181: A bowl of sunny lemons
Deborah Levy, David Baddiel, close reading, slowness, Carol Atherton & Seamus Heaney. And much more.
Michael Longley was (is) one of our greatest, a writer of such tenderness and intelligence. Another massive tree in the forest has fallen, now alongside Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland.
Deborah Levy
wrote one of my favourite sequences of recent books, her ‘living autobiography’ which started with Things I Don’t Want to Know. The Position of Spoons, and other intimacies is a collection of short articles and other pieces from a variety of sources, so it does not have the coherence or consistency of the trilogy, and some pieces are weak. On the other hand, Levy rarely writes less than interestingly, and there are some memorable pieces here, particularly those which focus on women: on Elizabeth Hardwick as an essayist and critic, on the painter Paulo Rego (which had me Googling lots of her paintings), on the French novelist Violette Leduc.
And there are characteristic moments of relish in the physical world. From ‘Lemons at my Table’, which is just right for these winter days:
It’s uplifting to glance at a bowl of sunny lemons with their startling palette of yellows on a cold British winter morning. I have been lucky enough in my life to have spent summers walking down a mountain to a beach in Majorca through lemon orchards that eventually lead to the sea. By the end of summer, many of the lemons have fallen to the ground and lie scattered below the trees. I often think about this walk when I buy a miserable lemon from my local London corner shop in February. Shivering in the rain, I know that the lemon (and I) would rather be in that orchard, and that we are both migrants.
My Family: the memoir
is a naughtily bland and deceptively understated title for David Baddiel’s new book, based partly on his stage show on the same material: Not The Trilogy can be seen now on Sky TV - check out the first one in particular).
The material is of course close to the bone, particularly about Baddiel’s mother Sarah (best described here as ‘lively’) and his father Colin (there are some harrowing parts late on when his Pick’s disease is addressed). As an experienced comedian, Baddiel knows exactly what he is doing, and the often laugh-out-loud comedy is based on the rawness of the topic, and his reaction to the uncontrolled chaos his parents often brought to their parenting, and to their own relationship.
There are anecdotes I certainly can’t repeat (his father’s behaviour at his mother’s funeral being the most extreme), but you’ll enjoy Baddiel’s timing delivering them. He is particularly skilful at using photos to pace his commentary.
The Close Reading Archive
is a formidable online resource developed by Professor Scott Newstok, author of How To Think Like Shakespeare, as a companion to the new book by John Guillory On Close Reading (also a bibliography in it).
In Closely Reading,
writes about the project:Just as the arrival of new media in the 1920s induced reflections on the practice of reading, the advent of machine reading in the 2020s has encouraged many to revisit the enduring value of decelerated or “de-industrialized” reading.
I’ve spent some time moseying around the Archive, and it’s full of terrific interest for an English teacher. In some cases you’ll have to hunt out a book or article offline. For the moment, just one link to define what is surely essential for our classrooms right now: Timothy Shanahan with ‘What is Close Reading?’ (2012), a question he answers with:
intense emphasis on text, figuring out the text by thinking about the words and ideas in the text, minimization of external explanations, multiple and dynamic rereading, multiple purposes that focus on what a text says, how it says it, and what it means or what its value is).
‘Death of a Naturalist’
is the title poem of Seamus Heaney’s first collection. I see from the inside of my copy (pictured above) that I bought it in July 1979.
Carol Atherton recently wrote a lovely post on teaching the poem to young pupils in her school. Her book Reading Lessons was one of my best of 2024.
We eased ourselves in with a wordcloud that allowed us to explore some of the key vocabulary in the poem. We noticed the rhyme of ‘clotted’ and ‘rotted’, and the onomatopoeic ‘slap’ and ‘plop’. We used dictionaries to find the precise meanings of ‘obscene’ and ‘coarse’, and talked about the fact that ‘coarse’ can be both literal – a prickly item of clothing, a hessian sack – and metaphorical. We talked, above all, about unpleasantness: about smells and textures and associations. We said words out loud. Slap. Slime. Spawn. Say them, and draw out the ‘s’ sounds: there’s something there to luxuriate in, to enjoy.
Thinking here too of two other parts of this Fortnightly - ‘On Slowness’, below, and the Close Reading section above.
One of the first reviewers to see Heaney’s promise was Michael Longley, who died this week at 85. Like Heaney, he was a beautiful reader of his own work, so do take a minute out of your day to listen to ‘Remembering Carrigskeewaun’.
On Slowness
A couple of things to add to my comments last time on Thomas Newkirk’s book The Art of Slow Reading.
- on changes in courtship, and how technology has made it problematic :
The notion behind courtship is that love is stronger when creating a relationship is harder. That’s true in other spheres of life—sports training, musicianship, education, etc. And it’s easy to understand why: We get stronger at anything by avoiding shortcuts and taking on challenges … We all know that slow food tastes better than fast food. And that’s true in many other pursuits—good things take time. If you care about results, you don’t rush … Courtship moves step-by-step, and thus provides a chance for ongoing reflection and learning, as well as an easy exit path, before things get too complicated.
- on Finding a path instead of forging the road:
According to [Wendell] Berry, school systems innovate as compulsively and as eagerly as factories. Instead of revering the great pedagogies of the past, we hate whatever went before and look on its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance. Each year, we become obsessed with using technology to learn (and assess that learning) faster and faster.
Fluke by
is one of the books which informed my post recently on contingency and decision-making in Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Now Klaas has put online the whole first chapter of his book.
Teaching and Learning Things:
‘In the real world’ is a phrase too often directed at teachers, and which really annoys me, so I finally snapped and wrote this.
#edchatie is back this coming Monday at 8.30pm to 9.30pm on Bluesky with what should be a spicy discussion on ‘AI in Irish Education’. Thanks to host John Hurley for moderating this one. And thanks to Humphrey Jones, who hosted last week’s debate on ‘teacher recruitment and retention’. It’s a great formula: an hour of well-informed, constructive and often funny comments. All you need is a Bluesky account: join in using #edchatie on every post and reply.
Mark Enser on Why children shouldn’t be using AI to do their homework:
The huge misunderstanding that permeates so much discussion about teaching and learning [is] that it is the getting things done that matters. We see it here. The goal is to ‘do’ the homework. Therefore, if there is a tool that makes it easier to ‘do’, we should use it. But that isn’t the goal of the homework. The goal of the homework is to support someone to learn something. We learn by thinking.
A clear and helpful post on ‘desirable difficulties’ by
in :Difficulties are desirable when they boost learning, not performance. To do so, we need to mimic the conditions under which the material will later be retrieved and used.
Et Cetera
The poem ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden is a staple of many English classrooms. Here’s a piece by Alan Jacobs exploring its tumultuous background.
John Tomsett with a wise piece: ‘This much I know about... using your best towels’:
Writing salves my soul. It’s time to do more of it, resurrect my blog, get on with finishing the novella, scope out my next book... There is no point waiting around! And carving out time to do something you love – as I have done this very morning – should be guilt-free. Abstinence is overrated.
The annual ‘100 Things That Made My Year’ list from
. A good one for anyone to do.25 Useful Ideas to Start 2025 from
.Above, Georgetown in Penang, Malaysia, in another vibrant thread from Bayt al Fann.