A Penguin Class

This exercise in compulsive reading is by Meghan Krogh, who really should know better by now than to embark on ridiculous projects. You can find her elsewhere on the web on Goodreads, Twitter, and Medium.

[apenguinclass]

How to make a good teacher

What matters in schools is teachers. Fortunately, teaching can be taught

Teacher-training institutions need to be more rigorous—rather as a century ago medical schools raised the calibre of doctors by introducing systematic curriculums and providing clinical experience. It is essential that teacher-training colleges start to collect and publish data on how their graduates perform in the classroom. Courses that produce teachers who go on to do little or nothing to improve their pupils’ learning should not receive subsidies or see their graduates become teachers. They would then have to improve to survive.

[apenguinclass]

Sorry! I haven’t been here in so long. I’ll work on catching up. :) 

[apenguinclass]

Early American Drama

Tonight, I abandoned my first Penguin Classic. As you know, I’ve endured some books I truly hated over the course of this project. But this one, I couldn’t do. It’s been weeks since I started reading it, and I got stuck on the first play. So I passed over it and moved to the next. And so forth, and so on, coming back to plays I’d already abandoned in disgust... 

There are a number of factors that ended up bringing me to the conclusion that I would be better of without adding this volume to my tally of completed works, but the chief ones were: 

I’ve been quite sick of late, and my patience is tried when I’m sick. 

My husband and I lost one of our beloved dogs a couple of weeks ago, ditto to patience when grieving. 

The racism is so thick you could cut it with a knife, and unlike a book like, say The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which at least has a number of mitigating redeeming factors in the face of its racism, I found that the plays in this collection simply did not. 

There are better books waiting for me to read them. 

So on that note, 

The next book in A Penguin Class will be The Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville. 

[bbcradio3]

Mark Ravenhill’s second choice for the short season of classic plays he’s curating for Drama on 3 is ‘The Octoroon’, a remarkable 19th Century drama about slavery by Dion Boucicault. Last night’s 'Night Waves’ was a fascinating post-performance discussion from the stage at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where the play was recorded. Read Lucy Collingwood’s blog post introducing the season on the Radio 3 blog and listen to the play itself on Sunday at 8.30pm.

[bbidom]

wikipedia, hilarious because it's true

the octaroon by dion boucicault

“When the play was performed in England it was given a happy ending, in which the mixed-race couple are united. The tragic ending was used for American audiences, to avoid portraying a mixed marriage.”

[materialistseaturtle]

“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them

[par-equality]

Reading Racist Literature - The New Yorker

How do you rehabilitate your love for art works based on expired and inhuman social values?

As students, when we are asked to read works that include racist themes and language, we are told to either ignore the racism or as a class, we acknowledge the racism with nothing other than disgust. Something that is not often done, however, is discussing why the racism in the work bothers us as a society today, and what that means about how we live our lives. Sometimes, in studying a work, it is better to ask ourselves why we feel a certain way about it instead of how we feel about it.

[houghtonlib]

Mary Marsh as Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, [ca. 1853]

TCS 45

Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University

[whatsunderneathmyself]

Then may you say that there is no nobility where there are no titles! But we have kings, princes and nobles in abundance– of Nature’s stamp, if not of Fashion’s,– we have honest men, warm hearted and brave, and we have women–gentle, fair and true, to whom no title could add nobility.

Fashion - Anna Cora Mowatt

(via whatsunderneathmyself)

[metropolitanplayhouse-blog]

Tod Mason and Stephanie Dorian in Anna Cora Mowatt’s “Fashion,” Season 11.

Photo by Roberta Ruocco.

[autumnalpisces-blog]

The greater the light, the stronger will be the shadow

Anna Cora Mowatt (via autumnalpisces)

[cynthiasbarry-deactivated201703]

Partners on stage: This is the first American play - The Contrast, by Royall Tyler. A major part of my (Letitia) costume was the hoop skirt. This is set in NYC is the late 1700′s and demonstrates the contrast between American and Britain, with Yankee characters in the cast. The hoop skirts were to keep the women cooler. The larger the hoop, the more wealth. I lived in the skirt in order to be natural with it, on and off the stage. The three of us had great fun!

[tumblngphilopoet]

It was on this day in 1787 that “the first American play” opened, at the John Street Theater in New York City. It was written by 29-year-old Royall Tyler. Tyler went to Harvard, studied law, and joined the Continental Army. He was appointed the aide to General Benjamin Lincoln to help suppress Shay’s Rebellion. After Shay left Massachusetts for New York, Tyler was sent to New York City to negotiate for Shay’s capture. And there Tyler did something that he had never done: went to see a play. Theater was slow to take off in America. There are known performances of Shakespeare in Williamsburg in the early 1700s, and in general the Southern colonies — more open to all British customs — were happier to embrace the theater. In the North, it was looked on as a sinful form of entertainment. Massachusetts passed a law in 1750 that outlawed theater performances, and by 1760 there were similar laws in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, although performances occasionally snuck through the laws with the special permission of authorities. In any case, Royall Tyler from Massachusetts had never been to the theater before. So on March 12, 1787, he saw a production of Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal (1777), and he was so inspired that in just three weeks he wrote his own play, The Contrast. On this day in 1787, just barely a month later, The Contrast became the first play by an American writer to be professionally produced. The Contrast was a success. It was performed four times that month in New York, which was very unusual. Then it moved on to Baltimore and Philadelphia, where George Washington went to see it. The Contrast was a comedy of manners, poking fun at Americans with European pretensions, and the main character, Jonathan, was the first “Yankee” stock character, a backwoods man who spoke in a distinctive American voice and mannerisms.

“the first American play" 

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/04/16

(via tumblngphilopoet)

[atinylittleworld]

Perhaps sea and pine are one because the sea, too, is endlessly and murmurously alive…

Royall Tyler  (via atinylittleworld)

[apenguinclass]

Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy

You know, epistolary novels* can be done really well or really badly. So it’s always a relief when they’re done really well, and Jean Webster’s little duo of novels about these two college friends and the John Grier House for Orphans’ impact on their lives is delightful. 

Daddy-Long-Legs follows the story of Judy (Jerusha—the poor thing), an orphan of the JGH, as an anonymous orphanage benefactor sends her to college, with the caveat that she must write to him regularly of how her education is progressing. Her letters are charming in the style of an Anne Shirley (comparisons were drawn in other reviews to Jo March, but I don’t see it), and it’s difficult not to find yourself cheering for her and falling just a bit for Judy’s pluck and ability by the end.

Dear Enemy, the sequel, finds Judy’s college roommate Sallie McBride accepting a commission to make over the JGH into a better orphan institution than it was during Judy’s woeful childhood. Sallie is a society girl, and what she encounters in some of her misadventures at the orphanage definitely test her mettle. She’s not quite as likable as Judy, and had this nugget to offer: 

Five other children have been sent to their proper institutions. One of them is deaf, one an epileptic, and the other three approaching idiocy... This is an educational institution, and we can't waste our valuable plant in caring for defectives.

Which, needless to say, is pretty wildly offensive. Though perhaps the audience of 1915 didn’t think so? It felt like a jarring misstep in an otherwise sensitive and compassionate novel about the lives of orphans in a system poorly designed to assist them.

Anyway, I’d recommend these to folks looking for some nice stories about (generally) nice girls.

*I generally assume my readers know basic literary terminology but just in case, an epistolary novel is a novel written using letters, telegrams, emails, and diary entries as the primary text to drive the plot and character development. If done poorly, it feels like cheap exposition. If done well, you feel like you’re spying on someone’s private correspondence and get a great story to boot. Dracula is another great example of this format done well.

The next book in A Penguin Class will be Early American Drama, an anthology edited by Jeffrey H. Richards. 

[goodbooks-smartbitches]

Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster

“It isn’t the great big pleasures that count the most, it’s making a great deal out of the little ones"

[cinderellainrubbershoes]

“It isn’t the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh–I think that requires spirit.” -Daddy Long Legs (Jean Webster)