English Teacher Weekly for Oct. 3rd

From J. M. W. Turner’s The Channel Sketchbook

Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities. I hope you enjoy this week’s edition!

This is the last week of our Back to School Special: 50 percent off paid subscriptions. It’s an excellent option if you’d like to support ETW but the typical yearly cost is a little out of the budget. If you’re a regular reader of ETW, and have some subscription funds handy, consider upgrading today!

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THIS WEEK’S FEATURES

Farewell Dame Maggie Smith

After featuring Judi Dench in last week’s edition, it’s sad and strange to hear the news of Maggie Smith’s passing. I had the good fortune to see both of them together in David Hare’s two-woman play The Breath of Life in 2002. Smith and Dench owned the stage. Not a line was wasted.

I spent the fall semester of my junior year studying in London, convincing a professor that I could be trusted with an independent study of drama while I was there. I lived on tea and fried eggs and spent most of my money on student-discounted theater tickets. I saw Tom Stoppard’s The Coasts of Utopia trilogy. And Chekhov, Shakespeare, amazing musicals, A Streetcar Named Desire—I couldn’t get enough. I played a lead role in a dramatic reading of Martin McDonough’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which my class performed for the program. I was terrible, and the whole thing changed my literary life. Watching Dench and Smith perform at such a high level was a highlight of my immersion into theater.

From The Economist’s tribute to Smith:

What made Dame Maggie’s fearsome roles work, in much the same way that a bit of acidity improves a sweet dish, was superb comic timing, which she mined to great effect in interviews, talk-show appearances and “Tea with the Dames”, a documentary from 2018 featuring her, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Eileen Atkins—all similarly honoured and rough contemporaries—discussing their careers. In repose, or among friends, she joked easily and laughed often, without a hint of the sternness that marked her best-known characters.

But it could return. On a British talk show, while discussing how her “Harry Potter” role had introduced her to a new generation of fans, she recalled a boy asking her, “Were you really a cat?” She paused for just the right amount of time. “I heard myself saying, ‘Just pull yourself together.’” And no doubt he did.

The best retrospective of her performances that I’ve found is from The Times, with accompanying video.

Truman Capote at 100

In celebration of Truman Capote’s 100th birthday,

Ted Gioia

offers this excellent overview of his legacy. For such largeness of personality you have to go to Oscar Wilde or Lord Byron for an equivalent. In terms of his prose, his best stands up to any of his contemporaries. To think his literary life started on the same street as Harper Lee, his dear friend and such a perfect foil to Capote’s flare.

From Gioia’s piece:

But Truman Capote always knew famous people—and often long before they were famous. I’ll go further, and claim that nobody in the twentieth century had more direct experience of the human condition than Truman Capote. Does that sound like an extreme claim? But just consider—Capote knew everybody at The New Yorker, but he also knew more than 400 people who had committed multiple murders.

He knew John F. Kennedy, but also knew Lee Harvey Oswald. (Only two people in the world could make that claim.) He knew Robert Kennedy, and also knew Sirhan Sirhan. He knew Charles Manson, but also four of Manson’s murder victims.

We may be able to get a certain sense of Capote’s charm from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of him in Capote. Does it get better than Hoffman?

Here he is at dinner with Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) and family. Dewey was the FBI investigator in charge of the Clutter family murder case, the focus of Capote’s masterpiece In Cold Blood.

For more thoughtful work from Gioia at

The Honest Broker

, check out “How to Read Greek Tragedy in a Netflix World”—a part of his 52-week humanities immersion course. And for more on Capote, here is The Guardian’s “Where to start with: Truman Capote”

Smart Devices and Love

For The Front Porch Republic, Nadya Williams writes about the wonders of the Snoo, a “smart bassinet” for babies. Because everything can be made smarter, even cribs.

In an iconic scene from the 1936 film “Modern Times,” a feeding machine feeds a meal to a character that Charlie Chaplin plays. First his head is strapped securely to a stand. Next, the machine gently tips soup into his mouth and feeds him some appetizer bites, one at a time. And then we get to the buttered corn on the cob. A short circuit results in a malfunction, so instead of being gently offered his meal, the eater is repeatedly hit in the teeth with the corn. An attempt to fix the machine and restart the meal only results in more malfunctions, as the machine begins dumping bowls of soup and stuffing food into the face and lap of its victim.

This admittedly comical scene is not intended to reflect reality. And yet, the casual cruelty and disrespect of the person for whom the machine ostensibly means to care exemplifies well the problems we can see in the latest advances in “smart” items of care, including bassinets. A machine can feed the baby—or an adult. A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love.

Chaos Bewitched: AI and Moby-Dick

There’s a little scene from chapter 3 of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael enters the Spouter Inn looking for a room for the night. He comes face to face with a large and dark oil painting that arrests his attention.

Here’s a bit of Ishmael’s description of the painting: “A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant.”

For The Public Domain Review, Eigil zu Tage-Ravn, a scholar from Copenhagen, offers this survey of critics who have attempted to harpoon this passage:

Few images of pure formlessness have attained to the canonicity of this darkly imagined canvas, which has been a touchstone for generations of Melville critics. The grizzled Robert H. Zoellner, for instance, writing in the early 1970s, discerned in Ishmael’s panic before the painting nothing less than “a glimpse of th[e] anteperceptual world” — itself a function of “philosophical or religious doubt, impinging corrosively upon man’s Adamic acceptance of the phenomenal datum.” Hence, Ishmael, standing before the beckoning disorder of a smoky vortex, feels “the consequence of faith’s receding wave” in “the dissolution of those hard, sharp lines, those incisive shapes, which characterize a thoughtless acceptance of appearances.” By these lights, the murky canvas of Chapter Three sets up “the ontological vacancy beneath appearances” that, for Zoellner, lies at the heart of the novel as a whole — and which, of course, the ghost-leviathan himself makes furiously and fatally real.

Zoellner wrote that of all the works of literature he had encountered, only Moby-Dick actually frightened him. So much so, in fact, that he called his critical efforts “sheer self-defense”.

There’s an idea: criticism as self-defense. Tage-Ravn then turns to DALL-E, the AI image generator, for help in coaxing out a plausible rendition of what this painting must have looked like. At this point his essay becomes much like the hunt for Moby Dick himself—in a good way.

Everybody’s Reading John Mark Comer

When Brad East started noticing that all of his students were reading John Mark Comer’s books, voluntarily no less, he was suspicious. And who can blame him? It’s probably best to keep some distance from the next new Christian guru on the scene. Fortunately, after reading Comer’s work for himself, his fears were relieved.

From Brad East’s review of John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way:

…Comer is doing the Lord’s work. My students appear not only to be reading him but to be reading no one else. Once it was Lewis and Chesterton, then Schaeffer and Stott and Packer, and then Piper and Keller. Now it’s Comer’s world, and we’re all just living in it. If it’s true that the typical American adult reads at most only a handful of books per year, then young Christians reading Comer is cause for celebration. …

This is nowhere more evident than in the newest book, whose endnotes might include more references to “catholic” sources (whether Roman, Eastern, or Anglican) than to evangelical ones. I lost count of the times Comer quotes a saint: Isaac of Nineveh, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus Confessor, Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, Benedict, Jerome, and many more. This is most welcome.

Comer is well aware of the tens of millions of Americans who have stopped attending church in recent decades. He’s from the Pacific Northwest, which is to say, from the future. He knows the score. He writes, then, for the sake of a church that is not yet, a church that might develop the backbone to endure in the West. Looking forward, therefore, he looks backward, drawing on the best of church tradition. Given the state of popular Christian culture today, with its influencers and celebrities, its digital brands and breathless innovation, Comer’s model stands apart. He’s willing to trade follows for roots. May his tribe increase!

Read the review to hear about his concerns and questions regarding Comer’s work as well as his praise. (For example, a book about spiritual practices and no mention of the sacraments!?) I’m on the final section of Practicing the Way, and I can vouch for East’s assessments.

From J. M. W. Turner’s The Channel Sketchbook

THE HYPERLINK GARDEN

• The must-read post of the week for writing teachers comes from Matthew M. Johnson: Three Ways to Make Sure That the Time You Spend on Feedback is Worth It

• The Mythmakers, John Hendrix’s new graphic novel about the friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis is receiving good reviews. From the NYT: “It’s a biographical study, but it’s less about the men in question than it is about the creative spark that flickered between them, flared brightly and finally went out.”

• A crucial distinction that teachers must make is between planning and resourcing. Gathering activities, sequences, and materials is resourcing. Necessary to do, but it’s not planning. As Ben Newmark puts it in a recent post, “Planning is a teacher thinking about the material and how best this can be taught to a particular real life flesh-and-blood class.” This isn’t just something that AI is mediocre at; it’s something AI can’t do: “Those that think AI can plan make an important category error because they don’t understand what planning really is and have confused it with creating resources…”

• In time for spooky season, the trailer for Robert Eggers’ next movie Nosferatu

• Tired of the typical reading quiz in class? Try this connections-style alternative instead.

• John Dyer’s presentation for the Dallas Theological Seminary students and faculty about AI in the classroom.

• Emily Wilson continues her series of explaining some of her translation choices of key scenes from The Odyssey: Why describe Odysseus as “complicated” in the opening line? How do different translators handle the marriage bed scene?

• I love this imaginative exercise from

  The Hollow
  : How to use sensory details, especially sounds, to imagine history

• “What it’s not is boring or mediocre.”—For The Scotsman, Alistair Harkness reviews Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie Megalopolis. The film’s a full send. Any movie with Adam Driver saying "And you think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind!?" is a must-watch in my book.

• Washington Post columnist Daniel Pink on the Post’s Impromptu podcast: “Why Not Pay Teachers $100,000?”

• From the Before Skool YouTube channel, an illustrated lecture from Daniel Schmachtenberger: “Why Modern Humans Feel So Empty”

• “The Chicago Manual of Style isn’t merely a guide; it’s a testament to the art of textual precision.”—From LitHub: 7 writers and editors discuss the glory of The Chicago Manual of Style.

• From the BBC: “Notre-Dame restoration reveals Renaissance poet's coffin”

• From McSweeney’s: “We are thrilled to announce that Google Translate has recently added “Deanspeak” to its suite of language-detection tools. In addition to offering translations from Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and other languages, Google Translate can now render your college administrator’s opaque prose into plain (if terrifying) English.”

From J. M. W. Turner’s The Channel Sketchbook