Carole Maso Reading

For my event, I attended the reading of Carole Maso. As I left the event, I remember thinking that I had nothing to write about because I could not see the purpose of the readings and I thought that my notes were vague and useless. When looked at my notes and read the lines from the readings that I had managed to write down, I saw a clear connection between all of the works and the Year of the City. The event began with an introduction in which we were told about the type of writing that Carole does. She is a professor of English at Brown University and she combines poetry, essays and fiction in all of her works, which makes her works unique. Some of the works that she read were about war, pain and suffering and they provided a new perspective on coping with problems that we face everyday.
Carole first read “Mothering During Wartime” which was about, as the name implies, a mother dealing with the stress of parenting during the Iraq war. What surprised me the most from the poem was when the daughter says, “we are meant to dig in the Earth, we are meant to find our way.” While the bombs are blasting, glass is shattering everywhere and homes are being destroyed; this little girl says something very inspiring. It tells us to go on in spite of the hardships that we face everyday. Life is about the being able to find our way through difficult times, because the difficulties make life important and valuable. The excerpt from “Young H Saved From Infamy,” had a similar message. A lot of the excerpt was about H who was a great artist and attended a well-known art school and through his experiences there he learns to be more humble and that “the pursuit of power destroys love.” But similar to the previous work that Carole read, the main character of this story is faced with difficulties with his violent father and ill mother, but he learns that he was saved for something greater and that he must go on to achieve his purpose in life. From that we learn that everyone has a greater purpose in life that they might not know of or may not understand, but we must not give up. We have to strive to achieve our ultimate goal or purpose. The last work that she read to us was called “Intersession of the Saints,” which was a humorous look at the same issue as the previous work. I felt that the main idea of that work was in the line “there is always hope, there is always love.” It goes along with the idea that there is always something in life to look forward to in despite the difficult times we should always look forward to the positive things in our life.
Carole ended the event talking about what she views cities as today. She is from New Jersey and spent a great deal of her life in New York, and was deeply hurt by the events of September 11th. She says that she has noticed that cities today seem more vulnerable and fragile than they were before the attacks. Carole talked about a picture that she saw of a saint holding a city in his hand, and she said like him she wished to hold all of the cities in her hand. She told us about an air traffic controller who watched the planes go into the World Trade Centers and he said that as he watched on the television screen he wanted to take the plane off the screen and into his hands to prevent the destruction that it was about to cause.
This event was very touching and showed us a different way to look at life. The Year of the City asks us to connect with Baltimore through its past and present. Everyday we see the inhabitants of Baltimore facing hardships and we watch as they continue to struggle knowing that a new day will come and they will always have that to look forward to, if nothing else. Like Carole wishes to, we should take Baltimore into our hands and make a difference in the life of people who matter. By taking things into our hands we can stop the suffering of the people that live in the city. This event also showed us that we have a greater purpose in life even though we may not understand what it is, and we should always move forward in life even when faced with hardships.