Hi (especially new) friends! It happened! Who knows how long it will stay, but Spring has pounced on Seattle and we’re all dizzy from the blow. Let us steady ourselves with:
News
I’ve had two essays published in the last couple of weeks that are free to read. The first, over at Front Porch Republic is called Some Reservations: Thinking about Native American Spirituality and it responds to some claims the great art historian Matt Milliner made in an article in First Things. My essay is basically recalling some (very) early memories about my life in Phoenix and it started as an exercise in Rhetorical Analysis in a class I was teaching at SPU last Winter (if you were in that class, can you remind me?) Basically, I put Milliner’s piece up on the overhead and we read through it looking for claims explicit and otherwise. Some of them started to feel egregious, so I responded with this. After the essay came out, I was talking about it on Twitter with some friends, and this picture came up, taken at the Phoenix Indian School in 1906.
I think it nicely validates the view I was advocating in the essay. I like a few things about this photo:
- One is how excellent these high school students are at drawing. Their instruction must have been taken very seriously indeed for them to have arrived at the level of proficiency as teenagers. It gives the lie to the assumption that instruction was purely utilitarian/ vocational in these places.
- Two is that the girls and even the special needs students are learning right alongside the boys (in 1906!). All of their work and talent is being taken seriously, and from the looks of it, equally.
- Three is that–look closely–the models that they’re working from are Native ones (even on the shelf in the back of the room) rather than Greek/ classically-Western ones. They’re being taught that their own culture is worth paying attention to, that their own beauty matters.
The second essay was just published this morning by my friends over at Mockingbird. The Life-changing Magic of Tearing my Student’s Papers Up is about composition pedagogy, Marie Kondo, late-capitalism, and a Girardian notion of sacrifice. Superfluidity! Freedom!
Reading
Atlas of a Lost World This is not the sort of book I’d regularly have picked up, a scientist’s recollections of his bone-dusting days, but it came with shouts of praise from several in my social media circles and, man, am I glad it did. The feat of imagination on offer here is impressive enough, but the feat of writing is more impressive still. This is the best science writing I’ve ever read and it’s high on the list for non-fiction generally.
Migrations by W.S. Merwin, who died this week. The man was a model of elegance, both in personal bearing and in language, and also of perseverance. He wrote every day, either original verse or translations, keeping the muse at heel. Read some of his poems here. requisite in pacem
Listening
I can’t get over the new project, Better Oblivion Community Center, which is very likely to top my best-of-2019 list. I make these lists all the time. And the new Pedro the Lion record, all about my first hometown, is growing on me. It took me a few weeks to get it (I’m a slow listener) but I look forward to it all the time now. And just a couple of days ago, a new record from Over the Rhine dropped. I’ve only been through it once, but the recording quality is the best I’ve heard across their expansive canon and the musicality is bracing and consistent.
Oddments
- My church is hiring a lead musician: know someone?
- It’s official: I’m not going to Rome this summer. The Italian government has decided to ask for…wait for it…a very expensive permit in order to teach American students abroad. Will have to sketch up something else.
- The NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) conference is in Chicago this year and I’ll be giving a paper titled “An Element of Egotism: Taking the Self out of the Sublime in Late Romanticism,” which puts me in the Windy City Aug 8-11. I’d love to see some of you while I’m out.
That’s it. Peace to you all this Lent.