The Steiny Road to Operadom A book publishing trajectory

Chicago Jam

2012-01-14T20:20:00.000-05:00

CHICAGO POETS JAM WITH EASTCOASTERS

On Wednesday, February 29, 2012, at 9:30 p.m., Chicago poets Charlie Newman and Dan Godston will perform their work with Washington, DC-based poet Karren LaLonde Alenier and New York state poet Margo Taft Stever. Godston will provide musical improvisation as counterpoint to the readings.

brown rice, an intimate storefront space for listening located at 4432 N. Kedzie Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625, will host this free program.

Karren LaLonde Alenier, a poet and librettist, is author of six collections of poetry including her latest, On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles from Kattywompus Press.

Dan Godston teaches, writes, and creates music in Chicago. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Drunken Boat, Kyoto Journal, and other publications.

Charlie Newman is author of five books and four CDs, including ZOOTSUITBEATNICK!. His poetry has been published in such journals as honeydu, After Hours, and Poetry Bay.

Margo Taft Stever is author of three books of poetry including her latest The Hudson Line from Main Street Rag. She is the founder of The Hudson Valley Writers' Center and founding editor of Slapering Hol Press.

# # #

Be Inspired by Gertrude Stein: A Workshop

2012-01-02T11:33:00.003-05:00

With the approval and support of Stanford in Washington and The Word Works, Inspired by Gertrude Stein, an interactive workshop will take place:

Saturday, February 4, 2012 from 10 am to 5 pm

The Stanford in Washington Art Gallery

2655 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.

The workshop will celebrate the anniversary of Stein’s 138^th birthday (Feb 3, 1874). Hans Gallas, co-curator of the Insight & Identity: Contemporary Artists and Gertrude Stein exhibition, and Karren Alenier, a.k.a. the Steiny Road Poet, will lead the workshop.

Here is the schedule:

10 am-noon ..Overview of Gertrude Stein & her work

 Noon-1 pm.....Lunch break in the neighborhood 

1-2 pm............Curator’s tour of Insight & Identity 

2-3 pm........... Participants spread out in the gallery to write 

3-4 pm ...........Tea break in the Gallery (including family & friends) 

4-5 pm ...........Share drafted work (with all visitors in the Gallery)

The Steiny Road Poet is working on a video about the workshop. She wrote a script, gathered still shots of Stein and her friends, shot photos and film footage in the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery, and made a PowerPoint storyboard. Meshing sound and image is definitely a challenge. Nonetheless, the Poet is amateur at this but hopes the message will get across. Coming soon!

Photo credit: Yale Collection of American Literature,

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

How About Midnight on Connecticut Avenue?

2011-12-03T20:24:00.001-05:00

The Steiny Road Poet had so much fun partying with Gertrude Stein at the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery that she has begun stirring to the pot to create an opportunity for other poets to share the fun.

Gertrude Stein’s birthday is coming up February 3. Shh—138, born in 1874 and still influencing other artists as the Insight & Identity: contemporary Artists and Gertrude Stein exhibition proves. The S. R. Poet is asking Stanford in Washington to bring poets in for a workshop where they can learn about Stein and her work, get a curator’s tour of the exhibit, write poems inspired by the exhibit and Stein, and then present these new poems at a birthday bash for the first Modernist. Why should Woody Allen get all the buzz?

Stein wrote a book entitled To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays. The image here is taken from the cover of this book and this book is part of the collection belonging to Hans Gallas. Gallas is a co-curator of Insight & Identity exhibition and he said he wants to participate in the workshop and birthday party.

Stay tuned for more details. Thanks to Wanda Corn, 2011 has truly been the year of Gertrude Stein, so let’s keep the momentum going!

Partying with Gertrude Stein

2011-10-29T23:06:00.001-04:00

On October 27, 2011, The Steiny Road Poet had the pleasure of attending the opening of Insight & Identity: Contemporary Artists and Gertrude Stein, an exhibition mounted by The Stanford in Washington Art Gallery at 2655 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.

The show curated by Adrienne Jamieson (MaryLou & George Boone Centennial Director, Stanford in Washington) with Dyana Curreri-Ermatinger (Director of the International Art Museum in San Francisco) and collector-writer Hans Gallas was mounted to coincide with Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, curated by Wanda Corn and currently on exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, after its opening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

The show brings together work by Stein and inspired by the work of Stein. The exhibition includes first edition books, paintings, and art objects that include dresses, buttons, and wall hangings. One of the paintings in the exhibition comes From Suzanne Bellamy’s series Conversations with Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, a series of 12 prints. The S.R. Poet came home and realized she has one of those prints entitled “Ritual and Deep Rhythm.” In the Stanford in Washington exhibition is the second print in the series. Here is what the painter had to say about this one and No. 4, which came to the S. R. Poet as gift.

No.2 COLLISIONS : “Lying Under the Whole of Gertrude Stein.” This print tells the story of their meetings and business transactions. Rejecting the manuscript of The Making of Americans, perhaps not ever reading it, Woolf wrote various letters to friends parodying Stein’s weighty work, body and presence. Here Alice faces the backdrop of their own Parisian life as Gertrude hurtles through the air on her magical manuscript and Woolf deftly avoids being crushed. The subsequent Hogarth printing of Composition As Explanation testifies to a shift in position over the value of Stein’s work and worth.

No.4 RITUAL and DEEP RHYTHM concerns the different ways each writer draws upon forms and myths from the ancient and matriarchal worlds. The work of Gloria Feman Orenstein on Stein’s use of the Seder ritual and Jewish iconography sits here with Woolf’s involvement with the work and ideas of Jane Ellen Harrison. As with all the Conversations, this theme shows how there can be deep points of connection between these two women artists if certain doors are opened.

The invitation to the opening encouraged costumes inspired by the 1920s, particularly Paris in the Twenties. Wanda Corn dressed and spoke as Gertrude Stein. Hans Gallas dressed as Pablo Picasso. Professor Corn’s students came in an array of flapper, Hemingway and Salvador Dali costumes. An honored guest was Gertrude’s nephew Julian Stein.

The S.R. Poet was pleased to meet cartoonist Tom Hachtman who generously presented her with a copy of his book Gertrude’s follies, an irreverent look at the life and times of Gertrude Stein and her faithful companion, Alice B. Toklas. Hachtman’s cartoons were regularly published in the Soho Weekly News starting in 1978. Some of his work also appears in the Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibition.

What a party! Not only was the food delicious (Alice Toklas would have surely approved) but everyone was willing to talk about Gertrude Stein. How rare is that?

Birth of a New Book: On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles

2011-10-04T19:07:00.000-04:00

The Steiny Road Poet is pleased to announce that Kattywompus Press of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, will publish On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles by Karren LaLonde Alenier. This is a chapbook that is comprised of the poems from which How Many Midnights, her new work-in-progress opera libretto, is drawn. On a Bed of Gardenias is the love story of the two unconventional writers who Beat writers (e.g. Allen Ginsberg) say are their precursors.

THE GREATEST HITS CONNECTION

Getting a book of any size published by a reputable publishing house is very difficult. So the Poet would like to share her story about how her manuscript was invited by Kattywompus publisher Sammy Greenspan. For full disclosure, Kattywompus, a press that was founded by Greenspan in 2010, took over the Greatest Hits chapbook series from Jennifer Bosveld’s Pudding House Press where Karren LaLonde Alenier Greatest Hits 1973 – 2002 was originally published in 2003. So now, it is possible to find the Poet’s Greatest Hits chapbook at Kattywompus.

The Poet met Greenspan and her associate editor Bonné de Blas at the Associated Writing Programs bookfair in Washington, DC, January 2011. In casual conversation at The Word Works AWP book booth, de Blas told the Poet about Kattywompus, including the fact that this publishing house now retained all rights to the Greatest Hits publications. Surprised, the Poet went to check out the Kattywompus display where the Greatest Hits chapbooks were standing in a vintage suitcase.

STRIKING OIL

In another old suitcase were the brand new books from Kattywompus and included among those chapbooks was Ode to Oil by Philip Metres, a poet the S. R. Poet had encountered through Word Works Washington Prize-winning author Fred Marchant at the 2010 Split This Rock festival. However, the first thought of the Poet in looking at Metres’ book was how interesting, poetry about crude oil—in another life, the Poet had worked on the audits of the major petroleum producers for the newly formed U.S. Department of Energy back in the 1980s.

Then Greenspan located Alenier Greatest Hits and the Poet offered to recite “Leo on Seesaw,” her number one greatest hit poem, which she has recited to good effect in places as far flung as a classroom in Xian, China, and this poem is the center piece of her first opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On. After the recitation, the Poet told Greenspan and de Blas that she had a work-in-progress poetry manuscript about Jane and Paul Bowles. So this is how the invitation came about and Greenspan waited patiently while the Poet tried to decide what portion of the full-length Bowles manuscript she would send Kattywompus and part of that decision had to do with some problematic found poems.

THE SKINNY ON THE WOMPUS

Most writers want to know the behind-the-scenes story of any press who publishes them. Kattywompus writes a blog that, by all standards, seems to tell the naked truth about how they conduct business. For over-the-transom submissions versus invited manuscripts, Kattywompus charges a reading fee and this practice prevents the outstanding writerly resource Duotrope from listing Kattywompus. Duotrope’s policy does not allow a member press to charge a reading fee to prospective authors. The fact is many reputable literary publishing houses are not listed at Duotrope, but have other credentials like being a member of Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. CLMP’s policy states that its members “do not charge authors a fee to publish their works.” All of this discussion hinges on the definition of vanity publishing, that is, authors who pay to get their work published. Vanity publishing usually means the work being published has not been vetted by the publisher and that it is a service-for-hire that anyone can buy.

The Steiny Road Poet is proud that Kattywompus editors, who are meticulous in their editorial process, stand behind On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles. Toward the end of 2011, the Poet expects that the Kattywompus website will make On a Bed of Gardenias available for purchase at $12 per copy plus postage. While there is no requirement from Kattywompus for their authors to sell their books, the Poet, for a limited period, will be happy to reserve, for anyone who emails her, a discounted copy at $10 plus postage. Most likely the book will be available in January 2012.

Here is the poem, from which the title of the chapbook is drawn. It was originally published in The Innisfree Poetry Journal.

FLOWER: PAUL’S LOVE SONG

Because the hotel manager floated

scores of our favorite flower on the surface

of the swimming pool, Jane and I decided

to visit the Taxco market and buy enough

gardenias to cover our bed.

…......……......………………….At siesta careful

not to arouse staff sleepyheads, we carried two

baskets of blossoms in several trips

into the hotel and up the stairs. When the bed

became a sea of creamy white, we undressed,

lay down, drowned our senses.

How much is too much?

In the blue fluid of the pool Jane Bowles poked

her head, short curly hair winking red,

through the fragrant corollas—a swoon

of flower boats.

……………………Could a husband and wife, sheath

and knife, be joined in everlasting memory

on a perfumed spread of gardenias? She

with her women; me, Paul Bowles,

with my men.

Could I recreate those hours we lay

together?

In New York I furnished everything in white:

sofa, chaise longue, Ottoman, coffee table,

lamps, a polar bear rug. Then I sprayed

the drapes, and every pillow, every throw

with ambergris mixed with crushed

petals of gardenia.

…………......…....….Come back

from Taxco, I wrote to her.

What price paradise?

Experiencing Japanese Butoh & Nepalese Quilts

2011-08-31T15:17:00.000-04:00

Entertainment and cultural enrichment may enter one's life in unexpected ways.

This summer the Steiny Road Poet was invited by her itinerant poet friend James Hopkins to see colorful quilts made by Nepalese mothers who are trying to provide education for their children. Quilts for Kids Nepal is a project James started to empower these mothers to improve the lives of their children, who are otherwise sent out on the streets of Kathmandu at age seven to beg.

In this dance video, one sees some of these quilts as well as the mesmerizing movement of Butoh. This is a stylized dance originally in protest of long held traditions. In this video, however, the slow execution of body movement allows plenty of time to see the quilt being used by the dancer.

Opera as Habitat

2011-08-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

Like a bride after her reception of hands and hugs, strawberries and champagne, the Steiny Road Poet will toss the coveted bouquet to the virgins as a way of imagining How Many Midnights, the opera love story about Jane and Paul Bowles on which she is working with composer John Supko.

Whoosh!

In this toss: music that breathes

Supko will provide computer screens to the singers and musicians. Every performance will be slightly different though statistically similar.

Whoosh!

In this toss: music that breaks through artificiality

If a jazz band working improvisationally can sit in the window of time that is defined by the present moment, then HMM produced by Supko’s guided chance will also work with that time that is now and therefore avoid the collision with sounds that happened yesterday.

Whoosh!

In this toss: opera that renews the past

In the party scene where Jane Auer first meets Paul Bowles, Supko, using Markov chains, recombines the chords of Coleman Hawkins version of “Body and Soul.”

Whoosh!

In this toss: a scale-able opera

If Kabuki Theater tickets can be purchased by the act, HMM can be scaled to a given amount time or offered in shorter scenic productions. Supko would like this opera to be thought of as an installation for an art museum.

Whoosh!

In this toss: opera with fragrance

In a true habitat, there are objects you can see, touch, and hear. HMM will have an optional element of fragrance similar to the spice market of Marrakech.

Note: How Many Midnights is a work-in-progress experimental opera by John Supko (music) and Karren LaLonde Alenier (words). Stay tuned for notices of public performances in 2012 that will sample the opera before its premier.

The Hilary Tham Documentary

2011-07-02T19:26:00.001-04:00

The first person who publicly spoke the lines of Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On was the Steiny Road Poet's dear friend Hilary Tham. Hilary's decision to participate in the first reading done on snowy February day in 1996 was something she thought about carefully. How could a Chinese Malaysian take the role of Gertrude Stein, she asked aloud. I was sure she would be a rock solid actor and she was. Just as she was a friend of deep importance to me and so it is that I visit her grave every June to celebrate her life.

This year brought new rewards when the Steiny Road Poet suggested that Perry Lindstrom meet Hilary's family and some of her poet friends at her gravesite. Perry has been talking for some years about making a film about Hilary. Kim Roberts gave him that suggestion.

The gathering included Joe Goldberg, his three daughers (Ilana, Shoshanna, Rebecca), three of his granddaughters, Hilary's youngest sister Choy and her Hong Kong-based youngest brother Chee Lung and four poets.

Thus there were poems written by Hilary read as well as poems about Hilary by Karren Alenier, Mel Belin, Judy McCombs, and Miles Moore. We also created a new work made of lines and titles drawn from Hilary's work. We made King David Memorial Garden sing with Hilary's words.

Here's a favorite poem by Hilary Tham:

MRS. WEI & ANCESTOR WORSHIP

An Englishman is visiting his mother's grave
with flowers. He sees Mrs. Wei
spreading a feast of roast chicken,
moo shu pork, noodles
before her father's grave.
"When's your father coming out
to eat that food?" he asks.
Smiling, Mrs. Wei answers,
"Same time your mother
come to smell flowers."

The Pleasures & Pains of Collaborating

2011-06-25T21:41:00.002-04:00

Engaging in collaborative projects is not easy or necessarily fun.

It is a serious matter that not only puts on trial one’s ego, but also tests the very essence of who one is as an artist. Since her first opera project that came to successful conclusion in New York City, the Steiny Road Poet has learned a tremendous amount about risking her time and talents with other people. No matter how stressful personal relations can be during a collaborative project, one hopes for the greater good.

Here are lessons learned (or relearned) from Anne Becker’s project Pleasures of Collaboration: Poets, Dancers and Musicians at Play which culminated in a final improvisation performance on June 17, 2011, under the sponsorship of the Takoma Park Arts and Humanities Commission of Maryland.

--Improv is a fickle process.

If the first attempt to combine poetry, music, and dance creates something magical, don’t expect that to be repeated unless you hire a seasoned theater director and that director gets a new set of professional performers. Short of capturing what came to be “Jane Bowles at Camp” on video footage, what the Steiny Road Poet remembers about the first session on her piece was its simplicity. There was the poet delivering her lines, the large red and white umbrella, the dancer who engaged with the umbrella, and the two itinerant poets who traveled in and around the dancer. The itinerant poets, one dressed in an eye-catching costume with turban and shaw, made the shaw a river behind the dancer who was hidden from view by the oversized umbrella. What was seen of the dancer was minimal, though full of little sparks of mischief. The music included the sonorous flow of the cello, the insistent voice of the flute, an underlying strumming of guitar, and an occasional accent of drums.

The second attempt of what became “Jane Bowles at Camp” felt lifeless since the itinerant poets never came on stage that night and so the third attempt, where the piece was actually named, drove the Poet to change what she read. She added a lot more text, which caused one of the collaborating poets to get upset with the new information. It was a good discussion, but by opening night, the producing poet Anne Becker asked the Steiny Road Poet to go back to the original text. That was gladly done.

The Steiny Road Poet is eager to see what was captured on film by the Takoma Park cable TV technicians, but she feels certain that the stage was overly busy with too many people on stage. Maybe this is something that could not be helped. The Steiny Road Poet has to be pleased that so many of the performers wanted to play in this piece.

--Pay attention & find out who your collaborators are.

It’s easy to get caught up in the process of creating a new piece and working with artists from various disciplines and then suddenly realize, you don’t know anything about your collaboration partners. The more you know about your partners, the easier it is to understand where they are coming from and how to negotiate what you feel is needed to make a piece a successful collaboration.

Another thing that happened to the Steiny Road Poet was she recognized that she had seen and talked with one of the musicians who perform in a new music concert that the Poet had reviewed. Also she had an impromptu collaboration with a dancer at a garden party back in the 1980s that was much along the lines of Anne Becker’s project. The odd thing was the Steiny Road Poet did not immediately recognize this person until the dancer struck a certain pose, at which point the Poet realized she a copy of a photo taken of this dancer at that garden party at the finish of that long-ago collaborative dance.

Maybe what needed to happen with the Becker Project was that a blog should have been created to provide biographical details of the performers and to post what happened at each session. The Steiny Road Poet, like other participants, did not attend every session and therefore, lost opportunity to hear all the introductions and get to know everyone.

--Go by the book. Don’t assume that collaboration partners will agree with you.

At the eleventh hour, the Steiny Road Poet made a short video (hours of work) based on early development of a piece that changed dramatically by the time it reached the public stage on June 17. The Steiny Road Poet thought the piece was fascinating and would show a potential audience member how our process worked. The poet of said piece was surprised about the early footage, but one of the dancers was upset that the Steiny Road Poet had moved forward without getting everyone’s permission to air the video on YouTube. The Steiny Road Poet, as asked, removed the video from public view.

--Do what it takes to support the leader of the project.

The process of collaboration is hard and made more so when the workshop period is at night when people are tired. Therefore, when thorny things happen, like someone losing patience with the process, misunderstanding what someone has said, unable to express him/herself clearly, it is vitally important that things do not get out of control. It is probably a good idea to ensure that every collaboration project includes some seasoned veterans who are levelheaded. What everyone should want is to see the project come to successful fruition. This cannot happen if any of the partners, including the leader, are not allowed to vent in a controlled situation. By “controlled situation,” the Steiny Road Poet means that no one should be allowed to leave the workshop space mad. The Steiny Road Poet knows that an angry exit causes many partners to lose face.

Finally, everyone should be asked to sign an agreement that lays out the scope of the project and the ground rules. The agreement should also contain a release that allows for photographs and videos to be taken which would promote the final performance. Any such products should be sent to the project leader for review and approval. This would also include images being use on blogs. Those who aren’t comfortable with this advance permission probably should not participate in the project.

Other Remarks

The Steiny Road Poet enjoyed the process and experienced wonder or amazement more than fun. She finds these kind of projects educational but not necessarily recreational. Would she do it again? Probably, yes. She has the utmost respect for Anne Becker and thinks she is an outstanding creative leader.

Photo by: Joshua Prentice

Looking for the Real Thing

2011-06-01T18:45:00.002-04:00

How does a writer bring a character in her work alive?

The Steiny Road Poet brings this question up because she realizes that it is not enough to say, as she said in her previous post on Found Poems, that to create new poems about such an artist as Paul Bowles, she does more research.

The obvious research is to become intimate with an autobiography, biographies, letters of one’s interest. Less obvious is to read the books that influenced your subject. Therefore, the Steiny Road Poet is reading Andre Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) and its companion journal because Bowles read Le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs on his trans-Atlantic crossing when he ran away from college in 1929 to Paris. Le Journal tells how Gide wrote his 1925 novel that was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1947. What excites the S. R. Poet is that she sees Gide’s complex story about sex-in-all-sorts-of-categories illuminating Bowles’ hard-to-understand sexual identity.

What remains to be realized is whether the Poet’s research will yield a worthy poem.

Watch out for Found Poems!

2011-05-01T22:40:00.000-04:00

Just a few words on found poems.

Do not ever use source material that is under copyright unless you know the author and have a good relationship with that person.

Recently the Steiny Road Poet spent several months trying to find out who held the copyright to the letters of Paul Bowles as published in In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. It turns out, the copyright was granted by Bowles to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. It took a couple of months for the copyright contact at the publishing house to get around to reviewing the request and when the Poet got her letter of permission, it said, “We have no objection to your use of the material listed above in your unpublished manuscript, on condition that the material is printed without alteration…”

Are you laughing out loud? If not, maybe a definition of found poetry is needed.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines found poetry:

“Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original.”

So how does one remedy this situation because clearly the permission the Steiny Road Poet got was completely useless? She sits down and does a whole lot more research. Then she replaces the eight found poems with brand new poems. So far there are four!

A Word or Two on What I Saw But Didn't Write About

2011-04-04T10:46:00.000-04:00

While the Steiny Road Poet has not really emerged from her winter funk, she is feeling burdened by plays and films she saw in recent months that she made no comment on. Here is her top down list.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by monologist Mike Daisey

Daisey is an amazing performer whose face can tell any story. The Poet is into Apple computer products as he is and she gets his shtick about Apple using cheap Chinese labor to line the pocketbooks of Apple's Steve Jobs and company. Because she has been to China recently and she has been reading the modern accounts of Chinese workers, she says Daisey didn't really give that story as much umph as he needed to. Does he really think American audiences can't handle what deprivations those Chinese workers suffer? And why didn't he suggest bringing the work back home to the States? Still, if you have the time and the money, the Poet says don't miss Daisey at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. The Poet saw him in The Last Cargo Cult and she thinks he knows what he is talking about but most of all he is an outstanding performer.

Photograph 51

Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51 explores the unrewarded life of British geneticist Rosalind Franklin. This play at DC's Theater J is a story that will appeal to feminists and anyone who believes in ethical workplace practice. The Poet doesn't believe Republicans will sympathize with the protagonist in this male dominated cast where mostly what the men want from Rosie or Ms. Franklin (they refuse to call her Dr. Franklin which is what she prefers) is her sexual favors since it was much easier to steal her painstaking work that led to Nobel Prizes for others. In real life Franklin perished from cancer and her so-called colleagues got the Nobel after she died. Nobel Prizes only go to the living. The Poet thinks Ziegler is quite inventive with how she keeps the audience engaged in a play with many talking heads.

Probably you will have to wait for the DVD appearance of the Korean film Poetry directed by Lee Chang-dong and starring the long absent, but formerly well know star, Yoon Jeong-hee but keep this at the top of your list. The Steiny Road Poet saw the film when it opened in NYC and with a Korean scholar who explained the joke scene and how many of the performers are local people and not professional actors. Even so, the film hardly needs the extra gloss. It's a story about a grandmother raising a teenage boy who gets into very serious trouble with his friends and how she if forced to handle this.

Other Films (good for Friday night entertainment):

The Lincoln Lawyer -- The Poet loved this street-smart bad-ass lawyer played by Matthew McConaughey who shares a daughter with a district attorney Marisa Tomei.

Limitless -- Who doesn't want to be the smartest person possible? This movie starring Bradley Cooper with a more secondary role by Robert de Niro shows the pitfalls of finding the magic smart pill.

Getting Ahead of the Curve

2011-03-03T13:34:00.001-05:00

The questions are these:

Is it better to know ahead of every other rejectee that your work was not selected in some competition you entered

or

Is it better to sit blissfully in the dark and hear the news when it is officially announced?

The Steiny Road Poet has accidentally, not once but twice, within the last two months learned ahead of the curve the outcome of competitions where her work was under consideration. The only advantage she can see is that she, unlike other artists not selected, did or will recover from her disappointment well before the announcement was or will be made public.

Life for the artist after all is one rejection after another. Some of us, because we came from dysfunctional families where we were loved imperfectly or not at all, have lots of rejection training. Still, we want our creations, our artistic babies, welcomed into the world and given the opportunity to be loved.

So how do the beans get spilled in advance so that someone like the Steiny Road Poet finds out without trying to know the outcome? In one case, she was discussing business with someone she has never met before and they start telling each other personal details that led to the do-you-know-my-friend-so-and-so game which then innocently led to the info that so-and-so just had her work selected by a big New York City performing group. The Steiny Road Poet knew exactly what was being said without losing a beat on the business conversation. However, she immediately called the NYC performing group and got verification that their selections had been made. Of course, they wouldn't say more but it was a fact that no communication had come across to the S.R. Poet. In the second case, she was having a conversation with a friend. In talking about about recent non-selections, the friend mentioned casually that a small piece of hers was selected by a DC area group and oh, it was really nothing but it made her feel good anyway. Again, the S.R. Poet recognized instantly that her own work had been passed over but not officially rejected since no announcements have been made yet. The Poet is very happy for her friend and told her so.

Now back to the drawing board and maybe the Poet needs to start practicing how to throw a curveball.

Who Stole Langston & Is This News?

2011-02-09T10:40:00.000-05:00

The Steiny Road Poet meant to post yesterday February 8, 2011, when The Washington Post finally made mention of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Convention and Bookfair in what basically turns out to be a gossip column called "The Reliable Source. The Poet had been thinking what a big oversight The Post had made in not covering any aspect of this writers’ gathering where prominent writers from across the world, but particularly American writers gather to discuss ideas, literature, politics, and more as well as present new and old books of importance.

In case you, my Dear Readers, do not subscribe to the venerable institution of print news and, in particular The Washington Post, in a nanosec, here is the story that continues to unfold, two days running, into a polemic against the always generous Andy Shallal, owner of Bus Boys & Poets, a restaurant in Washington, DC. Poet Thomas Sayers Ellis says he stole the cardboard cutout of Langston Hughes that Shallal had had made for Bus Boys, which is named after the poet who had been a restaurant bus boy in Washington, DC, when his first book The Weary Blues was accepted for publication by Knopf. After highjacking the Langston cutout, Ellis paraded it through the AWP Bookfair at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Ellis accuses Shallal of not paying poets fairly for their public readings at Bus Boys.

The Steiny Road Poet stands firm behind Andy Shallal and is OK with the gossip column "The Reliable Source" because it is fun but she takes The Washington Post to task for not giving appropriate coverage to the AWP Convention that included such writers as 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri (Conference Keynote speaker), 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan as well as such topics as the revolutionary changes involving print into digital formats for books, journals, and newspapers.

Finding Happiness at 2011 AWP DC

2011-02-06T20:33:00.000-05:00

If anyone mentioned that he or she had never seen the Steiny Road Poet happier than the four days she spent at the Associate Writing Programs (AWP) Convention & Bookfair, this would be absolutely true. She has found that passing The Word Works scepter to Nancy White, a former winner of the Washington Prize, has made this literary organization suddenly leap into the future -- we are now taking manuscripts for the Washington Prize electronically. We have a gorgeous new logo. We updated our Internet name to WordWorksBooks.org. We are sending electronic newsletters. We are saving money with print on demand production of our books. And we bought an expensive piece of real estate at AWP -- a booth with two big tables -- and covered all the costs by selling lots of of our beautiful books!

One particular high point was the celebration reading of selected Washington Prize winners as a scheduled event of the AWP catalogue. There were around 60 people in the audience to hear Nathalie Anderson, Peter Blair, Fred Marchant, Brad Richard, Jay Rogoff, and Enid Shomer. Fred moderated and created a warm community feeling for the program that included more than the usual nods to Nancy and the Steiny Road Poet. And it was February 3, 2011, Gertrude Stein's 137 birthday! Fred chose to read poems by both Nancy & S.R. Poet, including Karren Alenier's "Stein Writes It All Down."

The last day of AWP, the Steiny Road Poet paused for photos with friends Deborah Ager and Reb Livingston, with whom she also had photo opps at the 2009 AWP Conference in Chicago. How things come full circle.

More Allen Ginsberg Than You Would Want to Know

2011-01-02T08:15:00.003-05:00

The Steiny Road Poet entered 2011 with just a few more pages to read of Bill Morgan's I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. It's a funky biography by a man who worked closely with Ginsberg and on Ginsberg's vast archive of works.

Morgan's bio of Ginsberg is funky because it is not totally objective. Still, Morgan's spin on Ginsberg doesn't get in the way of the documentation which is extensive. The Steiny Road Poet walks away from this record of years that she could not put down understanding a much bigger picture of the Beat poet whom she personally experienced as a tremendously generous person and, much more surprising, filling in gaps in her understanding of what happened in America from 1950-1990 and how it affected her.

And no, she didn't know that Ginsberg had more than a passing acquaintance with Paul Bowles. Those familiar with Bowles and the Beats have seen the 1961 photo of them together in Tangier. She knew from Paul Bowles himself that he had visited with the Beat writers when they visited William Burroughs in Tangier. However, Bowles was careful to say, and said it in the interview the Steiny Road Poet and two journalists did with him in 1982 (see Conversations with Paul Bowles p. 128), that he was not involved with Beat writing. In 1961, Bowles invited Ginsberg to spend a week with him at a house in Marrakech. (In I Celebrate Myself, Bill Morgan claims the house belonged to Bowles—see p. 333, but that may be confused with the house he owned in Tangier.) In 1993, Ginsburg made one last trip to see Bowles. Bowles, who died in 1999, outlived the younger Ginsberg by two years.

What led to Ginsberg's death was Hepatitis C that he had contracted in South American in 1960. More surprising is that he did not contract the AIDS virus over his life time of multiple sex partners and this bio does not skimp on the outrageous sexual adventures of this son of a high school teacher. Another surprising fact about Ginsberg is that he always went after straight men. His life time partner Peter Orlovsky was a straight man who had many girl friends but Peter came from a family challenged by mental illness. Eventually mental illness and severe drug addiction plagued Orlovsky and his relationship with Ginsberg.

Articles on Ginsberg by Karren Alenier
Photos of the Beat Poet, Allen Ginsberg
Howl: Absorbing Poetry through Film
Howling in the Nation's Capital
Playing the Hydrogen Jukebox

10 Minutes: A Play

2010-11-21T11:57:00.000-05:00

Here, the Steiny Road Poet is not asking for your ten minutes, maybe only one.

She has written a ten-minute play entitled "Who Killed Jackie Bass." The title is a statement not a question. This poetic play is important to the Poet because it is a memorial to a murdered relative.

The play has been submitted to a competition and now the Poet would like your help in putting good energy into the universe so that even if the play doesn't make it to the stage this summer, the title will get caught in collective consciousness.

Here's a quote from the play:
"Did you ever meet Jackie Bass? You wouldn’t forget her. She had smile larger than her hands and her hands were so warm—they were better than gloves in January."

So, please, no applause now—just give the Poet a cyber-hand and send along your star-powered energy to keep this title alive.

2010-09-16T19:50:00.000-04:00

If asked earlier this summer, the Steiny Road Poet would have said political operas are not her kind of torch—that she would rather ignite something more exotic. However, by accident or intervention from the universe, she got involved with the Dana Beyer campaign that would have put the first transgendered woman into a United States political office. The Poet was told that if the candidate got 5,000 votes, she would win. Dana Beyer made her goal but the three incumbents got more votes and kept their seats.

What did the Poet learn?

1. Hard work and integrity are not enough to win. Does this sound like the business of getting an opera on stage? While Ms. Beyer visited 10,0000 doors in her district and people whom the Steiny Road Poet met after the fact were impressed by the candidate’s sincerity, intelligence, and record of achievement, it did not enable the candidate to push past the weakest incumbent although it was respectably close. Apparently a teacher’s union push made the difference in getting a significant people out of their apathy to go down to the polls to vote.

2. Ordinary people, including the Poet, do not like being interrupted by phone calls about who to vote for. They especially hate robo calls. Never mind that you haven’t read the literature or websites on the candidates, who wants a computer generated call to tell you what to do? Do the Millennials have this right about not communicating by direct phone calls? Text them or grab them by the sleeve or there is no exchange. More people told the Poet that coming to their doors to talk about Dana Beyer was the preferred communication. And OMG, the deluge of paper sent to each household! An entire forest went under in just the Maryland primary election alone.

3. With some voters, there is no winning ever. A handful of people said, “I am not a Democrat” despite being carried on the Democratic register. “It’s too much trouble to change parties,” one bubby told me while asking me why I thought the Democrats were not responsible for our government’s huge debt. When the Poet pointed out (much against the instruction of her campaign manager’s advice to never argue with the voter) that Bill Clinton left office with U.S. finances in the black and George W. Bush left the American people in a deep red hole, the old woman looked at the Poet blankly. Then the Poet realized the woman had been brainwashed by someone close to her and so she backed away quietly. Also there were people who complained bitterly about how many times campaigners came to their doors and this was their reason not to vote for a sufficiently qualified candidate.

4. Privacy? Unless you have zero contact with the world, people with Palm Pilots know where you live, how old you are, and how you voted in the last election.

5. This was not entirely a thankless job. In this market, there were people with advanced degrees walking door to door in 90-degree heat to carry the message of candidates like Dana Beyer. They weren’t volunteers either and they got less pay in their pocket after taxes than minimum wage. However there were some people who understood how hard the job is and they thanked the Poet for doing this work.

6. Some people in one of the wealthiest counties in America do not keep up their property. Just stepping onto their porches was dangerous.

Did the Poet run into people she knew on the campaign trail? Yes, other poets, composers, a government official she worked with long ago and she also campaigned on a street where she once lived with her parents and siblings.

Does the Poet have any ideas for an opera? Yes, she thinks she could write a 10-minute opera about the incredible people who came to the door to talk to her. People like the friendly bubby who was making stuffed cabbages, the deaf woman she signed with based on having learned how to say more with her finger tips, the woman who arrived home on her bicycle and insisted the Poet sit down with her on the front porch to talk about the candidate’s politics, the rabid Republican spouse of a registered Democrat who wasn’t home, just to picture a few.

Three Gun Shots: A Blood Simple Case

2010-09-03T18:09:00.000-04:00

If someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I am Li Changdi, I might answer like Louis Jourdan (he was in the 1958 film Gigi) did once in Positano (the Steiny Road Poet was at a table near where he was sitting on that dazzling piazza by the water) -- "I used to be Li Changdi." Now Li Changdi is a little gun shy -- don't point at her and ask her to speak to you in Chinese. She can still say Ni hao (hello) but she's getting nervous about the bloody lot of words she is supposed to have mastered.

The Steiny Road Poet fell off the learning-to-speak-and-write-Chinese wagon back in March after she completed her classroom project which had her represent herself as a Chinese broadcast film critic. This is where this post starts as the reviews are beginning to appear for Zhang Yimou's remake of the first Coen Brothers' film Blood Simple.

In Chinese, Zhang's film is called San Qiang Pai An Jing Qi (translated as The Stunning Case of Three Gunshots). Changdi would tell you that san is the word for three. The American title is A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop.

What was really hard in the classroom film report project was finding out how to say Blood Simple and the Coen brothers in Chinese. Her laoshi (teacher) said find out by yourself. So she called up a neighbor who is from Beijing and got the words: Xue Mi Gong bei Ke en Xiong Di. Changdi guesses that xue means avenge but she has no leads on mi gong. Xiong Di translates as brothers, so the rest of the phrase is by (bei) the Coen (Ke en) brothers.

Does she want to see Zhang Yimou's film? Yes, because out of all that struggle to say a few simple things in that Chinese film critic report like, "Xiang xiao le ma?" (Do you want to laugh?), she still harbors the idea of learning more Chinese.

Matteo Ricci: Chinese Mapmaker & Composer

2010-03-27T20:27:00.010-04:00

Jīntián wǒ kànjiàn lǎo dìtú de Zhōngguó hé Měiguó. Today I saw an old map of China and America. (Changdi hopes she chose the right Chinese words and applied the correct grammar. She also apologizes for not capturing the importance of this particular map but her Chinese is limited.)

The Chinese Meetup Group of Washington, DC made a field trip to the Library of Congress to see the first map (dìtú 地图) in Chinese to show America, in fact, the Americas including such details as Cuba and Jamaica.

The world map, known as the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography,” was drawn by Matteo Ricci (October 6, 1552 – May 11, 1610), an Italian Jesuit priest, one of the founding clerics of the Jesuit China Mission. The Chinese call this six-panel map that measures 5 ft (1.52 m) high and 12 ft (3.66 m) wide Kūnyú Wànguó Quántú 坤輿萬國全圖. The Italians call it Carta Geografica Completa di tutti i Regni del Mondo, "Complete Geographical Map of all the Kingdoms of the World." This is the map that changed how China dealt with the world because it opened China for commerce with other nations.

Take note that the map is on display at the Library of Congress Jefferson building only until April 10, 2010. It is part of the ongoing LOC exhibition "Exploring the Early Americas." (Located on the second floor and all the way at the back of this exhibition, this map is not easy to find!)

When the map leaves DC, it will go to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and after that to its permanent home in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

It’s also important to understand that in 1601 Matteo Ricci (the Chinese called him Lì Mǎdòu 利玛窦) was the first Westerner to enter Beijing’s Forbidden City and also the first Westerner to buried in Beijing. His remains are in a tomb the Beijing Administrative College but when he was buried there it was a Buddhist temple. Ricci learned classical Chinese but he was also a composer. Recently Changdi heard the Folger Consort play a piece of Ricci’s music.

Changdi was surprised that she could read many characters printed on this map!

Steiny Road to China: Step 9 GOING TO THE WATER WELL

2010-01-03T21:09:00.014-05:00

What drove the Steiny Road Poet to start learning Mandarin and to become Li Changdi was the wish to communicate with people she would meet in China. In Beijing, she and her Gang of Eight (along with 16 other Grand Circle Tour travelers) were taken to one of the hútòng 胡同 neighborhoods that flank the Forbidden City. Hútòng comes from the Mongolian word hottog, which means water well. Typically tourists enter the alleyways of the hutong in bicycle rickshaws.

What does it mean to live in a hutong neighborhood?

Well, people share toilets, bathhouses, courtyards. While you might have kitchen appliances, you don’t necessarily have running water. Actually the typical hutong quarters are most likely one room and there is no central heat or air conditioning. In the winter, it is cold in these honeycomb residences. The fact is, there is no privacy and everyone knows your business.

By these standards, the residence we visited was on the high end. The lady of the house who was a snuff bottle artist had two rooms. Her niece, who is learning her aunt’s art, assisted with our visit for tea.

We were surprised to see the aunt had a French poodle and the dog was decked out with a hairdo of orange ears and lime green tale. Apparently people living in the hutong are now more economically able to afford pets.

However, hutongs in Beijing are being demolished and replaced by modern buildings. The people are being bought out by the government and moved to high-rise buildings.

To see what it is like living in a hutong, check out Michael Myer’s YouTube film and read his book The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. He said the hutong streets could be compared to Venice canals. Changdi thinks only a former Peace Corps worker like Mr. Myer’s could stand to be so close up and personal with his neighbors for the two years he lived in the hutong. One thing he did have was broadband Internet, but Changdi experienced the People’s Republic of China’s stranglehold on social networking websites like blogs, Facebook and Twitter and so even broadband couldn’t necessarily help a Westerner escape the eyes of the hutong.

More photos from Changdi's visit to the snuff bottle artist.

Steiny Road to China: Step 8 – POWER TO THE PEOPLE

2010-01-02T10:09:00.011-05:00

In the month of November, Li Changdi, a.k.a. the Steiny Road Poet, got on a plane at Dulles International with her husband and six good friends for a flight through Tokyo to Beijing. The Gang of Eight traveled for 22 days through China partaking of such cities Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuhan, Yichang, San Dou Ping, Chongqing, Xi’an, Gui Lin, and Hong Kong. We were part of a Grand Circle Tour.

What we liked about the GCT was that we met ordinary people in their homes and communities. We went to visit people living in a hutong community in Beijing. We saw a performance of students and teachers at a kung fu school and after we talked to them. We met relocated farming families. We went to an elementary school where 5th graders were learning English.

Because there is so much to tell, Changdi is going to parse the trip into small pieces. Meet her trip manager Song Peng (Nick) and in this photo he is painting her Chinese name as souvenir to take home.

PORTRAIT WITH MAO

In Beijing, we did what all families do, and that was, we went to Tian'anmen Square and had our photo taken with Mao Zedong. Yes, the Chinese people still hold Chairman in high regard despite the devastation of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the massacre in Tian'anmen Square. In this photo, you see Changdi with her husband Jim. Does he have a Chinese name? No, but sometimes he responds to Jimbeau.

Mao’s photo hangs on The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tian'anmen). Tian'anmen is the entrance to the Imperial City. It is across the street from the Forbidden City. The scale of Tian'anmen Square is huge. While Changdi and her Gang of Eight were in Beijing, they traveled through this square twice. Some of them actually considered coming back a third time when President Obama was there. However, the Gang froze the first two times and they had no real desire to get squeezed by a mob (no matter how warm that would be) when these friends all live close enough to the White House where Barack Obama lives with his family.

LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE: LEFT SIDE

On the left side of the Gate, the characters read: 中华人民共和国万岁 or “Long Live the People’s Republic of China. In pinyin, one pronounces the Chinese characters as zhōnghuá rénmín gònghéguó wànsuì.

Here’s how the characters form their meaning.

中华.................... 人民...................... 共和国 ...................... 万岁
zhōnghuá ............. rénmín ............... gònghéguó ................ wànsuì
Nation of China..... The People.......... Republic .................... long live

As a beginning student of the Chinese language, Changdi knew the words and characters for zhōngguó meaning “the country of China” 中国, gòngrén meaning “worker” 共人, and suì 岁 meaning “years of age” as in “How old are you? 18 years old.” and in pinyin” “Nǐ jīnnián duō dà? Shíbā suì.” So while Changdi didn’t know on the spot what the characters said, she recognized elemental parts.

LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE: RIGHT SIDE

The right side of the Gate reads: 世界人民大团结万岁 or "Long Live the Great Unity of the World's Peoples." In pinyin, the characters read “Shìjiè rénmín dà tuánjié wànsuì.” You might notice the Chinese language doesn’t bother with plural case as in People versus Peoples. Certain aspects of Chinese is a lot easier than English.

世界 ...................... 人民...................... 大................. 团结............... 万岁
shìjiè...................... rénmín ................. dà ................ tuánjié ........ wànsuì
world...................... the people............. great............. unity .......... long live

Because the words “rénmín” and “wànsuì” are used in both sentences, there is a musical repetition to the message as well as psychological emphasis on “long live” and “the People.” Another detail of interest is that the character 万 wàn (meaning “10,000”) has built into its construction 力 lì meaning “power” and this character is one of the basic elements (or radicals) making up many other characters in the Chinese language.

If one understands how important the written Chinese language is to the people of China, one can get a glimmer of what these two sentences mean to the Chinese people. Mao was a master of language and he was able to bring power to the powerless and this has a couple of meanings. He declared everyone in China equal so that each person became powerful and he made China equal to the other nations of the world after China suffered centuries of domination by foreign nations. Perhaps this is still a game of smoke and mirrors, but to see China today, one cannot doubt that China is a world leader and that every Chinese person, in some way, has power unparalleled to counterparts under the governments or dynasties that ruled before Mao Zedong.

POET’S SIGHTING OF MAO

While Changdi has never embraced the tenets of Communism, she has come to this insight about her own relationship with Mao. Changdi realized that the image of Mao seeped into her subconscious in the early 1970s and this most likely happened with Andy Warhol’s series of silk-screen portraits of the Chairman. In 1980, Changdi bought a black-and-white print entitled “Manhattan Moonlight” from the cityscape artist Armin Landeck who was a good friend of her close friend poet Robert Sargent. After the print was signed by Mr. Landeck, framed, and hung, Changdi wrote this poem.

NIGHT RAYS

Let Manhattan Moon raynnn down on me
Fingertips clicking, nails tapping on the iron door
Mao Tse-tung’s bald face deflecting the bright moonlight
Chairman’s bar silhouette without a Warhol grin
Street sliding off the checkered Earth
Buildings challenge-dancing to the artist’s gait
Tap, tap, click, click, pop
Let Manhattan Moon razze night

--Karren L. Alenier
in The Dancer’s Muse

Jimbeau was surprised to know that the image of Mao, however subtle, hangs in their living room.

Steiny Road to China: Step 7

2009-10-31T20:28:00.010-04:00

Li Changdi, a.k.a. the Steiny Road Poet, has been caught up in Chinese homework and too "mang" (busy) to post to the blog. However, instead of going to a Halloween dance party, she decided to catch up her readers on her progress and adventures in learning Chinese.

Everywhere she goes, she carries along her character chart homework. Twice she was on the DC subway busily practicing Chinese characters for such words and phrases as wan fan (dinner), zhou mo (weekend--sounds like Joe Mo) hao jiu bu jian 好久不见 (long time no see--is this hip or what?), when she looked up to see a Chinese woman watching her. The first one who turned out to be Yang Yuge, a Chinese 101 teacher at American University, asked how long Changdi had been studying Chinese. At that point, it was six weeks. "No," the stunned laoshi exclaimed. She thought what Changdi was writing was too advanced for such a short time of study.

When Changdi reported this to her teacher, Laoshi Zhang Xiaoli said she also teaches at A. U. and could she please have Yang Yuge's email which Changdi had jotted down. Furthermore, Changdi learned that Laoshi Zhang teaches advanced Chinese studies at American and Georgetown University.

Backing up a couple of weeks before she met the Chinese women who complimented Changdi's ability to write Chinese characters, she went to a Renaissance music with Chinese pipa concert a the Folger Shakespeare Library. In their Great Hall, they had an exhibition called "Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550–1700." As she stood with a friend looking at one of the showcases, she saw the Chinese characters for pengyou (friend) and pointed them out aloud. A Caucasian women standing next to Changdi nodded her head and so Changdi asked if she spoke Chinese. She did and she thought that Changdi was doing very well for someone who had only been studying Chinese for four weeks.

In Changdi's third week, she was attending a poetry reading and met Anli Tong, a Beijing research doctor who had just come to Maryland to work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. To make this woman feel comfortable, Changdi said a few words in Mandarin like Wo jiao Changdi—my first name is Changdi. Ching wen, ni gui xing? (May I please know your family name?) Ni jiao shenme mingzi? (What is your first name?) It turned out that one of the poets reading that night Deborah Ager had studied Chinese in high school and in the audience was an eight-year old who had been studying Mandarin in a school in Indonesia.

The point is that in urban American cities, there are many opportunities to encounter Mandarin speakers and to see Chinese characters. Only yesterday, Changdi met two neighbors, originally from Beijing, who had brought their sons to the condominium Halloween party where Changdi lives. (Changdi was assigned the job of taking photographs and posting them to the Condo's blog.) To these neighbors and with her tongue tripping over the words, Changdi said to each woman, renshi ni hen gaoxing (so pleased to meet you).

週末快樂 - Zhou mo kuai le! Happy weekend!

Steiny Road to China: Step 6

2009-10-03T23:18:00.008-04:00

Laoshi Zheng was absolutely stunned. The average score on the first quiz was 64%. Most of the Asian students got the worst scores. Most the newbies got scores above the average. Changdi got a 71%. A week ago on Saturday night instead of going to the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo, she practiced writing Japan—Zhongguo,

..............................................the United States—Meiguo,

England—Yingguo,

.....................................................................................................................................
France—Faguo, and

Japan—Riben in Chinese characters.

She also practiced the words
laoshi (teacher), xuesheng (student), and pengyou (friend). Oh, and toss Beijing. The thing she has the most trouble with is hearing the correct tone.

The quiz had four parts: 1) dictation—write the Chinese word in pinyin with the correct tone mark, 2) translation—write what the Chinese word is in English, 3) write the pinyin & tone mark for 5 countries and for teacher, friend, student as well as the Chinese character, 4) write the pinyin & tone mark for 5 family members.

So Laoshi Zheng gave the class a worksheet with 34 words/phrases to write in Chinese characters! Some are words that the class was tested on but most are new. Learning ching wen (Excuse me or May I ask) is incredibly hard and what we have to learn is the simplified character set versus the fancier traditional character set. Changdi read a comment blog and found out that some students think it is easier to learn the traditional character set versus the simplified because the former has a story thread. Also the simplified character set is used primarily in mainland China. This might be why some of the Asian students in Changdi's class didn't do well on writing characters. One other thing she learned is that pinyin has become very important because of communication through email. Changdi's teacher thinks pinyin is hard also because she is more comfortable with the Chinese characters.

Steiny Road to China: Steps 4 & 5

2009-09-25T07:08:00.005-04:00

While Americans believe the number 13 is unlucky—as in Friday the 13th, the Chinese believe the number 4 sì is unlucky because it sounds similar to the word for death sǐ. However, the number 4 must be "sung" with the fourth or descending tone and the word death is intoned with the rollercoaster of the third tone that goes down and then up. So for this post, Changdi (a.k.a. the Steiny Road Poet) has paired 4 with 5 because the Chinese say that good things come in pairs.

Last week, I had the experience of thinking in Chinese. My laoshi (teacher) was going to each student and asking for a response to a question she would pose to that person on the spot. She was asking, "Are you the teacher" (Ni shi laoshi ma?) or "Are you the student?" (Ni shi xuesheng ma?). She expected us to answer "No, I'm not the teacher" (Bu. Wo bu shi laoshi.) or "Yes, I am the student." (Dui. Wo shi xuesheng.) I was feeling anxious because my brain was bouncing around trying to keep track of how to say I instead of you and yes instead no. The words for teacher and student I had down cold. So when she asked me in Chinese if I was the teacher, I responded, "No, I am the student." (Bu. Wo shi xuesheng.) I certainly hadn't planned what I was going to say. It just popped out without any conscious effort. It also surprised the teacher and she stopped to ask the class if they heard what I answered.

This week the drill is to learn how to write the Chinese characters for five countries and a few assorted words like student, teacher and friend. Last week we needed to learn how to write characters for 1-10 as well as the pinyin. Our first quiz is next week. So far, I cannot hear the tone differences very well. Tone one, the flat sound to infinity, isn't so bad and neither is tone four which descends but the rollercoaster and rising tones are hard for me to hear unless the words are said very slowly.

Basically, my teacher thinks the answer to our student anxiety can be covered by this: ke kou ke le. This is the Chinese interpretation of coca cola and in Chinese, ke with the rollercoaster third tone means permit and le, pronounced with the descending fourth tone, means happiness. So, drink ke le (coke) and permit the mouth to rejoice!

长笛