Long awaited, first impressions: The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

First, a few notes from the open Yale course on Milton: Anglican church politics and Protestant work ethic, contractual and economic language in the light of Milton’s poetics of power, his reception and critical prominence in the canon a tool of repression and of liberation (Woolf) -

Then, How much of this, how closely does this bear on  Pullman’s treatment of the great writer, his (Pullman's) conception of himself as a story-teller rather than a poet, a workman rather than divinely-inspired maker?

The whole topic of free speech and prophecy - can prophecy be free speech? - authority based on sentiment, on experience, rather than on coercive power. The infant (lit. 'not-speaking') depending on others, the nuns and the inn mirroring one another across the river--the flood foretold and prepared for which blurs the distinctions and suddenly pushes the plot into precipitate action. Profanity and corruption walking on three legs, but otherwise appearing friendly. The acorn with Bible-thin paper wrapped inside, the aura or aurora associate with Lyra’s name, the clockwise/ counter- imagery connected with problem-solving and seeing the world in a new way. The wretched league dedicated to betrayal of friends and family and subversion of the educational purpose of school. These characters who disappear - Mr Boatwright from the inn, Mr W the headmaster, Mr Taphouse the carpenter, and the curiously muted role of Malcolm’s real parents beside the allure of these other father-figures. The mysterious status of parents overall in the tale: Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, the one kept away from his daughter by force, the other seemingly unwilling to care for her but curious about her significance once it becomes mythic, intertwined with her passion, which is power, and her chosen avenue the church. National names, Brytain, Swiss War, mentioned for the first time (her hair color changed from black to gold? Any other changes, questions of temporality and causality here?)

The primacy of the Oxford tutorial system recast as conversations with Dr Hannah Relf, even with or superseding the importance of their spying, the reading they do and discuss together. The metaphor of reading the alethiometer, the books of research, the literal reading of real books: Agatha Christie, Stephen Hawking, but not so far poetry--though they quote a hymn and call out the allusion to Noah. (Faerie Queene at the end).

Now, to eagerly await the next book, meanwhile reading all those this one mentions and re-reading this one!

Revisiting Coates and Copperman: open letter to Tony

Hey Anthony,

I had not seen this article, so I'm glad you sent it! I should probably read the news more...but there's so much to read.

I confess I skimmed a lot of the dense sections marshaling evidence. These were my favorite lines, towards the end:

It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump.

Prophetic mode, critique of journalism, reprise of history and politics--a tour de force. Thinking of Trump in terms of Jefferson and Jackson and tragic hubris, mingling democratic demonstration with a kind of collective playwrighting we are all engaged in without a care for the scapegoats, this is deep jeonk. And I think it even begins to suggest a way towards the mending of the ills Coates is mainly at pains to highlight: namely, more writing and thinking informed by all these sources, nourished by these experiences both intellectual and practical. And beyond the writing is the confrontation with history, politics, race and economics that it points toward. But also and especially, I think,  squarely questioning those overtones of the word "fallen", and prodding at the white conservative Christians who believe their fall can be redeemed, yet live and act as though that redemption depended, like everything else, on the color of the soul concerned. Trenchantly calling out major white liberals for blindness or cowardice, too, in their attempts to name the problem, Coates is even-handed in his diagnosis. I hope at least one of them replies publicly.

But maybe the most interesting thing for me would be also to try to get those people who voted for Trump to actually read this article, to think through the argument and feel the force of these allusions. That would always be one of my big questions when we came to the Civil War and Reconstruction, trying to get the kids to think about how to even start to change someone's mind-and-heart who is raised to be a racist. I think we all understand on some level that when we go into that thought experiment, the someone is also us, at this moment of history, and not just a white Southerner post-bellum. On this topic, some of Studs Terkel's interviews with such recovering racists are illuminating. People are capable of reflecting, changing, healing in this way, and they are more than willing to bear witness to it if the right person asks the right question...

Honestly, it seems like part of what Coates might be confronting, as struck me in his Between the World and Me, is that the temptation to draw on religious language to identify problems must also remind us that religions have traditionally also claimed to provide people with answers to them, and may possibly suggest that they still actually provide the answer to many people. The Fall is bigger than politics, just as the American tragedy is part of a general human story. To deal with it, we need to turn not just to history and journalism, but to the Bible, to the poets, Blake, Milton, Dante... If people claim to believe in the Bible, for instance, we should read it with them and see what it says, and what they actually think about it; we should point them towards those poets and philosophers down through the ages who have been such subtle readers of it, and found in it things we can only wonder at. The same goes for the traditional beliefs of all the world's cultures, naturally, which we can't really start to understand without teaching foreign languages in a serious way. If public schools never read good books or take languages seriously, we can't really do that there, so in what space can that discussion take place? I wonder about this as I've started exploring online teaching and tutoring. Nothing really has come of it yet, but it's all potential.

I wonder, too, what Mr Copperman is up to in Teacher: Two Years. I take a lot of it to be him processing what he actually was doing there, and I'm intrigued by how little in the way of sweeping statements he comes out of it with, how much more modest his accounting turns out to be than the likes of Geoffrey Canada or the Freedom Writers or any of those charismatics. I agree that he slips in some generic Delta color; I think the chapter about the blues concert is the biggest let-down of the book. Elsewhere his writing is pretty powerful, but there, and when he quotes the kids' dialect, it is a little cringe-worthy. But I have tried a couple of times to say something about teaching in Phoenix, and so far I don't have much to show for it, so I respect and admire him for seeing his book through! He might let himself off a little easy in the end, softening the critique of his objective failure and trying to make up for it by attesting to his love for the kids--attempting to forgive himself. I think that's understandable, but I like that it's counterbalanced by the harsh statistics and hard-headedness of the scholar whose lecture he goes to there towards the end, who shoots him down and calls him hopelessly biased. Of course, this only helps confirm his point: Love is blind! It may be the only thing capable of redeeming guilt, this side of theophany.

Reading with Patrick should be something I can track down and read before too long. I'm glad you got to meet Stephanie, too! It was great seeing you. Until the next wedding, or whenever, let's keep reading, then, and keep in touch!

Unreal Beowulf

Spurred to write by news, but not about the news:

In the slaughter at the country music concert in Las Vegas or the school shooting down the road in Freeman, detecting echoes of Grendel's atrocities in Heorot. In the places supposed to be for joy and peace, the incursions of pain and hatred mark and mar. And soon enough, all will be forgotten, and in the case of the old poem even the language it is written in, unless people take the time to remember.

In some throwaway comments from the Tolkien Professor on the affinities between Germanic heroic verse and American hip hop, catching a glimpse of the relevance and red herrings of race as a focus for social justice. The celebratory focus on greatness in the midst of pain, the exultation in being awesome, as James likes to say it makes you feel awesome to listen to it, and this is universal. After all most of the music is bought by the white kids, and the poets and skalds were making it a thousand years ago in the cold North after their own fashion. So that would be something to share, together with the family histories, the migrations, poverty and richness that are more than skin deep.

In the No Fault Zone posited by the Nonviolent Communication Trainer, considering whether this means a No Story Zone, too. She had us tell stories of giving, times we were given something or gave something with no expectation of being able to repay. She had us sit in a circle and tell why we were there, then she told us her reasons: for her assumption was that we are all interconnected, meaning that we win or lose together. But all the tragic and comic stories from which our cultures derive their values run counter to that assumption. Heroes win or lose, representing us as ideals but not absolving us from making the same movement for ourselves. Our interconnections run only so far before attenuating or breaking down, so that what looks like winning in one country, or on one block, means losing over in the next. The same story being told in both places would have totally different meanings, supposing it could even be told, would even be listened to. Still, perhaps the story of the nonviolent communicator's ideals could be a story precisely about this movement between zones, a creation myth of the No Fault Zone, or a pilgrimage of getting out of one zone and into another, making it to the No Fault Zone--but perhaps as an infiltrator, a ravager, a stepper of the borderlands.

Smaller fish, too

In the past few months a handful of projects proceeded while others ground to a halt.

This blog, for example. Though Spef took the occasion to make a pdf of all of it so far on some magic website, for anyone who might like to get the full of the notes for a new school experience, I stopped posting on it. I just saw I had a draft for a post called Unreal Beowulf sitting here from sometime in the summer. Just that title, nothing else written. I think I will come back to it before too long with matter from my notes and be able to post it, words, absence thereof, and all.

I did write more, however, more on the memoir, more essay notes, and theorized a podcast with Pat for awhile there, writing three pages a day like I'm supposed to. Need to get back to letter-writing to people, before it's too late, meaning I forget again.

The Signum University work has been going well. Beowulf translation has been taking most of my time for writing since that course began. I had put in some kind of order the notes for an essay on Tolkien's translations, but that will have to wait again for now. But most exciting is the new partnership with Outschool, who wanted to provide homeschool parents with a Lord of the Rings class and reached out to the Tolkien Professor to get one. And here one is! And another on (or in preparation for) Pullman's Book of Dust, finally about to be released!

And then teaching Spanish long-term again for a teacher on maternity leave, so I get to see another public school quite different from the ones where I was posted most of last year. More on that later.

A couple of interesting places for Spokane to have: the whole neck of the woods around church, which includes a Montessori school or two and this campus of a Japanese university; and the Spanish conversation club that meets at Lindaman's, by Manito Park, where a lady from Andalucia who had recently gone back on a three-week vacation there was showing everyone postcards and reminiscing about eating boquerones on the beach. Something that I liked about these two sites is the second-language feel of some of the English. I admire whoever wrote them.

So, between the bigger fish and the small fry, life's good I have to say.