“Franz Kafka once wrote to a friend that ‘A book must be the axe to the frozen sea inside us,’ but in the average reader that ice is quite thick and not easily broken through. But you can’t tell by looking at people how thick or thin their inner ice is; and people vary in their vulnerability to any given axe. One reader can be unmoved by a book that devastates her neighbor.”
— Alan Jacobs, On Assigning Books, The American Conservative
“[B]ooks and poems — and all other things, really — that have the power to enrich and touch also have the power to wound.”
— Alan Jacobs, On Assigning Books, The American Conservative
“In any class in which I assign poetry, I ask students to memorize and recite fifty lines or more from the poems we have read. Those fifty lines can come from one poem, or from several, by different poets. (I tell them that if they want they can take one line from fifty different poems, but no one has taken me up on that offer yet.) When students memorize a poem it works its way into their minds — they develop an intuitive and often unconscious grasp of its structure, its way of working. As George Steiner has commented, ‘The private reader or listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life force.’ And to recite the memorized poem is to bring it to life in your own voice.
So I sit in my office chair while a student sits across from me, and then I turn aside so I’m not looking at them. (This tends to make them less nervous.) Sometimes they go too fast, and the words blur like telephone poles from a speeding car; sometimes they stutter and stumble. That’s all fine: I tell them that there are no style points. The point is learning by heart, and speaking the poem in one’s own voice.
Once a student came in and announced that she would be reciting the last fifty lines of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘In Praise of Limestone.’ My heart sank a bit. The lines of the poem are long and, because it’s in a quantitative meter, not regularly rhythmical; a tough poem to memorize, and not easy to recite. But I smiled and turned aside, and she launched in — hesitantly at first, as I had feared. But then, somehow, she found her balance and rhythm, and as she moved towards the poem’s conclusion — ‘if / Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead’ — she spoke with such assurance that I knew she had gone to the very heart of that great poem. When she finished, and I turned to congratulate her, I saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks.”
— Alan Jacobs, On Assigning Books, The American Conservative (via wesleyhill)
“[T]here is one moment each semester when my pulse accelerates a bit and I feel anxiety creeping around the edges of my mind: it’s when I order the books for the following semester. As a Christian, I should be prayerful all the time, but it’s when I see those book order forms that prayerfulness (at least about my teaching) really kicks in. I believe that these are the most momentous decisions I make as a teacher: the questions about how I run my class sessions and what writing projects I assign are relatively minor in comparison. It’s what my students read that has the deepest and most lasting effect on their lives.”
— Alan Jacobs, On Assigning Books, The American Conservative
“[T]here is one moment each semester when my pulse accelerates a bit and I feel anxiety creeping around the edges of my mind: it’s when I order the books for the following semester. As a Christian, I should be prayerful all the time, but it’s when I see those book order forms that prayerfulness (at least about my teaching) really kicks in. I believe that these are the most momentous decisions I make as a teacher: the questions about how I run my class sessions and what writing projects I assign are relatively minor in comparison. It’s what my students read that has the deepest and most lasting effect on their lives.”
———
“In any class in which I assign poetry, I ask students to memorize and recite fifty lines or more from the poems we have read. Those fifty lines can come from one poem, or from several, by different poets. (I tell them that if they want they can take one line from fifty different poems, but no one has taken me up on that offer yet.) When students memorize a poem it works its way into their minds — they develop an intuitive and often unconscious grasp of its structure, its way of working. As George Steiner has commented, ‘The private reader or listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life force.’ And to recite the memorized poem is to bring it to life in your own voice.
So I sit in my office chair while a student sits across from me, and then I turn aside so I’m not looking at them. (This tends to make them less nervous.) Sometimes they go too fast, and the words blur like telephone poles from a speeding car; sometimes they stutter and stumble. That’s all fine: I tell them that there are no style points. The point is learning by heart, and speaking the poem in one’s own voice.
Once a student came in and announced that she would be reciting the last fifty lines of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘In Praise of Limestone.’ My heart sank a bit. The lines of the poem are long and, because it’s in a quantitative meter, not regularly rhythmical; a tough poem to memorize, and not easy to recite. But I smiled and turned aside, and she launched in — hesitantly at first, as I had feared. But then, somehow, she found her balance and rhythm, and as she moved towards the poem’s conclusion — ‘if / Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead’ — she spoke with such assurance that I knew she had gone to the very heart of that great poem. When she finished, and I turned to congratulate her, I saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks.”
———
“[B]ooks and poems — and all other things, really — that have the power to enrich and touch also have the power to wound.”
———
“Franz Kafka once wrote to a friend that ‘A book must be the axe to the frozen sea inside us,’ but in the average reader that ice is quite thick and not easily broken through. But you can’t tell by looking at people how thick or thin their inner ice is; and people vary in their vulnerability to any given axe. One reader can be unmoved by a book that devastates her neighbor.”
(via wesleyhill)
—
The Immense Value of Giving Men More Control of Household Tasks.
I’m quoting this not because I think it — or any of the articles it cites — is especially insightful, but simply in order to register my frustration with this whole debate. In our 32 years of marriage Teri and I have never had one single conversation about what “men” or “husbands” or “fathers” or “women” or “wives” or “mothers” should be doing. We’ve just looked at the situations we’ve been in and tried to figure out how to divide the labors in ways that worked, in terms of efficiency and also in terms of our happiness.
For instance, when Wes was a toddler I had all my classes in the mornings and Teri worked in the afternoons. She didn’t get home until nearly six, and it was a high-stress job, so it made no sense for her to cook. If I cooked we both enjoyed the meals better, and then she didn’t mind cleaning up afterwards. So that’s the pattern we fell into, and after a while I became a pretty good cook. But in the past couple of years Teri has not been working outside the home, in part because of some health issues, but she has generally felt good enough to cook, which has been great for me because it’s been a very busy season of my life. When her health hasn’t allowed her to cook, I’ve picked up the slack.
None of this has anything to do with gender or even with roles as such. It’s just about figuring out (a) what needs to be done and (b) who, at the moment, is better placed to do it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that, does it?
(via ayjay)
“Intrinsic to both conservatism and Christianity as I understand them is the necessity of thinking in the longest possible terms, and well beyond the impulses, gratifications, and calculations of the present moment.”
— Alan Jacobs, Trolling the Homeschoolers, The American Conservative (via settledthingsstrange)
(via godthings)
“[The] bookish, readerly community, extending through time and across space, has still a substantial membership; nonreaders outnumber us—always have and always will—but we can always find one another and are always eager to welcome others into the fold. May our tribe increase.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“About seven hundred years ago Richard de Bury—an English monk, librarian, book collector, and eventually Bishop of Durham—wrote that ‘in books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.’ An effusive encomium to the joys and benefits of reading, yes, but not too effusive. Richard’s bookish, readerly community, extending through time and across space, has still a substantial membership; nonreaders outnumber us—always have and always will—but we can always find one another and are always eager to welcome others into the fold. May our tribe increase.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“To pick up a book—to decide to read something, almost anything—is to choose a particular form of attention. That choice creates simultaneously silence and receptiveness to a voice; the reader acts imaginatively, constructing meaning from the experience of finding words on a page, but also, ideally, strives to assume a posture of charity toward what he or she reads. This choosing reader is never merely passive, never simply a consumer, but constantly engages in critical judgment, sometimes withholding sympathy with a thoughtful wariness, and then, in the most blessed moments, when trust has been earned, giving that sympathy wholly and without stint.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“That so many of us conquer our fears of being cut off and embrace this solitude [of reading by ourselves]—this solitude that is also a connection—suggests that the rewards of reading can be considerable indeed.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“[W]e may be tempted to use books and other texts as ways of confirming our self-images, but the temptation can be resisted.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“In Proust and the Squid, Maryann Wolf notes that for many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“[I]f I know what I am looking for, I do not therefore know what I need.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“I used to try to determine in advance what books I would read over the summer, but eventually realized that to put any book on such a list nearly guaranteed that I would not read it. No matter how anxiously I had been anticipating it, as soon as it took its place among the other assigned texts it became as broccoli unto me—and any book not on the list, no matter how unattractive it might appear in other contexts, immediately became as desirable as a hot fudge sundae. And over the years I have decided that this instinctive resistance to the predetermined is a gift, not a disability.
The cultivation of serendipity is an option for anyone, but for people living in conditions of prosperity and security and informational richness it is something vital. To practice ‘accidental sagacity’ is to recognize that I don’t really know where I am going, even if I like to think I do, or think Google does; that if I know what I am looking for, I do not therefore know what I need; that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate; that it is probably a very good thing that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate. An accidental sagacity may be the form of wisdom I most need, but am least likely to find without eager pursuit. Moreover, serendipity is the near relation of Whim; each stands against the Plan.
Plan once appealed to me, but I have grown to be a natural worshiper of Serendipity and Whim; I can try to serve other gods, but my heart is never in it. I truly think I would rather read an indifferent book on a lark than a fine one according to schedule and plan. And why not? After all, once upon a time we chose none of our reading: it all came to us unbidden, unanticipated, unknown, and from the hand of someone who loved us.”
— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Niko Martell - “Carpenters” (CUPSI 2013)
“Fuck the closet as a metaphor. It is nothing more than dumb carpentry and dull hinges, an illusion that...
I need feminism because I’m sick of unfamiliar men calling me “sweetie” or other terms of endearment instead of asking my name.
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Is there no music now
except the chime
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