Welcome
to all: most of you have been receiving The Fortnightly for quite a while - some for 8 years! But if you’re coming here for the first time after the move to Substack, you can expect books, interesting articles, culture generally, teaching resources, and some quirky things. Even my dulcet tones (scroll down to Audio Corner).
Reading Lessons
is Carol Atherton’s marvellous ‘love letter’ to the profession of English teaching. Subtitled ‘The books we study at school, the conversations they spark and why they matter’ it is a rich portrait of the books which form the core of what we do, in her case from Oranges are Not the Only Fruit to Lord of the Flies to Macbeth.
I started writing a short review, and ended up writing a lengthy essay, partly about a lengthy career as an English teacher.
Small Things Like These:
My work is now done. So here is a downloadable 26-page teaching resource on Claire Keegan’s novel, which gathers all my previous blog posts in a coherent form.
It’s free, though if you find it useful and would like to buy me a coffee, of course do!
King Lear: light and dark
I’ll be giving a free webinar on the play for the English Community of Practice organised by Joe Rolston at the Wexford Education Support Centre.
Tuesday 7th May from 7.00pm to 8.00pm.
I’ll explore some ideas to underscore teaching of the play. Mentioned: writers such as Emma Smith, Tony Tanner and James Shapiro. And a little time with Caravaggio.
Go here for more detail. Registration link.
On a related subject,
has a post on ‘Why We Need Fools: Jesters, Power, and Cults of Personality’, an entertaining look at such figures. The Fool is of course an important figure in Shakespeare’s play.Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer
is the title of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland. It looks at Dutch and Flemish artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their experiments with the ‘tronie’ genre.
A standout picture for me was ‘Head of a Woman’ by Michiel Sweerts (above). How extraordinarily contemporary it is ( from 1654).
Below, my photo of the picture in situ in the exhibition. On the right is the famous ‘Girl with the Red Hat’ by Vermeer.
If you go, a bonus on the way out is the free exhibition on the Irish stained glass collective An Túr Gloine: I’m lucky enough to work in a school which has several examples of its work.
Audio Corner: ‘Love’s Growth’
My reading of John Donne’s poem, the prefect thing for the start of spring:
For a terrific discussion of Donne’s knotty, sometimes difficult and always fascinating poem, go to this BBC Sounds programme:
Michael Symmons Roberts invites three other Donne fanatics to offer a close reading of the poem, not in the hope of pinning down its too-numerous nuances, but instead trying to illuminate its deft marriage of mind and matter - and also celebrating the swagger of its lines and the young man who wrote them.
Roberts (who presented the excellent Auden programmes last September) gathers Simon Schama, Anthony Capildeo and Katherine Rundell, who wrote my Book of 2022, the brilliant Super-infinite: the transformations of John Donne.
Teaching and Learning Things:
English teachers in Ireland: it’s important we all contribute to consultation about changes to the Leaving Certificate in our subject - the online form takes only a few minutes. And the English Meet on Wednesday 1st May is getting close: 7 excellent English teachers as well as me talking about their practice.
Tom Sherrington on behaviour in schools, and his experience as a Head some years ago:
I’d say to anyone, just don’t ever get in the way of schools and school leaders trying to do the very hardest work there is – not unless you feel you personally could step up to do it better. I know I couldn’t because I tried. How about you?
Efrat Furst on AI in academic teaching has it right: the difference between experts and novices (see the full thread):
GenAI can make shortcuts for experts but for novices. A shortcut means bypassing the learning process.
Related, and as wise and clearly-argued as ever (my review of Teachers vs Tech? the Case for an Ed Tech Revolution):
on problems with technology, specifically LLMs:Technological change happens not just through the invention of new technologies, but through the integration of those technologies into human routines and institutions. If we want to improve education, then that is the challenge we have to meet.
For English teachers, certainly.
:If writing is thinking (as I believe it to be) the last thing you want to outsource to AI is the first draft because that's where the initial gathering of thoughts happens. It's why first drafts are hard. That difficulty signals their importance (more).
Et Cetera
The Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 shortlist rightly includes Laura Cumming’s superb Thunderclap: a memoir of art and life & sudden death, which was my Book of the Year 2023.
- on the neglected Irish writer Norah Hoult on the 40th anniversary of her death: Like Joyce’s precision about Dublin while in exile, Hoult was free to dissect Ireland’s morality, its view of women, and the rural and urban lives at the mercy of the church’s hierarchical control.
Three years ago I shared the NYT’s attractive presentation of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’. Now here’s another, by A.O. Scott, on Frank O’Hara’s deliriously erotic ‘Having a Coke With You’.
The poet Michael Hofmann on working at the University of Florida now (via Scott Newstok). Vivid, well-written and depressing: We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department … It’s strange to think of the mortality of institutions. Things that are the product of many lifetimes ending in one’s own. How easily and cavalierly the works of decades and centuries are demolished.
A thread by The Medieval Scholar on enduring the European medieval winter: I’m thinking also of Bruegel’s painting ‘Winter (Hunters in the Snow)’, part of which is the cover of Small Things Like These, and which I wrote about.
A beautiful and heart-breaking tribute by John Tomsett for his friend Anthony Christopher Knowles: Ant’s death has hit me hard. No amount of philosophising mitigates the fact of him not being here. And I don’t know how to live.
Also, RIP Michael Coady, former English teacher, and poet. I bought his début collection Two for a Woman, Three for a Man, on its publication in 1980, and have been revisiting it. There was a lovely obituary in the Irish Times: Michael Coady, from Carrick-on-Suir, lived a long and fruitful life, hermetically sealed by his devotion to family and by a sure confidence that he had created a body of Tipperary literature as fabulous and settled as Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow.
I’m a stationery nerd, so this deep-dive into pencils and their manufacture, by
, is just my thing. I’m still looking for the perfect pencil. By the way, an electric pencil sharpener is cheap pleasure: I recommend getting one. And feast your eyes on Mohammad Rafi’s pencil shop in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, below.
Hope the move goes well. Looks as slick as ever. Keep reading all the books so I can pretend I did too!