Latin. Goal: Reading the harrrrd stuff, and ... composition! Aim high! Artes Latinae. Halfway through Level II. What's a 'Netflix'? 😉 We watch the Criterion Channel, which has lots of great French film. The Jacques Tati films are everyone's favorite, though since there's almost no speaking at all, they may not count. Criterion has a 'Saturday matinee' category with films appropriate for families, and about half of them are foreign language. Great thread! ETA: Middle Girl swears by Foreign Service International for accent acquisition and super-fast language learning if you already know how to study a foreign language. She's been using it to pick up German this summer. Dated, but high quality and free.

We have liberal and conservative hardware stores.

Glad you're still showing up! Our internet was down for a couple of days and it feel like there are a zillion posts to read now. How does it feel being a Capitalist Oppressor, with an employee and all?

I'm convinced that Hardy wrote it that way to make it obvious that he didn't consider it to be the real ending.

Tell about your Latin studies. I'm working on my own Latin (with some guidance from Middle Girl, who is an excellent Latin tutor). ETA: It's annoying that Wee Girl learns new vocabulary by writing it down once, while my middle-aged brain needs multiple exposures and memory techniques.

What strange new thing is happening with the forum? I only posted once and then edited, but it posted twice. When I deleted my first post, the duplicate then replaced the quoted text with my own reply.

Double post.

Or just me. 🙂

But it's so hilarious!

Tell me what you think of it! And which ending you prefer.

I married one of them. Another is my spiritual advisor and my children's godmother.

Almost done with Work of Human Hands: A Theological Critique of the Mass of Paul VI. It very nearly became the first book I've read by a living author since starting BaW; but the author, Fr. Anthony Cekada, died Friday. We watched The Heiress, based on Henry James's Washington Square. Few movies are very faithful to the book, but this one suffered especially, as James's heroine is unattractive and not clever, and the male lead is an unqualified villain; neither of which Hollywood could dare try with Olivia de Haviland and Montgomery Clift. After finishing the late Fr. Cekada's book, it's back to The Ambassadors for me.

Forgive me : I want to put in a brief word for the impossibility of self-guided education in writing, except through reading challenging and well-written literature. In fact, if I were unable to provide direct instruction in English, I would, quite literally, do nothing except provide the student with high-quality literature of all kinds, and require that it be read.

We hired a local graduate student in the Fine Arts Dept at Big State University who wanted experience teaching K-12 and was delighted to meet once a week to teach Middle Girl drawing. It was a wonderful experience for MG.

Right, now I have to find Peter Ackroyd's book.

You cost me some bad moments of fearing for my sanity: amazement that James Thomson has again found his moment in the sun -- stunned amazement that somebody has friends, plural, who read Thomson -- bewilderment that any Thomson besides The Seasons has been read by anybody, and that a poem I've never heard of -- confusion as my Oxford Complete James Thomson yielded no such poem as "City of Dreadful Night" -- recourse at last to Wikipedia's disambiguation page, and the discovery that there were two Scottish poets named James Thomson. Yours is perhaps rather more readable.

I just finished Henry James's Washington Square in preparation for the Olivia de Havilland/ Montgomery Clift version on Criterion. It's been several years and I'd misremembered some of it. It's a good starter James for those not feeling up to tackling his less accessible later work (The Spoils of Poynton is also good for that). Hard to imagine a Hollywood version succeeding, but I'm up to being surprised. The fact that it featured major stars and yet I'd never heard of it isn't encouraging. ... And that brings me to 52 books for 2020! Next up: While I recover from my James daze -- he always leaves me wondering what complex meanings I should be gleaning in innocuous chat and silences in conversations -- I'll put The Ambassadors on hold and finish Work of Human Hands (for the Bad Catholic 10x10).

We've had to resort to home-produced drama, as the Victorians did. Also weekly recitals. Why else does one have children, if not for the entertainment?

A student who came to university having read plenty of fiction and non-fiction, but also drama and poetry -- having gone to see plays, musicals, and operas, both old and new -- knowing something of history and current events -- and having become used to thinking about how language works -- would be an English instructors dream, even if she had never taken a literature class or written a critical essay. It's much easier to do, as I'm sure you're finding, if they see you enjoying reading.

Well, yes. Or rather no, you need to let your kids listen to whatever parodies are going in this moment: probably parody twitter accounts, or something like. When they do eventually learn a definition of "parody," they'll learn that it's exquisitely context-sensitive. "How Doth the Little Crocodile ..." was hilarious because the reader had once been forced to recite Izaak Walton's didactic verses in school, and Carroll's send-up consequently was fresh and funny. Now it's sold as "nonsense verse," which is its only remaining literary value (though it's very good as nonsense verse, also). Weird Al, alas, is just as dead as "Casey" and Macaulay. tl;dr: If your parents find it funny, it isn't funny any more. ETA: Your kids are little, so forget twitter. Little kids usually learn their living parody from the school playground. "Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg..."

(Addendum: I don't actually teach "Casey At the Bat," as it's completely dead as parody, consequent to the death of 1880's slang, sandlot baseball, and the gruesome practice of making small children recite Macaulay. Nor did I learn about parody from Lewis Carroll, but from Weird Al Yankovic.)

Don't worry; pretty sure that Freudian literary theory died out in the '90s. It seems to me that most good literary study comes from getting used to doing three things. 1. Noticing what is being achieved by the text. (What is my response -- emotional, intellectual, esthetic? -- to what I just read?) 2. Noticing things that seem unusual in the text. (e.g. Why is there so much alliteration in that verse? Why is this character suddenly made so unsympathetic? Why did it begin in that odd way?) 3. Figuring out how (2) is working to get you, the reader, to (1). (3) is where all literary study occurs. The longer I read and teach literature, the more I think (3) is best achieved by reading widely, copiously, and judiciously. An example: A child doesn't need to memorize the definition of "parody" to grasp that "Casey at the Bat" is a parody of "Horatius at the Bridge": she needs to be familiar with both (which means some background knowledge of Roman history and baseball!); she needs to have seen other, simpler, parodic verse (hello Lewis Carroll) so as to recognize it and have an internalized sense of how it works; and she needs to have developed an implicit sense that what makes something humorous is an unexpected but unthreatening contrast. Those take a lot more time than studying definitions, but it's a lot more fun. And worthwhile, even if she never gets around to Horatius or Casey.

Yes but she mostly remembers it because she's obsessed with philology and the poetic explanation of it really bugged her.

All that Middle Girl remembers from our studying that book is that "mar" can be either gender in Spanish.