Christian Leithart

They Occasionally Soar

Poets are so much like dancers who ruin their ankles for the sake of a moment’s beauty in the air.
Colum McCann

When Is a Poem Finished?

A poem feels finished when I can’t enter it again. Everything falls into place, each line feels balanced and complete, the shifts between lines and sentences feel shocking but also permanent and incapable of change. This poem is finished. I have to make something new. I have to be a different poet.
Richie Hofmann: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/06/14/making-of-a-poem-richie-hofmann/

And:

I have often found… that sometimes the best revision of a draft is the writing of a new poem.

Tools That Flow

Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow. When the nerds upon Nerd Hill fight to the death over Vi and Emacs, it’s partly because they have such a strong affinity for the flow of the application and its meldiness. They have invested. The Tool Is Good, so they feel. Not breaking flow is an axiom of great tools.

A typewriter is an excellent tool because, even though it’s slow in a relative sense, every aspect of the machine itself operates as quickly as the user can move. It is focused. There are no delays when making a new line or slamming a key into the paper. Yes, you have to put a new sheet of paper into the machine at the end of a page, but that action becomes part of the flow of using the machine, and the accumulation of paper a visual indication of work completed. It is not wasted work. There are no fundamental mechanical delays in using the machine. The best software inches ever closer to the physical directness of something like a typewriter.
Craig Mod

When the Sumerians wanted to get a message across, they tended to write it in cuneiform on clay bricks. As writing the same message (“this wall belongs to King Lugalzagesi”) over and over again by hand would have become tedious, they created a stamp to speed up the process, a la the DMV.

Signs that made up the king’s inscription could be cut in reverse on a block and used to stamp the bricks. This first kind of printing went on for almost two thousand years. Remarkably, its use was reserved for mundane bricks, and no other purpose. Other types of text were not required in large numbers and there may also have been cultural resistance to the use of stamping for learned texts.

Why not produce poetry and other “learned texts” en masse? Perhaps to increase their value through scarcity. Perhaps because mindlessly stamping wet clay didn’t seem like an appropriate way to reproduce the text of a great epic.

Regardless, the stamp was a clever invention, perhaps even more so than we might think:

In a few stamped examples some signs are upside down. The best explanation is perhaps that individually mounted wedge signs had been carelessly replaced in the matrix after cleaning out the stamp. Here we could have not only printing, but even moveable type, two thousand years before Gutenberg!
Cuneiform, Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor

Oh, you crafty ancient Sumerians. Truly, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Campbell and Catharsis

Since I teach ancient Humanities, I’m occasionally asked about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the story structure he outlined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. My gut reaction has always been to reject his ideas, but since I’ve never studied them in detail, I decided to read the book itself. Hoo, boy. It’s bad. Campbell is entirely too fascinated with paganism to be of any use in the classroom. An example:

As Gilbert Murray has pointed out in his preface to Ingram Bywater’s translation of the Poetics of Aristotle, tragic katharsis (i.e., the “purification” or “purgation” of the emotions of the spectator of tragedy through his experience of pity and terror) corresponds to an earlier ritual katharsis (“a purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death”), which was the function of the festival and mystery play of the dismembered bull-god Dionysos. The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time inhabited it, and for that time was the reality clothed in the apparition (at once the sufferer and the secret cause), the substratum into which our selves dissolve when the “tragedy that breaks man’s face” has split, shattered, and dissolved our mortal frame.

In other words, ancient mystery plays were rituals designed to carry the community (let’s call it the congregation) through tragedy by showing how death frees the spirit from the mortal body. Unfortunately, the spirit gets caught and trapped again, which is why these rituals have to happen over and over.

I spend quite a lot of time in class describing how the ancient pagans viewed the gods. It’s true that the gods were revered partly because they had escaped the confines of the mortal body, so from a purely historical standpoint, Murray’s statement is accurate. What I don’t need is some twentieth century literary critic making goo-goo eyes at this “principle of continuous life.”

Worse, some Christians see the monomyth as a precursor to the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, which would imply that these ancient mystery plays were in some way prefiguring the gospel story. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pagan story is that death frees the spirit from the body, its prison, at least until twelve months’ worth of wickedness piles up again. The worshiper is united, not with the death, but with the spiritual life that goes on and on. The gospel story is that Christ died and we died with Him, freeing us from sin forever. Being united with His death is the whole point. Furthermore, in the gospel story, the separation of body and soul in death is a great discomfort that Christ will resolve when He returns.

Assuming Campbell’s analysis of myth is accurate (I’ll decide after I’ve finished the book), to teach my students that ancient myths foreshadow the gospel story would be to do them a disservice.

An Argument Against Abridged Versions

In covering The Social Contract, we will do close reads of a few passages. Some of those passages will be easy and some will be hard. However, learning to speak philosophy requires not only the close work of interpretation but prolonged general exposure to it. Put another way, learning to read difficult books requires not only quality time but quantity time.

If there are long passages in today’s reading that you don’t get, don’t tell yourself, ‘I don’t get this book’ and give up. The truth is, you’re not going to get many parts the book, but this book is worth reading for the portions that you do get. If we didn’t cover the difficult parts, you would never get to a place that you could understand them.
Josh Gibbs

This is why, in my 7th grade Humanities class, I assign the entirety of the Odyssey.

What Dorothy Sayers Really Said: Grammar Stage Curriculum

This is the third of a series of posts about Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” I think that’s sufficient introduction for anyone who reads this blog. Here are the first and second installments.

Also, I’m going to call her Dottie throughout, because I want to.

Some in the world of classical Christian education disparage Dottie because of her emphasis on teaching the “tools of learning,” which the educated student can apply to anything he pleases. They insist that the quality of an education depends on what is taught as well as how it is taught, and they believe that Dottie’s approach doesn’t take this into account. True, Dottie is somewhat agnostic about content. She says that the teachers must look upon their classes “less as ‘subjects’ in themselves than as a gathering-together of material [her emphasis] for use in the next part of the Trivium. What that material is, is only of secondary importance.”

As we’ve seen already, Dottie comes close to contradicting herself at various places in the essay, and this may be one of those places. After all, she spends quite a lot of time talking about what should and shouldn’t be studied in the Grammar Stage. But I think the operative phrase in the quote above is “less as.” The teachers will teach subjects, truth, stories, facts, information, but they must see these things as all of a piece. Everything they teach can be used later on, which means nothing memorized is completely useless. It does not mean that the teachers should break advanced subjects into pieces and get the kids to memorize the pieces. But that will have to wait for another post. First, let’s look at Dottie’s curriculum recommendations for the Grammar Stage.

Grammar

To master Grammar itself, students should learn the grammar of an inflected language. (This rules out English, as we saw earlier.) Dottie is ok with Russian, Sanskrit, and Classical Greek, but she recommends Latin—Medieval Latin, that is, not Classical. I don’t know of any classical school that starts with Medieval Latin, but that may be due to a lack of textbooks.

Dottie also suggests starting a contemporary foreign language at this age. She recommends French or German. Honest question: Do any classical schools teach modern languages in the Grammar Stage?

English (Literature)

Dottie recommends memorizing (and reciting) poetry and prose and telling many, many stories, including ancient myths. Do not, says she, do not use ancient myths to practice Latin grammar. I suppose she doesn’t want young people to spend time poring over the unfiltered words of pagan authors.

History

I don’t want to point fingers, but I want to emphasize here that Dottie recommends History consist of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities. Memorizing a timeline of dates and events does no one any good unless those dates and events are tied to real people and what they did. The particular dates, she says, don’t matter. What matters is having a historical framework of some kind—accompanied by “pictures of costumes, architecture, and other ‘everyday things.” Got that? Worry less about memorizing five hundred dates and more about getting a full picture of one or two historical time periods.

Geography

Geography, like history, is presented as facts associated with visual presentation: “customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on.” She encourages memorizing capitals and collecting stamps.

Science

Dottie recommends teaching science through “the identifying and naming of specimens.” Notice that word “identifying.” How is a student going to identify a devil’s coach-horse, Cassiopeia, a whale, or a bat without observing them? There is nothing in her description of Science that would require a student to even be inside a classroom. Excursions into nature seem like an obvious extension of her suggestions.

Math

I know people who scoff at the phrase “the grammar of Mathematics” because they view “grammar” as a linguistic term. But if we take Dottie’s own definition of grammar as “learning what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” then we can easily see how the term applies to math. She recommends memorizing multiplication tables, geometrical shapes, and “the grouping of numbers,” followed by simple sums in arithmetic. I’m not sure that these activities by themselves will result in a student’s understanding “what language is, how it’s put together, and how it works,” but then, I’m not sure that any of Dottie’s Grammar Stage recommendations fulfill that promise.

Theology

Here, more than anywhere else, Dottie emphasizes that the student does not need to fully understand the material, merely to be familiar with it. She recommends teaching the Biblical narrative as a complete story of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption, as well as the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. I think she underestimates the students here. A nine-year-old can easily understand all of those things—not fully, perhaps, but sufficiently.

How I Find Films to Watch

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For nine and a half years, I’ve kept track of all the movies I watch start to finish. At the moment, that number is six hundred and thirty-four, an average of one movie every five days.

What they are depends on the year. When my daughter was around three, we watched a bunch of Disney and Pixar movies together. When my son was born, I slept on a pull-out sofa in the basement and watched James Bond movies before falling asleep.

For most of 2014 I had no money and lived in a studio apartment without internet. Every Tuesday at work I’d check 99rental.com to find out which movie iTunes was renting for a buck that week. Most of the time I’d never heard of it. I’d download it anyway and watch it at home.

I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, not talking, but listening. Twitter was a gold mine of information about movies & writing, straight from sources who knew. That was back when nobody knew that @Bitchuation was Steven Soderbergh and Rian Johnson was still unverified and dangerous. John August once argued with me about the ending to one of his own movies. All of these filmmakers constantly mentioned the movies, directors, screenwriters, editors, and cinematographers they loved, and I took note.

Most directors are avid movie fans. In the course of a ten-minute interview, Steven Spielberg might mention a dozen movies, some of which I’ve never heard of. He might say that one of them is “Fellini-esque,” leading me to look up Frederico Fellini and add a couple of his most highly rated films to my watchlist.

Speaking of watchlists, I use IMDb to keep track of what I want to watch, partly because it makes it easy to find out where a given film is streaming, and partly because it’s so easy to follow a thread from one film to another. For instance, watching The Untouchables a few years ago, I noticed how well the chase scene was shot (not to mention the reference to Battleship Potemkin) and looked up the cinematographer (Stephen Burum). One of the films he shot (The Escape Artist) was directed by another cinematographer named Caleb Deschanel (yes, Zooey’s dad). Never mind that The Escape Artist has a 6.8/10 on IMDb and a 58% on Metascore. A great cinematographer directed it and another great cinematographer shot. It goes on the list.

When picking a movie to watch on a Saturday night, and after convincing my wife to watch something obscure that may not be any good, I filter my watchlist by one of the streaming services we have access to (Prime, Netflix, Hulu, IMDb Freevee) and poke around for something that looks interesting. I know I’ll never get around to watching all the films that are on my list (there are exactly 1000 of them at the moment), and I know that not all of them are good. That’s fine. My watchlist functions like an anti-library, reminding me of all the movies, good and bad, that are out there. And once in a while, I do stumble across a gem. Here are ten of the best lesser known movies I saw for the first time in the last nine years: