Our library actually owns a copy of this book by Guillermo de Torre, so I am recycling my xeroxed pieces of it. These sorts of items I like to keep around me, as they are mementos of my love for the field and of my innocence, in the time before I thought I must renounce it.
Axé.
Filed under Bibliography, Poetry
I would not frame the discussion in terms of success and failure, instructions for success, but I think this post gets closer to a useful discussion of how to do an academic job than do most in the genre. The activities it discusses are, of course, the ones that interest me and also interested me in taking this direction.
In my case the question is complicated, of course, since I was not raised to think I would ever be able to do anything. And my father was a professor and said he was unhappy. He thought going into academia was a poor idea, and did not think I could survive in it. I, of course, did not think I could do anything at all, yet knew I could do academic work and was very interested in it. I was careful each year of graduate school to make sure the main reason I was continuing was that I was interested, not that I was trapped; and to make sure I was working to lessen the factors that had made graduate school my only option when I was twenty.
I always felt I should quit to please my father, and I always felt one could not commit fully, since one would probably not be let in. And I haven’t always had the best of luck, or made the best informed choices, but these things, no matter how serious (and they are serious), are secondary. The primary issue is the early and constant message: you must renounce now what you love because it will never love you.
My father loved this song. It seemed to express much of what he felt and to comfort him, but it terrified me. I already knew my parents were afraid of ending up on the streets themselves, and ambivalent about us. Would they put us on the streets if they could? Would we ever be able to hold onto anything we loved?
And these things are all true and must be acknowledged but at the same time, I am so tired of them. I would like to work as I did in graduate school, days of innocence, when the work itself was healing balm.
Axé.
Filed under Da Whiteman, What Is A Scholar?
It is as though we had been through a long war and it were finally over, and we had had losses but had won, were in a position to pick up our lives again. Perhaps we have been through a long war that is now over, have had losses but have won, and are in a position to pick up our lives again.
Here is Vargas Llosa on Moro:
Axé.
I was saying things about academia, how I dislike it because it requires you to renounce the things you love most about it. That is about working at institutions that work against your programs, of course, and I won’t say this is not a real problem, and that it is not highly irritating. But “renouncing the things you love most” means something more to me, I realized as I heard myself speak.
“I don’t have the money to keep you.” That was what my mother always said, and she kept saying it even though she had the money. We were to be cast out, it was a daily danger, and she was to commit suicide, and that was a daily danger as well. Again and again I prepared myself for these losses and although they did not actually take place, the psychic one kept being repeated. Every day we were told, every day we renounced and steeled ourselves; every day we knew we would be abandoned, and love was withdrawn.
I always appreciated and felt affection for my mother, but I do not remember loving her. One could not love her, she was too coercive, cruel, weak and vindictive too often, and she might commit suicide any day. She was also a potential role model, and that was risky. If I got too close, I feared, I could become death-oriented like her, and I did not want this.
Just now I was thinking irritably about how foolish it is to accuse people of insufficient love (“you don’t love the university enough, if you did, you would put up with this!”) when they have in fact gone so far as to renounce what they most love to prove this love — renounced their own work and their better judgment to be polite to fragile power. I realized suddenly what this meant at another level: it means I must have loved my mother once. I don’t remember when I had to stop but it was very early on, and it must have been very painful because I have repeated it a few times, to try to get over it and also to try to see it; this also explains the reactions I have when I am asked to sacrifice or renounce.
People really should not have children to amuse themselves or to claim an identity. They should also not threaten suicide around their children. With the suicide threats, and also the accusations having to do with our failure to fill an emptiness, I remember renouncing love again and again. I remember the toy I held in my hand one time, watching my mother sail away from me as it were, and saying, “Good-bye, my honey. Good-bye, my honey.”
I can see it now. It must have been devastating, and I know there were many such scenes.
Axé.
Filed under Da Whiteman
We will talk about this. I would like to teach Quintín Lame along with Macunaíma and other Indian things, and perhaps I will.
Axé.
Filed under Teaching
My great-great grandmother from Mitau. She was born in 1822, before the town was swallowed up by Riga. Latvia had been annexed to Russia in 1795. Here she is in the early to mid 1840s. She is with her first son Alexander, who died at 18 months. Her second son Alexander was born in St. Petersburg in 1847.
My great-aunt Valeska met this grandmother in Chicago about 1890. Valeska was tiny then, and it occurs to me that her cousins, of whom I always think as ancient people, would have been small children as well. When they were old, they talked together and did not have parents; small, I imagine them talking without parents as well, like the Peanuts characters.
Axé.
Filed under News
....Sondé miroir, O Legba!....
