Fantastic new article just out in The New Yorker, parsing Hillary’s struggle to find balance in public perception– one that can take her seriously as a warm, personable candidate as well as a competent one. It’s not a struggle a man in the same position faces. Who, anyway, is asking them to “play the grandpa card”? The culture of this country makes me shudder.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Crab Meat on Bun
When my grandmother was still alive I would take these long, blank trips out to visit her in small-town Wisconsin. The whole time she always seemed to be preparing for the next thing– laying her clothes out for tomorrow night’s dinner. Getting the oranges ready for juicing on Tuesday. She jumped up a lot. She was always busy.
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“It’s out of control”
This week, I’m wild about the East/West program on Bill McGlaughlin’s public radio show “Exploring Music”. He’s taking us all on a nightly audio ride through Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Chicago, Shanghai and, tomorrow night, down to Bali. “It’s gamelan music,” he explained tonight. “And it’s out of control.”
What could be better? My days are now filled once more with eager, anxious, sometimes noxious ninth graders, plus dry “let’s get some financial order up in here” turkey sandwiches at 11 am, plus thin Bronx coffee from the guy who calls me sweetie but skimps on the sugar, plus big gutsy gusts of hot late summer NYC air, plus a penetrating longing for summer itself, summer as I had known her, and an inability to overcome her demise. Plus whatever else is setting me off these days– it does not take much.
Lately I realize how powerfully boring my life has become, how easily visions of an earlier grandeur have diminished to sheer banality. Up early. Tape things on classroom walls. Teach class. Close doors. Eat dry, dry turkey sandwich. Teach class. Teach class, please. Meeting. Teach now. Teach more. Another meeting. One last class. Metrocard. Walk home among all the fellow stinking, crowded people. Nip at their heels and bite my tongue. Review notes ahead of board meeting. Stir fry green beans. Board meeting. Engage in heated, passionate, probing debate on all the pressing issue of fuel oil conversion. Throw hands in air. Relent. Consent. Waive fees. Are you still reading this morbid list? Why the hell? It is all such a crashing bore that I got into hysterics with my own beleaguered mother the other night– I could hardly finish a sentence as to what I had been up to because I honestly got too bored to speak! I bored myself to tears and pleaded with her– please! How can you still be listening to this? Please! Go! Live your lone and wild life! Go water some plants! Take the dog for a walk! Go!
What I have done is simple. I have succumbed readily, pliantly, to the crushing march of time and the slow suck beneath the boots of its many boring and middle-aged concerns. That is all. There is no trick.
In class today, getting underway, I asked kids how their summers went. “Great!” one responded. “I got arrested twice.”
I see the trouble with that. I see how tragically strong this kid’s pitching arm is, how powerfully he throws his life away. But at the same time, I can’t deny I was interested. I could tell he was interested too: in and out of court, eager to see the process to its logical conclusions. Riveting. The stuff of great stories if it wasn’t so prone to ruin a life forever. Or a long while, anyway, which in teenage years is the same as forever. But still I was fascinated! I needed the full story. So I leaned in. I asked follow-up questions and encouraged others to do the same. How rare this offer of insider news on the police, the undercover cops who engaged this young man, and now all the courtly proceedings. We lapped it up like feral kittens.
When I got home tonight, everything unfolded for me just as above and I cannot write another word about it because I’ll die, I’ll weep and faint and die, of boredom. But I did catch tonight’s segment of the East/West program and that has made all the difference. To be in Bali as soon as tomorrow, by the jet plane of my eager ears, for long sessions of gamelan music is my top priority no matter my aged, boring self.
“It’s out of control,” our host promises.
I can’t wait.
HoppieHopper.org
Big news! A dear Japanese friend and I are, always have been, and always will be mad izakaya eaters, bopping and hopping from spot to spot in a NYC that is happily packed with interesting options. We were down in the East Village last night at this great place called Teshigotoya, reading copies of Chopsticks and anxiously waiting for our delicious meal to arrive, when we just though you know what?
We need to be covering this better. There are a million amazing izakaya across New York, but not enough people know where they are or what to order when they get there. Ergo– Hoppie Hopper. We’ll be updating it regularly; the survey and calendar-focused site just got its start today.
Hoppie is a low-alcohol content beer made popular in Japan during the difficult post-war years. Its devoted fans bought the beer cheap and bombed it with shochu. That’s exactly how most places in New York that offer hoppie serve it today. When paired with all the thoughtful bites on offer in an excellent izakaya, where hours melt away and conversation just flows over plate and glass, a hoppie is the perfect quencher. Hoppie Hopper, well. We just couldn’t resist.
— The two biggest izakaya nerds in the history of the world.
Work, Poem
We’re mere inches and millimeters away from the start of the public school year here in NYC, and the District 7 high school where I work is abuzz, I mean abuzz, with go-get-it-ness and get-it-done-ness and other forms of generalized optimism before the students arrive and deflate these many tires. Ohhh man, what it is to teach. What it is.
Caroline M Cooper 