English Teacher Weekly for April 3rd
Happy Eastertide! And welcome to English Teacher Weekly.
April and May are the harvest months of the teaching calendar, where all that we’ve accomplished with our students reaches its final season. And while harvest time is worth celebrating, it’s also hard work. Fight the good fight, people!
If you are a new subscriber to ETW, welcome to the club! You don’t have to be an English teacher to find something new and illuminating here. I hope you do. For those of you sharing and recommending ETW, thank you! I really appreciate your help with this project.
Salut!
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
E. B. White’s Love of the World
, author of Quiet and champion of introverts everywhere, wrote this brief reflection on the work of E.B. White, the prolific New Yorker contributor and author of Charlotte’s Web. He was asked why he would write a book for children like Charlotte’s Web, and Cain was inspired by his answer: “All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” Do you have even a whit of surprise that E.B. White was a shy, gentle & very private man?
And then I ask you to remember, the next time you, or a beloved child, friend, pupil, etc., feels lesser-than for being this way, to remember that Charlotte’s Web would not, could not, exist, without beings like this.
Other creations, born of bolder, louder temperaments, would still be here, and these works are glorious too.
But we need the people who can infuse a world of soul into a Wilbur and a Charlotte.
We need the people who love the world, even as they feel safest between the covers of a book.
We need them now, more than ever.
Words, Words, Words
Amit Majmudar, for The New Criterion, has written one of the most unique essays on Shakespeare’s work that I’ve read in a long time. He focuses on the power of language and how fortunate we are today to share the Bard’s modern English as it marches toward its inevitable expiration, as any given language will do every thousand years.
We read Shakespeare a century before the midway point of our drifting, shifting language’s lifespan. These four-hundred-year-old plays, by this time next century, will be only half-intelligible even to the few who make time for them.
…
His stories—which, in many cases, have their own charm—may reincarnate in new forms, as they have already done in Charles Lamb’s retellings for Victorian children, or in forgettable Hollywood popularizations like She’s the Man or Get Over It.
Yet I have always felt that the story’s not the thing. Pace Hamlet, not even the play’s the thing. Hamlet the prince, Hamlet the play, the play within the play, the Ghost, Elsinore, Denmark, the great Globe itself: language was always the thing that all those other things were made of.
A blessing, then, that we are still close enough, for now, to know and love this writer in the original English.
Ralph Fiennes as Macbeth
A London production of Macbeth, starring Ralph Fiennes, will be making its only U.S. stop in Washington, D.C. starting April 9. It’s directed by Simon Godwin, who is also the artistic director of Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company.
From The Washington Post’s interview with Fiennes:
“Simon has this great thing where the cast have to write biographies of their characters,” Fiennes said of the rehearsal process. “And as it’s modern-day, I sort of said, ‘Well, he’s an intellectual army officer. He knows his philosophers. He reads his Nietzsche.’ I think there are those thinking military men who are well-read. That helped me go, ‘This is a man who can talk, who can have a moral conundrum.’”
He may play Macbeth as well-read, but Lady Macbeth’s egging him on, to kill the king, strikes Fiennes as a more primal challenge to the thane’s manhood. “I can see that if you’re deeply connected to a woman partner, who calls on you, on this, this is the final test of you as a man — this thing goes beyond your moral anxieties,” he said.
It’s great fun to listen to Fiennes wax scholarly about the character, and it helps explain why he is devoting the better part of a year to a “Macbeth” that plays to mere hundreds in barracks-like spaces. “I didn’t want to go into the West End, because it feels like a well-worn path,” he said. (The London run was staged in a warehouse outside the city’s center.) “I love being in a company — the thing of being in a group. I miss it when I do films. I miss that sense of community that you get in a stage production.”
Writing Easter Poetry
James Matthew Wilson, writing for Modern Age, examines how modern Christian poets continue the Psalmist tradition of meditative poetry and bring it to the Lenten season as well as to Eastertide. Passion poems should be a gateway to resurrection poems.
Wilson begins with T.S. Eliot, whose poems before his conversion summon up a spiritual emptiness by arranging fragmented allusions and images into a type of collage:
How could he “construct” a poem that did not merely look upon tragedy and despair but which provided “something / Upon which to rejoice”? The answer came in the form of the poem from which these words are quoted: Ash-Wednesday. The choice was inevitable. The season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday, marks a liturgical pilgrimage toward Christ’s resurrection and the joy of eternal life, but it begins in sober penitence, suffering, and self-denial. Along the way, it must pass through the tragedy of the cross and the tomb before emerging into the light.
By marking his conversion with a day that holds both tragedy and comedy, death and resurrection, still in prospect, Eliot found at least a partial solution to his quandary.
Critic Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024)
Farewell to poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, who died this past week at the age of 92. She made a career out of celebrating the weirder, wilder side of poetry—the experiments and the avant-garde. She wrote the first major criticism of Frank O’Hara and also translated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notebooks that he kept during the first World War.
She was a critic of the Western canon, but not for the usual reasons. Her concern was not that it left out people of color or of non-European heritage, but that it was an obstacle to the avant-garde; indeed, she could be withering in her criticism of works by non-Western authors that nevertheless replicated the tropes of canonical writing.
Professor Perloff was an advocate of close reading, or the word-by-word, line-by-line examination of a text, and of seeking beauty in literature, long after both concepts had become suspect in some academic circles for playing down the social and political contexts of a work.
“She definitely turned against the reigning mode of whom to read and how to write about them to expand the canon and look at more challenging experimental work,” Andrew Epstein, a professor of English at Florida State University, said in a phone interview.
Here you can find her archive of writing for The Times Literary Supplement—essays on Ben Lerner, Cy Twombly, and Robert Lowell, among many others.
Write in your Books
shares “5 Ways to Write in Books”—a study of famous thinkers taking advantage of a book’s margins. The first way she considers is the ancient art of symbol-making. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a good example. Here are his codes:
⦿ points out a profound or at least solid and judicious observation;
= signifies that the sentence or passage in a line with it contains majesty of conception or style;
|| signifies sublimity;
✖︎ brilliance or ingenuity;
Q signifies characteristic quaintness;
F, that it contains an error in fact or philosophy.
I’m going to start writing SUBLIME! in the margins of my books.
Samwise the Champion
The
“Middle-earth March Madness Champion” Bracket has officially crowned its 2024 winner. Samwise Gamgee defeated Sauron in the the final round to claim the title. (He also beat Gandalf in the Final Four round!) Here’s Tolkien’s thoughts on his best character in a 1944 letter to his son, as quoted in the post:Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit. Frodo is not so interesting, because he has to be highminded, and has (as it were) a vocation. The book will prob. end up with Sam. Frodo will naturally become too ennobled and rarefied by the achievement of the great Quest, and will pass West with all the great figures, but S. will settle down to the Shire and gardens and inns. C. Williams1 who is reading it all says the great thing that is that its centre is not in strife and war and heroism (though they are understood and depicted) but in freedom, peace, ordinary life, and good liking.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
From The New Yorker: Emma Green on the dramatic rise of the classical-education movement in the States and its growing connections to conservative politics—with a side trip to Kenya along the way. The piece is not as alarmist as I would have guessed.
Sufjan Stevens’s classic album Illinois has been adapted for a dance-musical adaptation
- for Fast Company:“Few brands are as celebrated for their design acumen as Apple. … From its hardware to its UX to its retail spaces, Apple has an astonishing track record of nailing the right look. Given all this: What exactly is the deal with the reaction glyphs in Apple iMessages?”
John Steinbeck would change pencils after three or four lines on the page to maintain a crisp line. Here is his son describing his process on the Blackwing Pencil Instagram account.
And for all the pencil-heads out there, this post at
is a must read. I knew that Thoreau’s family owned a pencil factory, but I wasn’t aware that Henry David himself made some significant improvements to the graphite composition in their pencils. A game changer for the market!And speaking of Thoreau, for the past few years, the Groves family has taken a “Power Down Week” at their farm, a week where they literally flip the breakers off at their house and have a very different form of staycation.
A cool throwback interview to the turn of the century: John C. Reilly and Phillip Seymour Hoffman on performing Sam Shepard’s True West on Broadway, trading parts every three nights.
April is National Poetry Month! Why not join NaPoWriMo a couple days late and write a poem a day for the rest of the cruelest month.
Or follow
and her SubStack version of NaPoWriMo. She has some good starting advice: “If you’re still feeling intimated or dubious about the whole ‘poem-a-day-for-30-days thing,’ think of it this way: you’re not writing a poem, you’re making a poem attempt.”Novelist Tommy Orange paid a visit to a Bronx high school classroom after AP Lit teacher Rick Ouimet reached out. From the NYT (gift link): “Of all the classroom visits he’s made since There There came out in 2018, the one at Millennium Art Academy earlier this month was, Orange said later, ‘the most intense connection I’ve ever experienced.’”
has a good interview with Jonathan Haidt here, but it looks like we’re all going to need to read his book, The Anxious Generation, in the very near future.And here’s Bari Weiss’s podcast interview with Haidt. She’s a good interviewer.
From
—A Book a Week for 10-Year-Old BoysFrom
—“What You Need to Know About Commas”You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a new poetry collection edited by Ada Limon comes out this month.
From the Practicing the Way podcast: Andy Crouch on building a communal Rule of Life
If you’re a teacher, why not enter this giveaway to win a vacation from Ramsey Solutions?
Sublime!
Reading Charlotte's Web as an adult is what made me want to write stories for kids.