Welcome to English Teacher Weekly! This week’s edition comes to you from 30,000 feet above the middle of America, my first time using a wireless connection on a plane. What a time to be alive!
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Salut!
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
Farewell Alice Munro
Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning short story writer, died this past week. She is Canada’s only Nobel recipient for literature (unless you count Saul Bellow, but he became an American citizen in 1941).
Here is fellow Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s tribute to her in the NYT:
Fiction writers are people, supposedly, who have things to say; they must, because they are so good with words. So people are always asking them: Can you say something about this or about this? But the art of hearing the voice of a fictional person or sensing a fictional world or working for years on some unfathomable creation is, in fact, the opposite of saying something with the opinionated and knowledgeable part of one’s mind. It is rather the humble craft of putting your opinions and ego aside and letting something be said through you.
Ms. Munro held to this division and never let the vanity that can come with being good with words persuade her to put her words just everywhere, in every possible way. Here was the best example in the world — in Canada, my own land — of someone who seemed to abide by classical artistic values in her choices as a person and in her choices on the page. I felt quietly reassured knowing that a hundred kilometers down the road was Alice Munro.
LitHub has collected “25 Alice Munro Stories You Can Read Online.” If their links don’t allow you access, pasting them into archive.is is bound to do the trick.
And Lorrie Moore offers this assessment of her work for The Atlantic:
Her stories were radically structured—built like avant-garde sculpture. In this way, she completely revolutionized the short story, pulling it away from conventional form altogether. She understood that life was layered, that stretches of time did not neaten themselves out into a convenient linear shape but piled themselves up in layers that were sometimes translucent and contained revisions of thought and opinion, like a palimpsest. These layers seemed to have access to one another. This nonlinear way of course mimics the mind and memory and how life is bewilderingly lived and then recalled. She embraced Chekhov’s movement away from the judgmental finish and built on it, supplying similar narrative oxygen to the lives of North American girls and women. Because the story genre is end-oriented—one must stick the landing—she brought this power to her open endings as well, which were sometimes torn from the middle of the story and thrown down like a beating heart on an altar.
But far and away the best tribute to Munro I’ve seen is this compilation of comedian Norm MacDonald’s tweets in praise of his fellow Canadian writer. As he says, “Munro stands alone.” After Munro won the Nobel, author Brett Easton Ellis made a few degrading remarks on Twitter about her writing. MacDonald was quick to jump to his favorite writer’s defense—“If you gave only one monkey one type writer for one year, he would write a better book than Brett Easton Ellis. … He makes Alice Munro look like Alice Munro.” Classic Norm humor.
The Horror to End All Horrors
Last month, the Theopolis Institute hosted a series of essays of Christian responses to the horror genre of film and literature.
Justin Lee’s essay begins the conversation with a wide-ranging defense of the genre within the world of a healthy Christian imagination. His argument begins with this set of theses:
Horror, as emotion and event, is intrinsic to the human condition and therefore worthy of concentrated artistic expression.
Tragedy is so essential a genre that the gospel cannot be articulated without its foil; and many of the best horror stories function as tragedy on steroids for modern audiences with deadened moral senses. Even more than tragedy, horror destabilizes the “I” of the subject through a radical confrontation with the Other—and with otherness as such—that reveals the Other as the very ground of one’s subjectivity. The ethical implications are profound, and the experience can operate as praeparatio evangelium.
All true art is incarnational, but this is especially true of horror, whose effects require a special fidelity to representing reality.
Horror provides an entry into comprehending the paradox of the Incarnation, what John Milbank and others have described as “The Monstrosity of Christ.”
Horror, although colored by the Fall, is the necessary and proper disposition of the rational mind of the finite human creature as it stands before the immensity of the Creator. We will even experience horror in heaven—as ecstasy.
Six different authors offer their response to Lee’s opening essay, all taking a unique stance on the issue. Here’s a bit of Sebastian Milbanks’s response to Lee’s insistence that horror can help awaken our numbed sensibilities toward evil and the spiritual world:
One line, especially, stood out from Lee’s piece to me as objectionable: “The intensification of horror preserves the ethical effects of tragedy for audiences whose moral nerve-endings have been deadened by secularization and non-stop postmodern diversions.” Isn’t part of the reason that modern audiences are so “deadened” to finding deeper moral and spiritual truths in art precisely because they are desensitised by the sex, violence, profanity and cynicism that pervades so much of modern culture? Is the solution to a person deafened by a loud noise, or dazzled by a bright light to blast loud music at them and shine a torch in their eyes? Or do we put them in a quiet, dark room to recover?
Compare this to Flannery O’Connor’s famous sentiment from Mystery and Manners:
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Free as a Tree in a Forest
My colleague
offers this thought on the way we talk about the freedom that comes with high school graduation:…what we ought to emphasize in this season is not so much the advent of freedom itself as the necessity of choosing well with the freedom that you have. What we ought to tell our graduating seniors is not that “congratulations, now you are free to go anywhere!” but that “congratulations, now you are free to live well!” Because anyone can make a choice. There’s nothing particularly worth celebrating about merely having freedom. What’s worth celebrating is freedom well-used.
So what then is freedom well-used? What is the freedom worth celebrating? As I’ve been describing, in graduation season we seem to most often emphasize the freedom to go, Dr. Seuss-style. The emphasis is on movement, on novelty, on the chance to spend some time here, then spend some time there, and then some time somewhere else because now you can, darn it! And to be clear, it can be really good to go. Many of my students are leaving their hometown for colleges all over the country in exciting and interesting places, and this going has the opportunity to be an adventure that stretches and deepens them in all kinds of significant ways.
But there is one thing that you can’t do when you’re on the go: you can’t grow roots. I quoted the two passages of scripture at the beginning of this piece as an opportunity to highlight the fact that the Biblical mind seems to see some overlap between people and trees (Bibleproject has a whole series that touches on this, if you’re interested), and as the Psalmist points out, one of the most significant ways in which people are like trees is that we need to be planted and nourished. How is the righteous man in Psalm 1 blessed? He is “planted by streams of water”; that is why his “leaf does not wither”. He is healthy because he is rooted.
I think this Psalm is a picture of freedom well-used; the freedom to grow.
A River Runs Through It
likes to begin his summers by rereading Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It. We would be wise to follow his lead. The start of summer certainly merits an inaugural ritual that has some weight behind it.Every time I reread the novella I am further convinced of its accomplishment. There are a number of things that come together, and if any of them were missing or out of proportion, it would still be good. But it is not good. It is masterful.
A River Runs Through It is a requiem, deeply intimate, composed by a writer who marries subject and style with a naturalness only achieved by refined taste and maturity.
Investing in Mentors
makes the case for schools to deepen their investment in teacher mentoring:Early-career educators know the technical aspects of how to teach, plan, document, and so on. They do not know how to live the life of teachers. They need experienced voices to affirm them, share resources, and remind them that teaching is a long game that takes time to master. Veteran educators need something to believe in. We are weary of unfulfilled promises, systemic deadness, and a revolving door of building leaders. We have all this experience and knowledge and nowhere to put it. We can encourage each other, sustain each other, and celebrate each other.
Summer Movie Recommendations
A few movies for the slower pace of summer:
That They May Face the Rising Sun recommended by
—“powerful, still, calm: a confident piece of film-making, a rarity in the frenetic medium which is so much modern cinema.”A Taste of Things—From The Nightly’s review: “It’s a breathtakingly sumptuous film that impresses with both its lowkey but pulsing romance and its truly delectable commitment to gastronomic passions. Do not, we repeat, do not, go to The Taste of Things on an empty stomach.”
Megapolis—Francis Ford Coppola’s new epic. From The Vulture’s review “Megalopolis is a work of Absolute Madness”:
There is nothing in Megalopolis that feels like something out of a “normal” movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular. The characters speak in archaic phrases and words, mixing shards of Shakespeare, Ovid, and at one point straight-up Latin. Some characters speak in rhyme, others just in high-minded prose that feels like maybe it should be in verse. At one point, Adam Driver does the entire “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. Why? I’m not exactly sure. But it sure sounds good.
I’m here for it.
Perfect Days—recommended here by Alan Jacobs. Richard Brody, the longtime New Yorker critic, did not like the movie—which is a near guarantee that you will enjoy it. As Jacobs says in his review, “I just don’t think Brody likes movies enough to review them for a living.” I agree.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
From The New Statesman: Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, the new limited series Ripley is receiving good reviews, but Ryan Ruby’s isn’t among them.
For
’s series “Poems as Teachers,” Pádraig Ó Tuama reads and discusses Wisława Szymborska’s “A Word on Statistics”Penny Kittle’s 5 minute writing conference with one of her students
Look out ladies! Throw that Axe Body Spray in the dumpster. Teen boys are really getting into luxury colognes. From the NYT: “The scent Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier has ‘a really good honey note,’ said Luke Benson, a 14-year-old who lives in Orlando, Fla. Tom Ford Noir Extreme, on the other hand, is ‘a lot spicier and a little bit darker.’”
From Christian Scholars Review: Perry L. Glanzer and Lesa Stern surveyed public speaking courses at Christian universities and didn’t find much Christian about them.
For the
newsletter, Haley Larsen takes readers into the art of close reading, sentence by sentence. This is a good example of her work as she slowly analyzes a paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.- ’s introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’m looking forward to following this series over the summer.
The Atlantic’s summer reading guide—25 recommended books for the season
Thank you for the "Poems as Teachers" link! I'm looking forward to diving into that.
Much appreciate that take on horror. Also, there is surely nothing else like A River Runs Through It. time to pick that one up again myself, methinks.