Teaching as Seeing
Posted on January 24, 2010
Filed Under Language, Poetry, Teaching | Comments Off
I’m teaching a five-week Saturday morning class for local high school students on “creativity and imagination.” I’ve got a great group of thirteen teenagers who have self-selected or been encouraged by a guidance counselor to take this class in “creativity and imagination” and they seem engaged and happy to take part, though many are shy and all have been trained by their high schools to be obedient. Yesterday we were talking about ways to put pressure on language in order to see what happens; then we wrote six word short stories and haiku. While the students were working I wrote the following poem(s). I don’t think it’s great work, but it captures a certain insight and it does have the spirit of haiku, I think.
Two Hakiu in a Classroom
Gray metal tables
Arranged end to end in rows
The students also
A square of sunlight
Paints one row illuminating
One student’s face
Vietnam Seems Far Away
Posted on January 24, 2010
Filed Under Personal, Reading, River Notes, Teaching | Comments Off
Vietnam seems very far away at the moment. It’s below zero here and I’ve been running for ten days to catch up from . . . being in Vietnam. In a few days’ time I’ve gone from the leisurely life of a poet in a tropical clime to being a professor of literature living beside a frozen river and teaching, in addition to a class about Vietnam, an American Literature course. The distance, both physical and psychic, is considerable. Perhaps surprisingly, I have felt on top of things in the classroom despite my preparation being a little on the thin side — my students have filled in any gaps I’ve left, bless them. Also, I came home from Vietnam filled with enthusiasm for various projects that I’ll get too as soon as things settle down a bit over on the teaching side of life.
I’m teaching the first half of the American Lit survey, which in twenty years at Clarkson I’ve never done before, and while I can’t work up much enthusiasm for the likes of John Winthrop and Jonathan Edwards, we’re quickly moving on to Emerson next week and I’m rereading some of the central essays with real pleasure and greater understanding than previously.(I’ve found Emerson something of a pious pill in the past, I confess.) Emerson sometimes seems tantalizingly like an American Buddhist, but then he starts talking about superior and inferior intellects in a way that seems contrary to the spirit of enlightenment,i.e., that while there may be quick and slow people that all are capable of enlightenment; the slow require “indirect” teaching (rituals and chanting, etc.) while the quick can grasp the truth sometimes from a single sentence or the way light glances off a bowl. Emerson, on the other hand, seems to condemn “the mob” to live their unenlightened lives as best they can — and women as well, though he never comes right out and says this, perhaps because he had lively daughters. Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the audience for “Self-Reliance” consists of young men of a certain class.* In getting ready to teach thias essay, I find myself wavering between asking students to defend themselves against Emerson’s charges of conformity and questioning Emerson’s assumptions about the “nature” of the individual. Of course, I’ll do both.
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There is an provocative complication to this observation in “Self-Reliance.” When Emerson compares the “Vermont or New Hampshire” country boy to the effete city boy he seems to be making room for a broader distribution of “genius,” but this strikes me as more of a rhetorical flourish than a heartfelt sentiment; that is, Emerson seems to be using the figure of the farmboy to beat up the city boy a little bit.
Observation
Posted on January 11, 2010
Filed Under Buddhism, Personal, Vietnam | 4 Comments
Sitting in LAX waiting for the redeye to JFK. I haven’t experienced any delays because of increased security. Hanoi’s Noibai Airport was not crowded today and everything worked smoothly; Taipei was no problem, either, though they were doing random searches after clearing the gate and before getting on the plane. And LAX was all right, too, in terms of security. The problem here was not security, which was thorough but efficient, but the local infrastructure and Delta Airlines. After clearing Customs (easy), I had to hump my bag three-quarters of a mile to another terminal and haul it up a flight of stairs, then stand in the “bag drop off” line for an hour while three or four agents did triage, pulling out passengers who were about to miss their connecting flights and rushing them through. Oh, and it is possible to run an airline that does not treat its customers like cattle: I flew China Air on this trip and the service was efficient, the food was good (and free), and the airplane clean. I’ve had the same good experience with Vietnam Airlines and Cathay Pacific. The pilots put us down each time as if we were landing on velvet. Unfortunately, now I have to get on Delta for the final leg of my trip.
Later: I’m home now and have slept for about fifteen hours. To cap the trip, Delta didn’t manage to get my bag onto the last leg of my flight home, so they had to put it in a van and drive it the 150 miles from the airport to where I live. But it and I have arrived safely after one of my best and most productive trips to Vietnam. Details to follow. Oh, and I absolutely agree with Sam’s assessment, in his comment, of travel in Asia versus travel in the US. For my part, I just repeat a little Buddhist mantra: May I be filled with loving kindness, may I be well in body and mind. . .
House of Nem
Posted on January 9, 2010
Filed Under Food, Vietnam | Comments Off
Gender Roles in Vietnam
Posted on January 9, 2010
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My friend Hien and I were walking around Hanoi today and we stopped in a children’s clothing shop so she could look for a jacket for her nephew. While she was shopping I took the two photos below. As in the US, the training begins early, from infancy, really. [Click on the images for bigger pictures.]
Notes on the Hanoi Literature & Translation Conference
Posted on January 8, 2010
Filed Under Vietnam | 1 Comment
The main business of the conference concluded today and most of the delegates went off to Ha Long Bay, but since my flight out is early Monday morning, I didn’t accompany them. I hate group travel and probably would not have gone along in any case. There was a huge buffet dinner last night hosted by the Mayor of Hanoi and this dinner too included entertainment that, as with the previous night, was mostly over-the-top socialist kitsch. It’s too bad that the older generation of culture workers in Vietnam have so little respect for their indigenous traditions that they turn them into faux Broadway numbers with guys and gals in “traditional” costume and hootchie coo dance extravaganzas. I sensed that the younger writers in attendance were embarrassed by the show biz stuff, but the old guys ate it up. This conference has brought home to me some things I’d noticed before about the production of official culture in Vietnam: there is a great deal of ritualized behavior, both in formal ceremonies and in less formal situations such as dinners; there is a lot of talk about communication and cooperation, but not much in the way of actual communication and cooperation. That stuff, if it gets done at all, gets done around the edges.
What the conference did bring about, though, is the creation of a nascent world-wide network of people interested in Vietnamese literature. I got together with a group of poets last night from around the world and we read poems to each other and exchanged email addresses and began hatching plans for cooperation. Significantly, we had to meet in a closet because no rooms had been set aside — in a facility filled with meeting rooms — for discussions after the close of the official parts of the program. And today, after the closing ceremony, which amounted to another empty two hours, I finally cut out and went to visit my friends at the publishing house where I worked when I had a Fulbright ten years ago. There, the Director, who I had always thought of as a kind of conservative guy, noted that the Writers Association did not seem very enthusiastic about bringing in outside translators and creating networks, despite the fact that that would seem to be a natural institutional role for them to play. Instead, they brought in 150 writers from abroad and used them as props of some kind of internal cultural kabuki.
At the publishing house, we agreed to pursue a couple of projects, including a re-edit of a famous anthology of Vietnamese literature and a collection of stories by the early Vietnamese modernist Nam Cao. And at the conference I had been able to reconnect with a Vietnamese friend — a fine poet and meticulous editor — with whom I have worked before and we agreed on a collaborative project to pursue together. As I was leaving the publishing house, the Director noted again that the Writers’ Association was “pretty conservative” and “not dynamic.” We agreed to forge ahead on our own. So the conference has been a success for me and for a lot of other writers who got to know each other; but in official terms that success was incidental.
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Note: I’ve intentionally been a little cagey about names in this post because I don’t want to embarrass anyone.
Vietnam News Report on Translation Conference
Posted on January 7, 2010
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The local press has been following the conference very closely and even I have been interviewed three times by journalists. Here is the only English language report I’ve found so far.
The Full Ceremonial Monte
Posted on January 5, 2010
Filed Under Vietnam | 1 Comment
Attended the opening ceremony of the translation conference this morning — hundreds of people in the new, monumental National Convention Center. There was dancing and singing and speech-making and then lunch. I met a lot of the writers — American and Vietnamese — that I’ve corresponded with over the years, or seen in passing on one of my trips. I’m not crazy about being stuck out at the West Lake compound, but I’ve been able to get off on my own enough to get some work done on the classes I will begin teaching next week. And I’ll spend the last couple of days of my trip back down town, so it’s all good. I feel energized and excited about developing some translation projects, work that will begin tomorrow when we begin doing small-scale workshops.
Translation Conference
Posted on January 2, 2010
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Moved yesterday to the conference hotel, which is really more of a compound of freestanding “Villas” in a lovely landscape of topiary and tennis courts, one of which is right outside my window. The Vietnamese are great sportsmen and sportswomen — they start playing before six in the morning and don’t leave off until nearly eleven at night. The facility was once used exclusively by members of the government and is clearly still pretty much the playground of the ruling class. Incredibly, there is no internet in the entire facility — at least in the public parts of it — so this morning I’ve escaped back to the Old Quarter to an internet cafe with a cracking fast connection. The conference facilities, clearly, exist outside the influence of market forces. I love this place and all its crazy contradictions — almost as many as my own country.
Improving
Posted on January 1, 2010
Filed Under Vietnam | 2 Comments
My Vietnamese must be improving. Walking back to my hotel after dinner this evening, I watched as a big garbage truck picked up the Vietnamese version of dumpsters and without thinking about it read the motto on the side of the truck: Green — Clean — Beautiful. Civic uplift is the same everywhere, apparently. And during dinner I was able to tell in a rough way what the Vietnamese couple seated near me were talking about.
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