English Teacher Weekly for Oct. 10th
Roald Dahl, Lauren Groff, Quotation Marks, Hemingway's Cuba, Silence, Jon Fosse, Unconditional Positive Regard, and more!
Welcome to English Teacher Weekly, the 40th edition!
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Enjoy this week’s edition!
THE COLLECTION
Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl
Netflix is now streaming four short films adapted from Roald Dahl’s stories for grown-ups and directed by Wes Anderson. Of the four, my favorites are “The Swan” and “The Rat Catcher”
New Yorker film critic Richard Brody and I seem to have nearly the opposite taste in movies, but we agree on one thing at least: Wes Anderson is a treasure. These new shorts are staged in a refreshing, distinct way that plays to both Anderson’s strengths as a director and Dahl’s as a storyteller.
Here’s part of Brody’s review:
Anderson has long mastered the lesson that Godard delivered from “Breathless” onward: that viewers can remain deeply engaged in the events of a drama even while being pulled outside of that drama by fillips of form or fourth-wall-breaking winks and nods. Here he stands that notion on its head; he never breaks the framework of classically realistic drama because he never establishes it in the first place. It is not a question of characters breaking the action to address the camera but the reverse, and, for this reason, the direct address comes off as natural and central, and the acted-out drama as strange and supplementary.
And, of course, there are the stories: Dahl at his strangest—wildly clever, cruel, and funny—with moments of gleeful transcendence.
For a little background, here is a a great collection of videos from Open Culture where Dahl gives a tour of his writing hut, which Anderson recreates for the new films. Along the way, Dahl pauses to show off some of his memorabilia at his desk, stuff like the original tip of his hip bone which was replaced years earlier.
For more, this is a good, recent interview with Anderson about the Dahl project and his career.
Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff’s new novel The Vaster Wilds came out last month, and according to its reception so far, it will garner as much acclaim as her other books, three of them finalists for the National Book Award. Elizabeth Harris’s profile of her for the NYT reveals her unusual, but incredibly effective, working style:
But novel writing is an endurance sport, and Groff said it takes her about five years to complete one. She’s able to keep up her publishing pace by working on several projects, even several novels, simultaneously, holding entire, vibrant worlds distinct in her mind. She began “The Vaster Wilds” before “Matrix,” she said, but finished “Matrix” first.
Those different projects live in different corners of her office, a former nursery with blue walls on the second floor of her house in Gainesville, Fla. And when she shifts from one piece of writing to another, she doesn’t shuffle papers on her desk, but moves her body to another part of the room. On a recent Zoom-tour of her work space, she had one project going at either end of her long wooden desk and another on the daybed.
“I’m trying to Jedi-mind trick myself into not putting so much pressure on any particular project by having them be really loose for the first really long span of time,” she said. “I’m writing toward — who knows? Letting it be exploration and joy, centered around either questions or a central thesis or an image.”
When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.
“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she said.
The old “first draft in the bankers box” trick. Works every time.
Why Are So Many Authors Abandoning Speech Marks?
For The Walrus, Maija Kappler takes on the current trend of novelists, like Groff, who don’t feel a need for quotation marks in their work. Is it cool? Is it contagious? Are other punctuation marks on their way out?
The absence of quotation marks helps the text lean, uninterrupted, into the jagged stream of consciousness of a disaffected teenager trying to maintain an ironic distance even from her most difficult emotions. It’s a successful union of form and content, where everything is given the same undifferentiated weight because everything feels equally heavy.
The choice can be somewhat disorienting, and it can take readers a little longer to get into the book’s flow. But it’s a choice that’s increasingly common in modern fiction. Some of the best and buzziest contemporary writers—Sally Rooney, Ian Williams, Bryan Washington, Celeste Ng, Ling Ma—render their dialogue free of quotation marks. The reasons vary, but more writers are dropping speech marks to explore distances between readers and narrators and even to eliminate hierarchies.
Hemingway’s Cuba
, for Esquire’s 90th anniversary, travels to Cuba to visit Ernest Hemingway’s home and local haunts. In 1933 the magazine’s first editor Arnold Gingrich wanted to hire only top-shelf writers for his new project, so he approached Hemingway about the gig. It turns out, Papa was saving up for a boat and could use some cash: Hemingway was open to the idea and knew what he wanted: $3,000. This, combined with $3,500 he had in the bank, could help pay for a 38-foot twin-cabin cruiser. The Esquire money, about $70,000 today, would be advanced against future Hemingway dispatches on Gulf Stream fishing, Spanish bullfights, and African safaris. Hemingway’s wish list wasn’t done: He had to be the highest-paid Esquire writer. And his work couldn’t be edited. Other than that, he was good—nothing more, really. Gingrich accepted the terms gladly. This was an era when writers were genuinely famous—they traveled with Gary Cooper, and their photos ended up in Life magazine. Writers don’t get boats anymore; we’re happy to get expenses.
For more on Hemingway’s boat Pilar, check out Paul Hendrickson’s full book treatment of the subject. (Fun fact: My wife wanted to name one of our daughters Pilar, but I talked her out of it.)
David Coggins is a really unique writer, mostly covering travel, style, and fly fishing. His book The Optimist is one of the best fishing books I’ve read. His next, The Believer, will be out in April. (Also, his Instagram is a good follow.)
Silence
Paul J. Pastor considers the gift of silence in our lives, even when we don’t want it. As a starting point he turns his attention to the great bard Väinämöinen from Finland’s epic The Kalevala who must live on the “island with no words” for many years before finding his song.
Silence is the great and difficult friend of the writer and the artist. Silence—the condition of emptiness. Silence is the unfilled jar. Silence is the frame that holds no picture. Silence is the blank page, blank after you have stared at it for hours. It is the mainland with no trees (impossible and inhospitable). It is the island with no words. I do not mean the pleasantness of quiet, where you go as you like and leave as you like, and which is a privileged vacation from hustle. (Many coiffed pastors and productivity gurus sell little bits of this quiet, but it is all just aesthetics with them.) I mean silence that lasts, for whatever reason, long past the point of your preference. Silence that chills you, that roots you, immobile, for a while. Very often this is a literal silence, but not always. What is always true of such a time, however it comes, is that a fertile interior blankness settles in us.
This condition of inaction usually feels like being stuck, or being numb. And it is precisely what our culture—and our human appetite for creative heroics—would have us avoid. We wish to believe that the source of our creative power is activity rather than inactivity. We wish to believe that we have in ourselves everything we need to do our work, and that it will be our great efforts that haul that work out of us. And yet what brings Väinämöinen, the bard of bards, into the fullness of his power is precisely that condition of emptiness that so disgusts or unsettles us. It is being in the boring-place, the empty-place, the still-place that something happens to him, something so vast that nature itself unlocks her most intimate secrets.
Jon Fosse, Nobel Laureate
Jon Fosse, Norwegian writer and playwright, was recently announced as this year’s Nobel Prize recipient.
“His huge oeuvre, spanning a variety of genres, comprises about 40 plays and a wealth of novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel committee for literature. “Fosse blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism.”
“I am overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened. I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations,” Fosse said in a statement.
I really enjoyed this take from The New Republic:
After enormous dramas, intense scandals, a notable awardless year, a subsequent year in which one of the winner’s politics were very ... fraught, gossip, cheating, resignations, and Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize for literature has definitively exited its flop era—for now. Louise Glück, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux, and now Jon Fosse, who was awarded the prize on Thursday: That’s four serious winners in four years, all killer no filler. Glück was a long shot, Gurnah was a shock, and Ernaux and Fosse were obvious choices that happened to be correct ones. Together, these four winners make an unusually strong case for the Nobel as something more than a cultural phenomenon or a subject of jokes and speculation (by the way, the Nobel Preview will be back next year), and instead as something more surprising: a literary award that actually gets it right.
…
Indeed, Fosse is, like Lady Gaga—someone he almost certainly has never heard of—a triple threat: playwright, poet, novelist, mostly in that order. “My worry is that people will focus on Fosse the novelist, because novels are the most prestigious form of creative writing,” the Icelandic author Kári Tulinius told The New Republic. “But I think he’s at his most inventive and thrilling as a poet and playwright.”
Speaking of winning the Nobel Prize, here’s a hilarious video of reporters surprising Doris Lessing with the news that she had won the prize in 2007.
A Teacher’s Unconditional Positive Regard
Over at The Cult of Pedagogy, Jennifer Gonzalez interviews Alex Shevrin Venet about the crucial teaching mindset of “unconditional positive regard” toward our students—an attitude that I’ve seen in all of the best teachers I’ve encountered. Gonzalez starts with reckoning with the fact that negative generalizations and attitudes toward students are easy and often understandable—even if corrosive to healthy teaching:
I think many of these attitudes come from a real, valid, and vulnerable place, from teachers who once had high hopes but felt disappointed and hurt when things went wrong, teachers who had good intentions and got their hearts broken a little bit every time students rejected their efforts, teachers who see behaviors from their students that shock and frighten them. But regardless of where they come from, these mindsets hurt our relationships with students, and that makes everything else worse, from behavior to academics to the culture of school as a whole.
So with all of this in mind, I was intrigued when I came across the phrase unconditional positive regard. It was in Alex Venet’s book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education (Amazon | Bookshop.org), where she names it as the most important guiding philosophy in her work. Venet explains that unconditional positive regard is a stance that communicates this message to students: “I care about you. You have value. You don’t have to do anything to prove it to me, and nothing’s going to change my mind.” In her book, she asserts that taking this stance and putting it into practice builds the foundation on which our students can thrive. And the more I learned about it, the more I was sold on its value.
Much of the highlights of the interview are on the website, but it’s also available as a podcast here via Spotify.
More on the Fading Southern Accent
Last week, this linguistics study from UGA was a part of the ETW collection. Here is Jack Butler’s editorial on “Why the Fading of the Southern Accent is Bad News.”
From The National Review:
An America where everyone sounds the same, full of people — like me — whose very words don’t give them away regionally, is a less exceptional America. The way we talk, one of the most basic human functions, is an essential part of our individual identity, and the shared identities of those around us. Aside from sports fandoms, cuisine, and — ahem — cryptids and esoterica, it’s hard to think of something more powerfully associated with place in the U.S. “Accents are an important element of regional identity,” McClelland writes. For that to go might herald an end to something all Americans share: our differences.
In the piece he references a fun dialect quiz from the NYT that accurately guessed my hometown: give it a shot.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
John Water’s lovely book review of The God Desire by David Baddiel
- ’s very practical and beautiful tips on How to Light the Dark Months
An amazing story from Slate.com: How Lester del Ray invented the wildly popular genre of fantasy fiction as we know it
Parker Richards from the NYT Opinion: “We are no longer achieving an acceptable level of whimsy. In even the smallest corners of daily life, we are asked to abandon delicious inefficiencies — the archaic flights of fancy, the capricious nonsense — in favor of a totalizing commitment to the false idols of logic, regularity and efficacy.”
A book club in California started reading Finnegan’s Wake in 1995. They just finished: “We do one page and then discuss it for two hours,” he says, and laughs. “That’s why it’s taken us 28 years.” Via The Orange County Register
A wise perspective from Dave Stuart in this 6 minute video: How to Repair A Student-Teacher Relationship—(closely related to this idea of “unconditional positive regard” featured above)
From Pitchfork: “Once when Sufjan Stevens was in college, he brought an injured crow to the biology lab to help save its life. ‘You are doing the universe a great favor,’ a woman who ran an animal sanctuary told him once he called her to the scene. This is one of several stories Stevens tells in his 10-part essay included in the elaborate physical edition of his latest album, Javelin, all in service of exploring his ever-expanding definition of ‘love.’”
THE HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
This week’s homework assignment comes from Jane Clark Scharl’s essay in Plough, “Poetry at Home,” where she makes the case for bringing more poetry into the regular rhythms of family life. Try this game, via Richard Wilbur, with your students or at home, like she suggests:
The first thing parents can do to bring poetry into their home is to recognize that it’s already there. Our role is to simply allow it to flourish. We can encourage little rhyming games at the dinner table, or make wordplay a part of our family dialect. Richard Wilbur, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who served as the second Poet Laureate of the United States, invented a poetry game he played with his children around the table: someone would pick a thing, and the rest of the family had to find an unexpected, funny, or surprising opposite. Wilbur and his family enjoyed the game so much that he ended up publishing a book of the resulting poems, called Opposites. Here’s one of my favorites:
The opposite of doughnut? Wait
A minute while I meditate.This isn’t easy. Ah, I’ve found it!
A cookie with a hole around it.Silly, yes, but fun, and a wonderful lesson in rhyme. The book is a great way for families with slightly older children – elementary school age or so – to enjoy some clever poems and practice wordplay (younger children might enjoy it or might not; my son loves it, my daughter likes the pictures).
