Can this blog get any more pathetic?

My last post articulated that it had been quiet for a while as I was coming into a new post at Caldwell Academy for the 2010-11 year.  Now at the end of that year I am headed back out the door.  I am determined to keep in the Great Conversation and to keep my thoughts active here, but we will see how that comes about…

So it’s been a while, but things have been happening…

I don’t know if anyone follows this blog anymore, but I wanted to at least update this spot as I hope it becomes active again soon.

This past June I lost my job at Christ Covenant School in Winterville, NC where this blog began.  It was not an official school site, but rather the concoction of several faculty members and I who liked to chat about books.  Thusly, the silence for a while.  I am hoping it will restart in my new digs at Caldwell Academy in Greensboro, NC.

I am currently enjoying several works that are worthy of this blog: Thoreau’s Walden, Dicken’s Hard Times, and The Arabian Nights. Maybe I will have folks to discuss these with soon.

What is the “Heart of Darkness”?

I am enjoying this my second reading through of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.  I am seeing a lot I missed the first time.  The question that Jon Alder has pressed me on is, “What is the Heart of Darkness”?  I am finding this a truly helpful question.

Of course, there is within each of us a heart full of darkness.  Who can know it?  I am convinced that some of what Conrad is working through in this story is how dark the heart of man truly is, especially when those things that hold back that darkness (accountability, convention, tradition, culture) are stripped away, as with someone spending a great deal of time in the bush of Africa.

And I am sure given the context, that some of the darkness Conrad is examining is at a colonial level as the “Man” seeks to do this thing to the African people.

But one of the better thoughts I have had is how powerful an image darkness is on its own merits.  Physical darkness is fear inducing.  Mental darkness is common to all of us, and how often we can be brought there in this world of shadows.  One of the more compelling images of this early on is the slave on the coast who is unmercifully beaten and a few days later, “I saw him, later, for several days, sitting in a bit of shade looking very sick and trying to recover himself; afterwards he arose and went out — and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again.”

Another great image of this darkness, its vastness physically in respect to the size of Africa, is just a few lines before the story teller says, “And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

I hope the rest of you are enjoying this as well.

Next Book: Heart of Darkness

We will meet to discuss “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad on June 3rd at 7pm at the Alder’s home.

The following are some basic facts about the work I pulled from Sparknotes, just to give a gentle push out from the shore and start you up the river:

• Type of work · Novella (between a novel and a short story in length and scope)
• Time and place written · England, 1898–1899; inspired by Conrad’s journey to the Congo in 1890
• Date of first publication · Serialized in Blackwood’s magazine in 1899; published in 1902 in the volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories
• Narrator · There are two narrators: an anonymous passenger on a pleasure ship, who listens to Marlow’s story, and Marlow himself, a middle-aged ship’s captain.
• Point of view · The first narrator speaks in the first-person plural, on behalf of four other passengers who listen to Marlow’s tale. Marlow narrates his story in the first person, describing only what he witnessed and experienced, and providing his own commentary on the story.
• Setting (time) · Latter part of the nineteenth century, probably sometime between 1876 and 1892
• Setting (place) · Opens on the Thames River outside London, where Marlow is telling the story that makes up Heart of Darkness. Events of the story take place in Brussels, at the Company’s offices, and in the Congo, then a Belgian territory.
• Protagonist · Marlow
• Major conflict · Both Marlow and Kurtz confront a conflict between their images of themselves as “civilized” Europeans and the temptation to abandon morality completely once they leave the
• Themes · The hypocrisy of imperialism, madness as a result of imperialism, the absurdity of evil
• Motifs · Darkness (very seldom opposed by light), interiors vs. surfaces (kernel/shell, coast/inland, station/forest, etc.), ironic understatement, hyperbolic language, inability to find words to describe situation adequately, images of ridiculous waste, upriver versus downriver/toward and away from Kurtz/away from and back toward civilization (quest or journey structure)
• Symbols · Rivers, fog, women (Kurtz’s Intended, his African mistress), French warship shelling forested coast, grove of death, severed heads on fence posts, Kurtz’s “Report,” dead helmsman, maps, “whited sepulchre” of Brussels, knitting women in Company offices, man trying to fill bucket with hole in it
• Foreshadowing · Permeates every moment of the narrative—mostly operates on the level of imagery, which is consistently dark, gloomy, and threatening

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thy Bookchat?

I absolutely enjoyed our small group discussion on April 15 of Romeo and Juliet, those lovers of too much haste.  Discussing death on Tax Day, those two inextricably linked and inescapable ideas.  I wish I had time to recreate the discussion, but I do not.  Thanks so much to those who brought such wonderful insights and thoughts to this rich text.  I can’t wait for our next session.

How is Love Caught?

In starting to read Romeo and Juliet, by W. Shakespeare, I have been struck by the dialogue between Romeo and Benvolio.  Romeo is in love so bad it has him sick.  We are not sure as of yet exactly why he is sad, but we know he has it bad.  Ben, to try and revive the spirits of his cousin and friend, is seeking to distract Romeo off into the wider fields of fine possibilities, womanly speaking.  And Romeo won’t be dissuaded, claiming that the considerations his love has to offer make all other women plain and dull to him.  We don’t know how Romeo caught the love bug, we certainly know he has been bitten.

This has led to my own contemplations of the nature of outward and inward attraction in romantic love.  Often there is some outward beauty or feature that first gains the attention of the soon to suitor.  But almost immediately, at least in what we call “true love” there is a going inward, a relating to the new found lover for what is found within rather than halting at the outward and turning aside into some sort of objectification.  And there is often no logic, no accounting for such.  In many ways, it is a mystery from God. But boy did WS seem to understand this in how he wrote the part for Romeo.

Our First Local Meeting

We are going to meet April 15, 7pm, at Jon A’s home.  We will be discussing our reading of “Romeo and Juliet” and determining where we go from the first meeting forward.  Hope you can join us.

Let’s Get the Ball Rolling…

I love the great input folks have given about how to do something meaningful and enjoyable in our local community with the great books.

Here is my suggested plan, that can be further adjusted as we go forward…

The Idea:

We desire to become a community of adult learners who model for our children what we are seeking to cultivate in them as students at Christ Covenant School.  To that end, we are seeking with these forums to…

• Read the works our upper school students will be reading in their studies, focusing especially on the literature.
• Practice and enjoy the art of conversation.
• To sharpen our skills and increase our knowledge about the basic ideas of human experience.
• To share these great works with each other that each of us might love and appreciate them more.

The Means:

• We will choose a book and begin reading it prior to our first meeting (see below for first choice).
• We will agree upon in advance one or two questions that each of us will be seeking to answer as we read.
• We will come together to discuss the work and our thoughts on our questions.

The First Book:

• Romeo and Juliet, W. Shakespeare
• This book is read in our 8th grade.  I think its size and content are both manageable for us as a first work to tackle.
• Attached is a brief overview.
• I would recommend that we publish far and wide the call for all interested participants to read this work and come ready to discuss the following questions:

• • Do the main characters in this story truly love?
  • Compare and contrast the characters of Romeo and Juliet. How do they develop throughout the play? What makes them fall in love with one another?

Overview of the Play:

• Full title  ·  The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
• Author  · William Shakespeare
• Genre  · Tragic drama
• Time and place written  · London, mid-1590s
• Date of first publication  · 1597 (in the First Quarto, which was likely an unauthorized incomplete edition); 1599 (in the Second Quarto, which was authorized)
• Protagonists  · Romeo; Juliet
• Antagonists  · The feuding Montagues and Capulets; Tybalt; the Prince and citizens of Verona; fate
• Setting – Renaissance (fourteenth or fifteenth century); Verona and Mantua (cities in northern Italy)

What are we going to read? Poll 1

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to involve you all in getting to a book for us to share.  I am going to ask a series of questions to see if we can do this via polling and email.

Why is this so hard?

My question about books today is why it often seems so difficult to form and maintain “book relationships.”  I have tried to grow “book clubs” or “book relationships” several times over the years.  They seem to be seasonal, lasting for a book or two, or for a few months, maybe even years, before disintegrating.  Some of the blame has been my mobility.  Having moved about the country too much, I must pay the price for such.  But I think that even within a given community there is a set of possible difficulties that make such an endeavor difficult.

1. Margin - we do not choose wisely with our time in many cases and thus we don’t take time for reading or for discussing what we have read.
2. Epistemology - we often are unsure of our knowledge, and how much we can really know, and the relationship between opinion and true knowledge.
3. Education – I believe many of us know we were never taught to read well or to converse well about it, so we are hesitant to do that which we fear we are weak at doing.
4. Experience – the many who have attempted such things have perhaps had a high incidence of bad experiences (in part due to #1-3) in which they have experienced any of a number of bad types of book relationships, such things as some of the following:

a)      The smarmy hour, where no one says anything of substance, it is just all about the fellowship, not about the reading;

b)      The Ivory tower time, where one or more of the participants go off into the ether and do not bring anything of particular significance to bear on the reading – its just all ideas, nothing that can change my manner of living in any way; or perhaps

c)      Spiritual one up man ship, where a group of believers either read a purely theological work and preach to each other (calling this ‘fellowship’) or they read a ‘secular’ work and then preach at it, or bend it to the Christian view point, or some other crime against truth.

My thoughts above have not discouraged me trying it all once again.  I am talking with some folks at my school about getting together and starting some discussion about something worth all our reading time.  If you would like to jump in, let me know.  It is my prayer that we can have a group (large or small, either is cool with me) that avoids some of the above pitfalls and simply allows iron to sharpen iron, and lives to be changed through their love of great literature.