English Teacher Weekly for April 10th

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Apr 10, 2024

Welcome to English Teacher Weekly!

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural Illuminate Conference at Southern Adventist University. My judgement? A highly successful proof of concept, and I hope that this is the first of many Illuminates to come. With speakers such as Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, Andrew Peterson, and Karen Swallow Prior the whole thing was catnip for ETW-minded folks. One of my favorite sessions was led by artist Ned Bustard who gave us a virtual tour of his art gallery, Square Halo Gallery, in Lancaster, PA. Inspiring stuff!

Your help in sharing ETW goes a long way. Thanks for your partnership in this project! Enjoy this week’s edition.

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THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Need a reset? A vibe shift? Why not check out Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 hippie tribute to St. Francis, Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Featuring a soundtrack by Donovan and copious amounts of young St. Francis running around in beautiful Italian fields, what’s not to like? (And it’s free on Hoopla!)

Totality

I don’t want to rub it in, but if you experienced Monday’s eclipse outside of the path of totality like I did, you may be wondering what the big fuss is about. Annie Dillard’s classic 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” is the best description I’ve found about the difference between a partial eclipse and a total one:

I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.

The Eclipse and the Brakha

In the Jewish Review of Books, Jack Zaientz lays out the centuries-old debate among Jewish religious leaders regarding whether witnessing an eclipse should prompt a blessing (in Hebrew, brakha) from the devout or not. You see, the Talmud considers the darkening of the sun to be a curse—and you shouldn’t bless curses. Then again, there are blessings assigned to a whole array of natural phenomenon. Why exclude this one?

Here’s part of the discussion:

Meanwhile, in his essay “Solar Eclipse: To Bless or Not to Bless,” Rabbi Dov Linzer, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, acknowledges many of the issues that Rabbi Broyde brings up, but expands the argument. He writes:
What does it mean when our religious impulse to praise God and see God in the world is not able to find expression in halakhic forms, such as the recitation of brakhot? Does this not run the risk of making halakhah an experience only of following rules…and not a vehicle to express and experience ahavat Hashem [the love of God]?
He concludes by arguing one should express awe and amazement at an eclipse by making the brakha of Oseh Maaseh Bereshit—the blessing on the creation of the world: Baruch Atta Adonay Elokeinu Melekh Ha-Olam Oseh Maaseh Bereshit—Blessed are you Lord our God, Ruler of the universe who makes the world of Creation. In doing this, Rabbi Linzer spins the spiritual aspects of the solar eclipse in a new direction. It is a new opportunity for reverence and wonder.

Frost’s Acquaintance with the Darkness

For Robert Frost’s 150th birthday, Ed Simon offers this reevaluation of his work: “If you read Frost for the snow, but don’t feel the cold, then you’re not really reading Frost.” He may be the darkest poet in American letters. Even “The Road Not Taken” is far closer to strange, deep regret than to nonconformist resolution.

From The Hedgehog Review:

“I cannot rub the strangeness from my sleep”—1914. “‘Don’t let him cut my hand off… Don’t let him, sister!’”—1916. “Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice”—1923. “A voice said, Look me in the stars / And tell me truly, men of earth, / If all the soul-and-body scars / Were not too much to pay for birth”—1942. Then there is his mea culpa from a 1928 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review—“I have been one acquainted with the night.”
There is no supernatural terror in Frost’s poetry, he’s far too mature for that. What animates Frost’s darkness is precisely the same thing which many of his most fervent public readers superficially perseverate on, and that’s his abiding sense of realism. He is nothing if not a pragmatic poet … and it’s life itself, in all of its undeniable finitude, that supplies the poet’s most potent fears. The moral universe of a Frost poem might include the arbitrariness of life, the continual threat of accident, the singularity of the isolated soul, and always our trepidation toward the grave. Death alone—in the finality of its extinctions and its infinite blackness—is far more horrifying than any chimera dreamt up in weird fiction. The Yankee poet has murdered the Puritan God, and then must live with the aftermath—our condition now as silent as fresh snow lightly falling on a field, as dark as the woods two hours after midnight.

The Shield of Achilles

Alan Jacobs was recently interviewed by Phil Christman about the new critical edition of W.H. Auden’s Shield of Achilles, first published in 1952. The publisher calls it Auden’s “most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry.” Jacobs is the new edition’s editor.

In their interview, Jacobs makes an observation about the famous scene from Homer’s Iliad, where Achilles and Hector face each other. Achilles is bearing the wondrous shield made by Hephaestus, depicting a whole host of scenes from human life—marriage, agriculture, war, and dance. Hector is wearing Achilles’ own armor, stripped from the body of Patroclus, who wore it to inspire his fellow warriors in battle.

But there’s one more thing here: in the Greek conception of the agon (struggle) the opponents confront not so much their enemies as themselves, and who sees the decorations on the shield? Not Achilles — it faces away from him. No, it’s Hector who sees it, and Hector is the one character in the whole poem who best understands what is lost in war, who most loves all the things that the Shield depicts. Conversely, what does Achilles see when he fights Hector? His own armor — the armor Hector stripped from Patroclus when he killed him. In their confrontation each man, then, sees himself, his own understanding of the world.

Here’s another piece on Auden, from Helen Rouner for Commonweal. Her basic thesis: “In Auden’s mature work, death conditions ritual: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. To anticipate meaning in the Christian tradition is also to anticipate death.”

Freud’s Last Session

J. C. Scharl finds a lot to like in the new film Freud’s Last Session, starring Anthony Hopkins as Freud and Matthew Goode as C. S. Lewis.

Too often, contemporary art offers a clear and easy answer. From the simpleminded faith claims of Christian films like God’s Not Dead to the trite progressive political screeds that fill Poetry Magazine, many artists have abandoned their calling to grapple with the whole of reality—all its contradictions and divisions. Freud’s Last Session, as I’ve said, is not a perfect film; nevertheless, it delivers a hearty antidote to this poison of an easy answer—and it shows that the struggle to grasp reality is worth it.

Most critics have not taken to the movie very well. Steve Davis, for the Austin Chronicle, calls it “a relatively bloodless tit-for-tat conversation that shoots sparks that rarely catch fire.” That said, the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a fairly high 73%.

How to Delay the Smartphone World

If you’re concerned about how the digital world is affecting your children, it can feel like a lonely battle. You’re going need a supportive community around you to fight the good fight.

Here is Melanie Hempe, writing for the After Babel SubStack:

When we join with just a few other like-minded families to lead our children down a different path, we can create a new norm where our kids don’t feel the same burning need for smartphones and social media to feel accepted. When raised with the loving support and shared resolve that comes from a community of like-minded families, teens can demonstrate an amazing ability to adapt quickly to a new set of expectations and develop a healthy new normal.

Getting it Wrong

From Daniel Engber’s tribute in The Atlantic to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author Thinking, Fast and Slow:

Daniel Kahneman was the world’s greatest scholar of how people get things wrong. And he was a great observer of his own mistakes. He declared his wrongness many times, on matters large and small, in public and in private. He was wrong, he said, about the work that had won the Nobel Prize. He wallowed in the state of having been mistaken; it became a topic for his lectures, a pedagogical ideal. Science has its vaunted self-corrective impulse, but even so, few working scientists—and fewer still of those who gain significant renown—will ever really cop to their mistakes. Kahneman never stopped admitting fault. He did it almost to a fault.

Tu Fu: Poet of the Tang Dynasty

A poem by Tu Fu, one of the greats of classical Chinese poetry:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

"Standing Alone" 

Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk.
Between river banks, two white gulls
 
laze wind-drifted. Fit for an easy kill,
to and fro, they follow contentment.
 
Grasses all frost-singed. Spiderwebs
still hung. Heaven’s loom of origins
 
tangling our human ways too, I stand
facing sorrow’s ten thousand sources.

Here is Brian Patrick Eha on the Tu Fu’s work, via The Poetry Foundation:

There is a radical openness to Tu Fu’s poems. Partly this is a matter of language and form: the minimal grammar of classical Chinese poetry (conjunctions are usually absent, as are pronouns) is such that each character arises like an atoll from an ocean of emptiness, bespeaking not only the apparent content of the poem in its unfolding sequence but also the mental state of the poet and, more profoundly, the cosmological conceptions underpinning his verse. Verbal economy in Tang poetry was prized. “It is not just open to silence,” argues the poet and translator David Hinton, who has written extensively on classical Chinese poetry. “It articulates silence.”

THE HYPERLINK GARDEN

A yearlong assignment that helps students deeply engage in contemporary poetry: The Poetry Blog Exchange from Susan Barber and Melissa Alter Smith
Via Marcus Luther—How about trying this “Peer annotation gallery walk” sequence for your classes? A great way to share authentic annotations and kickstart a discussion with any short text
J. C. Scharl’s new poetry collection Ponds is out. From the publisher: “Speaking in a variety of voices--from a young mother mourning her own mother to Penelope, wife of Ulysses, Persephone, and Theoderic the Ostrogoth--Ponds is a polyphonous meditation on loss and gain, activity and stillness, and the nature of God, both hidden and revealed.”
Jake from The Workbox shares his simple practice for quickening his memorization of scripture: the first letter method.
An epic guide for how and why to build a “book monastery” by School of the Unconformed
David Epstein has a great interview with Cal Newport, author of Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
For Plough: Philip D. Bunn’s review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book Reading Genesis—“Genesis becomes, in her treatment, a means of grappling with the continued reality of the image of God in man and the continued acknowledgement that life on this earth brings hardship, but a hardship of a productive and creative kind.”
“Is thinking unique to the human species?”—David Weinberger’s review of James D. Madden’s book Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism
A NYT literary allusions quiz: How many can you recognize? (Gift link)