Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell's work, Outliers, was one of the books we could choose as an Upper School teacher this past summer for our discussion groups. Since I had read Gladwell's The Tipping Point as well as Blink, I had a pretty good idea of the approach he would use in this book about those rare individuals, the super successful, superior intellectual or phenome athlete. However, my suprise was in the angle he chose. Gladwell's argument bases success on factors such as family ethics, birth month and even year of birth. He compares these outliers to their fellow attorneys, hockey players, even airline pilots with startingly suprising contrasts. For a short read that makes you think more about the intangibles in life, I recommend Outliers. We have just begun Siddhartha, then off to Kafka's Metamorphosis.

Mary Karr's Lit

Outside of teaching five sections of senior and AP English, I love of course to read for pleasure. It seems that summer is ideal, but because of my amazing book club of brilliant women, I picked up Mary Karr's latest memoir, Lit. I read Liar's Club years ago and most of her second work, Cherry. So when Lit was selected, I thought I knew enough about the author to see this third installation as one more part of her sequence to self discovery. I, however, must admit that this book of all three has such powerful images of pain and recovery that as a reader I saw almost too much -- her evaporating marriage, her wheezing toddler, her bouts with depression and the ever-present alcohol. Karr is a fine writer with a love of language that supercedes all. She chronicles relationships with such crisp prose that I left the book feeling I had grown up next door to these memories. And that is the magic of the written word.

The End of Hell

Dante concludes for the seniors this week with a giant Dante Day celebration slated for Friday. The day promises to be an amazing amalgamation of food, dance, videos, games and artistic rendering -- all in the name and for the love of our favorite Italian writer, Dante. We are also blessed this week to have Dr. Bill Cook, a noted Medievalist from SUNY to pop in to all my senior classes and talk a bit about Dante. Dr. Cook will be wrapping up our study this Thursday, so it promises to be a terrific week.
Our travels around hell have finally led us to the base of the cone and to the frozen ninth layer, reserved for the traitors. After 34 cantos, the seniors all feel a bit of a let down when Dante and Virgil come face to face with Satan. Here in Dante's Inferno, Satan is the greatest sufferer and the greatest sinner. He is not the royal ruler of his underworld lair, as often depicted in movies.He represents all that treachery can, and his enormity and pain are so powerful that Dante and Virgil only observe him briefly before literally climbing down his torso to head toward a passage out. One of my observant seniors noticed this week that in the eighth and ninth layer, Virgil, aka Human Reason, seems to be much quieter than earlier in the journey. As we discussed the possible reasons for this, one offered the idea that as a teacher, he needs to step aside a bit and let Dante use what he has gleaned on the journey to work his way through these most terrible of layers. I added that perhaps Human Reason itself cannot altogether offer insight about treason; treachery to that extent seems to defy reason altogether.
Well we have certainly had a lot to ponder. As we end our visit in Hell, the seniors will move onto Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. Seems after a month of Inferno, we need the calm, cooling river of Hesse.

Senior Dante project

I am posting this link, dantesinfernoproject.blogspot.com which is an unfolding project by a few of my senior boys. They are keeping a video diary of the filming of the Dante project. They have built a greenscreen... who knows what else is coming? We head onto the 7th circle of the 9 today, so I can see the end of Dante in the distance.

Mid Hell

As we wandered through the Castle of Dis, reserved for those heretics in their custom-heated tombs, and made our way to the river of boiling blood, Phlegethon, my class discussed the idea of anger and its manifestations. Earlier in the cantos, Dante deals with what must be termed righteous anger, when he runs across an enemy from Florence whom he sees in Hell and rejoices. Virgil, Dante's guide and the manifestation of human reason, explains the concept of righteous anger as that emotion which we should, in fact, reserve for those sins and sinners who violate the trust we all have with one another. We discussed in class the ways we may all feel righteous anger and how such an emotion has played a pivotal role in movements across history, spurring Civil Rights activists among others as well as marches for equality and peace and research. In this third river in hell though, the sinners are not just angry; they are tyrants who shed blood. They are highway bandits and murderers and those who not only spilled blood but whose own blood boiled with malice. Dante seems to spend quite a bit of time detailing these feelings of anger and down further here, rage. Clearly as a man who has lost his home, his family and his position as Prior of Florence, this emotion was not foreign to him.
However, through these sinners and punishments, Dante seems to call for a tempering and a step back, away from the river alive with rage and to a place of reflection. Only with such can one see the source of this discontent. Sure it is a 700 year old lesson, but its relevance is undeniable.