Oh Captain! My Captain! Rise Up and Hear the Bells.

Like most couples who have been together for a while, Dan and I have developed our own language and repertoire of childish, domestic games. One such game is called Falling Rock. Its premise is simple. Dan surprise attacks me. He hurls his 180 pound frame onto my weakling body yelling "Falling Rock!", at which point I must attempt to extricate myself from his dead weight. Because I have no upper body strength, and he tends to land on my arms, I usually just lie there. That's how you play Falling Rock.

My prolonged absence from the blogosphere (three months) has to do mostly with school, which initiated its own little game of Falling Rock in early August and never let up. I have to periodically take a hiatus from writing to appreciate my need for it -- words start to accumulate until I practically bloat from them, until my brain is so distended that one day I come home and say to myself "I think I'd rather write than watch Heidi Montag celebrate another birthday or New Years." (The only thing more pathetic than watching The Hills is watching reruns of The Hills).

This fall term was exhausting. For the first time in my teaching career, I visibly bored a majority of poetry students. With a room full of non-English majors fulfilling an elective, I shouldn't have expected Russian Acmeism to win out over a cellphone game of Bejeweled. But I did. I taught my heart out, over and over in a kind of lyric loop, and my reward was unmindful apathy. I'm careful to write "unmindful" because student texting isn't an aggressive affront. Indifference is default, almost sweet.

I made the mistake of showing Dead Poets Society the final week of class. I'm not sure what possessed me to give my students a Tinseltown example of professorial bravura, to reinforce the reality that they didn't form a secret society and meet up in an cave and read aloud to each other from Keats and worship me. While Meditations in an Emergency inspired only slight meditation, this film was of unparalleled interest. No one slept, no one texted. They arrived on time. Two boys in the front row cupped their chins in their hands like Precious Moments figurines. So I've been giving the Robin Williams phenomenon a lot of thought.



What exactly is my teaching style? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to describe what I don't do especially well: carpe diem, stand on my desk, rip out anthology pages, teach motivational phrases via kickball, touch shy students on the face to encourage spontaneous public composition. When we spent a week on "Song of Myself," we didn't sound our barbaric yawps. My approach was to, well, read the poem. All of it, not just the lines that lend themselves to email signatures. Rogert Ebert, in his 1989 review of Dead Poets Society (he only gave it 2 stars) writes "at the end of a great teacher's course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher's semester, all they really love is the teacher." He's right. When I paused the movie, and asked my class who penned "I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world," no one could tell me. No one really cared.

In my freshman rhetoric class, I teach a 1997 Harper's essay by Mark Edmundson called "On the Uses of a Liberal Arts Education." In it, he argues that college is an extension of consumer culture -- that students purchase their education and therefore demand to be enlightened and entertained. But like Edmundson, I don't want to entertain. At least not all the time. I resent relying on stories of working fast food service at Disney to make a point about Billy Collins, or impersonating John Berryman.



Most days, I just want the poems to speak for themselves. Is that possible? I want to be jovial and approachable but not have to compete with cellphones for attention. Our class would have been a whole lot better off if I hadn't felt the need to coddle them with media, to screen that Whitman documentary that culminated in a two minute homo-erotic scene with blousy shirts (note to self: pre-view!). Edmundson writes:

I don't teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says that she "enjoyed" the course -- and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations -- somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind.

I'm so hard on my teacherly self, choosing to focus on those I don't reach, ignoring the thank you letters on the fridge. It's hypocritical to resist performance and still wish to be someone's Captain, but there you have it.

Child (s)care

Holy Zwielicht --- this is the German au pair's purse!

Genious

I’m in Blue Hill, Maine, living with a family of musicians, taking care of a precocious 4-year old who speaks with a vestigial German accent (“Becca, can I have a wrrrrrradish?) and a 7-year old violin prodigy. The 7-year old, Sabrina, bested me in an impromptu living room performance of the Bach Double. Which is humiliating. I remember a woman -- she must have been at least eighty, varicose veins mapping her legs -- flying past me in a Central Park 10K. She wasn’t at all winded. I tried to convince myself that she’d stumbled onto the circular path from a service road, that she was part of a Senior Citizens bus tour where everyone was forced to safety pin a number to their chest just in case they wandered off. I expected to see her collapsed at a water station asking why the Empire State Building had vanished. But no -- I was the one cramping at mile four, bent over and regretting my choice of race music (The Very Best of Hal and Oates).

I studied violin for twelve years, and at no point did I come close to experiencing music the way Sabrina does. The first time she heard the Mendelssohn Concerto, she jotted down each key change in her program. At age 4, she was playing Haydn (I spent a solid six months perfecting “Hot Cross Buns,” and before that, bowing a tissue box). I sit beside Sabrina at dinner -- her hazel eyes wide-set, her skin the color of moonlight, her long hair single-plaited straight as a fret board -- and cajole her into eating. She has no appetite for food. Her belly is full of notes. She’s an ethereal fairy we speak to in numbers -- take 3 bites, now take 4 -- and appease with stories of Issac Stern. She hungers for bits and pieces of her lineage. Her great grandfather was a world renowned violinist who studied with Franz Kneisel, who in turn studied with a master who studied with a master who studied with a master. This trail of masters leads to Vivaldi. If you drew a performance tree, the trunk would rise from the ground of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony orchestra. Last night at dinner, while I was fighting a losing battle with Sabrina’s meatloaf, she dropped her fork, shot up and shouted, “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Vivaldi!” Her grandmother corrected her, slightly: “Musically. Musically you wouldn’t be here.”

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a genius. Being a genius translated into being famous. I sought various outlets to get there (including a guest spot on the locally produced Uncle Paul Show, where I paraded with other children in a wobbly line behind our blind public television host, Uncle Paul). Once, in third grade, the same week as the Challenger explosion, an unidentified man with a raspy voice called our house and asked if I’d ever considered acting -- in a panic I hung up the phone. For months I lamented my lost chance. Why had no one taught me *69?

As I creep into my mid-thirties, I'm coming to terms with the likelihood of a humbler fate. My blood is not the blood of a prodigy. I frequently misspell genius. But I’m a good writer, a decent singer. Perhaps my greatest talent is my patience. Yesterday, I waited for an hour with Hannah, the 4-year, for her poopie to come. This poopie was not the first to come -- the first she was mostly wearing. I cleaned her up (after dissuading her from grabbing a toothbrush to “scrrrrrrrub die gerrrrrms!”), and then we sat together in the neighbor's bathroom, weighing the pros and cons of princesses and candy, coaxing the poopie with soprano songs. Ultimately, it was this little ditty that did the trick:

“Snow White, Snow White, she cast her magic spell,
And woodland creatures cried with joy, Look! Her poopie fell!”

Quite a virtuoso move, if I do say so myself.

Hair

*This is part of a creative non-fiction essay that centers on hair and intimacy. I'll be writing a little every other day, until I have about 3000 words. I'm also hoping that several sections function as stand alone prose poems. I'll probably be reading this part at the Iowa Book Festival on Saturday.*


When I was twenty-four, I discovered a hair, the length of a unicorn horn, growing out of my lower back. I felt like a marionette in control of its own body. My then-boyfriend was drying his face with a washcloth. He was lanky and angular, his chest smooth. "Look, a web," I bragged, shirt lifted, sliding the hair gently between the tips of my pointer finger and thumb. He wanted to remove it with tweezers. "No," I said. After all, who knew how many years I had spent unwittingly coaxing the silver strand out of my spine. It was practically invisible in the bathroom light. When I straightened it, revolved to find a good view, it shimmered taut with centrifugal force. I was radiating. He had just begun flossing when I felt the rip -- flush from the root in a singular fluid motion, right out of my hands -- leaving me stupefied, emptied. He held it up to the mirror for close inspection. My loss doubled: power and power reflected. "Got it," he said, pretending to work the hair back and forth between his uniform bottom teeth. We kept it in the medicine cabinet, weighed down underneath a bar of hotel soap, for weeks. There I would sneak periodic looks until it finally lost its pulse. It blanched the color of an arctic fox pelt. No longer lambent. Rosewood scented, a thing dead to me.

The Hills Are Alive

This August, I'll be in coastal Maine for two weeks as live-in help for a playwright and her extended family. My job entails grocery shopping, baking banana bread, making puppets talk to toddlers, and listening to Bach. One of her granddaughters is a violin prodigy. Part of my appeal -- because honestly, I have limited experience around children, and I don't know which is the smaller onion, chopped or diced? -- is my background in music.

I very carefully explained that I haven't studied violin in over 14 years. While I'm good at leading afternoon singalongs (better if there's box wine involved!), I might not be your go-to girl for Shostakovitch. Despite my disclaimers, I was hired anyway. Not as a primary teacher -- more like an upbeat attendant. Like Jiminy cricket. He didn't play violin but rather did the Charleston up and down the strings, encouraging moral behavior. Or did he play? Anyway, I'll be setting up the metronome but secretly life-coaching.



I can not wait to while away my mornings writing poems that feature hard to pronounce deciduous shrubs. And later, watch the sun set over schooners. And go clamming in knickers. And buy knickers. And hike in Acadia National Park. And perhaps most of all, rediscover my love of the violin.

Tonight I recorded a video of me playing about a minute's worth of a watered down adagio version of Bach's Double Violin Concerto. (Dan makes a dancing appearance around :47.) I don't plan on continuing to practice in the kitchen by the litter box and Swiffer.

I'm Seriously Procrastinating

Thriller Kitty:

Cat Calling

Last week, I made a shocking discovery: my cat Karaoke will come running and nuzzle my face when I whistle. I must say, this was a huge relief -- now that he has an automatic feeder and a stuffed bunny on a string, he isn't much in need of me anymore.



(Oddly enough, the playback of me whistling had no effect on him whatsoever -- he stayed sleeping in my study.)

Like the Pied Piper, I've been abusing my power -- luring Karaoke onto the couch to warm my sockless feet, or into the bathroom to keep me company when I've forgotten toilet reading. He always arrives purring but then looks vaguely disappointed, like he's bought front row tickets to the wrong show. "Hey Buddy!" I'll say, feigning surprise. "Did some whittle kitty come to play with this whittle square of Charmin, hmmm?"

I love my Tubby McGuire and would never intentionally do anything to hurt him, and because he rubs up against me and snuggles in my lap (once he's gotten over the disappointment of it being me), I'm assuming this lip trick doesn't cause him any pain. An exhaustive internet search provided no real explanation for his behavior. Bffer1 on Yahoo Answers posits it's the high frequency of my whistle, and that if I purchase electronic-sounding ringtones, I can achieve the same effect. Um, no thanks. Besides -- it isn't only the whistling that works. If I hum at a low frequency, or speak in an exaggerated French accent, or sing Beyonce's "Irreplaceable," there he is again, right on cue, with a look of "When will I learn this is not an emergency? Pet me now."

Sometimes I imagine that the day will come when I really do need him-- say I'm having an allergic reaction to Farmer's Market produce, or I'm losing a lot of blood because I cut myself on the Rotato -- and it will be at precisely that moment, when I put my lips together and blow, or manage a dying refrain of "to the left, to the left," that he'll ignore me. Something tells me I should just stop Life Alerting my cat for no good reason -- that is, until Dan and I are settling into bed, and neither one of us wants to go and get him from the hall carpet (nor do we want to be surprised by his tail in our faces at 3AM), and Dan turns to me and says, not exactly with seriousness, but not exactly joking around, either: "You could always whistle."

Another theory circulating online -- and again, I can't find a vet endorsed website -- asserts that cats respond to whistling because it triggers their nurturing instinct (they mistake you for a mewing kitten). Then why does Karaoke react to Beyonce? I guess she does solicit the affection of male cats.



So -- can anyone tell me for sure what's gotten into Karaoke? I don't want to whistle if it's harmful!