Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.
Happy Juneteenth! And, not only that, we are a few days away from the official start of summer for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.
A few housekeeping items:
Next week’s edition will be for paid subscribers. It’s my small, special thank you for those of y’all who keep this project running.
For the month of July, ETW will shift into our summer program. Same quality content, but a little less of it. July is a time to chill out as much as possible.
And finally, I’d like to invite you to contribute to ETW. This July, we will commence our inaugural Summer Sizzler Series1. I’m interested in hearing about your favorite ETW-flavored summer moments. Click here for the prompt and submission guidelines. It’s the perfect way to do a little creative writing this season.
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
The Battle for Attention and the Third Bird
Nathan Heller wrote this epic article for The New Yorker back in March, and I just got around to reading it. It’s titled “The Battle for Attention” and features a secret society of writers and artists fighting back against our poverty of attention. They call themselves The Order of the Third Bird.
The group coordinates flashmob-style events of “playful, insurgent, and anarchic forms of collective attention” in museums and public spaces. They don’t attempt to draw attention to themselves; instead, the Birds show up to attend to the art and the space that surrounds it.
Heller learned about the Order from Stevie Knauss, an ambassador for the group:
Knauss identified herself as an emissary affiliated with the Birds, and began to describe the way their actions worked. “The practice lasts twenty-eight minutes—four parts of seven minutes each,” she said. “The movement from one part to another is announced by a bell.”
Knauss told me that the Birds who were about to convene might not have met before. Actions were called in e-mails from alias accounts—she had heard about this one from “Wrybill Wrybillius”—with invitees’ names hidden. Any Bird could call an action; the Order was decentralized and ungoverned. Existing Birds invited new participants at their discretion, and, in this way, the Order slowly brought additional people into local chapters, known as volées. Nobody was sure how many Birds were in the world—New York City alone was home to several volées, overlapping to some degree—but there were believed to be hundreds. Actions had taken place as far afield as Korea, the Galápagos, and Kansas.
Knauss eyed some passersby. “The first seven-minute phase is known as Encounter,” she said. “I think of it as entering a party. First, you take a look around the scene.” On arriving at the action site, the Birds wander. The subject of an action is rarely, if ever, identified in advance, but usually it is the most desperate-looking work in sight. (“In a museum, it will be, like, the painting next to the bathroom or on the wall opposite the ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” Burnett told me.) The work is unnamed because the Birds are supposed to find it by paying attention. Those who don’t can follow the flock.
The Order of the Third Bird publishes a journal, supposedly run by the Esthetical Society for Transcendental and Applied Realization. It’s worth checking out.
Writing by Hand
From NPR, here’s a thoughtful article about the importance of handwriting and what students may lose as typing replaces handwriting in the early grades: “‘Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of,’ says Marieke Longcamp, a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.”
"There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.
Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could cause serious consequences in how we all learn and think.
The Week-long Walk and Talk
From Kevin Kelly via
: How to Walk and Talk: Everything We Know.A walk-and-talk is a moveable salon. A small group of people walk together for a week, having casual conversations side-byside during most of the day. In the evening the group sits down to an intense hours-long discussion centered on a daily chosen topic by those present. A moderator keeps the conversation on that day’s single topic to sharpen it and make it memorable.
To focus on conversations while walking, participants carry only day-packs, and eat locally prepared meals. The walks are not strenuous and to keep it even more inspiring, they take place in storied environments that are walker-friendly, such as footpaths in England, Japan, and Spain. By the end of the week, every person present has walked about 100 km and has had deep conversations with all the others.
Poetry and Wonder
riffs on Coleridge’s philosophy of poetry and how it can help us enrich a child-like sense of the wonder of existence:Wonder isn’t the mind’s final resting place. It cannot be permanently sustained. The mileage comes from what happens after a powerful aesthetic experience: the need, as Matthew Scott writes, “to answer its place in our emotional make-up with the act of critical reflection.”
This is where poetry proves an invaluable vehicle for cementing wonder.
We can’t always be looking at the Eiffel Tower, hearing a child’s laughter, or holding a letter by someone long dead. But the poem can capture these experiences and, through its various forms of enactment, deliver the almost-inarticulable stakes of human life, sending us back into our own lives prepared to do the work of reflection.
Wonder requires engagement, not passive observance. Coleridge writes that “we can only know by the act of becoming.” He echoes this self-actualization in The Lectures: “that sublime faculty, by which a great mind becomes that which it meditates on.”
The Masterpiece of our Time
Gary Saul Morson, in honor of the 50th anniversary of The Gulag Archipelago being translated into English, writes about why and how this book continues to be held in such universally high regard.
Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been “repressive,” but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: “I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!” “The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.” Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.
In 1965, Solzhenitsyn explains, “my archive was raided [by the secret police] and a novel impounded,” and thus he had to be especially careful with Gulag, since his notes for it mentioned the real names of his informants. In Russia, literature was not only persecuted but also dangerous, and not just to the writers. The fact that the book could not be published in the ussr and had to be smuggled abroad also marked the difference between the Russian and Western experiences. Russian literature was morally serious in a way American, British, and French literatures were not. The preening of Western intellectuals about social injustice began to look almost ridiculous by comparison.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
Another piece from Kevin Kelly: How to host a Jefferson Dinner—“The Rule: You must have a single conversation. You talk to the whole table and the whole table listens. The whole time. That’s 8 to 14 brains on one topic. It’s powerful and unique.”
From Alan Jacobs: Because students are “Self-Deceived Rational Utility Maximizers”—like most of us—you have to hold them accountable for doing the reading.
I just discovered Sister Wendy Beckett this week, the popular BBC art historian. Her television series were big hits in the UK throughout the ‘90s. For now, most are available on YouTube. I couldn’t turn away! Here she is disccussing Rothko’s work.
PowerPoint Nights from Cosmopolitan Magazine: “A PowerPoint night is a fun, stay-in-sweats activity that has been blowing up on TikTok for a while now. It occurs when friend groups and sorority sisters decide they wanna make presentations (particularly on topics that usually would not get covered in a class). They're honestly pretty exciting and hilarious.”
- ponders the art of revision via poet Dana Gioia and philosopher René Girard: “The whole trick, it seems to me now, is to get to the point where the dread of being seen gives way to actual hunger for competent feedback, even if it blows up something you thought was working.”
Pope Francis’s message to the gathering of comedians at the Vatican last week: “Remember this: when you manage to draw knowing smiles from the lips of even one spectator, you also make God smile.”
In other Papal news, the Pope attended the G7 conference to discuss the future of AI. He is the first religious leader to ever attend the G7. The Pope’s leading advisor on AI is Franciscan friar Paolo Benanti. The NYT profiled him back in February.
Fairy Tales as the Music of the Spheres: Jonathan Pageau at 2024 National Symposium for Classical Education
From Venessa Veselka at the defunct but still online The American Reader: “The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters”
Esquire interviews Zach Williams, author of the short story collection Beautiful Days, about his work and the significance of the short story form.
“How to Salvage Books from Flood Damage” from Orion Magazine
Via Lit Hub: Who would you bet is the most anthologized essayist of the past 25 years?
From Andrea Castellano and The Cult of Pedagogy: The Art of Annotation—how to guide readers of all ages to meaningfully annotate a text
Here are
’s ten “favourite, alternative recipe books for competent but confident man-cooks.”In honor of Father’s Day:
on the secrets behind the Dad Joke—“…the dad joke is sort of uncanny — it looks like a joke, but fails in being truly funny. If jokes make us laugh, dad jokes make us regret laughing.”
The “Summer Sizzler” is a drink that my dad created a few years ago. An easy recipe: In a tall glass filled with ice, add one part orange juice to three parts Vernor’s Ginger Soda. Enjoy.
The absolute best art history curriculum is purchasing a $5 used copy of Sister Wendy's 1,000 Masterpieces and giving kids total access. Not worrying about the book, but letting kids live with the images. So much becomes possible!