Tras haber creado mi anterior blog cecilmundo varias personas, muchos de ellos mis alumnos, me sugirieron que creara una secciòn dentro de cecilmundo para publicar mis obras de docencia de idiomas. Dado que la cantidad de documentos de explicaciones, ejercicios y exàmenes de inglès son muy numerosos porque tengo màs de 30 años del ejercicio de la docencia, preferì estrenar blog con mis alumnos a como ellos realmente merecen. En este blog planetcecil no solo iràn mis documentos didàcticos de inglès, sino tambièn la producciòn literaria de varios alumnos que se destacan en las letras. Tambièn darè oportunidad a aquellos que tienen excelentes obras pero que no han logrado publicarlas ya que en mi paìs Nicaragua todo se mueve por la marrana polìtica, y si una no pertenece a determinado partido no verà jamàs publicado su opus. Tambièn tenemos la desgracia de contar con seudoeditores quienes al no conocer verdaderamente de literatura se convierten en mercenarios de la imprenta solo para llenarse ellos mismo de dinero y fama a costillas de los escritores. Todos aquellos que deseen participar en este blog, denlo de antemano por suyo. Aunque lleve mi nombre en un arranque de egolatrìa, yo soy sencillamente vuestra servidora.Cecilia

Las alas de la educación

Las alas de la educación
La educación es un viaje sin final.

La lección de física

La lección de física
Casi aprendida

jueves, 26 de marzo de 2009

Parthenogenesis




90th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on March 26:
1479 Vasili III great prince of Moscow (1505-33)/son of Ivan III ,father of the monster Ivan IV Grozny,did he have any idea what he would beget when he jumped on top of Elena Glinski?1577 Elisabeth of Nassau daughter of Willem I & Charlotte of Bourbon, not as silent as her dad the Stadholder of the Netherlands
1911 Tennessee Williams Columbus MS, dramatist (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Tramway called Desire)one of USA´s most charming gays
1931 Leonard Nimoy Boston MA, actor (Spock-Star Trek, Mission Impossible),Mr.Spocl from Vulcan, with the Pointed Ears, delicious. Idol of my childhood
Deaths which occurred on March 26:
0752 Pope Stephen II dies only 4 days after his election, shit poor guy didn´t even live to enjoy his power
1566 Antonio de Cabezon composer, dies, somehow I like him even though he was Spanish
1827 Ludwig van Beethoven German composer (Appassionata), dies in Wien (Vienna) at 56,raging at the storm, fist threatening the storm,what a colossal way to die
1892 Walt Whitman poet, dies in Camden NJ at 72, father of free verse, blue eyed gay who was one of the first to wear jeans
1918 César A Cui Lithuanian fort builder/composer, dies at 83 ,was so mediocre no one could even say Cui about him1923 Sarah Bernhardt [Henriette-Rosine Bernard] actress (Qn Elizabeth), dies at 77,the Divine Jewish Diva
Happened today
1526 King François I returns Spanish captivity to France, and the coward sends his son Henri (future King Henri II) to take his place
1942 1st "Eichmann transport" to Auschwitz & Birkenau Camps,train chockfull of Jews, for extermination.WE SHALL NEVER FORGET

Parthenogenesis…Look Ma; no male!

I knew that one day I would be destined to produce something without the physical aid of a sweating male getting his own good pleasure on top of my exhausted body. My father would laugh about it when he said I would be capable of parthenogenesis. Asexual reproduction. My father, like my blond boss Lorenzo, so long gone, fatherly miens to understand how complex the lack of penis can make us humans who are denominated females. I subrepticiously see the stars on my shoulders and I am sure of something: I did it all alone. I owe it all to myself. Could every woman chasing falling stars or being infatuated with someone write a book? No, sir, the world would then be a library. And it isn´t. The only stars I have ever touched lie not in my each day more deteriorated hazel eyes, but on my shoulders. Dust to dust, everything goes back t where it came from .I wallow in the loose and splotched comfort of my air force camouflaged jacket. Paradise found again, not Milton´s Lost Paradise. Paradise as described to me among chimeras doesn ´t work. I ´m the freak on my own leash. It is only fair. At the end,the acknowledgements are there but passed over. We want to get to business, ma ám,says the cadet.I just wanna read the book, he says in his embryo English. Someday he will learn not to contract and say want to.
How many times we feel sorry by all those who stand up to receive an award and hear them blab about thank you wife, thank you dog, thank you milkman? Everyone gets credit because we creative people, specially those of us who wear breasts, are inured to the fact that we should be cooking or washing the floor instead of writing, we are told that the time we spend writing stuff should be given to another baby or being nice to the mother-in-law. NO NO NO:I wrote this myself .It came in a bubble of sunlight and it goes on into an arid steppe, a puszta once inhabited by delibab. Dust to dust. Only a nut would write to a muse he has never even smelled. Try smelling the muse-if you ever catch her- after a dust storm, says an imp that lives beneath the third star on my shoulder. This imp is a minion of mirth, and is constantly laughing at me. But is always so intrinsically right that it scares me. It is the same imp that tells me this creation was just another way of reached self-glorification, an easy road to self gratification. Literary masturbatory practice. Why not? Taboos are being lifted from ipsation in the physical sense. Why not lift the barriers that take writers to masterpieces..?
Books don ´t die. They have an immortality that flesh and blood will never possess. Muses get flushed down the toilet every day along with other waste materials our life produces. Did Hector Berlioz ever regret having met Henrietta Smithson and dedicating his Symphonie Fantastique to such a mediocre moneydigger? Well, his pocket certainly suffered. All to end in despair and disappointment. Can he call me as welcome new member to his club, along with Dante cuddling a doll who looks like Beatrice or Petrarch with his mummified cat still longing for Laura? No. I never took my muse to the barber, nor shared a breakfast with the shadow. As much as nobody can get pregnant from watching a greedy Mahgreb gigolo ejaculating against the wall through a webcam, you cannot take responsibility for someone who has never sneezed over your left cheek. Fairy tales are only that. Sorry. But they can yield interesting products, such as these words that now you devour. Someday my grandkids will pay their college fee with money given by this non fiction book written by their crazy yet pragmatic ancestress, and they will invent stories about a shadowy phantom dancing in the background, but whose bloodline they aren´t related to.
There is no labor blood around my ankles. No placenta to show . I gave birth alone, like a hen who saw the shadow of a rooster and laid a white egg, as my grandma used to say. I used lots of music, my knowledge of history as the historian I am, the circumstances given every day to me by life, sometimes on a silver tray, other days with a kick in the ass. I almost deluded myself sometimes into believing there was a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, or a happy ending like an American Hollywood blockbuster film. The almost made all the difference. Translation into Spanish is one penstroke away from this. A hard or soft cover is only a matter of choice. The pictures will come easily and the book is done. Elton John wrote Your Song. I wrote this scrapbook, and all the time it was focused on one person: the me that I became while I was life ´s avid student.





The road untaken




Entry 89 for the Colonel´s Scrapbook

Birthdates which occurred on your SELECTED date of March 17:
1473 James IV king of Scotland (1488-1513)was so unlucky as to be killed on the battlefield of Flodden leaving 4 bastards behind and among his legitimate kids the useless James V
1787 George Simon Ohm physicist (discovered Ohm's Law), thanks Georgie
1834 Gottlieb Daimler Germany, engineer/inventor/auto pioneer-designed 1st motorcycle, and since then so many people have ended splat
Deaths which occurred on March 17:
0180 Antonius Marcus Aurelius [Marcus Verus], Emperor of Rome, dies at 58, of dysentery ,unlike Vespasian who died on foot despite having loose bowels, he died in bed and not poisoned by his not biological son Commodus0461 St Patrick patron St of Ireland, dies in Saul (according to legend), what a lovely saint
0432 St Patrick, a bishop, is carried off to Ireland as a slave, for his benefit and that of the Emerald Isle
1836 Texas abolishes slavery, legally…but is it real?
1960 Eisenhower forms anti-Castro-exile army under the CIA, old squirrel hater couldn´t do without barking orders, maybe to vent out his frustration over his impotency and his frustrated love for Kay Summersby

WRONG TURN
The driver who was behind the wheel of the car which took Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his beloved morganatic wife through the streets of Sarajevo took a wrong turn and delivered these people to the gun of Gavrilo Princip, the TB-ridden patriot who dreamt of a free Serbia. Some wrong turns are not as drastic, though.You can always unwalk the path and get back to the main artery of your life. All of you know that I am not religious. Today is Saint Patrick´s Day and green Ireland is afeast.On a day like today he was abducted to be taken as slave to Ireland. Had he stayed in his native isle, would he had become the formidable, honest to god saint he became? He converted the Emerald Isle to Christianity pushing aside the Druid religion, and supposedly got all snakes to leave Ireland.Was he aware of the steps that would guide him when he was abducted? He was barely over childhood, and out he went into the world, not exactly by choice.
Choice. Women have less choices, perhaps because of the double standard. If a man sacrifices his family to duty he is a patriot. If we women do it we are heartless egotistical bitches in search for crazy glorification. My uniform is in the closet, peeping at me, the stars twinkling on it. Have I ever been out of it, even when I don ´t officially wear it? I can´t imagine if there really is a choice once you get so far in life. Once I read Virginia Woolf´s short tale Solid Objects. A guy leaving all he had for something supposedly meaningless for everyone but himself. Some things wil never make sense to everyone at the same time. If you are running after freedom on a wild goose chase, running wild, dropping things on the way while the finicky quetzal of freedom flies into a tree, lands at a pool of desire, winks at you…how much do you have to shed to fly like it? Once obtained, the bird is just a sad creature. Heart pulsing like mad under fear, trembling, a fistful of feathers, clinging hopefully to life, begging for one more minute of life, asking you to spare him from beady eyes. It has lost its charm because freedom that is attained only to seek for a new type of slavery is worthless. No parakeet wishes to change cages, it longs for the jungle only. That is what I have always meant, and the bird is bird with or without feathers of whatever colors it may be. What I´m trying to say is that with or without military uniform the same discipline is there, the same sense of following my own code of Bushido One of my friends, now retired, says that you can leave the army but the army inside never leaves you alone.
Patrick comes to me again. Not in the religious sense, because I don’t believe in that kind of sainthood. The man who was Pat, the tall and burly redheaded who always had a jovial smile. I have a little chat with the historical Patrick. He would tell me nobody leaves all for all if all is relative. He´s about to smack my bottom and say that woman, that was a mess but it is easily arrangeable. I can still retake my path. He will laugh and comment that I painted myself into a stupid corner. Risking all for chimeras isn´t only stupidity, it is suicide. He would remind me that another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, would say, centuries after Patrick lived, that innocence is a fragile blossom and if you touch it the bloom is gone. Virtual is a delicate blossom and reality when it touches it wilts it off, is my version. I´m back in my old office, the air conditioner hums softly. But these are only the trappings, the physical skins of power or what we think is power. We have access to our dreams by what we sacrifice for them in reality. But dreams come in two versions, sweet ones and nightmares. Nothing is worth making sacrifices for nightmares. Remember how they make us scream. Words have a way of developing iridescent curves when we see them on a screen. Real concepts don ´t temptingly snake a belly dance for us. They are solid and concrete and have seven seals on their bent backs.
No, I can unwind my wrong turn. In fact I just did today. Was green-clad, redheaded handsome Pat there? Probably, as well as all the living dybbuks of my Jewish past and a few hand picked jinns from Muslim legend that my ancestress Fatma Osmanli took in her bags when she married my French ancestor? Somehow many people long to go back to the womb. A sense of welcome comfort engulfs me. My Pikachu glucometer on my desk, my Taz cushion. The iced tea, Lipton, already foaming in its pitcher in the small fridge. I take my Jungle boots off and doze off. Dreamlessly I wade through unconsciousness, until I wake up again and realize it is reality. I have just exited a murky swamp of confusion. My next class is in three minutes .I don ´t have to apologize for being me or having no time. Like Lot´s wife I want to turn around, but my computer screen confirms me I am ok.The image of my long dead ocelot floats on the screen and a smile suddenly has no choice but to explode upon my face...