berci immediately pops in and says no it is Four and a Half Minutes, which it is, damn the kid is full of surprises, pulls up a performance on YouTube, plays it, and then we launch into a 20 minute investigation of what is MUSIC, with me arguing that art is at its core a social thing, he disagrees, saying that it is independent of such restrictions, i say no, that a soloist rehearsing all alone in a room is not producing art, is perhaps honing a craft, but it isn't ART, then berci goes back to the noise clip and then he asserts that art is something that arouses an emotion in you, whereupon i fake a punch to his face and say THERE, if i had hit you and hurt you that would certainly have aroused an emotion in you and so my hitting you in the face is ART, right, and then we argue whether or not it might be performance art.

another question and i decide to produce a work of socalled art to demonstrate my point, i take a scrap piece of paper with some printing on it, crumple it into a fist sized shape, pull out an empty photo frame that i inherited from one of the earlier teachers, "mount" the paper inside the frame, hand it to berci, and say to him, Is this Art?, and he is somehow forced by his logic to say yes it is art, that EVERYTHING is art, and i counter that if EVERYTHING is art, then art has no meaning whatsoever.



it is chilly and rainy
the days are noticably shorter
death peeks around the corner
and waves, not menacingly, but just to let me know


but as for Art, i know some of it
and i know some of it is better than all the rest of it
and here is one part of that some


This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spining man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage read, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms
To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooning the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On atounged puffball)
But animals thick as theives
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms ina throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multiudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now.