If during graduate school you lost a TAship at your institution; if you have now tried everyone’s patience here; if you are now being allowed to take certain classes so you can earn a professional qualification in another field; please do not address the professor who is kindly but painedly showing you how to register and directing you to other faculty’s classes as “my dear.”

Axé.

I have not been posting very much because I no longer have reliable Internet to the house, and will not until April. I am not reading the news very much because the 60% budget cut higher education in this state is to absorb by 2012, is antithetical to my good mood. Work is going well, although there is too much of it, and I do not want to think of what may soon happen to us. I believe I shall play classical music. You will recognize this beautiful Mozart concerto.

Axé.

That Blackguard has asked me what will happen at third year review. He was not interested in my answer, however, because he believes the public university which awarded him his degree is several tiers better than the one that awarded me mine (the University of California at Berkeley).  In addition, I work at this university, so I could not know anything.  (As does he, I note.) Because he has something none of the rest of us could imagine having — friends at other universities — he knows much more than we ever could about how the profession works.

So, since he will never even listen to my advice, let alone take it, I will offer it to you. Imagine yourself as someone with acceptable research and teaching records, but no record on service except your record of refusing regular service assignments, disrupting service undertaken by others, and haranguing colleagues about large service projects they should undertake. Imagine that you are a foreigner and you do not speak English.

My advice to everyone would be, first of all, that rather than create conflict and stress on the committees to which you have been assigned, and then boycotting these, you should actually function on them. If I take time to give you, the person described above, this advice in response to your questions about third year review, you really should listen rather than spit in my face.

Since the Blackguard spat in my face, I did not give him my next piece of advice, which would have been that if he undertakes additional service work on his own initiative, he should finish it; and he should finish it in such a way as not to create additional work for others.

He would then be able to say that he initiated the awarding of an essay prize, an activity which has grown in popularity and is now a thriving departmental tradition; that the theatre group he started is now performing at local festivals; that the new study abroad agreement he suggested has been negotiated and is poised to begin functioning.

Instead, all he has to say is that he started an essay prize and was then too lazy to have a certificate made or arrange in any other way to actually award the prize to its winners, and that the contest, which was supposed to be yearly, was never given again; that he started a theatre group and then dropped it in a fit of pique after students had put in a good many evenings rehearsing for their first performance; that he harangued his colleagues about study abroad but would not listen to the information they offered on how he might realize his dreams; and that he did these things in addition to disrupting regular work rather than helping with it.

Axé.

1

¿La ola no tiene forma?
En un instante se esculpe
y en otro se desmorona
en la que emerge, redonda.
Su movimiento es su forma.

2

Las olas se retiran
–ancas, espaldas, nucas–
pero vuelven las olas
–pechos, bocas, espumas–.

3

Muere de sed el mar.
Se retuerce, sin nadie,
en su lecho de rocas.
Muere de sed de aire.

Axé.

Axé.

…that I heard over the weekend. For your consideration:

1. “Student centered classrooms” and “task based learning” have been invented to cover and compensate for having teachers trained in classroom management but not knowledgeable about the subject matter.

2. “Communicative” and “proficiency” oriented language teaching is part of vocational education, not part of a liberal arts education. It is like English as a foreign language, taught in Asia, for instance, so that businessmen from different places have a lingua franca and can read software instructions written in English.

3. If students are majoring in a foreign language, starting with a beginning course on how to speak it, they should also start with other courses in their native language, about the target language and its cultures.

Axé.

Axé.

I remember clearly when Bending the Bow came out and we read:

My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I’d turn my head.

My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.
She lets me ride to the end of her curb
where I fall back in anguish.
I dread that she will cast me away,
for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.

She would bring down the little birds.
And I would bring down the little birds.
When will she let me bring down the little birds,
pierced from their flight with their necks broken,
their heads like flowers limp from the stem?

I tread my mother’s wrist and would draw blood.
Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded.
I have gone back into my hooded silence,
talking to myself and dropping off to sleep.

For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me,
sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist.
She uses a barb that brings me to cower.
She sends me abroad to try my wings
and I come back to her. I would bring down
the little birds to her
I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly.

I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood,
and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying.
She draws a limit to my flight.
Never beyond my sight, she says.
She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching.
She rewards me with meat for my dinner.
But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her.

Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,
always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,
at her wrist, and her riding
to the great falcon hunt, and me
flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart
to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet,
straining, and then released for the flight.

My mother would be a falconress,
and I her gerfalcon raised at her will,
from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own
pride, as if her pride
knew no limits, as if her mind
sought in me flight beyond the horizon.

Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,
were the blue hills where the falcons nest.
And then I saw west to the dying sun–
it seemd my human soul went down in flames.

I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me,
until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out,
far, far beyond the curb of her will

to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where
the falcons nest
I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak.
I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight,
sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist,
striking out from the blood to be free of her.

My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely heald,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilld

I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.

Axé.

AZURE

Gracias, violines, por este día
de cuatro cuerdas. Puro
es el sonido del cielo,
la voz azul del aire.

–Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973), El mar y las campanas. I would post a photograph of Isla Negra but I lack time.

Axé.

Yo sé un himno gigante y extraño
que anuncia en la noche del alma una aurora,
y estas páginas son de ese himno
cadencias que el aire dilata en las sombras.

Yo quisiera escribirle, del hombre
domando el rebelde, mezquino idioma,
con palabras que fuesen a un tiempo
suspiros y risas, colores y notas.

Pero en vano es luchar, que no hay cifra
capaz de encerrarle; y apenas, ¡oh, hermosa!,
si, teniendo en mis manos las tuyas,
pudiera, al oído, cantártelo a solas.

–G. A. B.

Axé.