The Weekly Reviews are a lot of fun to write. I enjoy scouring the web for interesting articles and blog posts. But, all the same, the project had begun to become a unmanageable. There are so many websites and blogs to check out everyday. I had been afraid that I was going to miss something.

What I repeatedly missed was my own deadline. You may have noticed that the past two weeks I had postponed my Weekly Review until Saturday.

I have been working hard but I haven’t been working very smart. Then I remembered a quote from one of my favorite writers:

Novels are written in the same way that farms are made productive, or houses are kept clean, or baseball penant races are won: with steady work each day.
–Andre Dubus

Substitute “Weekly Reviews” for “Novels” and you get the same concept. Rather than gathering up work throughout the week and then trying to throw something together slapdash on Thursday night, starting this week I will be working on the Weekly Review throughout the week.

Thursday afternoon I spent some time setting up a feed reader through Google. Though I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet — unlike Gmail, the posts disappear after you’ve read them unless you ask them to stay — but I am glad to consolidate many of my different websites into one place.

In addition to that, I’ve also setup Literature&Literacy on Feedburner.com. You can now subscribe to Literature&Literacy through an RSS Reader or through email.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Fixing Education
• Fighting What You Believe
• Failings
• The Humbling of Philip Roth

Fixing Education

• Teach Your Teachers Well by Susan Engel, Op-Ed, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• Grade the Teachers by Michael Jonas, The Sunday Boston Globe via boston.com
• Teacher Training Termed Mediocre by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• How to Improve American Education by Charles Wheelan, Ph.D., The Naked Economist, Yahoo! Finance
• Subversive Elevator Music by John Spencer, Musing of a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Former NBA Coach Switches Gears At Charter School by Mike Pesca, All Things Considered, NPR via npr.org

There has been a lot about this since Arne Duncan came out and said that he wants to improve teacher training programs. Newly minted teachers come out of these programs and feel overwhelmed by having to manage a classroom.

Most actual training for particular jobs happens on the job. I have read that it takes a year to just begin to feel comfortable at your job. When I first began my job at the bank, I remember feeling overwhelmed. I know that many of my other friends felt the same.

It is quite easy to take potshots at educators:

• They work in a rarefied realm where they are not held accountable for their results.
• They don’t work very hard because they cannot be fired.
• They work only half a year! Every time you turn around they have another vacation! They get summers off!

People pay lip service to the idea that educators play a vital role in our nation. But I do not believe they actually believe that. Teachers are paid very poorly for the work that they do, especially as class sizes grow and resources are reduced. If people truly believed that teachers and educators were vital to our economy, they would pay teachers more.

There is no end to commentators and news writers who are willing to offer advice on how to improve our education system. Everyone has an opinion on this matter.

One idea that is being passed around is the idea of merit pay for teachers. I believe in what Alfie Kohn writes in Punished By Rewards that you can get diminishing results when you attempt to tie rewards to performance. And there are economists and business theorists who believe that as well. I remember seeing articles arguing that Golden Parachutes are necessary because CEOs who are not allowed to pursue ideas that may fail will not innovate and will not advance the economy.

I also fear that you will get unethical behavior. I have met salesmen and saleswomen who will do whatever they can to get a sale, tell customers whatever they want to hear. Do we want teachers and principals who are fighting to get rewards rather than educate our children?

We need to go back to basics. We need to have a national conversation about the why of school, its purpose.

If we decide public education is vital to the lives of our children and our success as a nation, we need to align our teachers paychecks with that belief. People choose careers in college based in part on what they expect to get paid after leaving school. There are some people who want to be teachers and would be excellent educators, but instead become engineers or computer scientists for fear that they will be unable to support their future families on a teacher’s salary.

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Fighting What You Believe

• Knocking Out the Beliefs That Hold You Back by April Dykman, Get Rich Slowly

Get Rich Slowly was one of the very first blogs that I started reading. Practical, down to earth financial advice for people who understand that there is more to life than earning money.

Much like Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Get Rich Slowly has a broad definition of rich. Rather than limiting richness to wealth, these blogs talk about living a rich life.

Granted they take it as a starting point that you cannot live richly if you are living in debt with no financial plans.

April Dykman is a new staff writer at Get Rich Slowly. And she never thought she would be able to make a living as a freelance writer. She had had this belief before she entered college. One of her professors reinforced that belief.

And for years she clung to that belief.

That belief became part of her personal narrative. Each of us keeps this personal narrative of who we are and what we can and cannot do. Many of these beliefs are locked away in our minds, invisible chains that restrict our realities.

Read through April’s article and ask yourself, what narratives are you carrying with you that are holding you back?

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Failings

• Analysis: College students need lessons in failure by Justin Pope, Associated Press via boston.com
• What If We’re Afraid of the Wrong Things? by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher

I found a fortune cookie fortune in the pocket of a pair of trousers the other day as I was cleaning:

The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.

And then I saw this article through boston.com. I think that it is timely, especially with all the talk of fixing education swirling around. But I also thought this so important that it deserved its own discussion.

I fear that my generation has been too mollycoddled. We grew up during the age of self-esteem and the idea that hurt feelings were too much to bear. Self-esteem means nothing. Self-respect means everything and the only way to gain self-respect is to earn it.

Throughout my life I have been told that I am a gifted mind, that I can do whatever I set my mind to, and a lot of other things that I believe are platitudes. These were fed to me to encourage me. I don’t know whether they served their purpose.

When I was in college, I shared some of my poems with a professor I admired. He thought my works were utter drivel and told me so. Afterward I discussed the conversation with my adviser, thinking he would keep the conversation to himself, and let vent to my feelings.

I had been hurt and because I was not used to being told that I couldn’t do something. I gave up. My adviser tried to encourage me to think of this time as an apprenticeship.

But I had never been given the tools to handle failure.

So rather than think of this failure as a temporary setback, as an assessment of where I was on that day, I became a failed poet. There is a world of difference between being a beginner with a handful of failed poems and being a failed poet.

And perhaps if I had had experiences with failing prior to that, I would have been able to see the difference. Perhaps I could have picked myself up and begun to work again.

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The Humbling of Philip Roth

• Darkness visible by Richard Eder, The Boston Globe via boston.com
• Roth on Roth by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com

As with John Irving, I am not familiar with the work of Philip Roth. And, again as with John Irving, after reading these two book reviews though I want to read Philip Roth as well.

The Humbling follows a down and out actor. The theme is the end of inspiration and the end of creativity. I don’t know Richard Eder’s taste in books but I can tell that The Humbling is not his cup of tea.

A great actor is suddenly unable to act; the misery and the humiliations to which this leads bring him to the verge of suicide. It is not the business of a review to be telling what happens. It is telling, though, that the reader rather wants him to go ahead with it.
–Richard Eder on The Humbling

Yet even that dismissive review entices me on. Philip Roth is considered one of our times’ greatest writers. I want to read the book for myself and see if I can detect Roth trying to convey the struggles of creativity after a life time.

In This Essay

Steppenwolf: A Novel by Hermann Hesse (Basil Creighton, trans.)

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Richard J. Finneran, ed.)

Don Juan in Hell: From Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Last night I finished rereading Steppenwolf. I had put it down for a while and flitted among the arts.

I know for certain I am in the middle of two other novels. But I think I may have forgotten that I am in the middle of any number of others.

The past few weeks have been filled with theatre and opera.

As if that were not enough, I have been reading from the poetry of Rumi, W.B. Yeats, and John Keats. In fact, I have been working on memorizing Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” I have the first stanza of ten lines memorized; only seventy lines left to commit to memory.

“Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” I asked myself earlier.

Castles Built in the Air

I looked at the stacks of books piled up around my room. Looking at my room, I could not stop thinking of the descriptions of Harry Haller’s room nor the scenes of Will Hunting’s room. I have towers and towers of precariously balanced books; so many that I spend much of my time at work worrying if my cats have knocked them over.

These towers of covers, these garrets of paper, these gates hinged with glue enclose a beautiful courtyard of thoughts and ideas.

But they are also doorways to the Magic Theater.

The Magic Theater: For Madmen Only

What is the Magic Theater?

This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend; but it would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are. You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality.
–Pablo to Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 176.

Who has not had the desire to lay his personality, her self, aside for a few hours? Each of us, I believe, gets tired of the little dramas and games that occur in our day to day lives. We seek out the adventure and the relief of being someone else.

And this is why I am myself enmeshed in so many different books right now. I enjoy the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s characters who are both interior and self-aware while being bundles of chaos, drives, and impulses. But equally I enjoy the the relaxed stateliness of Jane Austen’s austere character dramas. I see myself as much in the personal poetry of John Keats as I do in the more affected poetry of W.B. Yeats.

The times that I most enjoy a book are those times when I can lose myself in a book. That is what Pablo is asking Harry to do on entering the Magic Theater. That is what so many of us do when we sit down with a book or in front of a television screen, when we enter a theater or a cinema.

Many great thinkers since the time of Socrates, if not before, have had their own variation on this theme. Socrates asks us why we run when what we run from is ourselves, the very thing we cannot escape through running. Seneca writes the same.

And Laughing Break the Mirror Sweet

And looking in the mirror, I asked myself again, “Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” And laughing, I realize it is because I want to escape for a little while from myself that I have spread myself so thin.

The mirror breaks.

And the image of myself dissolves. In my pocket I find a number of figures, each of them my self — each at least a sliver of self — that I can assemble into a number of different constellations. Some grow big, take on aspects that I do not recognize, while others recede, shrink away until they have almost disappeared.

I observe all this happening to me just as it happened to Harry.

The Wolf and the Scholar

As I was reading through Harry’s adventures in the Magic Theater, especially when he enters the box “All Girls Are Yours”, I found myself thinking of one of my favorite poems by W.B. Yeats.

The Scholars

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

–W.B. Yeats

Early in the novel Harry became disillusioned at seeing someone else’s painting or bust of Goethe, thinking his own image of Goethe — because it was in his mind and not vulgarly committed to clay or canvas — was any less a graven image. He believed he inhabited a more rarefied air than his contemporaries until he began to find the sweetness of popular entertainments.

Throughout the book, Harry Haller realizes that he has made quite a hash of his own life by creating these false dichotomies between the high arts and the low arts. Within his soul, Harry under Hermine’s tutelage found that he could find as much enlightenment in dancing a foxtrot as he could in listening to Mozart.

The Great Divide

I do not wonder, though, that he makes the dichotomies that he does, however. This idea of the gulf is pervasive. Shaw speaks to it in Don Juan in Hell. The Devil says:

The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that.
– The Devil in George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, page 15.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which Harry hints at throughout the novel but does not cite by name until the end of his time in the Magic Theater, and much of Goethe’s poetry is in praise of life’s pleasures. Perhaps Harry took Don Giovanni’s punishment too much to heart. That Harry takes things outside of the Magic Theater too seriously and that he cannot become enlightened because he has no sense of humor are major themes of Steppenwolf.

Entering the Magic Theater, Harry begins to take things less seriously. Through the illusions and entertainments of the Magic Theater, he begins to learn. At the critical moment, though, he lapses into his past thoughts and forgets the good humor he has learned.

And so it is with us, is it not? We close a book or leave a movie, in good cheer, in good humor, thinking we have learned to be better people — more loving, more generous, and more good-humored — and then our old selves come crashing down on us.

Is there no hope, then? Harry will tell us:

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

–Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 218.