1. Debbie arrived home today a little earlier than usual and feeling good about how she and her students worked together in class today. Some positive things happened today that helped boost Debbie's confidence. I loved seeing Debbie walk in the house this afternoon looking satisfied, humble, but satisfied that she and her students had had a good day.
2. I enjoy going on jags watching certain movie genres, performers, and makers of movies. Right now, I'm trying to watch as many movies as possible photographed by James Wong Howe. I'm also wanting to watch as many of the British New Wave movies as I can. Today, I made my movie watching life a bit more impossible after watching Bette Davis play twin sisters in the murder thriller, Dead Ringer (1964).
Now I want to watch more movies featuring Bette Davis. I'd like to watch All About Eve again and go back to the 1930s and watch Dangerous and Jezebel as well as her wicked performance in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. I don't really have a vocabulary to describe her acting style. I'd have to say it is, by contemporary standards, outmoded or old-fashioned -- and I enjoy it. Her vocal range, her elastic face, her sense of melodrama, and the attention her presence commands works for me -- it's hypnotic. In Dead Ringer, her magnetism is not glamorous. It's powerful, yes, treacherous, and I'd like to watch more of her movies and experience more of her force and intensity.
3. In tonight's Poetry Break, Bill featured some long poems, one on old age by Walt Whitman and a couple of apparently autobiographical poems by Dick Allen (RIP), a poet I had never heard of who was born about the same time I was.
The Whitman poem is remarkable. It's entitled "Old Age" and it epitomizes Whitman's gift for copious exploration of truth. For Whitman, truth is told not by whittling an idea down to its essentials and expressing it in a compact way, but it's told by expansion, by exploring as many dimensions of an idea or an experience as possible, reveling in complexity and beauty.
Whitman's poem, yes, explores the diminishment of powers we experience as we age. The eyes grow dim. Our energy runs down. Even our desire weakens. But, diminishment is not the whole story and Whitman also explores the beauty of aging, the way we slow down, see things more clearly, gain wisdom.
Bill read this poem first and, in some ways, this poem was it for me tonight.
My mind wandered. This particular Walt Whitman poem and many others took over my attention and I reveled in the beauty of his long copious lines, his fertile and benevolent imagination, his keep gifts of observation, and the undeniably American music of his poetry.
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