Welcome to ETW, your weekly source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities. Take a look around and see what catches your eye. The week we’re headed to YouTube for a full-on extravaganza.
It’s Teacher Appreciation Week here in the States, so please consider this edition my note of appreciation to all the teachers out there, fighting the good fight. I hope you snag a gift card or two this week. Maybe grab a little treat from the break room. You earned it.
Looking for the right gift for a teacher in your life? Why not send him a gift subscription to ETW?
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
Poems for a Year-End Blessing
Some poems that offer a blessing of sorts at the close of a school year:
“Beannacht” by John O’Donohue
“Ithaka” by C. P. Cavafy
“Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limon
“A Psalm of Life” by H. W. Longfellow
“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith
“blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton
“A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto Rios
And one more, from Wendell Berry:
“The Real Work”
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Farewell Paul Auster
Brooklyn native Paul Auster died this past week.
Paul Auster will always have a special place in my heart for his New York Trilogy. It was the first book that my book club of 10+ years read together, and it was the perfect starting point for us—entertaining, profoundly chaotic, and worthy of a good, long discussion.
One work of Auster’s that I’ve wanted to read for a while now is his biography Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, but at nearly 800 pages long, I haven’t worked up the courage to start.
From novelist Jonathan Lethem’s tribute to to Auster in The Guardian:
I remember thinking last night about the array of the books I felt were Paul’s best and how, contrary to the tendency to think of writers as if they are athletes with one early flare who then are destined to disappoint, Paul’s lasting accomplishments are scattered early, middle and late. I remember then being certain again of something I already knew: that when a writer enters the past, their lesser efforts become instantly unimportant and we are able to see the masterworks as a constellation, glinting together, and nothing else matters.
Roger Bennet, of the Men in Blazers soccer program, was an Auster fan:
A gent who was literary Brooklyn personified. A romantic, warm, prolific, creative, chainsmoking novelist who was both hyper-local and globally revered. Auster was massive in France. His self-styled suave was very, very Left-Bank.
I met Paul a couple of times. He was one of those very open gents who made you feel like you had known each other forever, and were mid-conversation at very first meeting, which I loved, as one of his books is very central in my own life. In January 1979, Auster’s father Samuel, passed away, a moment which became the inspiration for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982. It has become a book that I routinely buy for any friend who loses their own parent. … A meditation on life, death, and memory, asking how much we really know of even those closest to us by blood, and how that shapes us. There is a line I love as it makes so clear how time is so immensely precious: “I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.”
One more on Auster. Here’s his incredible advice to young writers which is must-watch video: “Don’t be a writer. It is a terrible way to live your life. There is nothing to be gained from it but poverty, obscurity, and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means you are really are burning to do it, go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anyone.” Which is pretty much what I say to new American football fans who ask me if they should support Everton.
YouTube Extravaganza
For your consideration: four excellent videos harvested from the jungles of YouTube.
Tennyson, the Poet of Grief
Evan Puschak, aka The Nerdwriter, produces some of the best art explainer videos out there. Here is his profile of Alfred Tennyson, featuring an analysis of Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break.”
There are no Cheat Codes in Education
Anyone interested in the intersection of teaching and technology needs to listen to this talk by Dan Meyer (from the
SubStack). Presented at the ASU+GSV Summit, an education/technology gathering, Meyer does not mince words: “You are forgetting the value of what you know.” Much of his talk is a pointed critique of the mainstream edtech vendors peddling their AI wares. He does everything here but knock their display tables over.Here’s Meyer’s comments on the talk:
“…it might seem like my criticism is motivated by anger. It probably seems that way because I am angry. But my criticism is motivated much more by love—love of students and their ideas; love of math and its depth; love of teaching, a blend of relational and cognitive work that I have not found anywhere else in the world.”
Amen.
It’s important to remember as you watch this that he’s not at a Wendell Berry conference: he is in the lion’s den. Dan Meyer gets the ETW Medal for Courage.
A couple highlights:
My favorite line—“Sam Altman [OpenAI founder] would be devoured by the average middle school classroom. They would not find his bones.”
My favorite definition—“Teaching is inviting and developing student thinking.” Not bad!
Jerry Seinfeld: How to Write
We watched Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie, Unfrosted, this weekend. It’s as delightfully silly as you’d expect a movie about Pop-Tarts to be—a fun addition to the Seinfeld universe. Probably not for everybody. I thought the Mad Men spoof was brilliant.
I first heard Seinfeld talk about his obsession with Pop-Tarts over ten years ago in this interview for the NYT, wherein he breaks down his joke about the cardboardish breakfast treat. At this point he’d been workshopping this bit for over two years. As he says, “It’s a long time to spend on something that means absolutely nothing, but that’s what I do.”
Seinfeld, of course, is a giant in the comedy world, but his talent as a writer is what makes it all work.
’s post about this video (“Five Lessons on Writing From Jerry Seinfeld” ) is worth a read. I turned Rogers’s ideas into a mini-lesson slide show for my students which you can find here. The final slide is a brief clip of Seinfeld actually performing the Pop-Tart joke, but unfortunately I couldn’t find the whole bit online. And now, all these years later, a silly little joke has mutated into a feature length film. Who would have thought?!100 Years of Meisterstück
If you’re a Wes Anderson fan or a lover of high-quality writing utensils, this new ad for Montblanc is made to order. It features not one, but two slogans.
For the record, this is my favorite piece from this week’s edition. I couldn’t begin to explain why.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
The NYT Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000 (gift link)
Fintan O’Toole for the NYRB on the new production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People—Spielberg’s Jaws and Dr. Stockmann’s unsettling connections to fascism
Ethan Hawke on The Russell Moore Podcast talking about Flannery O’Connor and his new movie Wildcat
- has a review of the movie here—“Wildcat is a beautiful film. It is strange like its subject. It is true to Flannery’s fiction and her Catholic faith. It refrains from Hollywood-izing her story. It is a triumph.” (I just hope they get the Southern accents right.)
A 2014 article from Wired that I return to occasionally as a reminder for me and my students: “What's Up With That: Why It's So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos”
- on “The Cost of Reading Wendell Berry”—“It is painful, at times very painful, reading Wendell Berry. There you are, sitting down comfortably to read what you think will be a quaint and nostalgic treatise on the virtues of horse-drawn tools, when suddenly you are confronted with Mr. Berry forcing you to reconsider your relationship with speed, efficiency, and the fast-paced life.”
- ’s lovely tribute to poetry critic Helen Vendler, her teacher and friend for The Point Magazine—“It’s ridiculous even to point out that her example as a critic is daunting—but so, too, is her example as a kind and devoted teacher. Now, a poet and poetry teacher myself, I wanted to write a little about the kind of exemplar she was and is.”
From The Washington Post: “How a Connecticut middle school won the battle against cellphones”
- reviews two works of prose written by two of America’s greatest 20th century poets: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha
From Tyler Austin Harper for The Atlantic: A very interesting review of Percival Everett’s new novel James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim—“Everett wishes to kill the Black stock character, entrenched in American fiction and film, whom the director Spike Lee christened ‘the magical, mystical Negro.’”
- on what Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation means for English teachers. (Girdham’s newsletter is English teacher catnip.)
A great gift for any jazz aficionado: The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (and here’s Rollins depicted on a quilt, featured on this week’s cover of The New Yorker)
The Winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes (NPR for the journalism prizes) (Book Riot for the book prizes) The fiction prize goes to Night Watch by Jane Anne Phillips.
Thank you for the recommendation Andrew. Much appreciated.
And that poem by Mr. Berry on real work is excellent.
"The mind that is not baffled is not employed" - this is why I argue so strongly that AI content is not real art, prose etc. The mind is not baffled or engaged when producing this content. There is no sweating or labouring over words, no wrestling with an argument or colour palette.
Thanks Andrew. Happy to be 'catnip', a word which can be equally applied to ETW. Another pleasing issue!
Lovely to see Paul Henry too.