suzy has moved!

 Dear Faithful Readers,

I've moved my blog to Wordpress. Please follow me! Just click on "MY BLOG" and then, once you're there,
click on the little rectangle that says "sign me up." It's easy.I hope I see you all again.

My newest post is "Everything is not going to Hell, or going to Mass with my mother." 

~Alison ( my name is not really Suzy)

mission statement from a public school employee

One day Beth commented that the point of education is to nourish the brain. A little comment that immediately became the way I look at and measure what we do, my own little personal mission statement. Are we nourishing the brain? Is it possible within the context of school? Sometimes the answer is yes.

adorno is wrong

Adorna said that art, because of its association with class and because it objectifies, is inherently fascist.  Did he really mean this or was he simply being provocative?

Paul Celan

Why did I awake lonely
Among the sleepers?

another word for hell

I was reading Night and helping plan a fundraiser for an elementary school in Gaza. I was reading Night and writing a novel that includes the Kabbalah, which is a form of mystical Judaism. The Kabbalah is also called The Tree of Life, and included in this Tree is its shadow, which is known at Qliphoth. Qlipoth is the place where all the half- formed things of creation go, the mistakes, the monsters. When you read Night, it’s easy to imagine that the landscape is Qlipoth, which is another word for Hell.

My husband’s paternal grandfather is German, but when a genealogist discovered that he was Jewish, his great aunt stopped the research. When I read Night I thought about the Palestinians and I thought the worst thing that can happen is for the victim to take on characteristics of the oppressor.

do we have to talk about it all the time?

 The men at the next table are talking about their weight. They are average-sized, middle-age men, drinking coffee. They are talking about the calories in various foods, about gaining a pound but then losing it again, about the best time to weigh yourself. My word. I thought only women had to have conversations like this.

too cool to care

The two hip girl bartenders at the brew pub in Eukia hadn’t heard about the nuclear plants melting down in Japan. They shrugged when we told them. Why should they pay attention to something like that? We can’t do anything about it anyway, they said.

why he's not in college and I am

My 24 yr old son saw me working on an essay for poetry class this morning. That’s not hard, he said. All you need to do is bullshit.

white devil

Reading Amiri Baraka for my poetry class. A poem written after the murder of Malcolm X: Poem for Black Hearts.

For all of him, and all of yourself, look up,
black man, quit stuttering and shuffling, look up
black man

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was a high school student in Beardstown, Illinois. I was at the county fair a while later with my friend Sue Hye. A couple black guys from Chicago were flirting with us. I asked mine what he thought he was doing. Didn’t he know that I was the white devil? He looked at me confusedly and then turned to his friend, “Yo! Raymond, come hear this white girl talk.”

charging their phones in Egypt

digg and helping

This is a test because I'm messing around with Digg, which I can't for the life of me get to work. What I really want is to show you a picture from a birthing clinic in Haiti. I told Chuck I want to go there and help. I said probably if I really wanted to help I'd just get a second job and send the money, but that doesn't sound fun. Do I really want to help or not?