For this week’s blog you can choose to return to Tuesday’s
discussion of Lark & Termite and
the challenge to read the novel as an address to the problem of “how to be
good” or (if you were an “h”) “how to be happy.” Your post should develop and
expand on what you did in class.
Alternatively you can turn your attentions to Jean
Valentine’s poems, particularly those selected from her volume The Cradle of the Real. Often in the
first encounter with a poem, a volume of poems, or a new poet, simple description turns out to be a useful
tool. We’re brought along to believe poems demand explanation, translation into meaning
or a point of some kind, but sometimes
a careful description of the poem and the experience of reading the poem can
take you a long way toward understanding. So after you have spent some time
reading the assigned selecction, choose a poem or a small cluster of
poems and write descriptively about it (or them). Even in this kind of exercise
you should work to make your post well reasoned and coherent rather than simply
a collection of observations. Be bold.
Finally, you could use this week's blog to explore the topic of goodness and flourishing. Go to this link, then click on the left side of the page to listen to the podcast of this interview with Jean Vanier. Do you see connections between Vanier's perspective and Phillips' novel? Write thoughtfully about those. If this link does not work you can paste it in to your browser.
http://www.onbeing.org/program/wisdom-tenderness/234
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