the hour is getting late

Nobody told me I would be allowed to sing along with my son, who would be playing the guitar better than I could ever have imagined, and we would make a kitchen full of loud music together. Some privileges are unpredicted.
Also, when your kid knows the words to “All Along the Watchtower” better than you do, much of your job is done.
Both of them, I must add. His sister has already amazed me with her guitar skill and ability to make beautiful music.
This is one of the things I really desired strongly, and for a long time, for my kids to have the ability to make music. But I had no idea how to make it happen. Then along came youtube, and their determination. I am so proud of both of them.

Today I went to work to correct my papers, saw a few students, and then went to the dentist — on my daughter’s advice, who told me to just get it over with — had a good massage, and came home, to some computer work, and then, music. In my walks between public transportation and work and dentist and massage, I took the pictures you can see to the right. My favorite is the lion spitting water rather slowly under the spurting fountain. I wanted to set him free to do something else, but he is just a lion made of stone.

inner dialogue (2)

this one was actually out loud:
– I should have thought of it.
– No! Stop! Just stop thinking!

As if.

inner dialogue

inner dialogue:
– get a life!
– I have a life!
– get a better life!

Admittedly, a bit hard on myself, but it’s always hopeful when a person strives for self-improvement, no?

catch up with myself.

I feel as if I need a few days just to catch up with myself. I think I might be going to get them. Exam time is always a time when I don’t quite know which way is up.
Today I went with my good friend Carla to an organization that she has belonged to for a while. It is called “The Garden Club” or something like that, and it is older ladies who go and visit gardens. In the winter they visit museums, and today we went to the Naples acquarium, which is very small, just a part of a scientific institute. They pipe in their own sea water from the gulf, and so they have some animals that are harder to kee alive in more filtered water. What I really enjoyed today was watching cuttlefish swim. That is a really amazing thing to see. They swim their whole lives, back and forth, never stopping. To see twenty of them doing just that was amazing. I also saw a ten-year-old grouper (also called a sea bass) as big as a beagle, and the cutest little flounders you can imagine.
My laptop is having keyboard issues with a group of keys (space bar, hyphen, the “at” sign, p and the single quote). They are a vertical line on the keyboard, so it must be something systematic. Luckily none of them are in the password to open the computer. It’s like a tooth-ache, I’m going to have to deal with it, but not today. I think I’ll buy a keyboard I can hook up with a USB, just in case I have to do something important before I deal with it. This morning I copied a bunch of spaces and p’s and stuck them in manually into a recommendation letter that was urgent. Very comical process.

sad and bad times

Italy is going through a really bad, bad time. Racism has become very explicit and scary. First there was the police operation called “White Christmas”, a house-to-house search in a small town near Brescia for illegal aliens. And now there is this:
(from the Guardian, here)

– Local people clapped and cheered yesterday as hundreds of Africans were moved by police out of a small town in Calabria following clashes in which immigrant farmworkers were shot at, severely beaten and run over.
More than 300 immigrants were loaded on to buses in the riot-torn town of Rosarno, destined for immigrant holding centres. Meanwhile, an immigrant was shot from a moving car with a pellet rifle, bringing to five the number who have been shot.
The first shooting, last Thursday, provoked a violent protest march by Africans through Rosarno, which left 66 injured. A second immigrant was beaten with metal bars yesterday despite a heavy police presence in and around Rosarno.
“There is a very serious security problem here and many immigrants working on local farms are scared and just want to get out, even though many have not been paid,” said Laura Boldrini, a UN official, after touring some of the disused factories in which immigrants sleep after returning from poorly paid shifts in nearby fields.
“My fear is that the government will use this opportunity to expel those who do not have permits to stay in Italy,” said Jean-Léonard Touadi, Italy’s only black MP.
Reportshave emerged of mafia involvement in a vigilante-style response by locals to the immigrants’ protest, including setting up a roadblock and hunting down stray Africans in the streets of Rosarno. Among the Italians arrested was Antonio Bellocco, 29, who is related to members of the feared Bellocco clan, which controls the area in which the fruit farms are situated, the newspaper La Repubblica reported.
A year ago, two immigrant pickers were shot and wounded by a gunman in the disused factory where they were staying.
“This is the very first time the Africans rebel against the local ‘Ndrangheta mafia which dominates the fruit and vegetable businesses,” said Francesco Forgione, a former head of Italy’s parliamentary anti-mafia commission.
“During their protest they even surrounded the house of an old boss in the Pesce clan, which is powerful locally, something the Calabrians have never done.”
The Pesce and Bellocco clans are both believed to be involved in racketeering at the nearby container port of Gioia Tauro.
Touadi said: “[African imigrants] need to be helped or the Italian south will this year become like Alabama in the 1920s, just as Rosarno is now.” –

back to work

I finished and send the translation I was working on: the a priori according to the pragmatist Clarence Irving Lewis. I know, I know, you all are just dying to know more about this fascinating topic. All I can say is that the most interesting question involved is near the area of the nurture/nature debate. What is out there, and how do we perceive it? How much of what we perceive is constructed by us, and how, and how much comes from outside of us? These questions are very close to the question of what is inside a baby before anybody talks to the kid or touches him/her.
Everything is everything, we used to say at the university. Be here now.
Amen to that.
Today was very much more practical. Putting exam papers in front of students, encouraging them not to copy the answers from their neighbors, examining the students’ identification papers and collecting their signatures, collecting their exam papers at the end of the allotted time (harder than it sounds), beginning to correct the exam papers. Listening to colleagues. This last part was the most interesting part. I like my colleagues. Lucky, lucky me.
I listened to music on the bus ride home. I love my mp3 player and I love youtube, which lets me download almost anything I want to listen to. Today I listened to “Visions of Johanna”. There is something about Bob Dylan’s voice in this song that moves me. I really liked the documentary “No Direction Home”, and this particular song is tied in my mind to a time in his life when he seemed both very successful and very lost. He seemed to be trying to keep track of who he was, and at the same time he was stepping closer and closer to the edge of his creativity. I feel it is a brave song. That is how it sounds to me.

I also really enjoy Paul Simon singing with Miriam Makeba (bless her, bless her, what a woman) about African skies, and with Willie Nelson about going to Graceland.

Tonight: yoga! I will go get ready. Here is my picture on the first day back to work:

The weather is cold and crappy. But I am so grateful that my daughter made it back to Scotland that I don’t care.

memory

I’m listening to “The Sounds of Silence” sung by Paul Simon with Bob Dylan. There’s something magic about youtube. Paolo was saying this morning that the whole idea of memory has changed with the internet, youtube, google, wikipedia. Anything we forget, we can look up. But I see my children know and remember the lyrics to SO MANY songs I don’t even know (by Bob Dylan, among others). Today’s “poetry by heart” is song lyrics, of course.

I love it that I can find out things. I have never been good with either names or dates, and Wikipedia helps me to nail things down.
I was not able, today, to find a source for “what goes around comes around”, except a rather dubious Shakespeare for “comes full circle”, which is the same meaning, but not the same play on words. Who knows where it started, how it spread? Internet, great as internet is, cannot answer my question. I attributed it to the Grateful Dead, totally erroneously, and I think I’ll stick with that.
It used to be, not so long ago, that very few people knew how to read, and they all read pretty much the same things. Nowadays, cultured people still know the same stuff as one another, but there is more variety and more sheer volume available.

park was pretty yesterday

Today is rainy and dull and I have a head-cold. I had nausea all night, and slept very little, with my husband snoring like a squeaky door, opening and then opening again and then — well, you get the idea. I tried snapping my fingers, which worked a bit, but I didn’t really want to wake him up, because he doesn’t get back to sleep so easily, and he had to work today. When I am sleeping well, it doesn’t matter what noises he makes, so I just let the man snore.
It’s rainy and cold.
But yesterday, well, yesterday was BEAUTIFUL.
Look at this (and click on it, to see the rest of them):

“nun saccio maje si aggio avuto custanza”

My kids, especially my daughter, have introduced me to a Neapolitan band called “24 grana”.

The song lyric that has just struck me is “nun saccio maje si aggio avuto custanza” = “I never know if I have been constant”, that is, I never know if I have been determined and tenacious (enough). If I have hung in there.

Have I given up too soon? Have I given too little of myself always? These are the things one doesn’t know. And yet making a song out of it means taking a stab at exorcising this self-torment. Okay, so I may not have tried hard enough. That might be true. I will never know.

In the meantime, I have lived a life.

The lyrics in Neapolitan, and the meandering tunes, sound like Arabic to me. I think Naples is not entirely part of the Western World. I spent from 3 to 6 years in Turkey, and there are places in my heart that are reserved for swaying music with meandering lyrics.

fearful

I am a fearful person. I do not want to be a fearful person. I want to be a fearless person, or at least a person with fewer fears. A fewer fear person.
I make resolutions to not pay attention to my fears, to plow forwards regardless.
I take airplanes, one of the the things that makes me most fearful of all.
I deal with groups of 200 people at a time, when there are exams where I work. I do not fear the people, I fear that I will faint or have a heart attack or stroke, or rather: I fear that I will be on the verge of a heart attack or stroke, and that stopping the exam and running away to the hospital would save me. I never know when to stop what I’m doing and run to the hospital. I know my fear is a bluff. I know that it is really a fear of being incapable, unable, and inadequate. It is fairly elaborate, since I do not overtly fear that I don’t know how to organize 200 people. I do not overtly fear the people themselves. Or so I tell myself.
I have recently realized that I “do not do well in crowds”. That is how I put it to myself. And so my fear gets all contorted into my oncoming heart attack/stroke.
I would like to call my bluff, and mostly I do call my bluff and bluster and blunder forward, into the situation, my heart beating rapidly, and my blood pressure rising. And I do a good job.

The other day I wanted to walk on the Bagnoli loading dock, which is a pier going out a kilometer into the sea. The wind was howling, and there was nobody else there. I had the whole pier to myself, which is rare and exciting, a privilege. Nobody else in the world was there. The wind was wild, the sea was rising.
I was fearful.
I was irritated with myself, and determined to get to the end of the pier and back. I sang loudly. On my way back I listened to my heart, and just how fast it was going.

This story does not have a moral, or a happy or sad ending. It is an ongoing story. You can see that in the picture below the pier seems to go on forever, past the horizon.