Reading the Bible with Children

Just came across David Murray’s Bible reading plan for children. Stunning for its straightforward simplicity.

Harper Lee on books and reading

I have long loved Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, even though I read it later in life. I have also appreciated Lee’s occasional commentary on the state of books and reading. This letter Lee wrote to Oprah’s O magazine really got me on a couple levels, not least because I finally broke down and bought a Kindle. The quotes belong to Ms. Lee.

1. The relative value of books.

Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again.

As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed–he swapped his sister’s doll buggy.

2. The devastating effect of poverty on literacy

We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school.

It wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one–three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.

3. Books as stock for the full mind

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.

4. The inherent warmth of books

Can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up–some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

What should this mean to us? Are we walking willfully into an electric fog, a world where Jim Hawkins, Tom and Huck, Ender Wiggin, Anne with an e, Bilbo and Frodo, and hundreds of other beloved book characters live in the shadows, while the bright spaces are occupied by the ephemeral and forgettable figures of our time? It’s certainly a tradeoff. We cannot ignore that electronic culture makes access to reading material a non-issue. But will our children want to read? And if so, what will they read?

Harper Lee is no pure book snob–Hannibal Lecter makes her list, after all–but she gets that a world without books will be colder, darker (despite the artificial light), and less enduringly interesting.

“The good teacher will…”

“…the good teacher will almost in the same breath translate a great poetic sentence, bring out its relations to the whole of which it is a part, make its musical rhythm felt by appropriate declamation, explain a historical or an antiquarian allusion, call attention to a dialectic form, put a question about a peculiar use of the optative, compare the imagery with similar figures of speech in ancient and modern poetry, and use the whole as a text for a little discourse on the difference between the classical and the modern or romantic spirit; so that you shall not know whether he is teaching science or art, language or literature, grammar, rhetoric, psychology, or sociology, because he is really teaching the elements and indispensable prerequisites of all.”

Paul Shorey, “The Case for Classics,” in Frank Kelsey’s Latin and Greek in American Education, 1927.

H/T: Center for Western Studies

Tags: education, quotes, teaching

Poems to Memorize

The list of 101 poems worth memorizing that Ted Hughes published as By Heart. Thinking about putting some of these on my memory to-do list for 2012, thanks to the encouragement of reading Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein. Two down by Frost, memorized earlier this year.

1. William Shakespeare: ›The Witches’ Song‹ from Macbeth
2. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Eagle
3. A. E. Housman: ›On Wenlock Edge‹
4. Rudyard Kipling: James I
5. Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken
6. W. H. Auden: The Fall Of Rome
7. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Inversnaid
8. W. B. Yeats: He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge
9. T. S. Eliot: Lines For An Old Man
10. Anonymous: Donal Og
11. William Wordsworth: Upon Westminster Bridge
12. Alexander Pope: From An Epistle To Dr Arbuthnot
13. Keith Douglas: How To Kill
14. Wilfred Owen: Anthem For Doomed Youth
15. Edward Thomas: The Combe
16. John Milton: On The Late Massacre In Piedmont
17. R. S. Thomas: Here
18. John Betjeman: Meditation On The A30
19. William Blake: The Tyger
20. John Keats: On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer
21. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias
22. Emily Dickinson: ›Like Rain It Sounded‹
23. Anonymous: Mad Tom’s Song
24. Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky
25. Andrew Young: Field Glasses
26. Walter De La Mare: An Epitaph
27. William Shakespeare: My Mistress’ Eyes
28. T. S. Eliot: La Figla Che Piange
29. Robert Frost: Provide, Provide
30. John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci
31. D. H. Lawrence: Piano
32. William Wordsworth: The Solitary Reaper
33. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan
34. T. S. Eliot: Marina
35. W. B. Yeats: ›A Woman’s Beauty‹
36. F. R. Higgins: Song For The Clatter-Bones
37. John Betjeman: A Subaltern’s Love-Song
38. William Shakespeare: ›Other Slow Arts‹
39. William Blake: Long John Brown And Little Mary Bell
40. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring And Fall
41. Thomas Wyatt: ›They Flee From Me‹
42. William Shakespeare: ›Fear No More The Heat O’ The Sun‹
43. W. H. Auden: ›Stop All The Clocks‹
44. William Blake: The Smile
45. John Crowe Ransom: Blue Girls
46. John Donne: The Relique
47. Dylan Thomas: A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London
48. Ezra Pound: The Return
49. Seamus Heaney: The Skunk
50. William Shakespeare: ›That Time Of Year Thou Mayst In Me Behold‹
51. W. B. Yeats: Easter 1916
52. William Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey
53. Rudyard Kipling: The Way Through The Woods
54. Thomas Hardy: Beeny Cliff
55. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Windhover
56. Emily Dickinson: ›There’s A Certain Slant Of Light‹
57. William Blake: Auguries Of Innocence
58. W. E. Henley: Invictus
59. William Shakespeare: ›The Heavens Themselves, The Planets‹
60. Wilfred Owen: Strange Meeting
61. Robert Frost: The Runaway
62. Dylan Thomas: Poem In October
63. William Empson: The Small Bird To The Big
64. Sylvia Plath: Crossing The Water
65. W H. Auden: Musee Des Beaux Arts
66. Stevie Smith: Not Waving But Drowning
67. Philip Larkin: Livings (Part 2)
68. W. H. Auden: ›Carry Her Over The Water‹
69. John Crowe Ransom: Winter Remembered
70. Wilfred Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est
71. William Shakespeare: ›Let Me Not To The Marriage Of True Minds‹
72. John Crowe Ransom: Bells For John Whiteside’s Daughter
73. T. S. Eliot: The Journey Of The Magi
74. Robert Frost: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
75. William Shakespeare: ›Tir’d With All These, For Restful Death I Cry‹
76. W. B. Yeats: Leda And The Swan
77. Emily Dickinson: ›This World Is Not Conclusion‹
78. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Binsey Poplars
79. W. B. Yeats: ›Come Let Us Mock At The Great‹
80. William Wordsworth: The Simplon Pass
81. Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
82. William Shakespeare: ›My Love Is As A Fever‹
83. W. B. Yeats: Roger Casement
84. William Wordsworth: ›A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal‹
85. William Shakespeare: ›Not Mine Own Fears, Nor The Prophetic Soul‹
86. John Donne: Song
87. Emily Dickinson: ›A Wind That Rose‹
88. John Keats: To Autumn
89. William Blake: The Sick Rose
90. Robert Frost: Spring Pools
91. William Shakespeare: ›To Be, Or Not To Be‹ from Hamlet
92. T. S. Eliot: Mr Apollinax
93. William Shakespeare: ›To-Morrow, And To-Morrow, And To-Morrow‹
94. W. B. Yeats: Death
95. T. S. Eliot: Death By Water
96. W. B. Yeats: The Second Coming
97. Emily Dickinson: ›There Came A Wind‹
98. William Shakespeare: ›Our Revels Now Are Ended‹
99. Robert Frost: Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
100. W. H. Auden: This Lunar Beauty
101. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Musical Instrument

Jimmy Fallon wants traditional liturgy

In an interview on Fresh Air, Jimmy Fallon told host Terry Gross:

I want the old way. I want to hang out with the, you know, with the nuns, you know, that was my favorite type of Mass, and the grotto, and just like straight up, just Mass Mass.

H/T: First Things blog