eyes on the prize

Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph

After ten years of licensing limbo Eyes On The Prize may be
broadcast on PBS and released to educators on DVD in Fall 2006. It is one of the most important films made in our lifetime and it was almost lost. Don't let this happen again! Tivo it! Save it on your external hard drives! You will probably want to show this to your kids.

Clodia and Juventius

I sat for a while in a bookstore today reading some translations of Catullus. He was my favorite person to translate when I took Latin in high school because he was raw and sex-obsessed and funny as hell--really none of the other guys writing about how many Roman centurions it took to invade Gaul could even touch that.

And we didn't even get to see the half of it. Many of his poems were obscene by the standards of his day and have remained obscene by all standards for 2000 years since then. This boy was unstoppable. He was hell-bent in love with a woman historians think was probably Clodia, the wife of a Roman consul named Metellus. He calls her Lesbia in his poems, after Lesbos, home of Sappho, a 7th century BC Greek lyricist whom he admired greatly and whose work he translated. (Not many of Sappho's poems have survived but some come through Catullus's translations. She is one of the first known poets to write from the first person.) He also wrote love poems to a guy he called Juventius. He was pretty crazy about Juventius, but not QUITE as crazy as he was about Lesbia. He died, probably, not long after he turned 30.

Some of my favorite of his poems, though, are ones he wrote to his friends. Here is one:

Yesterday, Licinius, we made holiday
and played many a game with my tablets,
as we had agreed to take our pleasure.
Each of us pleased his fancy in writing verses,
now in one metre, now in another,
answering each other, as we laughed and drank our wine.
I came away from this so fired
by your wit and fun, Licinius,
that food did not ease my pain,
nor sleep spread rest over my eyes,
but restless and fevered I tossed about all over my bed,
longing to see the dawn,
that I might talk to you and be with you.
But when my limbs were worn out with fatigue
and lay half dead on my couch,
I made this poem for you, my sweet friend,
that from it you might learn my suffering.
Now be not too proud, and do not, I pray you,
apple of my eye, do not reject my prayers,
lest Nemesis demand penalties from you in turn.
She is an imperious goddess–beware of offending her.

Ok, let's have it. I'm flummoxed. I have never quite been in the position in which I currently find myself. I am: constantly distracted, and completely divided.

I have been in Austin for nearly a year and a half now and life here has been dramatically inconsistent and unpredictable in spite of the monotony of some of my work. Those are some of the benefits of being a foreigner, I guess. Even if I'm standing in one place for eight hours scanning groceries, my brain is always buzzing with the strangeness of my surroundings. It never got un-strange. I really value this challenge.

Now I am in a graduate program where I get to read and think and talk about things that I am passionate about for my full time job. Three weeks into the program, Emily died. In order to process this at all and chart out any kind of recovery--God I want to do right by her so bad--I have given myself over to the love and connection that I feel with people back home. I hardly feel like I am here, in glorious Texas, at all.

How much do I need to be here? How important is it to be in the place that you're at? What about the fact that I have stubbornly refused to become close to anyone here? I feel so frustrated and clueless right now I could kick in a wall.

P.S. Pandacam of Butterstick very cute.

14th street

Kicking up leaves
Love too big for one Fall

weather

Last night I sat in Spiderhouse's light-strung yard for hours. My reading companion and I exchanged articles across the table. Her hand was sometimes tapping a cigarette on the ash tray ledge, mine was sometimes trying to balance hummus on a chip, without eyes looking up from our pages. Sometimes one of us would take a deep breath and look around. Sometimes we would talk. It got cold and we went inside, and sat on the big couch in the front living room. Now that sundown is coming earlier, the dark, when it comes, seems darker. And more like a world of its own, where the important parts of your day will end up happening.

I am weathering the days until I am with you. That is all, at the moment, for the time being, I am managing to do. But some times, during those days, I am so very happy.