Mr. Mac's Reading Blog -- Summer 2018

     This is a Group Reading Experience.      As you make your way through the poems, or the play, or the novel, you may have a comment.  Maybe you had a teacher like Mrs. Krikorian.  Maybe you suddenly have a vivid memory of riding the bus to school in the rain.  Go to the "Twenty Selected Poems" page, and leave a comment.      Maybe you're really getting angry at Hedda for how poorly she treats her husband.  Or maybe you can really identify with the limitations that Hedda feels society has placed on her just because she's a girl.   Go to the "Hedda" page, and vent!  But wait! what's this?  Somebody else has expressed a completely different opinion?   What's up with that?  You'd better let them know how wrong they are (in a pleasant and collegial way).       And when you're reading The Return of the Native , you're very confused about why Eustacia refused to open the door...

But largely, c’mon — you and I both know — real live American poetry is absent from our public schools.  The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited and aria’d only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated, and silent, like a classroom whose door is unopened, whose shades are drawn. This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations.  We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through.  We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak. The first part of the fix is very simple: the list of poems taught in our schools n...

The year: 1890; the country: Norway. Hedda Gabler returns from her honeymoon to a house and life she despises, with a husband for whom she has no respect. Into this unhappy home bring two men who would become her lover – one an upstanding judge, and the other a brilliant but dissolute man with a scandalous past.  Just a word of warning about Hedda. You probably won’t like her, but she’s a fascinating literary creation. She’s more complicated than you think (if the responses of earlier classes are any indicator). The actress Kate Burton called Hedda “a female Hamlet.” I’m not sure I‘d go that far, but she’s more than just a “mean girl“. There are reasons for everything she does, (although sometimes they are dark even to her). Take the “bonnet incident”. You can take her at face value when she tells Judge Brack that she doesn’t know why she does things like that.  But for a key to understanding Hedda look closely at the nature of her relationship with Lovborg — especially in...

Imagine yourself being a lively, vibrant young person stuck with a bunch of hicks in an insular location where nothing ever happens. (It may not be that big a stretch.) What can you do to amuse yourself? What would you do to get out? The Return of the Native is a traditional 19th century novel by one of the great English novelists, Thomas Hardy. You’ll find that it’s kind of slow-paced for our tastes. But stick with it. The characters are interesting, and the situations they find themselves in are compelling. Hardy liked to subject his characters to the vagaries of fate, and that is certainly in evidence in The Return of the Native. Warning: this book starts off slow. Real slow. It's a loving description of Egdon Heath, the setting for this novel. (The chapter gives you some idea of what it feels like for Eustacia to have to live there.)  Try to get through it. The heath is an important character in the novel. But, rest assured, the whole book is not like this. Once we sta...