Garbanzo Toons

American Digest

One of my favorite blogs is American Digest. It's full of fascinating posts that are brilliantly written. Even his links are worth reading. My only complaint is that sometimes I get sucked in and between the new posts and links within the posts, I spend too much time on the computer.

This post struck me in a number of different ways. First of all it begins with Harold Bloom, who I was upset to learn suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Maybe I'm too naive, but after reading The Western Cannon and his savage attacks on the various academics who want to replace western literature with multicultural drivel, I thought he was . . . well . . . I didn't think he would turn out to be a typical intellectual moonbat.

Second, it's extremly perceptive, it describes the BDS suffering intellectual so well.

Third, like many of his posts, it's funny . . . and caustic. I like that combination.

Gerard Van der leun, who writes American Digest, like me and so many other bloggers, used to be a left-leaner. So when he writes about lefties, he writes from experience, as he makes clear in this post.

So it is with the PAI "Professional American Intellectual." Indeed, many of them have wheedled their way into The Bubble of the Suddenly Wealthy since he always needs affirmation and they always need a grant. One of the first thing a PAI learns in school is how to mirror money. And money loves to be mirrored as much as the witch in "Sleeping Beauty." PAIs proliferate next to and within effortless money and the vast dark towers of American philanthropy. As Exhibits A to D I give you Senator and Mrs. Heinz-Kerry, the Hollywood Clintons, the George Soros Brigade, and the Huffington Huff of 2004 if you can bear to recall their antics. There are others and they are legion. This is, as I said, a fat country. We can afford a lot of them. We even let them jet about the nation to instruct us on how to live and think and believe and be. All the old snake oil of "the betters" who always know better and love to butt in to people's lives. Sometimes, since they are parasites on the body politic, we even allow them to run for office.

Looking at these intersecting bubble palaces wafting about America today, one can only feel irritated and saddened the inhabitants are compelled, en masse it seems, to move from hating Bush to hating The People as well. When this happens the murmured subtext is always thus: Oh, pity and fear the poor " Little People" who did not go to the right schools, read the right books, wear the right clothes, summer in the right places, speak the right French phrases, and have all the right friends. At parties, summer houses, and lunches in New York City for over 30 years I heard this nattering as a constant theme. I am ashamed now to say that I nattered right along with the rest. After all, once you've got a seat at the round table you've gotta walk the walk and talk the talk. That person standing behind your chair isn't the waiter and can't wait to sit down.

When you read this post, follow the links. And while you're there read this one too.

Ah well, the Enlightenment lies buried along the Western Front. It had some nice ideals, but left us living rapt in the spell of Reason. Now we are a "reasonable" society, a "scientific people" swaddled in a million theories of management -- convinced that all can be, somehow, managed through the limitless employment of Reason. Many of us, as we have seen in the past month, worship "intelligence uber alles," that strange and deadly viral god that kills the soul long before it kills the nations that embrace it. We see the apotheosis of this worship leap up from the dazed lands of Europe. We see it arc across our own skies.

You won't regret it. You may spend too much time there, though.

Labels: American Digest, BDS, books, Harold Bloom

posted by Harry @ 6:20 PM 2 comments

Macbeth for Kids - Part 2

My fourth graders finished reading Macbeth a few weeks ago. I posted previously about this subject here. I can't say everyone enjoyed reading Shakespeare, but I can say that they all got something out of their reading, and that the majority of the class did like it. I even started reading Hamlet with a group of four because they begged me. The leader of that group had been one of my biggest trouble makers for the past two years. She was also one of the smartest and most perceptive students in the class, but was, shall we say, foul-tempered, especially when she didn't get her way. The rest of the class was memorizing the witches'speech from act 4. Some were brave enough to recite what they had memorized in front of the class and for visitors.

After we finished the play, we watched the movie version by Orson Wells. My other choice was the Roman Polanski version. It was produced by Hugh Hefner and Playboy Magazine, so it really wasn't a choice. Whenever we show current movies to classes in school, the students are noisy and obnoxious. In this case, even though the movie was in black and white with lousy sound, they watched. They pointed out to me the places Mr. Wells took liberties with the script. I hadn't seen this kind of attention paid to a movie since I showed a group of fifth graders Romeo and Juliet after they had read that play.

The point here, as we can see, is that if children are taught to read properly, they can read, understand, and enjoy anything we put in front of them. We don't have to bring Shakespeare "down to their level". We don't have to patronize our "urban" and minority students to make great literature palatable to them. It's so much better for our students when we raise them up to meet the great voices from the past.

In his book, The Western Canon, Harold Bloom says something to the effect that reading the great books gives us something to think about when we're alone. I also know from years of teaching that the more a student brings with them when they read a piece of literature, the more understanding they will get from it. These students will bring with them more than most fourth graders.

A final point. We read some things after Macbeth. Students were much more fluent than before Macbeth. The ease of reading "normal" books surprised them.

Labels: education, Harold Bloom, Macbeth, Shakespeare

posted by Harry @ 5:24 PM 0 comments