171: Nobody's pig had died.
A bumper start to the academic year. George Eliot, Naomi Klein, Claire Keegan, Judi Dench & Shakespeare, George Saunders & David Sedaris, Macbeth, and much more.
Back again
after the summer holidays. Summer reading was as unpredictable as ever. You start with certain plans but then zoom off sideways, which is also a delight.
However, I did complete the immense and profound Middlemarch as planned, in a leisurely manner across plenty of time. What an achievement it is. As David Frum writes,
In its scope, ambition, and truth, this great novel exemplifies what literature at its best can do. Why would anyone want to waste time reading or watching anything less?
I put together some links, resources and comments from my re-reading.
At the same time in the Croatian sunshine I was reading an utterly different book about an utterly different time. Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger: a trip into the mirror world won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction this year. It starts in the ‘relationship’ between her and her photographic negative, the conspiracy peddler Naomi Wolf, and spreads its focus to all elements of the contemporary world, especially the impact of online behaviour on ‘real’ life. A fascinating but also often depressing read.
The slow-moving immensity of Middlemarch was a balm. The title of 171 comes from near the end of the novel, when Dorothea is checking on others in the community.
Coming on Tuesday 10th September:
my free webinar via Tralee Education Centre on teaching Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. Mainly directed at the comparative module in the Leaving Certificate, but should be useful to anyone teaching the book. There’s a summary of my aims in the illustration above.
Also recently, some comments about the novel on the
Story Club, and it was discussed for the last edition of the Graham Norton Book Show (after about 6 minutes, and including an interview with the author).Judi Dench
and Shakespeare are a match made in heaven. In Shakespeare: the man who pays the rent she is in conversation with her friend Brendan O’Hea as they discuss the extraordinary range of parts she has taken, from major to minor: Lady Macbeth, Gertrude, Ophelia, Cleopatra, Titania, Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, Hermione, all three Lear daughters and many more.
My reaction, and points I noticed during a recent reading.
George Saunders and David Sedaris:
another fabulous combination. And what a treat to hear Sedaris read and then discuss (with Deborah Treisman) Saunders’s haunting story ‘Love Letter’ from his latest collection Liberation Day, which I wrote about here a while ago.
Sedaris is always funny - sometimes it’s black humour - and while Saunders is often funny, not in ‘Love Letter’, in which a grandfather writes to his grandson caught up in a newly authoritarian United States. Let’s hope it remains fiction.
This is fabulous: David Runciman
has Fifteen Fictions for summer reading on the Past, Present, Future podcast, covering books such as Gulliver’s Travels, Coriolanus, Phineas Redux and the musical Hamilton, and just re-released. Of most interest to me currently are the two episodes on Middlemarch, in which he makes the case for the novel being the greatest in English, and a political one (covering of course the Reform Act, the threat of typhoid, and the arrival of the railways).
Here’s part 1 of the Middlemarch pair:
Macbeth resources:
given the large number of new subscribers, over the next few issues I’m pointing the way again to some teaching resources I’ve made, starting with the Scottish play:
20 key moments annotated (video and audio).
Macbeth autotest (20 key quotations).
Quizlets for quotation retrieval practice (designed for Leaving Certificate revision). One per Act, plus one with them all for the whole play. Important: discuss the ideas/context etc for each quotation, rather than ‘just’ recall it.
12 thinking exercises on the play, based on key quotations.
Essays on the play (based on the podcasts below, updated): 1) the crucial soliloquy in I vii | 2) the real Lady Macbeth | 3) Malcolm the hero? | 4) the supernatural | 5) the end |
Macbeth: 7 revision podcasts.
Teaching and Learning Things:
Conor Murphy on AI (not) in his English class:
I want the students to do all the thinking, all the analysis, all the writing, all the creating. I will be there to answer questions, supply information, guide them in their endeavours. But, and this is crucial, the classroom is a, relatively, closed environment.
Also a post from Conor on teaching film in Transition Year (Ireland), have a look also at his excellent chapter in the book Perspectives on the Teaching of English in Post-Primary Education, which I wrote about this time last year.
Thanks to
for his English Teacher Weekly mention on August 14th of my post for Jonathan Gibbs’s : 12 short stories which have worked for me in the classroom. Again, all English teachers should subscribe to ETW!This is good from James Durran on ‘Disciplinary literacy: reading a challenging text in the classroom’ (using an example from Geography).
A teacher’s preparedness to model, out loud, the various comprehension strategies which experienced readers use often unconsciously, can make a huge difference in the classroom, and is a subject for another blog. What’s key is that teachers, in all subjects in which pupils are asked to read challenging texts, are thinking carefully about where that challenge lies, and about how to mitigate that in the classroom. This is partly about good adaptive teaching – about making the text accessible to all, so that the learning can happen; but it is also about motivating pupils to engage, and to stay invested.
‘Edu-Twitter’ in the UK seems to be moving en masse to Bluesky (there’s been quite an exodus due to X’s owner): a few more Irish voices would be welcome. Here I am.
Why is English such an anomaly in Leaving Certificate grade inflation?
Et Cetera
’s series on John Donne continues. Here’s ‘The Flea’ - always a joy to teach (pupils love its naughty eroticism, its sly tone). My book of 2022 was Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne.
- with your 5 most recent reads, you might get a personalised recommendation back, as I did - Joseph O’Neill’s novel Godwin.
Another poet I often teach:
on Philip Larkin, and how we mediate between his poems and his dreadful personal attitudes:Whatever else he was, Larkin was a poet of the almost. That haunting line from the Whitsun Weddings—As if out on the end of an event/ Waving goodbye—can be felt almost everywhere in his work, prose or verse. It is that which makes it harder to go back to his poetry now. Separating the half-cut racist from the lyric poet is possible. We can despise and dislike the man and still enter into the dream of the poetry. What should challenge us in the letters is not the same as the challenge of the work.
Colour in Vermeer: the heritage scientist Frederik Vanmeert is discovering new angles on the great painter, as told to Adnan R. Khan:
The limited palette is intriguing. Vermeer’s ability to produce works of such astonishing beauty with so few colours is remarkable. But if you look as closely as Vanmeert does, you see something else too: colour is meticulously prepared; paints are carefully layered, one on top of the other, to produce delicate highlights, suggestive shadows, and textures that project an almost tactile quality. At the microscopic level, what you see is that Vermeer is not only transferring his vision onto the canvas; he is doing it in painstaking detail, sometimes with such an obsessive attention to material that it feels like a kind of madness.
Mathew Lyons on Heather O’Donoghue’s Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero, in this review:
The book is a tour de force of accessible scholarship, bringing what is arguably the most forbidding text in English literary history to life in all its supple, dark complexity.
I previously wrote about Maria Dahvana Headley’s radical modern translation.
‘Interest/ing’ in Jane Austen is the topic of an LRB podcast in which Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell look at Jane Austen's use of the words and the significance of women reading in her novels.
Seamus Heaney died ‘yesterday’ 11 years ago. What a shock that was. Last year RTÉ Lyric FM asked ten people to each choose and introduce a favourite Heaney poem, including an archive recording of the poet himself reading that poem. Olivia O’Leary on ‘Clearances 4.’
Colm Tóibín on James Baldwin (it’s his centenary), modified from his new book On James Baldwin:
From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed—to be moved from the narrow confines of the public realm back towards the unsettled (and unbounded) space of the self, the questing, uneasy spirit.
My annual recommendation of R.C. Sherriff’s perfect, and perfectly-timed, novel The Fortnight in September.
How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse, by Kate McCusker. Mention here too of our excellent public library system, which I’ve praised. And surely some part of this is that almost every child studies English to the end of schooling?
Culture Night 2024: if you’re in the Dublin area, I’ll again be giving an architectural and historical tour of our campus on the evening of Friday 20th September. No booking required.
There are some seriously talented film-makers in broadcasting companies. End of Olympics montages from RTÉ and BBC (both about 5 minutes).
A recommendation from the 12 year-old. She has just finished E. R. Murray’s Nine Lives Trilogy (Mercier Press): ‘it’s not that there’s just one exciting thing happening in each book - there are lots!’
The Typewriter Dance. Ruby Keeler and Lee Dixon in Ready, Willing and Able, 1937.
I wasn't interested in Doppelgänger at first, but then I heard a long interview of Naomi Klein and it really drew me in. I'm planning on reading it — at some point ;)
(Just as I plan on re-reading Middlemarch — at some point!)