Today I walk into my first classes after a year of sabbatical. After having spent all day Friday meeting with new entering students and hearing about their momentous decision (as they see it) to attend St. Mary’s, it makes sense for me to write on decision making.
What is arguably America’s most famous poem is about decision-making. Or more [...]
When my wife and I leave the house in the morning, I will sometimes call out to her, “One kiss, my bonnie sweetheart” and we will embrace before going our separate ways. I suspect you recognize the line, which is from one of the English language’s most beloved poems, Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” I write [...]
Since I have been devoting recent posts to lamenting how badly literature is often taught, I owe it to readers to talk explicitly how literature should be taught instead. In his book The Crafty Reader, which I wrote about on Friday, Robert Scholes lays out a way of teaching that counters the emphasis that teachers [...]
My friend Rachel Kranz and I have been talking and e-mailing about the value of novel reading, always a useful topic to revisit. Rachel is as thoughtful as anyone I know on the subject—she is a novelist as well as a novel reader so she has a double perspective. Leaps of Faith (Farrar Straus, 2000), [...]
Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to [...]
I seem to be returning to my childhood in recent posts, what with all my references to Sewanee, Tennessee. In my last entry I showed literary scholar Robert Scholes blaming Allen Tate, a poet and critic with close ties to Sewanee, for the abysmal state of American literature instruction. To balance Tate out, my launching point [...]
Poetry used to play a much larger role in our culture than it does today. That, at any rate, is the opinion of literary scholar Robert Scholes in his wonderfully provocative The Crafty Reader (Yale, 2001). Scholes’ book is provocative in part because of where he puts the blame:
“I would like to suggest that a [...]
I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion this past weekend and marveling yet again at his ability to pull me into his stories about the Lake Woebegone citizenry. His account of a school field trip may have been a summer repeat—I’m not sure because I came into the program late. In any event, [...]
Let me end this series of posts concerning racism in America on an up note. This past Sunday I was singing in the Trinity Episcopal Church choir (in St. Mary’s City, Maryland) and we concluded the service with a rousing rendition of hymn 599, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the black national [...]
