New York City 10 degrees January 2013
I am easily pleased but not easily entertained.
I try my best to stay in the present moment but am challenged to do so.
I love writing, reading, and teaching.
I’m overly sensitive at times.
I love lavender lotion and candles. All things lavender! We are planning to plant lavender this spring.
I am a student at Stanford University working toward a graduate degree. This is my last year. I will miss the friends that I have made in this program.
My thesis topic has been approved with the condition that my work be centered on the work of W.G. Sebald. I will examine the complexity of narration found in W.G.Sebald’s Austerlitz,as well as assert that the narration, among other things, is Kafkaesque. The novel is also a Holocaust Memorial.
My adviser has been assigned: Professor Herbert Lindenberger, Avalon Professor of the Humanities, author of 11 books, most on opera, and a thoroughly delightful, brilliant, and charming man. He will be the perfect mentor to guide me through this process.
Thank you for reading this blog, and on occasion, leaving a comment.
Hi Cheri,
Cindy emailed your Jerry Brown blog…an unbelievable story. I hope you get a response from the “big guy”. Hope all is well with your family. I will check in to your blog now and then.
xoxo Maryann
Hi Maryann,
Welcome to my blog and thanks for the comment. I hope you all are doing well and that you aren’t working too hard.
I’d love to have you stop by here now and then. An honor!
We miss seeing y’all, particularly after reading your blog! Lets get a date on the calendar.
BTW, love the story about your dad and dinner:-)
Thankee, Sharon!
I found your writings by accident, or maybe not. I find your writings refreshingly honest, simple and very reflective. You tell a short story that is mostly poetic and easy to be mindful of. I followed you as if you were a big sister and Judge Blah a big brother in your earlier years and am pleasantly surprised that you are even easier to listen to now. Must be because I am also so much older. Don’t stop writing you are a breath of fresh air.
Thanks very much Gregory. As you may have noticed, I have slowed down on the blog posts but your comment is motivational for me. I’m also pleased to know that you find some of the posts poetic, which is something I try to do.
Take care.
A am also an alumnist of Mission from the class of 1970. You and your husband, of course, are in my memories as students and not as an English teacher and Judge. I believe, as do you, that it is never to old to become educated. I still aspire to be a lawyer and currently am working in that direction. Health to you both.
Oh I like the story about the auger, keep writing.
cheri,
did i miss you blogging about your latest trip to Prague? and where are the photos of this trip?
will you please share?
Hi dafna,
You did not miss my Prague pictures or commentary. I haven’t posted them or written about the trip.
As you can see from my postings, my blog posts are few each month. The reason for this is that I am devoting more of my time to researching for a book idea that I have.
What I wanted to write about from Prague is our Kafka experience and the reading we did in order to participate in the class there. But, every time I start to write, my thoughts are jumbled. Maybe I can post some pictures of beautiful Praha AND write about Kafka.
Thanks for your interest. I see that Jacob is a blogger!
“our Kafka experience…” has a ring to it.
perhaps jumbled thoughts are “kafkaesque”, just part of the experience?
we look forward to your pictures and comments when you are ready.
best wishes on the book, may your words and ideas flow freely and have that special magical connection that writers seek with their readers.
Dear Mrs. Sabraw,
Found you on the internet and hoped you could come to the Class of ’86 25th reunion picnic on October 16th at Lake Elizabeth, We appreciated you investing in our lives. Would love to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Stacie (Harris) Clark
your former red-headed student
Hi Stacie,
Did you say 25th (25th!!) Reunion picnic???
Oh my. And to think that I remember you so well. Where did the years go?
I will be at a nephew’s wedding up in the wine country that weekend…Please send me the details to Mill Creek Academy on Washington Blvd. Perhaps I will be home in time.
Until then, thanks for your kind words. At this stage of my life, they mean more than you can imagine.
Mrs. Sabraw ( Cheri)
Dear “Mrs. Sabraw,”
This is Graciela Cabana, a former student of yours at MSJ. I found your blog through the wonders of the internet — there’s a Facebook page devoted to a 25 yr class reunion now, you were mentioned, so I decided to Google you to see what happened. And look! A wonderful blog, and I see you are on a second wind in life. It’s inspiring to see. I wanted to let you know that you were a wonderful teacher, showing me how both fun and educational literature can be. I remember your classes well.
Love, hugs, and best wishes for your graduate degree, Graciela
How marvelous to hear from you Graciela! Stacie Harris contacted me on this blog to let me know the date of the reunion and I was blown away that my students are celebrating their 25th. I may still be in Santa Rosa at my nephew’s wedding, but if I can come, I certainly will.
I appreciate your taking the time to express such generous thoughts. As you know, I had a great fun teaching American literature during those days at Mission. They seemed idyllic. Of course, I was only 36 years old when you were my student…Even then, I couldn’t get through Our Town without breaking down in tears, so I had some sense of how short life really is.
I hope your life has taken the turns you anticipated.
And yes, it is never too late to go back to school. Most of my classmates are in their 30′s and 40′s (although there are a number of us over 50…). I am stimulated by pursuing education around a table with so many vibrant minds and faces.
Gfletts,
Thanks for the encouragement. Oh my. Please don’t tell any stories about what I was like in 1968….
Dear Cheri,
thanks for your reply.
it is often the flaws and imperfections in a thing that makes it more precious and beautiful.
Sorry to hear about your mom Cheri.
I’ve had the Iron infusions, and they are also administered amongst people receiving chemotherapy. More than once, people receive this treatment with only the nurse for companionship.
your mother is lucky to have you. if she can not verbalize, these infusions are cold and sometimes burn a little, she may want a heated blanket.
Hi dafna,
Thanks for your concern. Mom has had these infusions since 1997 when she contracted viral meningitis. When we moved her last year, we had some difficulty with insurance. We’ve finally got them covered, so she is able to have her immune system pumped up a bit. Prior to her moving here, my brother’s family took her once a month to these infusions.
Now it is my time to do this for her.
She always wants a heated blanket. You are correct.
Mrs. Sabraw,
My name is Brittaney Meyer (although, when I knew you it was Brittaney Scholz) and I was in your English 11 and Journalism classes at MSJ in 1997 and 1998 respectively. I am currently working on my Ed.D. at UC Davis and the other day a professor asked us about a teacher that made a difference in our lives. I found myself telling the story of my experience in your classes. It was not the first time that I have told the story, but it was the first time I wondered why I had never contacted you to say thank you for the positive impact you had on me as a student and as a person. I left a message at Mill Creek Academy with my contact information a while back but I’m not sure if you ever received it. Either way, I would love to hear from you if you have a chance. It seems that you are doing very well.
Have a fantastic Thanksgiving.
Brittaney Meyer
Dear Brittaney,
What a Thanksgiving gift you have just given to me! I have strong memories of you and look forward to getting together so that you can update me about your life.
I am thrilled that someone with your creativity and verve will make a big dent in education…God knows we need you.
And yes, I am doing very well. Thank you. I will be turning in a big paper on Thursday, December 8 and then I am a free woman. My last class at Mill Creek Academy happens on December 7. It’s hard to believe that 40 years have passed since I first stepped foot into American High School with Joe Tranchina at the helm.
Enjoy your life. It goes by very fast.
Please e-mail me if you are going to be in town over the holidays. If not, we can make arrangements to get together.
I’m so glad that you are doing well! Best of luck with the big paper–I am currently working on a 20-pager of my own!
I’m not sure how to email you directly but you can email me at brittaneymeyer@gmail.com and I will send you a reply. I will be in the Fremont area on December 17th if you are free in the late morning. I will have my family with me (my husband and our twin 5 year-olds), but if you are up for it it would be great to see you!
I noted with interest that Edith Wharton was among the novelists you have specialised in, because quite recently I read the only novel of hers I’ve ever read, “The Age of Innocence”. Depicting the Gilded Age, it speaks to us loudly today, given what’s currently being talked about in the public sphere. And its theme of unrequited passion is timeless.
Now, I’m reading Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” which came out in 1899. Although subversive then, it’s arguably still subversive now. Have you read it?
An immersion in such novels is a welcome refuge from an oppressive present, so I find.
Good luck in your “big paper”.
Oh Wow. An Edith Wharton fan!!
I taught “Ethan Frome” for 25 years. Talk about unrequited passion. The kids would read and read and read to get to the part where Ethan is finally alone with Mattie because his cold wife Zeena has gone away for the night. I won’t spoil the moment, but when the kids got there….they ran into my classroom saying, ” Is that all there was??? He didn’t even kiss her….” and so on.
I have read Chopin’s “The Awakening.” Marvelous novel. Now I am trying to remember the short story of hers that I taught. I will be back to you on this one.
I’d love you to post your reactions to “The Awakening.”
And thanks. I am here now at the CoHo at Stanford, a coffee house with really cool music and people of all ages and races just hanging out. I feel good here. I have 5 pages of writing and only 15 to go… a race against the clock. Do you work well under pressure?
I like to write in an environment such as this…
I’ll put “Ethan Frome” on my “to read” list.
Your pupils’ (students) reactions (“is that all there was?”) to the overt chasteness between Ethan and Mattie put me in mind of David Lean’s 1946 film “Brief Encounter”, which is about consequences of a chance meeting at a railway station between two seemingly contentedly-married bourgeois people – he (Alec) a doctor, she (Laura) a housewife.
Bourgeois English society being then what it was, Alec and Laura had to conduct their affair almost wholly under the public gaze. So there could be well-nigh no touching. But it was precisely these restrictions that gave such piquancy to their meetings and such poignancy to their final parting.
I’ve now finished Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”. Much of its charm for me was the simplicity of its prose, and the slighty exotic air lent by the locale of New Orleans, and by the main characters being French Creole.
You will surely remember that the main character, Edna Pontellier, is a respectably married woman from the monied class (what today would be called the “’1%”), who feels stifled in her marriage and by the social role she has to to play.
Wanting to be free in every way, she moves out, and engages in a mode of living that can only lead to her becoming a social outcast, and to her death – the inevitable fate of a “fallen” woman in the literature of that time.
In openly depicting its main female character as having sexual feelings, and her expressing them through her making the moves on Robert, “The Awakening”, as a female-written novel, would, I think, have been very much ahead of its time in the English-speaking literary mileau, and have shocked the Establishment. Is it any wonder that it ended Kate Chopin’s literary career?
Was Erica Jong’s “Fear of Flying” more than seventy years on, standing on the shoulders of “The Awakening”?
Anyway, for me, “The Awakening” was a wonderful read.
What’s next for me in my current journey through nineteenth-century and early twentieth century American literature? Willa Cather’s “My Antonia”, I think. I’ll begin it, though, with reservations, since it’s told through a male narrator, and I have doubts that a female novelist can do this successfully. I could be wrong though, and probably am!!!
Oh Wow, Philippe. This is exactly the type of literary dialogue that I love! Ask any of my former students. You are awesome.
My Antonia is my husband’s favorite novel. In fact, there is a passage that makes him tear up every time he even tries to describe its effect.
Remember, Willa Cather was a lesbian with very male tendencies. If anyone can create a “male narrator” with some sensitivity, it is Willa Cather.
Kate Chopin broke ground for many female novelists of the 20th century, that’s for sure.
Now about Ethan Frome… It’s a “stark” novel with a tragic ending…but I still love it. The language, the romance, the frustration, the irony…it’s all there.
Thanks for your comment. It made my night.
It is very moving to see how students remember you with affection, Cheri, because you have given them something valuable.
“It was the first time I wondered why I had never contacted you to say thank you for the positive impact you had on me as a student and as a person.”
Brava sei.
Thanks Giovanni.
As you know too, the legacy we leave can be the people whose lives we touch. I’m sure you have had this experience, as well. You are a people person.
Grazia.
PS We are coming to Italy in May…Follina…to study Nietzsche, Wagner, and Mann.
Follina, North Italy, not far from Venice. There’s a possibility we can meet then, I hope.
Meeting you would be fun!! We will not get south of Follina, though. We fly in close to the beginning of the seminar (five days) and then are going to Germany to see our nephew and his wife for just a few days. I cannot miss two consecutive classes of my spring quarter this year. I am excited to travel to Italy again.
We will see. Not very far in any case. Let’s keep in touch.
I’m put in mind of a film I first saw when a boy – “Good Morning Miss Dove” (circa1955), with Jennifer Jones, about the influence of a village school teacher on the later lives of her students.
I’ve seen it a couple of times since. It still tugs the heartstrings.
I’m going to rent this movie.
My heartstrings need tugging.
You are such a fantastic resource for old movies.
We watched “While the City Sleeps” with Ida Lupino, last night.
We are hooked on old movies, old novels, old music.
And yet, we try to stay young.
I have now finished Willa Cather’s “My Antonia”, and found it a wonderful evocation of what it must have been like to live in the American prairies in the 19th century. Although this novel is little different from an autobiography, are not straight-out autobiographies disguised novels anyway?
Ah have ter tell ya, though, that I didn’t find Jim Burden a convincing heterosexual male character, despite your saying that if there was any female novelist who was able to “……create a ‘male narrator’ with some sensitivity, it is Willa Cather……”.
I agree that Jim Burden had sensitivity, and lots of it, but it was more a female sensitivity than a male one. I felt that his overall “voice” was that of a woman, or of an effeminate man, but not of a “real” man. Every so often I came upon sentences or passages that showed this clearly. Well, at least to me they did.
For example, when Jim goes to live with his grandparents (his father, the grandparent’s son, had died), his grandmother, on waking him up after his first night there, remarks how much he looks like his father had. Then Jim, as the narrator, writes “….I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come to wake him like this when he overslept…….”.
“……I remembered that my father had been her little boy……” has something so…..so…….motherly about it. A “real” man would have written “…..I remembered that my father had been her son…….”. Only after rewriting this sentence thus, might a man confidently show his face at the poolhall.
Jim liked to go to the dance hall on Saturday nights, to dance with Antonia, Lena, Tiny, and the other Bohemian and Scandinavian farm girls who the respectable burghers of the town looked down on. Jim wrote of these girls, “……I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have……..”.
To describe them as “my country girls” is not what a “real man” would write, for it, again, sounds motherly, or sisterly, and therefore not manly. A “real” man would write, not “my country girls”, but “these girls”. This would pass the poolhall test.
One evening Jim goes with Lena to see the play, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, two of whose characters were Marguerite (played by an actress “….already old, with a ravaged countenance….“) and a young man, Armand.
Jim writes of them, “….Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed in her (Marguerite’s) power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. I wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince that there was loyalty and devotion in the world…….”.
So moved was Jim by this play that he “….wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund woman (Marguerite) sank for the last time into the arms of her lover…….”.
Would Jim’s reactions to “The Count of Monte Cristo” have passed the poolhall test?
Hardly.
Indeed Willa Cather may have had doubts about being able to portray Jim as a convincing man, since she had him write about himself and Lena on that evening, “……I congratulated myself that I had not brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the Junior dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth. Lena was at least a woman, and I was a man…..”
Why would Willa Cather have added the superfluous …..and I was a man…..” if she was confident that her readers wouldn’t doubt that Jim was a bona fide man?
While Jim did have lots of female friends – which would have made him the envy of the fellows in any poolhall – his attitude to them wasn’t particularly sexual. While there was the occasional chaste-seeming kiss, and while Jim did say he was in love with Lena, and said later, to Antonia’s children, that he’d once been in love with their mother, were these simply more attempts by Willa Cather to convince readers of Jim’s manliness, or at least to remind them that the novel’s narrator is a man?
And what is one to make of Jim’s later marrying a woman with whom he appeared have little in common, and that he didn’t father any children?
Given that with just a few changes, Willa Cather could have given “My Antonia” a female narrator, which would have given it a more authentic “voice”, why did she bother with a male narrator?
Was it to eliminate the the possibility that readers might construe a female narrator as having homosexual feelings towards the likes of Antonia and Lena – a possibility which, I’m going to assume, may have caused such a novel to be banned, given the temper of those times?
OK – I’ve talked enough of “My Antonia”. Would the manner in which I’ve talked about it pass the poolhall test? I’m not absolutely sure. On the other hand, I don’t go to poolhalls.
I’m about to begin on Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie”. Have you read it?
Philippe,
You’ve written a convincing short piece of literary analysis. But first, you must define the poolhall test if you are going to compare Jim Burden’s sensitivity to the sensitivity a woman would have rather than a man.
If you hadn’t known that Willa Cather was a lesbian, would you have had the same sensitivities to her language usage?
I must confess that your examples are persuasive. Your final question about Cather’s concerns that her homosexuality might burst through the text may be accurate. I just don’t know.
There is a scene in the novel in which JIm’s grandfather broods that we (the older generation) are unable to protect our children (or even young people we care about) from the vicissitudes of life and all of its disappointments. We want to protect the people we love! I find this scene one of the most beautiful in the story.
But now you have me thinking…perhaps I found the language in that scene so moving because, well, it never would have held up in a pool hall.
Perhaps it was too sensitive. Perhaps that is why the Judge gets teary-eyed whenever he reads that passage. Perhaps it is a woman speaking to him.
Yes. I have read Sister Carrie but a long time ago…in college.
“…..you must define the poolhall test……”
By poolhall test, I mean anything a man writes that, if read by fellows in a poolhall, wouldn’t cause them to think that the writer is anything less than totally manly. Such writing passes the poolhall test.
I had forgotten about the passage where the grandfather talks about parents not being able to protect their children from life’s vicissitudes. However, your reference to it made me recall it. I’ve just paged through the entire text of the novel, but, gosh darn it, I’m not able to locate this passage. Which part of the book is it in?
“……If you hadn’t known that Willa Cather was a lesbian, would you have had the same sensitivities to her language usage?……….”
Good question. A book by any female novelist, regardless of her sexual proclivities, in which the main character is male, and is told in the first person, causes my antennae to wave, just as my antennae would wave if I read a book by a male novelist whose main character is female, and is told in the first person.
This is because the life histories, and sensitivities and emotions of men and women, and the ways they are expressed, are so different. Also, science is discovering huge differences between the male and female brains. In this connection I highly recommend a book called “The Female Brain” by Louann Brizendene.
Perhaps I might re-phrase your question thus: “If you didn’t know that ‘My Antonia’ was written by a woman, would you have had the same sensitivities as to the author’s language usage?”
Probably not. But I would still have thought it strange that a heterosexual man would have a lifelong interest in the lives of the young women he knew when he was a boy – especially as they were women that Jim appeared to have little sexual interest in, for he seemed to looked upon them more as big sisters.
I found it odd that Jim wasn’t strongly sexually attracted to at least one. A heterosexual man surely would have been. It’s just the way heterosexual men are. Trust me, I’m one.
So, even if not knowing that “My Antonia” was written by a woman, I would still think Jim an effeminate man, even a homosexual one. Consider the nature of his friendship with Gaston Cleric. And consider a passage in which Jim and Gaston are discussing something in Virgil’s poem, the Georgics, which they found moving.
Then Jim writes, “……We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of great feeling, though perhaps I alone kept Cleric intimately enough to guess what that feeling was……..”.
What exactly was that feeling? And would it pass the poolhall test?!!!
I also wondered about Jim’s job as legal counsel for one of the great Western railways. Wouldn’t this have been in those days an excessively macho atmosphere for the comfort for the likes of Jim? Just asking.
Just because I doubt that male and female novelists can successfully have first person narrators of their opposite gender (sex), doesn’t mean I doubt they can successfully portray characters of their opposite gender (sex) when writing of them in the third person. There is a huge difference between observing someone by means of the third person, and being him/her by means of the first person.
Or so I think.
OK. I want to get back to your comment! But…I have jury duty in Oakland today. Please cross your fingers that I do not get seated….
I am SO embarrassed. I gave you the wrong reference. Poor you!! Trying to find a precious passage that is in another Cather book. Oy vey.
The passage is from One of Ours. I can get you the page number tomorrow.
Please, don’t be embarrassed, for, as I said in my comment, I do recall the grandfather saying something on the order of what you said he said.
I may suffer from false memory syndrome.
You are so funny (and gracious).
I read your comments here to my husband, who loves all of Willa Cather’s writing, and he agreed with you. I suggested that maybe he likes her writing because she helps him get in touch with his feminine side from a male narrator. He said he’d have to think about that one.
For our little book group about 5 years ago, we read a book by Reynolds Price. I can’t remember the title but it was a woman’s name. I thought he absolutely captured the female psyche.
I went into Google and learned that the titles of two of Reynolds Price’s novels were women’s names – “Kate Vaiden” and “Roxanna Slade” – and that both were written in the first person from a woman’s point of view.
May I assume that one of these two novels was the novel you read?
Accepting that Reynolds Price convincingly captured the female psyche through the first person, does this disprove my assertion that men and women writing in the first person through a character of the gender opposite to that of the writer, can’t as a general rule do this successfully, or was Reynolds Price merely an exception to this general rule?!!!
Oh yes. Thank you for doing my homework for me. It was Roxanna Slade. I thoroughly enjoyed the read. In fact, since I am on holiday from school, maybe I will reread this this week.
I do not know the answer to your question. It is a very good one! Perhaps a Masters Thesis topic.
Have you considered going back to school?
“……Have you considered going back to school?………”
No. School and I were always uneasy bedfellows.