Rereading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (the greatest achievement in American literature), I’ve realized anew how relatively temporally close Quentin is the events Rosa Coldfield is relating. Coldfield relates the story of Sutpen to Quentin (though he knows it already — it’s in his blood from growing up in Jefferson) in 1910, and Coldfield makes it clear that Sutpen was the reason God saw fit to let the South lose the war. Coldfield wants Sutpen’s story told so that those
who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read [the story of Sutpen] and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.
It is, in other words, a story of the Civil War. And while that seems so very distant to us now, it’s easy to understand the lingering resentment Southerners feel in the story. After all, it’s only been forty-some odd years since the war when Quentin sits in Coldfield’s house, listening to the story of the most mysterious man in the county.
For us today, that’s the nearness of the Vietnam War, something that’s still in most everyone’s cultural consciousness. Many are still upset about “Hanoi Jane,” and I suppose that resentment might be something akin to what Coldfield is feeling in the novel: a resentment of a defeat that seems due to so many non-military, non-combat reasons.
Yet it’s still difficult for me to understand the continuing resentment many white Southerners feel about a defeat that was almost a century and a half ago. “The South will rise again!” would have made sense in Quentin’s turn-of-the-century culture, but another century after that and so many are still boiling about it?
Then again, a century and a half is nothing compared to the length and depth of some of Europe’s ethnic and national resentments. Hatred and disappointment never die, I suppose.
In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,
lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
They left the house at half past nine [...]
The smallest one was Madeline.
Madeline is fast becoming one of L’s favorites. We only own one book (Madeline’s Christmas), but we’ve borrowed several from the library, all of them hits. And what’s not to love about them? Lovely stories and a recurring theme: don’t judge by appearances.
Lately, L’s been fascinated with the Madeline cartoon. So far as adaptations go, these cartoons are wonderful. Christopher Plummer as the narrator has a warm, grandfatherly voice.
It seems to worm its way into your heart and stay there:
This show hasn’t been popular since I was in kindergarten. I am almost thirteen now, and sometimes, when I am up late, I stumble across “Madeline” on the Disney channel. I loved this show when I was little and I wonder why they don’t show it at times when little children can see it. It’s a lot better than the junk they show on “Playhouse Disney” these days. (Koala Bros., Higglytown Heroes, etc.) If they could bring this show back, it would be just as popular, if not, more than it once was. I think that Madeline had a big influence on children between the ages of two to six. Heck, I would still watch it. I hope to see Madeline on Disney Channel really soon. (IMDb)
The best part: the theme song. We’re all going around singing it.
Shakespeare is a challenge to our modern ears, no doubt about it. Even the most knowledgeable experts halter a line or two of a performance before they settle in to the poetry. In my experience, it takes me about a few minutes before the language on stage sounds completely natural and non-foreign.
I’ve been teaching Shakespeare to eighth graders of various academic levels for the past week: an enlightening, frustrating, ultimately rewarding experience. We’re reading an abridged version of Much Ado About Nothing. It is, in fact, part of the required eighth grade curriculum here in Greenville County, and I’m thrilled that those who designed the curriculum had the wisdom of chosing a comedy rather than, say, Julius Caesar. (A perfectly fine play in its own rights, it’s an absolute bore to teenagers.) Much Ado has all the elements adolescents can relate to: unrequited love; jealousy; the twittery, jittery joy of new love.
Yet it’s still been difficult enough for them that it’s been, at times, a chore. And so to remedy that, I changed my unit plan and decided to show the Branaugh Much Ado concurrently with our own reading. We’ve completed the first two acts in class; we watched the first two acts today.
What a joy to watch the kids watch Shakespeare and enjoy it. What was most rewarding for me was to hear them laugh at lines that had been omitted from our abridged version. “They’re really getting it,” I almost said aloud.
As part of our recent test on Romeo and Juliet, I included seven passages from the play for identification.
The instructions:
Identify the following passages. Who is the speaker? To whom is he/she speaking? How is this a critical passage in the play?
Here are the passages
A plague on both your houses!
I pray thee, good Mercutio, let’s retire:
The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,
And, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl;
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.
Compare her face with some that I shall show,
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
What if it be a poison, which the friar
Subtly hath minister’d to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour’d,
Because he married me before to Romeo?
Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer’d; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.
Some are easy; at least one is a little obscure (but covered in class as one of many examples of the Bard’s incessant foreshadowing).
I have not been “into” poetry for some years now. I once thought I might be a poet at heart, but I can’t even write compelling blog entries, so that is a dream long lost.
I do have to teach poetry, though, and I discovered, while teaching a unit on imagery, my new favorite poet: Billy Collins. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, he is accessible, witty, and charming.
The poem we read in class was “The Country.” While searching for an online version, I found an animated version of the poem. Then, I discovered “Forgetfulness.” It has all the elements of a poem of genius: enlightening observations, a uncommonly commonplace topic, perhaps even a cliche turned inside out.
In a study entitled “Vanishing Shakespeare,” the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that 55 out of 70 “English departments at the U.S. News & World Report’s top 25 national universities and top liberal arts colleges, as well as the Big Ten schools and select public universities in New York and California” don’t require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. Instead, we’re replacing the Bard with Madonna:
Increasingly, colleges and universities envision a major in “English” not as a body of important writers, genres, and works that all should know, but as a hodgepodge of courses reflecting diverse interests and approaches. See Appendix B.) After redesigning the English major at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, the department’s undergraduate hairman told The Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper that “We might not agree on what we think English is, but we could all agree that our curriculum should reflect the makeup of our faculty.” Such a philosophy results in course offerings being driven not by the intellectual needs of students, but often by the varied interests and agendas of the faculty. As a consequence, it is possible for students to graduate with a degree in English without thoughtful or extended study of central works and figures who have shaped our literary and cultural heritage.
It’s difficult for me to imagine not studying Shakespeare as an English major. Shortly after I graduated, the professor who taught the Shakespeare course at my small liberal arts college introduced a second Shakespeare course in which students spent a whole semester studying a single play, with the ultimate aim of performing it. It was offered every other year, with a more traditional, 12-play Shakespeare course offered on off years. I wish I’d had the opportunity to take both.
But not to study his work at all? “A degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud.”
Madeleine L’Engle, author of one of the most famous books in the adolescent literature canon, A Wrinkle in Time, died last week. (Madeleine L’Engle: News)
A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and it’s one that has stayed with me for twenty-some years now. I read it again in college for the required course on adolescent lit, and it was just as enchanting in my early twenties as it had been twelve or so years earlier.
Frederick Wirth writes in Prenatal Parenting of an experiment Anthony Casper conducted at the University of North Carolina regarding parental reading and prenatal development. He had mothers read Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat to their unborn children twice a day. A few days after birth, the infants were given a chance to hear the story again. However, using a device fitted with a special nipple, the infants could change the story being read by changing the rate at which they were sucking.
As demonstrated by their sucking speed, the newborns remembered The Cat in the Hater. Furthermore, they preferred it read forward instead of backward. (Wirth, 37)
So I guess in a way I was wrong when I suggested that our daughter might prefer Shell Silverstein to Robert Frost.
Or, looking at it another way, here’s a chance to get my daughter interested in all the nerdy literature I love.
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse
In my “Currently Reading” pile of books lies Prenatal Parenting by Frederick Wirth, M.D. Most interesting so far have been the sections on fetal sensory development, particularly the development and growth of the auditory system. Wirth writes that at “twenty-two weeks of gestation the developing infant will respond to sounds from outside the womb. By twenty-eight weeks the infant responds to sound in very consistent ways.” (28) And so K talks to her walk driving to work, and I press my cheek to K’s belly nightly and tell our daughter how much we’re looking forward to meeting her.
K and I have been playing a little music box for our daughter nightly for some weeks now, but recently, we’ve added reading to the ritual.
It should have a noticeable effect:
I can always tell which of my full-term newborn infants have been read to. They have more mature orienting behavior to auditory stiumli. I can even tell which fathers have been active in reading to their unborn child. I do this by holding the infant between me and his father while we compete for the infant’s attention by calling the child’s name. If the dad has been actively involved in the reading and singing, his child will turn his head toward him, looking for the source of the sound. Invariably, when their eyes meet they both react positively. (Wirth, 29)
Often, it’s selections from Where the Sidewalk Ends, not so much because L will like it more — obviously, fetal brain development at this point is not that advanced — but because K likes Silverstein’s playful language.
Tonight, Robert Frost, concluding with one of his best, one of the best, period: “Mending Wall.” It has one of the truest passages ever written:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’
In my “Currently Reading” pile of books lies Prenatal Parenting by Frederick Wirth, M.D. Most interesting so far have been the sections on fetal sensory development, particularly the development and growth of the auditory system. Wirth writes that at “twenty-two weeks of gestation the developing infant will respond to sounds from outside the womb. By twenty-eight weeks the infant responds to sound in very consistent ways.” (28) And so K talks to her walk driving to work, and I press my cheek to K’s belly nightly and tell our daughter how much we’re looking forward to meeting her.
Often, it’s selections from Where the Sidewalk Ends, not so much because L will like it more — obviously, fetal brain development at this point is not that advanced — but because K likes Silverstein’s playful language.
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