182: Outward conditions notwithstanding
Harriet Walter & Shakespeare's women, English Meet, Sarah Churchwell on 'The Great Gatsby', AI & English, Marianne Faithful & Byron, Sheila Heti, Philip Larkin & more.
A lot of listening this time, it seems. Which can never be a bad thing.
Next week, an edition of The Occasional, for paid subscribers, with my thanks for your support: plenty of book recommendations.
Harriet Walter
joins Judi Dench in excellent recent books on Shakespeare’s women. The latter’s Shakespeare: the man who pays the rent was in my selection of best books I read in 2024.
She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s women might have said shares with Dench’s book a deep knowledge of these parts by an actor who has played (most of) them. Whereas Dench was in conversation with Brendan O’Hea, Walter quite bravely writes new speeches for women like Gertrude, Desdemona and Rosalind. Her touch is light and often funny. Emma Smith got it right in her Guardian review:
The pleasure of this collection is the display of a deeply Shakespearean allusive facility that draws effortlessly on a long career of actorly absorption.
Lengthier comments from me, and a link to Walter discussing the book and reciting some monologues from it - superbly, of course.
English Meet 2025
We’ve had great meetings over the last three years, and so let’s have another one. If you’re an English teacher in the Dublin area, consider presenting at, or at least coming to, the 2025 Meet on Thursday 8th May. Just reply to this saying you might be interested in talking.
Low-key, friendly atmosphere of like-minded teachers sharing practice. 15-minute presentations on a topic of your choice.
Thursday 8th May; refreshments from 6.30pm. Presentations 7.00-9.00pm.
Free tickets available right now.
Sarah Churchwell
discusses The Great Gatsby in an interesting podcast with Sam Leith of the Spectator on the occasion of the publication of a centennial edition of the great novel, focussing on misapprehensions of the novel. One to listen to if you teach it, and also I recommend her book Careless People: murder, mayhem and the invention of The Great Gatsby.
Writing on AI
I’ve been circling this topic in recent writing, specifically on how it affects/might affect English teachers. More coming. Meanwhile, here’s a summary:
On Thomas Newkirk’s book The Art of Slow Reading (2012), in which I revisit this fine analysis. Everything ‘slow’ is of course anathema to AI-boosters.
AI Thinkers for English Teachers: a collection of sceptical writers I’m finding useful, such as
, , Audrey Watters, and I’ve recently added Anne Lutz Fernandez on - two excellent posts from her recently on Resisting AI Mania in Schools (Part 1 / Part 2).Prompted by the current tech/education culture: my rant on the phrase ‘In the Real World’ - what people outside education tend to throw at us.
For those who’ve signed up in the last week, the February 1st missive on Neil Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology. Many thanks to Peter Nilsson for featuring this piece in his latest Educators’ Notebook (which you should sign up for).
English, AI and the Thermostatic Principle (Neil Postman again).
RIP Marianne Faithful
Above, a lovely version of Byron’s verse.
Audio recommendations
I’m now teaching The Crucible again. The Apple Podcast of 2024, Hysterical, gives us a contemporary parallel (Miller is mentioned several times), with reporting from the mysterious outbreak of Tourette’s-type symptoms in a high school in New York State in 2011. How strange the human brain is. Thanks to
for the tip.Sheila Heti wrote Alphabetical Diaries, one of my two Books of 2025 alongside Richard Flanagan’s Question 7. Her new story in the New Yorker, ‘The St Alwynn Girls at Sea’, is a typically discomfiting listen. At war-time, a ship of boarding school girls (there is one for boys too) is out at sea, the girls caught up in an emotional fever: but Heti is no Angela Brazil.
From Tiny in All That Air, the Philip Larkin Society podcast, an examination of Larkin’s notorious ‘This Be the Verse’, with that notorious first line, which I listened to while stacking wood just before Christmas. The poet Joe Riley talks about the poem: he has personal reasons as a new father for finding it particularly significant.
George Saunders
in Story Club this week, below. Mostly for American friends. I’ve just re-read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich as the current story, and how good it is to have Saunders guide us through it.
Teaching and Learning Things:
#edchatie on this coming Monday, February 10th, for educators in Ireland, is on the topic ‘Cognitive Science in Irish education’, hosted by Patrick Burke. Tune in via a Bluesky account from 8.30 to 9.30pm. We had a terrific conversation on January 27th on AI in Irish education, hosted by John Hurley. The ideas fizz, and it’s fast, furious and fun.
A pointed and sometimes scathing post by Ben Williamson of Edinburgh University on ed-tech exhibitions like BETT, which are always riddled with clichés:
Startup edtech companies are given time on stages to present and platform their innovations and make claims that (as I observed) “school sucks” but AI promises to “unbox education” from its structural constraints. AI is attached to every possible aim and purpose of education, with “pioneering” innovation said to be “transformative” for “enhancing” learning outcomes, “empowering” students, addressing inequalities, “upskilling”, providing “opportunity to life” and driving up student employability.
Peps Mccrea in the ever-helpful Evidence Snacks on one of the key ideas in teaching, and one which I am constantly conscious of: expert-induced blindness (aka ‘curse of knowledge’):
The ideas and strategies we hope students will develop come so easily to us—it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t reach the same conclusions on their own. Consequently, we can find ourselves intuitively resisting more explicit approaches to teaching, despite the wealth of evidence in their support.
Et Cetera
: Why is everybody reading Middlemarch right now? I didn’t reread the novel in the summer because of Substack, but the phenomenon Petya describes here is cheering:
There's something almost rebellious about choosing to read Middlemarch in an era of endless scrolling. George Eliot's careful examination of provincial life, with its intricate web of human relationships and moral choices, couldn't be further from the quick-hit content that dominates most of our media diet. When you commit to reading War and Peace, you're not just reading a book – you're making a statement about what kind of relationship you want to have with culture and with your own attention.
Tarisai Ngangura: ‘How Toni Morrison’s characters modeled womanhood and confinement in their dress’. My comments on Morrison’s only - but extraordinary - short story, ‘Recitatif.’
Defending Mr Jefferies: a moving, and sad, piece by Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford, on his former English teacher Chris Jefferies, who was vilified after the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010:
The things Jefferies loved – books, music, theatre, opera, architecture, poetry – were, in the hands of the press, weapons to be used against him. They were evidence. And all the more so because he tried to communicate them to the pupils he taught, could not help but communicate them, in a way few other tutors and lecturers I encountered at school and then at university ever did. He didn’t just ‘teach’ these things; he showed us what it meant to be changed by them, to make them part of ourselves.
Real Covers on Fake Books in Real Movies by
. A treat, particularly the covers for the film American Fiction, the original of which, Erasure by Percival Everett, I’ve recommended here (and the film itself is enjoyable). Including, of course, that book by ‘Stagg R. Leigh’.Marina Hyde on fire again on OpenAI and DeepSeek:
For us little people, the choice seems to be between being data-jacked and screwed over by the undemocratic Chinese, or being data-jacked and screwed over by the post-democratic tech bros. Once again, it’s the old syphilis or Ebola menu choice.
Jan L. Waldron, via Helen Warlow.
Very glad you enjoyed the Hysterical pod--really made me rethink how I understand the relationship between community/mind/body/spirit.
A perfect companion to The Crucible. A couple years ago I replaced The Crucible with Death of a Salesman in my American lit course, but I always feel the draw back to it.
I devoured this edition of The Fortnightly! Thank you for the good work.