7:53 PM: today is st. philips day, so chronia polla to my grandson philip and to me as well!
7:21 PM: a rich and full day in the classroom, with pithywise comments; rib poking; explosive laughter; gluing painting & pasting; innocence & rabble-rousing instigative-majik.
7:31 PM: and all the while i reflected upon gaze 35. how, once we get home, she would disappear and transform into another face; another gaze. perhaps one of the students will replace her. i do have one in mind. and here is a preview:
7:25 am:
Dylan Thomas with his wife Caitlin in 1946. It is now considered likely he was misdiagnosed with dilirium tremens, when he was actually suffering from severe pneumonia. He was given morphine, which made no sense and further suppressed his breathing, leading to his death. Here is a quote from Early One Morning, in which he describes his experience in Mrs. Holes Dame School:
"Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime – the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature."
he was my idol as a teenager. other kids had elvis on their walls; i had dylan. i knew some of his poems by heart, and never tired of reading under milk wood over and over, drinking in the intimate feeling of a welch village. 10 years later i discovered a version of this intimate, quirky feeling in the town of chora on the island of andros, in greece. the aroma of fresh baked bread and cheese pies; the local intrigues; the small very individualized shops, which included a lame shoemaker who made me a pair of boots in exchange for a sign i made for his shop. it was how i imagined thomas' village. and here's how under milk wood begins:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
you can find the entire play here: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608221.txt