I heard a story on NPR this morning about how Harvard and MIT are joining the ranks of top tier universities offering FREE online courses. Awesome! The courses don’t lead to degrees, but according to the story, they might in the future.
I found this so inspiring. A Harvard class for free? How cool is that? So I checked out available courses, and one of them is Shakespeare After All–The Later Plays. Sign me up!
Happy April, and Happy National Poetry Month! To celebrate this awesome month, my students are starting off each class period by reading a poem of their choosing. I directed them to poets.org, my favorite poetry website, to begin their search for poems to bring in. Poets.org is sixteen years old this month and is doing fun things to celebrate its “Sweet Sixteen”–fun! To join in, I’ve compiled a list of sixteen poems that I’ve enjoyed in my life. Next to each poem, I jotted one takeaway or “summary” to give you an idea of what the poems are about, so if the title, author, and/or topic piques your interest, give it a google and give it a read!
1. “Sadie and Maud,” by Gwendolyn Brooks – on following your own path in life
2. “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” by Walt Whitman – on persistence and patience
3. “O Me! O Life!” also by Walt Whitman – on the meaning of life
4. “For Those Who Need a True Story,” by Tara Betts – on survival
5. “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop – on the art of losing
6. “Dublin Made Me,” by Donagh McDonagh – on the pride of your roots
7. “Age Looking Back at Its Youth,” John M. Ridland – the electricity of youth
8. “If Thou Must Love Me,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning – on love
9. “One Boy Told Me,” Naomi Shihab Nye – on fresh perspective and questioning
10. “Why Are Your Poems So Dark?” by Linda Pastan – on poetry’s inspiration
11. “Love the Wild Swan,” by Robinson Jeffers – on freedom
12. “On Turning Ten,” by Billy Collins – on leaving childhood
13. “Like You,” by Roque Dalton – on human connection
14. “On the Death of a Colleague,” by Stephen Dunn – on the inevitability of death
15. “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” by John Donne – on the strength of true love
16. Number sixteen on this list is reserved for some of the poetry submissions I got for the first issue of Killing the Angel. They were fantastic, and I can’t wait to make the first issue acceptances final and write those poets to let them know how great they are! Who knows, maybe those poems will be on your top sixteen list when you read them this summer…
1) If inspiration were an establishment, that establishment would be Shakespeare and Company (read about the history of my love for this bookstore here and here). Last week, I received notification that Killing the Angel, my literary magazine, will be on the shelves of Shakespeare and Company this summer. There are no words.
2) Killing the Angel is still accepting submissions for our very first issue. We have an April 1 deadline and are still eagerly reading all the submissions that we get. We invite you to submit your work.
I leave you with a random literary thought: Anyone who said chick lit started with Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1996 is just wrong. Clearly, it began with Nora Ephron’s Heartburn in 1983. Everyone else just took an extra thirteen years catching up.
I’m wrapping up a unit on Transcendentalism with my American literature students. We’ve focused on essays by Emerson and Thoreau that beseech us to reject technology, embrace our individuality, and accept nature as part of our divine existence. However, something I heard on NPR tonight suggests that technology might be the very key to sustaining our individuality.
According to a report on All Tech Considered, half of the total languages spoken in our world could be extinct by the end of this century. Aboriginal languages in America’s Pacific Northwest, for example, are slowly being phased out as those cultures assimilate more and more into the dominant English-speaking culture. However, thanks to digital tools now available to us, staying connected to your language is easier than ever. Online lesson plans, translations, social networks, and dictionaries make it easy and convenient to stay in touch with one’s native tongue. And in Canada, the Inuit people are taking steps to preserve their language, Inuktitut, by working with Microsoft to create translations of Microsoft Word and other everyday computer programs. The project leader has this to say about the importance of everyday engagement with one’s native tongue: “So many people will spend their entire day sitting in front of a computer, and if you’re sitting in front of your computer in English all day then that just reinforces English… if you’re now using Inuktitut, it’s just reinforcing that this is your language.”
We have language to communicate, so embracing technology that can link speakers together could be the answer to keeping all 7,000-odd world languages alive instead of fulfilling the linguists’ prediction that half will be gone in the next ninety years or so. I also see language as a powerful, albeit intangible, artifact of a culture. A culture’s values can be apparent simply in the variety of its distinctive lexicon. As our world becomes increasingly globalized, we have the unique challenge of maintaining our individuality while continuing to come together as a global community. Emerson and Thoreau might have eschewed technology, but they also said that we shouldn’t be afraid to evolve in our ways of thinking about the changing world around us.
Good news from France! While there’s no official French equivalent of Ms., all 2012 tax forms will identify every French female as Madame instead of having to choose between Madame (indicating the woman is married) and Mademoiselle (indicating the woman is unmarried). While I wish that a French translation of Ms. (indicating neither that the woman is married nor single) existed, I think that this new tax procedure is a step in the right direction. I’ve always gone by Ms. because I believe language is powerful, and the line between work and personal life is an important one.
I heard about this procedural change on NPR, and one of the most poignant parts of the story was when the leader of this French movement said that mademoiselle is just a word, but it’s important to fight words and images of inequality because they contribute to creating the climate in which we live. I couldn’t agree more–language is powerful stuff. Our expressions, slang, and words are representations and reinforcers of what we value and how we perceive the world. If men have essentially one title (and one last name) their entire lives, and women alter their titles (and sometimes their last names) based on their relationships to men, what does that say about gender roles in that society?
I’m happy to announce that my literary magazine, Killing the Angel, now has its own website. Check out killingtheangelmagazine.wordpress.com for information regarding who we are and what we’re seeking in terms of submissions.
Everyone knows Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic Little Women, but fewer people might know her father, Amos Bronson Alcott. Alcott was a teacher, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and major figure in the American transcendentalism movement. Of her father, Louisa May Alcott once wrote: ”My father taught me in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child’s nature, as a flower blooms, rather than crammed it, like a Strasbourg goose, with more than it could digest.”
It’s a beautiful image, albeit a tad idealistic; apparently, the Alcotts had to move more than twenty times in thirty years because of this unpopular philosophy. I can’t help but compare that to John Keating in Dead Poets Society, the free-thinking teacher who is (spoiler alert!) fired at the end of the film for his nonconformist teaching style. It’d be interesting to hear what former students of Alcott said about him in their later years. Were his freer, less traditional methods more effective than the more structured philosophies of his peers? A fellow writer once told me a story of how she had a writing teacher whose advice entailed telling her writing students to quit their day jobs and become truckers. Is becoming a trucker really necessary for becoming a writer? No–the teacher was simply coming at the question of creativity from a specific, personal perspective. Not all teaching philosophies will click with all students.
I’m in agreement with at least one of Alcott’s ideas: the idea that teachers tap into something the student already possesses. I like the idea of learning as an appeal to something inherent in the learner, for the only conclusion we can draw from such a philosophy is that we are all capable of learning.
Happy 130th birthday, Virginia Woolf! I’m commemorating the occasion in two ways.
First, Killing the Angel, a literary magazine inspired by one of Woolf’s speeches-turned-essays, is now accepting submissions. Check out submission guidelines and information by clicking here.
Additionally, The Christian Science Monitor has published another one of my pieces, “How to Date Virginia Woolf,” in today’s Chapter & Verse blog. I hope you enjoy it.
About two years ago, I found myself in a used bookstore in London. A book titled Leonard Woolf, by Victoria Glendinning, caught my eye. I was in the UK following a passion for Virginia Woolf, and so I bought the book because I thought it might supplement my study of her. The novel sat for the past two years on my shelf, and only this week did I finally feel compelled to pick it up and begin reading.
I didn’t expect the biography of Virginia’s husband to expose so much to me about Virginia herself. Reading about his life before her, his life with her, and his life after her gave me a new and somewhat unsettling context to everything I know about Virginia Woolf. While her inspirational diaries and letters often focus on writing and womanhood, I found some of her personal views on other topics to be elitist and snobbish, and I found myself having a hard time believing someone that has been such a source of inspiration to me–as a woman, a writer, and a human being–could have such different opinions from me when it comes to other facets of life.
Another surprising fact I learned was that within the first year of Virginia’s death, Leonard became romantically involved with another (married!) woman, Trekkie Parsons. (Yup. Trekkie. I can’t say it out loud without laughing.) Apparently, he stayed devoted to her for the last thirty-some years of his life. He wrote to her that she was the best thing that ever happened to him. This, too, surprised me. I always thought Virginia was the great love of Leonard’s life, and that he spent his surviving years working to preserve her place in literary history. It is a romantic image that might have some truth, but might also be just that–an image we carry in our minds, promoted by popular representations of the Woolfs years later. After all, it’s much more romantic to think Romeo and Juliet were the love of each other’s lives than to remember that in Act One, Romeo swears up and down that Rosaline is the only girl for him.
It’s an important lesson to remember: Our heroes, like all humans, are fallible. We can admire their strengths and allow them to inspire us, but we shouldn’t put them on pedestals so high that we forget they are humans with flaws. If we remember that, we can continue to learn from our heroes without sacrificing critical thinking–and thinking for ourselves.
tiny.noredcandy.com
I’m beyond excited to announce that my literary magazine has received enough funding through my Kickstarter campaign to create and launch a first issue! Thank you to everyone for your support and enthusiasm for this project. Now the real work can begin! I will be putting out an official call for submissions by the end of January. Stay tuned!
