Feathered by the Moonlight in the Daytime

Digest No. 08 - April 2024

Nota Bene: Welcome to the many new followers who’ve signed up this week. The end of each month concludes with these digest posts, covering a variety of topics in brief. If this is your first emailed post, I hope you’ll find this as enriching as the rest of my work.

On Commonplacing

Love was always the reason for work, for enthusiasm . . . Love has always been building something somewhere. Either that or it decays. All married life you build—build egos, build houses, build children. If one stops, the other keeps going from momentum. But then it’s only a half structure. It roars down, finally, like a tower of cards.

Ray Bradbury, “The House,” in The Cat’s Pajamas: Stories (New York: HarperPerennial, 2005), p. 88.

Great Ideas: Love, Family, Happiness, Labor, Man

Trying to fill in-between some of the academic reading, I’ve picked up in the Barsoom series¹ again and also revisited some of Ray Bradbury’s work. The Cat’s Pajamas was the first Bradbury book I read all the way back in 2012. I started using the short story “A Matter of Taste” in the classroom and have read it a dozen times during the intervening twelve years. But I have never gone back through the whole volume until now. Its marvelous. The commonplace here comes from a short story titled “The House.” This one may not strike a reader as typical Bradbury. No Martians. No robots. No carnivals. Just a husband and wife remodeling a house with all the strains that such a project can bring to a marriage. And yet, it is typical Bradbury because it pierces to the heart of the human experience. It could fit neatly into any of Bradbury’s Greentown stories, of course, even without the almost magical realism latent in his fiction.

This passage struck me in particular, as I reflected on the fact that Bradbury’s wife had passed away only a few months before this collection was assembled. Bradbury wrote at length about his great love for his wife, Maggie, to whom The Cat’s Pajamas is dedicated. Though “The House” was originally drafted in 1947, I have no doubt that as Bradbury re-read it in 2003 the words were still fresh on the page. If you haven’t given this collection a go, I highly recommend it.

On Reading & Researching

I finished Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at the beginning of April. It was . . . not a pleasant read. Jargon-filled with completely unstated and unchallenged assumptions, the book had little important to say for education, near as I could tell. However, as a political tract I can see its charm. Freire writes assertively and confidently, laying out some cultural critiques that the Left and the Right should note. He begins by saying only two kinds of people will finish his book: Marxists and Christians! Throughout, I was surprised at how Freire prefers to skewer those on the Left far more than those on the Right, and his critique of how Leftists fail felt like reading the current American Left’s playbook. As if, after reading Freire’s analysis of how the Brazilian Left “messed up,” the American Left decided, “yeah, lets aim for that.” In that way, he reminded me a lot of Marx and Nietzsche, thinkers who are excellent at critique but cannot (refuse to?) understand the Traditions they are critiquing. I’ll have more to say on Freire in the future, but for now, I am glad that’s behind me.

The same day I finished Freire, I read Jamie Smith’s reflection on Richard Rorty. Rorty too was fairly good at analysis, especially of the Left, but always struck me as lacking in practicality. What caught my eye in Smith’s piece though was a footnote. He notes, “If you think universities are sanctuaries for only left-wing political views, you’ve clearly never visited a School of Business or a School of Engineering.” This is like, after someone laments about the Left-leaning nature of the American University system as a whole, a person responds: “To be fair, Conservatives colleges do exist. Like Hillsdale.” Of course, one college out of thousands would hardly prove a balm in Gilead. And such a claim fails to apprehend the larger point of the critique and reduces it to a kind of cherry-picking that falters proportionally. It’s made worse as the complaint that universities are generally and overwhelmingly Left leaning is true even in Business and Engineering departments. The Business department at Harvard could hardly be called a hotbed of Conservative thinking. One shouldn’t make arguments out of footnotes, I think, but it caught my eye coming off the heels of Freire.

I also finished Rousseau’s Emile. Finally. Though I have a lot of disagreements with Rousseau, his book on education is full of insights and provocations. Book 5 proved far more interesting than I anticipated, and the last couple of sections are brimming with ideas worth further study. It is a whale of a book, to be sure, but I think it’s one I’ll return to in the future.

On Writing & Publishing

I sent off three essays this month. One was a brief write up on the state of Latin teachers in U. S. schools. I used the NCES National Teacher and Principal Survey data to put it together and I hope the journal editors are happy with it. One of the most interesting takeaways for me from that project was the percentage of Latin teachers with no formal Latin training. Given how many secondary schools seem to be offering Latin, one might think universities should be doing more to close that gap.

The second essay was about reading Livy’s History of Rome through a Gadamerian lens of play, which I argue turns the history book into a morality tale of significant accomplishment. I gave a version of this paper as a talk some years ago, and I think a total of three people were there. I’m hoping the peer review process goes smoothly and the article is accepted for publication.

The third essay was an edited version of my talk on Charles Williams and the classical classroom. Williams has been on my mind a bit more since sending that off, and I plan to dig into more of his work over the Summer months.

The ClassicalEd Review published my brief review of John Milton Gregory’s The Seven Laws of Teaching in its Canon Press edition. I’m awaiting feedback on my reviews of What Barfield Thought and The Black Intellectual Tradition. Hopefully, those will see the light of day soon.

The Seven Laws of Teaching

On Traveling & Speaking

April has been an intentionally quieter month in terms of travel. We’ve had plenty to keep us busy here in Arkansas, with piano recitals and homeschool geography fairs occupying much of our time. And of course, we enjoyed the near totality of the eclipse a couple of weeks back. The darkness grew heavy enough on the U of A campus that the automated lights kicked on, enhancing the atmosphere.

The class I’ve been co-teaching this semester only has one more class session, and I don’t think there will be another opportunity to do something similar next year. So, my brief period “teaching” at the University of Arkansas is drawing to a close. As they say, it was fun while it lasted.

May, June, and July are all heavy travel months for us. Here’s hoping for rest in the midst of the joy.

On Listening

I was elated to learn there’s a new album of Johnny Cash music being released this Summer. Those interested can pre-order the album. The music was originally recorded in 1993 as part of the American album that began a sort of renaissance in Cash’s career (though I think it can be argued he never really faded from the music scene). Those albums are excellent, and American IV remains one of those albums I still listen too in the Spotify age. The Cash Estate released one of the songs as a preview. Give it a listen.

1. I have two books left in the series, and then I plan to finish the Pellucidar books before diving into the Venus series.