“The Skies Belong to Us” #2

I’m having a lot of fun wondering what prompted my mild-mannered friend to tweet a WTF.photo-31

Is it the sheer number of hijackers?
Is it the crude capitalism of the security debate?
Or is it the hijacker in the cowboy boots?
Is she thinking of our friend Amber the flight attendant?
Or maybe the new Almodovar movie with its Glee-like musical number?*

It’s hard to say what has my eyes wide open to the point where I want to nudge strangers on the train to share my incredulity. Is it the zaniness of the hijacking capers or the tug-of-war between the airlines and a government trying to protect a public that didn’t seem terribly bothered by side-trips to Havana? I’m in awe of the “What to Expect When you’re Hijacked” articles and the proto-Dr. Phil and his cray-cray theories about what makes a hijacker. The pissing contest between Cuba and the United States. I don’t even. WTF.

I know Holder and Ketchow are at the center of this story, but, right now at least, I’m not at all interested in them. I want to know more about the other hijackers, especially the hot Italian or the guy who hijacked a plane in order to propose (note to Dom: if a man went to those lengths to get me to marry him, I might seriously reconsider my “no wedding” policy). I credit my curiosity to the way Koerner tell us about the collection of the disillusioned and the delusional—one right after another. It’s like a slideshow you want to watch again.

Underneath the hijinks and breeziness (sorry), Koerner offers a history of the current security state we all currently live in. If Holder were getting on a plane today, a TSA agent would have the right to search his afro for explosives. Maybe “history” isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s a kind of prequel. Right now, he’s laying it out without making a lot of fuss about it. He is just telling the story and leaving it to the reader to make of it what she will. I hope it stays that way. It’s distracting when authors and/or their narrators do the work of interpretation for me. I don’t want or need anyone sitting on my shoulder and talking to me while I’m reading, unless I’m being mocked (see Jane Austen’s narrators).

Some free associations…

I’m with Dom when she reacts to politics that seem uniquely American**. I had to stop reading for a bit when Koerner describes the trauma of Holder’s youth. I also wonder if she has the same experience of being challenged about her blackness that Holder faced in his youth and I had to negotiate well into graduate school.

I’m noting how much the military industrial complex leaks into our daily lives and how the technology that begins there wends its way to civilian use.

I’m wondering if there is a connection between deregulating airlines and the current security model of the TSA. I was a kid when the airlines were deregulated and have no memory of it, but I keep seeing it as a crucial turn in public policy and our relationship to travel and, eventually, security.

I read Koerner, stop, and do other things, and I think about travel.

I remember The Flying Tigers airline that took my family from Mississippi to The Philippines. The flight attendants were extra kind to us. My Christian mother calls this God’s favor. The militant part of my black identity thinks it made them feel good to be extra gracious to this nice, squeaky clean black family. My father was handsome and sharp in his uniform, my mother was beautiful, and I was wide-eyed and well behaved. The flight attendants weren’t just nice to us on the plane. Even after we moved into our house, whenever they flew into Clark Air Base they would bring me presents—a shiny blue Flying Tigers jacket (in my size), a Flying Tiger pin, and, my favorite thing: real, whole milk. We couldn’t get that overseas, so we drank the powdered stuff (I actually only used it for my cereal or in hot chocolate). The flight attendants would bring me the milk that didn’t get used during the flight. Bliss.

Now, of course, the experience of flying overseas is exhausting and invasive.

On my way back from Amsterdam a few years ago the wand the security guard used to scan my body for explosives was triggered by the underwire in my bra. When it beeped, the flat-chested agent asked what was causing the beep. When I said it was most likely the underwire in my bra she was derisive: “why do you need underwire in your bra?” I looked at her breasts and then down at mine and then back at hers and then back at mine. I did that until she nodded curtly and let me go through.

I feel impossibly naïve to be so shocked by the degree to which all thoughts and policies about “security” are guided by commerce. I like to think I know how the world works, and as much as I attach the phrase “industrial complex” to any number of nouns (prison/education/wedding/mainstream feminist/Hollywood + see above) you’d think I know by now that Sally Bowles and the Master of Ceremonies are dead on right when they sing “money makes the world go round.”

I wonder if we will we ever buy our way back to that relative ease of travel. I know we’ll never be able to walk freely around airport and airplanes without intense scrutiny, but will the passenger’s comfort matter more than security the farther away we get from 9/11? Is there enough money in corporate travel to offset the billions earned by security?

My concerns about the writing have evaporated. I wondered at first if my first response was just me being a prickly, picky reader who was being super critical about a writer she doesn’t know, but I do think the writing gets better and smoother. I also am having a hard time putting the book down. But I am. As much as I want to know what happens next (of course, on some level I do know what happens), I’m slowing down to savor this book. I flew through Mat Johnson’s Pym a few summers ago and was bereft when it was over, wandered around like some lost puppy unsure about what to read next. Not this time.

I like what Dom says in her first thoughts about the book:

I have the sense that the “dots” in Roger’s and Cathy’s story can be easily connected from choice to choice, coincidence to coincidence, and consequence to consequence. Whether that is due to who they are, or to Koerner’s skill as a writer, remains to be seen.

*Dom is right about television. I was with her in Toronto for a week and only have some vague memory of a television somewhere in her apartment, and I don’t think it was ever on. I, steeped as I am in serialized fiction, love the whole process of falling in love with a show—especially dramas. I am very much looking forward to a well-done mini-series of this book, narrated by Samuel L. “Get these motherfucking hijackers off of this motherfucking plane” Jackson.

**I know, I know. I can’t help it.

“The Skies Belong to Us” Post #1

For two people who don’t live in the same city, Dominique and I have done a lot together over the last eight years or so.   It goes too far to say we’re like sisters, but we are a lot alike.  In fact, when I showed up in Toronto in May to be part of her wedding, her father, after spending ten minutes watching us together, noted just how alike we are–not just mischievous, but mischievous in the exact same way (she refers to me as “smart ass” quite a bit).  We don’t have the same taste in television shows (mine is good and hers is, well, let’s just say it’s something other than good), but we like so many of the same books.  So many.  We recommend them to one another, agree that they’re great, and then go our separate reading ways.  But after we survived the death march of 2013 (otherwise known as 10 hours in three-inch heels and formal gowns) we agreed on two things: we need to take a trip together and we should read a book together…at the same time.

We’re reading The Skies Belong to Us.  It’s my choice because three smart folks recommended it and because it’s non-fiction and that’s what I want to read these days.  From the book’s website:

THE STORY
In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of sixties idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. Over a five-year period starting in 1968, the desperate and disillusioned seized commercial jets nearly once a week. Their criminal exploits mesmerized the country, never more so than when the young lovers at the heart of The Skies Belong to Us pulled off the longest-distance hijacking in American history.

It’s a fascinating story, and already I feel like I’m in the hands of a good storyteller and someone who has done his homework.  Given how many other things I should be reading right now, it’s nice to know that this vacation away from my other reading has an excellent guide.

Random first thoughts:
Koerner wants to attribute Cathy Kerkow’s attraction to the Black Panthers to the break up of her family saying her rebelliousness is “rooted in in the trauma of her family’s dissolution several years before.”  But I’ve started Skies right after watching “Orange is the New Black”–another story of a talented, privileged white girl who needs to sow her rebellious oats by visiting the world of the dangerous and/or the marginalized.  For Piper Chapman it’s lesbian drug dealers and for Kerkow it’s the Black Panthers.   So this grates a bit.  In general I’m not a fan of the this-is-why-people-do-bad-things approach to understanding a character (I’m looking at you “Mad Men”), but I certainly understand the impulse.  Further, this is not fiction, and the point of the book is to tell us who Kerkow and Roger Holder are and how they hooked up.  It just seems too easy.  Her choices might just be that…choices.  It makes me wonder how this story would read if told by a different author: a woman (black, white, or of any hue), a black man, a historian.

My father was in Vietnam in 1968, the first year of my life (he was sent over a month after I was born and came back a year later).  We never talk about it, and I don’t watch war movies, so it’s jarring to read what he must have seen over there while my mother and I were living in my aunt’s attic in Amsterdam.  I’ve always seen Vietnam as more of a metaphor than a lived historical event, so it’s hard to read about it, particularly when I remember stories my mom told me about how my dad’s absence affected her.  And, unlike movies where I can cover my eyes if I don’t like what’s on the screen, I have to read all of Koerner’s vivid descriptions. They’re harrowing. I don’t know how anyone recovers from those horrors, and Koerner puts those dots together so carefully that it’s easy to understand Holder’s choices.

I got the Prefontaine reference without looking it up–but only because I dated an economics professor in grad school who was a marathon runner.  He had a poster of him in his home office.

Dom, I’m curious to know how the references to American politics read to you.  The name Thomas Dodd might as well have been written in bold for me.  I didn’t know his story (I looked it up), but his son is Chris Dodd, who also went on to be a senator for the state of Connecticut and is now president of the Motion Picture Association of America. That last bit doesn’t really matter, but since I’m sure this book will be made into a movie (or maybe not because I’m not sure how mainstream America will feel about this interracial couple; how far has “Scandal” taken us?*) and it points out some eerie coincidences in the first few chapters, I’m going to note it.

The idea that America didn’t have a law about hijacking planes cracks me up.  Like no one thought to put up on of those “Please Don’t Take This Plane” signs.   I guess you can’t think of everything.

For the most part, I really like the writing.  It only bugs me when Koerner writes about Kerkow’s “abundant charms.”  It feels like he’s reaching and trying to be a “writer” when it’s clear he’s already a very good one.

That’s it for now…Dom will blog her thoughts at some point.

*As a black woman in America, I feel I have to go on record and say I have no problems with black men dating white women. Or black women dating white men (I’ve done it). Or people dating other people. The heart wants what the heart wants, and I don’t politicize or historicize that.
 

Tyvek

Tyvek /taɪˈvɛk/ is a brand of flashspun, high-density polyethyelene fibers, a synthetic material; the name is a registered trademark  of DuPont. The material is very strong; it is difficult to tear but can easily be cut with scissors or a knife. Water vapor can pass through Tyvek (highly breathable), but not liquid water, so the material lends itself to a variety of applications: envelopes, car covers, air and water intrusion barriers (housewrap) under house siding, labels, wristbands, mycology, and graphics.  (from wikipedia)

 

I live on a mixed block in Bed-Stuy.  It’s not a picturesque brownstone block.  The buildings here are either brand new with no personality or dilapidated without being charming.  My neighbors are Pratt students, yuppies who haven’t yet had their puppies, young guys with dreads who think they have a band, large Chassidic families, and an alarmingly jolly Texan who I’ve come to like a bit because he’s kind enough to knock and remind me when I’ve left my keys in my door.  There’s a playground next door to me and it’s shared by everyone—the school kids (mostly black) during their recess, Chassidic kids and their moms (and on Saturday night their dads), moms of color with their own kids in strollers, black families who BBQ for special occasions, and guys playing chess.   There’s a guy on my block who plays Soca music loudly during the day and then, in odd moments, vintage Amy Grant.  On his porch he has a huge cardboard cut out of some island destination.  A man on the street told me once that he drinks all the time.  My building super sounds like an extra from the Borat film. He hoses down our walkway everyday in the summer and keeps it clear whenever there is snow and wonders aloud why a woman my age, especially one with plants on her balcony, is single: “You don’t, you don’t, you don’t have anyone?  A man?  But the flowers up there.  Everyone talks how pretty they are.” Sometimes the Chassidic women smile shyly at me.

The Southern girl in me says hi to all of my elderly neighbors (the urban feminist does her best to avoid the invasive gaze of men), and they all say hi back.  Except for my neighbor across the street.  I say hi, she looks through me, or away from me, or around me.  On days when I’m off to campus she is always on her porch, and I can’t help myself from at least mumbling good morning.  The building she lives in, a two-story, single-family dwelling I think it’s called, is falling apart.  From the street you can see rotted wood planks under the eaves of a roof that needs replacing.  There are gaps between the boards.  The one window at the front of the house is covered by a large bush.  Her stoop is painted that same orange you see on construction cones and gates.  She sweeps it everyday.

As far as I can tell, she doesn’t do the stoop visiting that the other folks in my neighborhood seem to enjoy.

For the first two years I lived here, she lived next door to an empty lot.  I don’t know what was there before, but when I got here it was covered in grass, weeds, and bushes. You could see an old tire or three.   For a little while there was an abandoned car.   A wooden gate appeared one morning (and was instantly covered in graffiti).  From my balcony I could see people, men, going in from time to time and looking around. Some sort of small bulldozer came in one day and picked at the ground, gave up and went home.

They cleared the ground in earnest one weekend, and the side of my neighbor’s building was covered in Tyvek. I hadn’t noticed how far back her building went until they put the Tyvek up.  I also hadn’t noticed the chimney.  It’s a big building, and it’s all hers.  You never see anyone else go in or come out.  I know because I’m out here on my balcony all the time.  First thing in the morning, over lunch, late in the afternoon, and in the evenings playing on-line scrabble against my dad.

When I lived in Clinton Hill, just on the edge of Bed-Stuy, I fell in love with the brown lady brownstone owners.  I would see them here and there cleaning their front porches in the morning.  They are women of a certain age—maybe late 50s (it’s hard to tell with black folks)—and they remind me of my Dutch aunts who scrub their stoops every single day, without fail.  The brown lady brownstone owners have flowers and potted plants near the door. And the doors are all gorgeous and gleaming.  Right after my landlord told me I could no longer afford his building, I chatted for a bit with a woman sanding the front door of her brownstone. It seems she is remodeling it herself.

The building in the lot across the street, next door to my neighbor is going up fast.  The men arrive in two small waves—Hispanic men first, sometimes in a large van, and then white men in trucks.  They start early and this week they’ve started laying the brick layer by layer over the Tyvek.  They stand in a row and layer.  You can’t see them from street level, but I’m one floor up, so I can see it all happening.  So can the Chassidic children.  There’s a little guy who sits on his balcony and watches them for long stretches of time.  Sometimes his mother lets him peek in the gate.  Men in full orthodox gear stop by everyday to check the progress.

My neighbor has started sweeping more than her stoop.  She sweeps in front of the gate—on the sidewalk, in the street, around the construction gate.  She’s methodical about it and sweeps around the men as they show up for work.

Last night I heard her voice for the first time in two years: she was yelling at some Chassidic kids who were pushing their toys on her sidewalk.  “Get away. Go away. Get. the. fuck away.”

For Julia, as she mourns

Dear Julia,
I don’t normally respond to these mass shootings.  I’m left too numb by them, feel too helpless.  I don’t think of myself as particularly cynical, but in many ways I am and moments like these bring that cynicism to the surface.  But you asked what I thought, and I do have some thoughts.  I don’t think they are helpful, that I have anything particularly useful to say.  But I suspect you just want to know what others are feeling.

So here it goes. My thoughts, like yours, are unedited and unvarnished.

Today I had a rare day away from the news (radio, television, the internet, social media).  I’ve had severe pain in my right arm and shoulder for the last few weeks, so I decided to cash in on a massage deal and went to the Village for the day.  My plan was to have a cream tea and then to treat myself to a massage.  I heard in the background this morning that there had been a shooting, but I’m numb to gun violence, so what little time I spent on-line today was spent reading about Cory Booker, reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and joking around with his readers.

I went to the Village and promptly got lost.

All of this is to stay that I didn’t know until about six o’clock about this new, all too familiar tragedy.

It was very strange to be so out of step with everyone (I usually watch news events unfold in real time).  I “returned” to the world, after roaming around the Village, having a one-hour massage, and then tea and scones to an e-mail from my mother and then a phone call telling me about the killings.

She is too sad to talk.

My twitter feed was a jumble of rage and mundane announcements.  My facebook timeline begged for gun control.

As I tried to catch up with the news (and maybe with the grieving), all I could really think about was the ritual of it.  We have rituals around everything, even the murder of innocents. I knew without watching exactly what happened while I was away.

“Breaking News” flashed across news channels
Pictures of a parking lot
People crying
Images of first responders
Speculation
Misinformation

I knew that the president spoke and that what he said would resonate with most of us
I knew that Trayvon Martin and the other recently murdered would be mentioned
I knew that some group that speaks on behalf of communities of color would note the special mourning sparked by deaths of suburban white children while scores of poor black kids in poor black neighborhoods are only mourned on a national level

I was sure that NRA would dig in somehow and that defenders of gun ownership would make astonishingly stupid statements, dipped in paranoia:
Cars kill people but we still let people drive
We have to arm ourselves against the government
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people
My cold, dead hands!

Most of us would rail against the NRA
Some of us would call for better mental health services
Someone would say “let’s not name the killer”
Pundits would say they shouldn’t opine about the situation.  And then opine about the situation.

Social media would be a twitter

Eventually, I will cry along with everyone.

And wait for the next cycle to begin.
Your friend
In solidarity,
Tricia

The Week in Afro-Pedagogy: Handel, Hickman, and Mama Cass

I hadn’t really thought about how it would feel to share these songs with my students.  I’m enjoying myself, and I’m sensing a settling in feeling from the class as a whole.  But it’s also a bit strange to share something as personal as music with people I really don’t know. Thus far, I’m only choosing songs from my own library, so they all resonate with me in a personal way.  I can’t listen to “Ev’ry Valley” from Handel’s Messiah (paired with Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” because the runs in Handel are actually sublime) without thinking of my father.  I didn’t tell my students this, but the first gift I remember choosing and buying for my him was the score to Messiah.

We were living in Biloxi, Mississippi at the time, and my mom and I were at the mall.  I wandered into a music store. I was probably in the fifth or sixth grade*, and I don’t think I’d ever seen a music store before.   I don’t remember much about the store except seeing a wall of musical scores and honing in on the score to an oratorio I practically knew by heart.  It never occurred to me that one could buy such a thing.  But I knew immediately that my dad would love it.  I don’t remember how much I had to pay for it, but I do remember saving up and going to the store a few times. And if the older white man who ran the place thought it was weird that a black kid in Biloxi was into Handel he never let on.   My dad loved it and still has it (don’t be impressed: he also still has the same bathrobe from about the same era).

Whether my students like the selections or not (I don’t ask), songs I’ve listened to for decades are new again when I hear them in the classroom.

In my Novel to 1900 class we spent the last week of our Moll Flanders discussion thinking about femininity and criminality.  We used “Criminal Ms-Representation: Moll Flanders and Female Criminal Biography” by John Rietz for the discussion.  He argues:

Female criminals, then, are figured as being outside the social order, and their behavior is figured as somehow incompatible with their sexuality, crime being either a perversion of or a substitute for it.  These two factors complicate the representation of characters like Moll Flanders.  How does a writer effectively portray a character with the incompatible traits of femininity and criminality?–John Rietz

To kick that discussion off we listened to Sara Hickman’s “Take it Like A Man.”  I’ve been listening to Hickman almost non-stop since my college days, and this anthem is still pretty terrific.  I try not to stare at anyone during those first few minutes, but out of the corner of my eye I saw students nodding and smiling.  We ended the week wondering whether or not Moll repented or simply reinvented herself and rocked out (that’s the only word for it, sorry) to “Wild Women” by the great Mama Cass (she goes great with Sara Hickman!)

A writing drill centered around from John Richetti’s essay “Freedom and Necessity, Improvisation and Fate in Moll Flanders” followed.

And speaking of writing.  My Art of Poetry class on Thursday listened to “Avalon” by Harry Connick Jr.—the song I usually listen to at the start of my writing sessions.  I’ve been adapting my own writing strategies to help my students (undergraduate and graduate) get a handle on their writing struggles.  We have different motivations and different goals, of course, but the trials of writing only change in intensity.  The challenges remain the same.

Eva Cassidy’s “Fields of Gold” was probably too melancholy for Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” but we were moving from prose to poetry and we started the week with “Mont Blanc” and, well, there you have it.

This week we’re on to Evelina and Wordsworth and Thomas Gray, and I’m thinking that later in the semester Willoughby’s “I had always been expensive” might call for Natalie Cole’s cover of “Cry Me A River” (his theme song this term might just be Nina Simone’s “Buck” but I’m not sure he deserves Simone or that much genuine passion).  I’m chatting with everyone about my experiment.  Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to uses music in the classroom at some point in the term.  This doesn’t surprise me, of course, but I don’t know how much we think about what it means for critical analysis and writing.

Perhaps we should.

*And speaking of hair, mine was pressed at the time…in Biloxi, Mississippi.  This was before Jheri Curl’s set us all free (yes, I had one…don’t judge me; my head was not my own).

The week in Afro-Pedagogy: Nat King Cole, Wynton Marsalis, Gloria Gaynor and Cake

I’ve been trying not to overthink my choices for those first few minutes of class because, if I overthink them, I’ll worry too much about whether or not students are “getting” it when I really just want them to have a transitional moment. Worse, rather than simply listening with, perhaps, some moment of insight, they’ll feel as if they have to perform.

Vibe is everything.

For the final Frankenstein discussion I kept thinking about Gloria Gaynor’s classic “I Will Survive” and how Cake’s cover of the song gives it a different hue, especially with the guitar riffs and the male vocalist.  One assignment for the class asks students to either recite a poem of their choosing or adapt the structure of one of the poems to their own topic.  I hoped the Gaynor-Cake versions of the song might inspire them.  The only problem is that Gaynor’s disco tune is really only good for two things—dancing around in one’s apartment (usually while singing at the top of one’s lungs)  or dancing in a club (preferably with a group of friendly gay men).  If the point is to settle in, Gaynor’s not going to do it. But in order to get to Cake, I had to go through Gaynor.  We ended up listening to just the first few minutes of Gaynor (and it was a bit jarring), but the Cake cover seemed to pull most of the students into the work for the day. Of course, Frankenstein’s creature promises to do the exact opposite of survive (a funeral pyre seems to be in his immediate future), but I’m not necessarily going for a specific correlation with these moments.

It’s not so easy to experiment with music in the classroom, and I have to remind myself not to seek a specific reaction from anyone. It was affirming to see students tapping their fingers and feet to Cake, but music is such a personal medium (so often we listen to it in private spaces) that it’s difficult to share in the clinical space of a classroom.

I don’t particularly have the, the vocabulary to discuss music.  This is not necessarily a bad thing as it reminds me, again, how much of critical writing is knowing what language to use to describe what a reader feels about a text.  For all that I keep a list of terms that my students need in order to discuss literature, I sometimes forget just how much of that vocabulary is new to many of them. At this point, it’s not even second nature to me. It’s just how I talk, but that wasn’t always the case. This uneasiness with musical vocabulary keeps me mindful.

It’s difficult to decide how much needs to be done by way of introduction or discussion afterwards.  In my “Art of Poetry” class last week we read canonical Donne, “The Flea” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Morning.”  The second poem had me thinking of Wynton Marsalis playing Hayden and Mozart with the National Philharmonic.  Symphonic music with Donne felt like a cliché, but for the second class, when we discussed “The Flea,” Nat King’s Cole “If You Can’t Smile and Say Yes…” felt more in keeping with the spirit of whatever Afro-pedagogy might be.  But the song needed a bit of glossing.  I wanted students to note the line “squeeze me a squoze” and felt I needed to explain what “men are scarce as nylons” alluded to.  And that brings me back to my main concern.  How much do students really need to know about these songs?  I run the risk of overthinking, of being that nerd who ruins the moment with overbearing explanations.  Students don’t need to “get” everything anyway.

And really how is life not better for spending three minutes with Nat?  I mean really…

NB: As I was jotting down a few notes, I realized that the other, perhaps more present, inspiration for this experiment comes from my favorite blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates and his occasional Morning Coffee posts.

(Thanks to my friend A.S. for putting Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive” on a birthday mixed CD.)

Afro Pedagogy: An Introduction

Not really.

I mean I don’t even know what “Afro Pedagogy” would mean. I just know that I’ve been having a lot of fun with my new afro (my teeny weeny afro, to be exact), more fun than I thought was possible, and that fun has seeped into my teaching.

Here’s what happened.

In the middle of getting Written/Unwritten ready to run the publishing gauntlet, I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer to get rid of all the permed and/or weaved hair I’d been bored by for years. It was both the right and the wrong choice. Right because I promised myself to make the big chop this summer. Wrong because it distracted me from my work. The first day after I took my braids out I could barely concentrate as I could actually feel the coils of my hair unfurling. It felt like there was a party going on on top of my head while the brain inside my head was wrestling with trying to get the beast out the door. The combination of both events—-getting rid of the book (for now at least) and getting into my afro has me feeling playful…but in a serious way.

Because afros, when they are not being called things like teeny weeny, are also serious declarations, whether the wearer intends them to be or not. Women, especially older ones, have been coming up to me and talking about my liberation, my freedom, my declaration. No matter that I was bored and tired of shelling out all of the cash it takes to maintain processed hair. Apparently, I’ve been liberated. So I’m passing it on.

All of this is to say that I’ve been spending the first few minutes of each class easing my students into the day’s work by asking them to be playfully, or perhaps the better word is creatively, serious. The idea is one I got from a friend who has her students use meditation exercises to prepare them for class. I’m not really the meditating type, but I’ve noticed that there are certain songs that get my teaching brain started, and I wondered what would happen if I shared them with my students, if I gave them three or four minutes before class to focus on something that was interesting and important and that might connect them to their work but that required very little from them.

I started the first class on the first day by beginning my Art of Poetry class with Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime.”

It was interesting for me but not necessarily so for the students. We did some work with the lyrics, and I think it set the right tone, but I didn’t get the impression that students felt anything after listening to it.

My romanticism class started with Aretha Franklin singing “Skylark” (we’ll read Shelley’s poem by the same name later). It worked a bit better. The class is smaller (16 students instead of 33), some of the students already know me from other classes, and there’s something to be said for the fact that Franklin sets just the right tone:

For my final class of the day (Novel to 1900), I didn’t really have anything in mind for those first few minutes, so I started the class chatting with my students about what they’d read over the summer.  One brave student admitted to reading 50 Shades of Grey, and before I knew it she was reading a pithy, scathing review of it from Amazon’s website. By the time she got to

“The main male character is a billionaire (not a millionaire but a billionaire) who speaks fluent French, is basically a concert level pianist, is a fully trained pilot, is athletic, drop dead gorgeous, tall, built perfectly with an enormous penis, and the best lover on the planet. In addition, he’s not only self made but is using his money to combat world hunger. Oh yeah, and all of this at the ripe old age of 26!”

we were laughing too hard to let her finish.

I haven’t quite worked out what should happen after these moments, but I know what happens during them: Nothing. No roll taking, no passing out papers, no announcements. We all just sit and listen or read quietly.

Sometimes I make a direct link to the day’s work; sometimes I explain that what we are hearing or reading is loosely connected to some element and ask them why that might be. Last week, on both days, we started our work with Moll Flanders listening to Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”, and a student said, “I’ve heard her voice before.” And maybe that’s all that really matters.

I don’t know that I’ll always choose popular Afro-American culture for these moments (we listened to Professor Snape read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets last week, and while he is certainly popular, there is nothing Afro about him), but the spirit behind it is somehow connected to what’s going on on top of as well as inside of my head.  And, in much the same way as my afro, I’d like those first few minutes to unfold as naturally, as organically as possible.

For Nora and My Inner Sally

I sometimes feel sad when celebrities die, very sad, but I don’t join in public grieving. Even when great people pass, I am mournful but rarely feel bereft.* I lost interest in Ephron’s movies over the years. Her characters can’t bear the weight of my feminist-womanist-Marxist gaze. But when I saw she died I was crushed. I started crying immediately and called my mother. She has no idea who Nora Ephron is, but I called her anyway because that’s what you do when you lose a friend.

She certainly wasn’t a friend in the usual way, and I had no interest in meeting her, but her heroines—quirky, high maintenance, hopeless romantics—managed to get through my cynicism. And I don’t care if it’s a cliché to say it: I love Sally. Love that she is uptight and a bit of a know it all. That she orders so much on the side.

Sure I loved Claire Huxtable and Murphy Brown and Julia Sugarbaker. Still love their sass and their strength (sometimes I watch old clips of Julia Sugarbaker just to stiffen my spine). But just like there’s always been a part of me that is Mary Richards, there is a part of me that is Sally and that woman in “You’ve Got Mail” on the Upper West Side.

Especially in my closet.

When I see pictures of myself from the past, in men’s ties and hats and funky scarves, I know that Annie Hall seeped in when I wasn’t looking. That phase passed (along with my Birkenstock phase, thank the fashion gods), but Sally (and her iterations) has remained.

So when I heard that Nora died, I thought of the pearl gray dress I bought earlier this year and the linen skirt with the side pleat that needs to go to the dry cleaners. I’m drawn to clean lines and, for the most part, muted colors. Given a choice, I will always choose tea-length skirts and ballet flats. I venture out from time to time, but even my favorite, bright red linen dress looks like something that Sally might have worn—if she could pull off such a bold color. There’s a sweetness to that style that I’ve always been drawn to.

I may live in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, walk by a huge portrait of Jay Z every single day, and sign e-mails to my colleague-friends “Omar,” but I also wore a twin set to a Trinidadian Cooler Fete, a fact that makes everyone who knows what that must have looked like laugh out loud.

And just last week, when I was overcompensating because I’m fairly certain the afro I’m sporting these days makes me look like a boy and I tried to balance it out by putting on a mini skirt and heels, I didn’t feel a bit like myself. It didn’t matter how great my friends told me I looked, the outfit was just not me. Even if the skirt was seersucker pink, and I wore it with a pink cardigan.

Sometimes “You’ve Got Mail” will come on, and I’ll roll my eyes and change the channel, but I always come back to see the taupe and grey linen dress with the cardigan and the skimmers. It’s a sweet scene with Ryan and Hanks in some garden. There are flowers and a dog. And I can just about get past the horrible politics of the story.

I’ve wondered over the last few years, as I’ve settled more comfortably into the many different parts of me—the Mary Richards and the Omar Little, the Julia Sugarbaker and the Clare Huxtable—if I still feel such a strong connection to Nora’s women. Then I look in my closet and know that I still do.

*(exceptions include Etta James and Lucille Clifton)

Speedy Romeo! Perfect, Perfect, Perfect

A pizza joint worth a review…

When it came to our goal of visiting twelve pizza joints in a single year, the intrepid Karen would have happily gone the last pizza mile, but Joan and I got too busy, and I didn’t think there was anything new to say about the pizza we were trying—primarily because we were going to places that were new to me but not new to anyone else but also because we agreed that thick crusts were out and that limited our choices.  It’s not that the nuances of the different pies we tried were lost on me (Fornino Williamsburg is superior to Fornino Park Slope), but it wasn’t particularly interesting writing about variations on a theme.

So I’ve continued my pizza journey solo without writing about it: Fornino Park Slope (better ambiance, inferior pie) Paulino’s on Bowery (and eating grilled octopus for the first time and learning the joys of chili sauce), Otto’s (with its amazing salads), and Motorino Williamsburg before it had to close because the building was sinking…literally sinking.  I also tried Graziella’s in Fort Greene. It might have been good at some point, but it needs to step up its game because there’s a new kid in town, and Speedy Romeo is not fooling around.

What I know about haute cuisine could fit on the back of a pizza joint napkin, but even I have heard of Jean Georges, and when I heard that one of its chefs (Justin Bazdarich) had opened a new place just a few blocks from my apartment, I thought I should try it out before it got too busy.

I waited too long.

And I knew it when I saw Bob Tuschman from the Food Network having dinner at a table by the door.

Speedy Romeo opened on Tuesday and the wait for a table its first Saturday night was already 45 minutes. In fact, my friend and I ended up sitting at the bar.  I’m glad we did as we got to see all of the restaurants offerings being prepared in the brick oven and on the grill, and the chefs behind the bar were happy to offer suggestions.  The restaurant offers pies made in a brick oven located behind the bar and also serves steaks, chops, chicken , and fish.

We started with the mozzarella salad.  I may not know from fancy food, but I’ve eaten enough fresh mozzarella to know when it’s good and when it’s gotten too old, and this was the good stuff.  The texture was perfect and all it needed was a drizzle of chili oil.  It was served with a side of grilled eggplant on toast and garnished with mint.

My friend ordered the Margherita. I’m glad we agreed to share because it was pretty close to perfect.    Too often restaurants don’t balance the sauce with the other ingredients, but they get it right here, and the addition of oregano was terrific.  One of the chefs behind the bar (the friendly and adorable Justin) suggested a pie named after his dad, and I’m glad I followed his advice.  The King Salami is covered with hot and sweet sopresatta, finocchiona, and red peppers, that manage to sit on the perfect crust without weighing it down.  I’m saying the crust is perfection. Seriously. It has just the right amount of salt, it’s firm without being chewy, and when you go back for your fourth piece (because, let’s face it, you’re gonna), it still tastes as good as it did when it came out of the oven

All of this is served with a side of pickled peppers, spicy and tangy and perfect on pretty much everything (I’m dying to try it on eggs).

The only reason I was able to stop eating my pie was because I wanted to save room for dessert.  They were out of lemon tart, so we shared a piece of the chocolate cake, which I was convinced would annoy me.  The menu describes it as having a marshmallow in it.  I know that the whole s’mores thing is all the rage these days, but I seriously have no interest in that flavor combination.  Like everything else at Speedy’s this marshmallow was amazing, more like a meringue than a gooey mess, and the cake was just moist enough to feel almost as smooth as its topping.  I politely offered the last bite to my friend who took me up on the offer before I could change my mind.

We shared a bottle of Montepulciano and the bill was still quite reasonable.

The only drawback to the place is that its ambiance feels out of place in mellow Clinton Hill.  I’ve become accustomed to low lighting, interesting but unobtrusive music, and the hum of a local crowd.  Speedy Romeo feels like a sports bar with its loud rock and roll and even louder crowd.  It’s jarring given how wonderful the food is, and I hope this changes.  I’m looking forward to going some weeknight with the hope that it will be quieter…and that they’ll have lemon tarts to end the evening.

one. three. twelve: Il Porto

Our trip to Il Porto in July (selected by yours truly) was a chance to visit a local pizzeria, one that was within walking distance, even on a warm Saturday evening. This meant that Joan and I, who take turns driving to our destinations, could freely enjoy the more than decent bottle of wine we selected from Il Porto’s wine list.  Il Porto doesn’t quite feel like a “neighborhood” joint—perhaps because it’s on a block that only has commercial properties—but the folks who work there were welcoming, particularly on the Saturday night when we visited.  It has two distinct eating areas.  One side is a proper restaurant, and the other side (the one I recommend) is more casual and closer to the counter where the slices are sold.  They take credit cards and have an outdoor eating area that looks quite nice, though it’s worth remembering that Il Porto is near the Navy Yard and its unmistakable aroma.

While eating pizza each month and sharing our experiences is fun, we’ll be taking a break —not from eating pizza (of course!) but writing about it.  As Joan writes at the end of her review, our lives are moving quickly (I am currently scheduled to finish not one but two books in the next academic year) and our plates are full.  In the meantime, if you’re interested, you should visit these Brooklyn Pie Joints:  Fornino Park Slope • Motorino • Lucali’s • Anima

What We Drank

Primitivo Puglia Autentico (Canaletto 2006)

What We Ate

Appetizers

Rucola e Parmigiano: Arugula, mushrooms, shaved parmigiano

Mista : Tomato, shaved carrots, mixed greens, balsamic vinaigrette

Lobster Spring Rolls

Pies

Rucola e Prosciutto Mozzarella, prosciutto di parma, arugula, & shaved parmigiano

Sotto Sopra Mozzarella, fresh tomato, finished with shaved parmigiano

Dessert

Affogato

The Reviews

Tricia

Il Porto was my choice. I stumbled on it last year when I was zipping around Brooklyn looking for furniture for my home office.  Hungry, hot, and a little bit lost it appeared like an oasis in a block of warehouses and eighteen-wheelers.  The “slice side” is super cute without being precious, and I was amused to see the truck drivers hanging out in such a quaint area where you’d expect to see hipsters and their female equivalents.  I had a great slice, chatted with the burliest men I’d seen all years (NB: I am an academic, and academic men tend NOT to be burly), and went on my way.  Since I didn’t know the neighborhood, I had no idea where I’d just been, and it took me the better part of a year to find the place again.

It was great to find it again, but I must confess that the décor and ambiance of the place didn’t work for me.  The proper restaurant side is trying too hard and in a borough full of amazing musicians, artificial keyboard music (even with a good vocalist) seems a crime.  Kinda like eating Domino’s Pizza when Luigi’s is right around the corner.

Joan’s appetizer was a lovely idea that didn’t quite work for me.  A lighter wrapping would have allowed for less frying and better flavor and you can call the filling lobster all day. It tasted like shrimp to me.  Our salads were quite good, but I confess that I was worried.

That worry melted like the perfect slice of buffalo mozzarella when our pizzas arrived.  The Rucola e Prosciutto didn’t match up to a similar pie I tried at Fornino’s in Williamsburg, but the Sotto Sopra, which is like the Margherita’s sassier big sister, was absolutely delicious. Dessert was too difficult for me to actually enjoy it (the tastes were good but the texture was all wrong), but it was a nice ending to a decent meal.

Overall, I felt that Il Porto has the right ideas about food, but the execution is hit or miss. I will most definitely go back (it’s on my way home from school), if only because it was my first Brooklyn pizza experience.

Karen

There’s no place like home.

It was one of this summer’s alarmingly scorching July days and we were hot, tired and not in the mood to travel, so we stayed in the neighborhood, content to spend some time together, decompress and hopefully enjoy a reasonably good meal.  Who knew we’d strike gold right on our own backyard?

Il Porto is on an industrial and rather unsightly stretch of Washington Avenue in our Clinton Hill neighborhood, but it’s fairly spacious with one side comprising a regular slice joint and another that is a dining room which also has outdoor seating.  I think we were all immediately put off by the loud and somewhat incongruous live music (singer/electric piano player singing in – Spanish?  Italian?  Portuguese?), which felt very intrusive when all we wanted to do was talk.  The (presumable) owner was also a little off-putting, as he kept coming to our table and telling us “You look good!”  This had a decidedly different feel than, say, “You look lovely this evening.”  He hovered around us for a while, telling us the specials (which our waitress had already shared) and — a pet peeve of mine — refilling whosever wine glass looked the emptiest.  I hate that practice – it may be good serving etiquette but the person who drinks the fastest also gets to drink the most, which is hardly fair.  We quickly put an end to that, telling him we would fill our own glasses of the very good primitivo, which was smooth, round and on the fruity side (my personal preference).

Oh but wait, we were there for the food, and overall, we were very pleasantly surprised.  I ordered a basic mixed salad, which turned out to be an entrée-sized plate of fresh seasonal greens with carrot strips, tomatoes and light, tasty balsamic vinaigrette which did not overpower.  I tried one of Joan’s special lobster spring rolls which basically tasted like any other fried spring roll – not a bad thing, but not very memorable.  But the pizza!

Or should I say, one of the pizzas, because we ordered two, and in my mind, only one of them qualified as pizza – the sotto sopra, with mozzarella, fresh tomato and a little parmesan cheese.  I am not a fan of most cheeses other than mozzarella but the parmesan blended in seamlessly adding a touch of saltiness to the already tangy and well seasoned tomato sauce and the sprightly mozzarella.  The crust was crispy on the edges and chewy in the middle but not too dense or overly filling – it offered that pizza gestalt I always seek, and I could not have been happier.  The rucola e prosciutto, however, left me cold – a big circle of pizza dough topped with some prosciutto and a big pile of raw arugula that made it seem as if it had gotten lost inside a bushel at the farmer’s market.  It was bland, bothersome and after one slice I ignored the rest, content with my real pizza, my wine and, of course, my compatriots.

It doesn’t usually take much convincing for me to order dessert, but if the truth be told, only hours earlier I had suffered the loss of a dear aunt, so I was feeling especially in need of living to the fullest.  I ordered an affogato, which had a lot of ingredients listed on the menu but seemed mostly like some yummy chocolate ice cream covered in chocolate syrup and espresso, and was a satisfying end note.  While Il Porto probably won’t be winning any awards or earning any Zagat ratings, the quality, combined with the proximity and pleasant surprise factor, made this particular outing one of the most enjoyable so far.

Joan

This excursion had all the ingredients for a classic Saturday Night Live skit: Cheesy lounge singer on a synthesizer? Check. Unctuous host? Double-check! Absent Tricia’s recommendation from a previous visit, these were not promising signs for a good meal. However, the arrival of our first course – salads for my companions, lobster spring rolls for me – accompanied by a decent red wine, raised my expectations. While the lobster rolls tasted more like shrimp, they were crispy and non-greasy. Now that I’ve damned my appetizer with faint praise, I can wholeheartedly endorse the margherita-type pie (sotto sopra). It was a nice balance of thin crust, tangy sauce and quality mozzarella (with a sprinkling of parmesan) that restored my excitement about the meal. The second pie was less satisfying – I’m just not a big fan of white pies (i.e., no sauce). The prosciutto was good quality but the overall impression was just too much dough offset by a lot of arugula. We ended the meal by sharing some type of chocolate dessert with espresso. At this point, it’s really hard to remember much details about the meal for a number of reasons – I waited too long to write this review; there’s too much going on in my life to focus on what was basically a decent if pedestrian meal; I’m just not cut out for the job of food critic. I still stand by my lifelong belief that I could eat pizza everyday (and did, during 7th grade), but after a while there’s not much new to say about the experience. I’d rather just enjoy the occasional good meal with friends. Period.