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This week’s edition is for paid subscribers—a small, special gift of thanks for helping keep the lights on at the ETW offices. We will return next week with the standard fully public offerings.
In this week’s edition:
Academic Joy: A journalist professor embraces the poets
Joan Acocella and the Case for Criticism
George Smiley: the Greatest Spy in Literature?
Frederick Buechner tells the Truth
The Resurrection of the Bawdy with Rabelais and J. C. Scharl
Echoes of Eden in Wuthering Heights
Lessons from George Herbert
Book inscriptions as hidden treasures
And a whole Hyperlink Garden of interesting bits of literature, humanities, and Christian thought!
(Please excuse this week’s lack of editorial polish. My better half and ETW’s Editor-in-Chief is out of town this week.)
THE COLLECTION
Academic Joy
Journalism professor Robert Jensen recently shared his “philosophy of teaching statement” from 2012 at The Front Porch Republic. Writing these kinds of statements can be akin to burying your soul in the graveyard of bureaucracy, but Jensen found a way to infuse the genre some vitality. Although he teaches journalism, he doesn’t shy away from the poets. He begins his statement with a little Mary Oliver riff:
After years of research, I have developed a three-stage teaching method that breaks new ground in pedagogical theory: Stage 1: Pay attention. Stage 2: Be astonished. Stage 3: Tell about it.
Ok Jensen, I’ll bite! He’s learned over the years that, while he considers himself a good teacher, he has become “less sure why that might be the case.” A refreshing dose of humor and humility. He has begun to acquire—and even embrace— the ambiguity inherent in the profession:
Time for a closing metaphor, this time borrowed from Wendell Berry’s poem, “To Know the Dark”:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.We are the best teachers when we aren’t afraid of the dark. When I began teaching, I went into the dark with the biggest flashlight I could find. That light allowed me to see many things, but the intensity of the beam obscured other things, those traveling in the shadows. That light allowed me to feel smart, but these days I am less reassured by being smart. The older I get, the more I realize that being smart isn’t going to get us all the way home.
So these days I carry a smaller flashlight, and I turn it off as often as I can muster the courage. My best teaching is when I go dark.
Make it dark. Or darker.
Joan Acocella and the Case for Criticism
In a recent episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the role of professional criticism in culture today, at a time when local journalism and fine arts budgets are in crisis. (Not to mention that algorithmic taste-making is a trillion dollar industry.)
The trio makes the case that the essential starting point for the professional critic is a love of life—the belief that the world is worth investing in and that one can learn to enjoy it more fully with some wise discernment. Good criticism is not about gate-keeping; it’s about gate-opening. Or, more specifically, it’s about announcing the existence of previously unknown, wide-open gates.
Much of the episode is a tribute to dance critic Joan Acocella, who died on January 7th. Here is Schwartz on Acocella’s writing, from her tribute to her in The New Yorker:
On the page, her fabulous erudition was melded to a frankness that was so unaffected as to seem effortless. Actually—a very Joan word—simplicity is hard work, and Joan worked hard. She wrote her drafts in longhand and sent page proofs by fax. She liked her diction blunt, earthy, threaded with startling touches of beauty.
And here’s a classic example of her beautiful style that they reference in the episode. From a 1998 profile of Baryshnikov, the famous dancer:
I have never seen him so happy onstage, or so wild. (“He’s showing off!” said Lisa Rinehart, who was sitting next to me.) He gave them the double barrel turns, he gave them the triple pirouettes in attitude (and then he switched to the other leg and did two more). He rose like a piston; he landed like a lark. He took off like Jerry Lee Lewis; he finished like Jane Austen. From ledge to ledge of the dance he leapt, surefooted, unmindful, a man in love. The audience knew what they were seeing. The air in the theatre thickened almost visibly. Even the members of the orchestra, though their backs were to him, seemed to understand that something unusual was happening. Out of the pit, the beautiful introduction to Pergolesi’s “Adriano in Siria” rose like a wave, and he rode it to the finish. By that time, we actually wanted him to stop, so that we could figure out what had happened to us. Latvians, I was told by the locals, almost never give standing ovations. And they never yell “Bravo!” in the theatre; they consider that vulgar. But they yelled “Bravo!” for him, and everyone stood, including the President of the Republic.
And here’s one of my favorite passages from Acocella, from her essay on the book of Job, from 2013:
God’s speech slaughters the moral, the what-should-be, nature of the rest of the Book of Job. It is the knife flash, the leap, the teeth. And despite, or because of, its remorselessness, it is electrifying. It is like an action movie, or a horror movie. Of course, Job is important in the story, but today he seems the pretext, the one who is like us, and makes the argument that we would make. As for God, he makes the argument that, at least as far as nature is concerned, is true.
Acocella’s last collection of essays will be published next month.
The Greatest Spy in Literature?
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