Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.
The July editions of ETW slow down a little bit. It’s the heat. Our ceiling fan on our porch where I work is only capable of summoning the lightest of breezes. It’s not Christian. I hope you’ll find plenty to enjoy in this week’s edition, but you’ll notice a little less commentary and content.
Your Invitation to the Summer Sizzler
There’s still time to contribute to the Summer Sizzler—ETW’s inaugural call for reader contributions. Here is the prompt and directions. Have some fun with it. If you hoped to do a little writing this summer, consider this Fortune knocking at your door. The deadline is July 4th, but if you need more time, that’s ok. Just let me know. We’re looking for writing in your own voice, of your own mind, for our ETW readers.
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
Melville and Hawthorne
This recent post about Moby Dick from
has everything a Melville fan wants—the weirdness, the history, and a close look at Melville’s friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne.Here is Melville in a letter to Hawthorne from 1851:
…If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert,—then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us,—when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity. Then shall songs be composed as when wars are over; humorous, comic songs,—”Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the world,” or, “Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,” or, “Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight”—yes, let us look forward to such things. Let us swear that, though now we sweat, yet it is because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the champagne hereafter….
I’m sure many teachers of American lit will agree with
here:In school I learned to call Hawthorne and Melville the Anti-Transcendentalists. But if the Transcendentalists were many and had their communal farm and whatever, Hawthorne and Melville had only each other. (A more knowledgeable buddy of mine once said: transcendentalism was a movement. Anti-transcendentalism was just two guys.)
Sounds about right to me.
Pablo Neruda’s house on Isla Negra
The Rise of the Independent Outdoors Magazine
The NYT reports on the rising trend of high-end, print-only publications covering niche markets. The most prominent new wave is coming from the outdoors and adventure scenes:
There are sprouts of life, even profitability, on the landscape of print media and magazines, cratered by the pixilated bombardment of the digital age. High-end niche periodicals are popping up, but the trend might be most evident in a burst of small-batch, independent outdoors magazines like Adventure Journal, Mountain Gazette, Summit Journal and Ori. They are crowding into quiet spaces of narrow lanes — climbing, surfing, skiing, running and the like — where quality is key, advertising is minimal and subscribers are faithful. Most do not put their content online; this is journalism meant to be thumbed through, not swiped past.
From Chronicle of a Summer, 1961
Black Libraries in Harlem and Beyond
In the 1920s the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library became a pioneering space for Black patrons and writers, hosting the “first public collection dedicated to Black materials.” This NYT article profiles the revolutionary work of those first Black librarians in New York and across the country (Gift Link).
Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections
Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of philosopher Charles Taylor’s new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.
Taylor’s new book is formidably chewy, with page after page featuring passages of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rilke, offered both in the original German and in translation. Long analyses of T. S. Eliot and Milosz arrive, too. But, though Taylor’s subjects are often severely abstract, his sentences are lucid, even charmingly direct, and his purpose is plain. We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the modern world the Enlightenment produced—one of fragmented belief and broken purposes, where no God superintends the cosmos, common agreement on meaning is no longer possible, and all you can do with the moon is measure it. “I admire the moon as a moon, just a moon,” Lorenz Hart sighed, with memorable modernity, adding, significantly, “Nobody’s heart belongs to me today.” Enlightened, we are alone.
At age ninety-two, the book “may be the most ambitious work ever written by a major thinker at such an advanced age.”
Pitchfork and the Evolution of Music Criticism
From
’s piece “How Music Criticism Has Changed” wherein he analyzes over 20 years of writing from the famed music website Pitchfork, which was purchased by Condé Nast in 2015 and was “merged” with GQ Magazine earlier this year.His piece is a fascinating study of how writing about music has changed since the end of the last millennium.
The Caran D’ache Ballpoint Pen
Treat yourself this summer to a new writing utensil—Swiss-made, snappy, reliable, colorful. $20. ETW endorsed.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
Via
: The world’s best-selling album of 2020 was Map of the Soul: 7 by K-Pop sensation BTS. What’s wild is that the album is based on psychologist Carl Jung’s ideas as told in Murray Stein’s book Jung’s Map of the Soul.From IndieWire: “Portland-based [movie production company] Laika will explore a labyrinthian alternate reality in Piranesi, one of its upcoming stop-motion animated features, adapted from Susanna Clarke’s best-selling fantasy novel.” Laika is also producing Colin Meloy’s Wildwood for stop-motion film.
From
: 100 Famous Southern Books- ’s case for not sanitizing fairy tales
Looking for a new book group to join? Start with
’s incredibly helpful and comprehensive list of what’s available on SubStack.Here is
’s recent tribute to Peter H. Reynolds’s children’s book -Ish, the perfect inspiration to kickstart your creative work. I used this book every year in my creative writing classes along with Reynold’s other book The Dot, equally good.From Nautilus: the “ethical thicket” of issues when kids talk to machines
For LitHub, Alex Belth’s piece “The Art of Hanging Out”—on the Golden Age of the once great genre of the celebrity magazine profile
From the Institute of Labor Economics: How groups and gender affect our propensity to lie—“Our main findings are that (i) larger groups lie more, (ii) all-male groups stand out in their proclivity to lie, (iii) already the first female in a group causes a substantial shift towards more honest group behavior, and (iv) group behavior cannot be fully explained by members’ individual honesty preferences.”
From Becca Rothfeld’s Washington Post review of Elissa Gabbert’s new book: “Any Person Is the Only Self is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop. …She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity.”
- on the rise of the new religion of therapy culture: “Because where is God, in all this? Who is God? Some say therapy culture has no God. I think, more accurately, it’s us. God is who all this revolves around. All these apps and platforms serve us.”
For Christianity Today, Alex Sosler chooses “5 Underrated Books on Spiritual Formation,” including one of my favorites—Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection
- ’s collection of poems about honey. From Rilke: “We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
From McSweeney’s: “You’ve read your last free article, such is the nature of mortality.”
Thanks Andrew! I've added you to my recs.
This is great! As a fellow English teacher, it's nice to find another newsletter supporting our cause. Keep it up!