English Teacher Weekly for June 26th
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities.
My family and I are still on the road this week, so this week’s edition will be somewhat abbreviated. We find ourselves along the Costa Brava for a few more days. The views are spectacular, the food is delicious, but my kids think the sand is too coarse. You need a finer grit for a proper sandcastle. Viviendo la vida.
Enjoy this week’s edition! I expect to return to my regular scheduling very soon.
Jane Eyre and Summer Reading
I had a lot of fun discussing Jane Eyre with
of the newsletter. We talk about a Christian rationale for reading, assigning summer reading for school, and how students respond to Jane and Rochester, et al. Check it out!
Looking for a good pairing with Jane Eyre? Try a few fairy tales. Read Grimm’s version of “Cinderella,” Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and maybe this version of “Beauty and the Beast.” Which seems the most Jane Eyre-ish? As far as I’m aware, “Bluebeard” is the only one of the three specifically alluded to in the novel, and it’s probably the weirdest of the lot.
Rowan Williams
From The NYT: A lovely interview with Rowan Williams about his Christian faith, unbelief, suffering, the Bible, and a lot more (gift link). Here he is on Dostoyevsky:
I suppose the other thing was Dostoyevsky’s absolutely relentless commitment to making it as difficult for himself as he possibly could. He says: You want the grounds for atheism? I’ll tell you the grounds for atheism. Let me lay out to you all the good reasons for not believing in God.
Of course, in the famous chapters in “The Brothers Karamazov” where Ivan Karamazov talks about the suffering of children, that’s Dostoyevsky saying: Let me show you. You think you have reason for not believing? I can show even better reasons for not believing. And pushing through that, saying: I’m not going to pretend it’s simpler than it is. And saying at the end of that: I’m not going to pretend to give you an answer. I’m going to give you the fact that love is possible in the middle of this.
The moment of reconciliation, of love, of forgiveness, of acceptance is as real as all the nightmares that he describes. Dostoyevsky, as it were, flings down his pen and says: Well, there you are. You make your choice. The world is full of evidence against love, against reconciliation, against the possibility of a God who holds the world.
The probabilities stack up in a fairly unpromising way, and then a moment happens where the light gets in, where something in the world refuses to be crushed by that.
“The concept that sits right at the heart of a sane and meaningful life, I’m increasingly convinced, is something like aliveness.”—Oliver Burkeman on “navigating by aliveness.” We often talk about literature as a way to learn about “what it means to be human,” but it may be more accurate to say that it simply makes us feel more alive.
Wendell Berry’s new novel will be published this October: Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story
From The Smithsonian: The semicolon may be endangered.
Here’s
on summer laziness and the work of French writer Françoise Sagan. I loved this quote he pulled from a Paris Review interview with Sagan:It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying “I’ve done this or that.” You need strong nerves to do nothing.
From 2018, the debut film of RaMell Ross, the director of The Nickel Boys. Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a documentary following the lives of two young men from Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years.
From The Paris Review, Jeremiah David on the Crew Change Guide, an underground publication for train hoppers and hobos.
That’s the primary purpose of a folk text: to pass from hand to hand the secret knowledge of the marginalized and the outcast. Many of our ancient scriptures, including parts of the Bible, would once have fit this description. You can’t buy such a book, can’t download it, can’t trace its often multiple authors. But if you run in the right circles, all you have to do is ask.
Vanity Fair covers the rise of Christianity as a socially acceptable, maybe even popular, religion in Silicon Valley. Things are getting wild: “People are so ready to make AGI their god… What we’re trying to do with events like this is give them an alternative.”
Hadley Freeman’s editorial for The Times London: The “ed tech” obsession in primary schools is poison for our children.
The New Statesman’s review of Hamlet/Hail to the Thief, the Shakespeare/Radiohead mashup performance at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
The ovation was tremendous but preceded by a hesitant silence. The audience had lost all its mirth and knew why; we had been transported from the hottest day of the year to the coldest night in literature. It is only a truly great artist who can bring out “that within which passeth show”. We were lucky to have enjoyed the work of not just one such artist, but two.
The NYT published their list of the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century, so far. I think the celebrity voters’ ballots are more interesting overall, always some surprising choices. (gift links)
I agree with you that Rochester reads as repentent. I love him so much! Do you have a favorite film adaptation of Jane Eyre? (Mine is the Ruth Wilson/Toby Stephens one. So so good!)