Reads of the Week #55

A diverse mix of subjects caught my interest this week. Writing on politics, history, newspapers, the Beatles, and Brexit stood out, even though my week away from reading was dominated by the movies. I've seen seven films in the last ten days!

First pick this week is by Matt Hartman for the Awl. Against Personal Politics is about how strands of political activism have become about the advantage gained for the individual though they purport to be about the collective. There populism lies.

Hannah Jewell wrote this, 12 Historical Women Who Gave No Fucks, a while ago but it's a great read on how women have had to ignore the prevailing attitudes to make progress. Still do.

The amount of work Damian Shiels has done to illuminate the landscape of Irish involvement in the American Civil War is extraordinary. This story of Johanna Barry, an emigrant domestic in Ireland and America goes further and continues to see the pension records of those left behind to investigate their lives. Long many he continue.

Next is more history: these photos show the making of the New York Times, step by laborious step in 1942. What struck me was the number of Irish names and how so much of this kind of work is gone. Compiled by Alex Q Arbuckle.

Bill Wyman ranked all 213 Beatles Songs from worst to best, argue with the order of you like but this is a history of the Beatles too. Great stuff.

There are 100,000 new Irish passport holders in Britain. As the Brexit crisis deepens Mary Bourke wants to give you a guide to what's expected of you. Hillarious!

Podcast of the week is the first episode in the very good Irish Passport series. It's on the Irish border and it's an excellent place to start with Irish history and politics.

Picture of the week I got here, it's called the Love Letter, I think and it's by Nakajima Kiyoshi.

Reads of the Week #53

This week, the week the State Exams finished for 2017, also marked the finishing of my school work. I manage the Book Rental Scheme in our school and that means waiting until late June to stock take and look at the order for next year. It’s an opportunity for listening to radio while I work and for finding reading material that distract me from textbooks. 
Earlier in the week I read a piece by Michael O’Loughlin to mark Bloomsday in the Irish Times on James Joyce as a European. I liked this line in particular ‘There are few other nations whose foundation myth is based on the notion that we’re not actually from around here.’

Last week Fintan O’Toole won the Orwell Prize for his coverage of Brexit and in this article for the New York Times, he deftly puts British turmoil in an Irish context: perhaps some of us in Ireland can be allowed a moment of schadenfreude as we look across the sea and ask… the question the English so often asked about us: Are the English fit for self-government?

For Fathers Day, Esquire published this moving piece by Tyler Coates on his father’s voice which is moving and real: The last remaining evidence of my father’s voice, the final thing that roots him and his existence in my brain, will eventually cease to exist–just like VHS tapes, and the accent he spoke with, and my memories of him, too.

To my friends’ baby girl: I hope you grow up to be Wonder Woman by Heidi Stevens is essential reading for anyone with a daughter. [You were born] the same week a female superhero (finally!) started kicking butt at the box office… a signal of our fondest hope for you: that you grow up knowing you can choose your own path and fight your own battles and change the world.

Here, Pasi Sahlberg reckons we should be concentrating on ‘small data’ to improve education, ‘small data’ emerges from the notion that in a world that is increasingly governed by binary digits and cold statistics, we need information that helps us to understand better those aspects of teaching and learning that are invisible or not easily measurable. 

Organising Teaching: Developing the Power of the Profession from Howard Stevenson and Nina Bascia has seven challenges for teacher unions to reorganise and it is essential reading for teacher trade unionists. 

Podcast of the week is the conversation between Tom Sleigh and Paul Muldoon about Seamus Heaney’s In the Attic and Tom Sleigh’s own The Fox On the New Yorker Poetry Podcast, which, mainly due to Paul Muldoon’s knowledge and geniality is a always a treat. 

And finally, this weeks picture of the week is of  Ballinaboy, County Galway, Ireland, 1965 by Edwin Smith which I found on twitter from Anne Mortier. Beautiful landscape, ominous skies, homestead in between, the perfect vision of Ireland. 

Reads of the Week #52

Reads of the week is back! I took fifteen months or so off mainly to write about the ASTI and education in general but there is time now to start curating and recommending things you may have missed over the last week. (Actually I’ve cheated this week and gone back two weeks). 
First there’s local (for me) history of boys who chose to fight in World War One rather than stay in Clonmel Borstal, the only such Irish institution outside Dublin. Seventy of the more than fourhundred who went to war died. Great work by Conor Reidy.  

Next is some more local-ish history.  Colm Wallace has completed a study of murdered Free State Gardaí from 1922 to 1949 and this is the story of the first, killed in Mullinahone. 

My Family’s Slave is a  piece by Alex Tizon, who, sadly, died in recent months. It’s about a woman who lived with with his family from before he was born and long after she needed to. And was never properly paid. It hurts to read but his journey to do Lola justice in the end is  powerful. 

From prose to fiction, but not too far a journey: to Alexie Sherman‘s Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest, a short story about a motel cleaner that gets to you by describing a life of seemingly banality in hugely human detail.

Podcast of the week is on Manzanar the Workd War 2 camp for Japanese-Americans, now designated a National Historical Site. Interesting discussion on whether the camp was an internment or concentration camp. I listen to a lot of podcasts/radio (50 hours this week is a record [yes I keep track!]) this one stayed got to me. The quiet dignity mixed with activism and the pursuit of justice are moving. 99 percent invisible have dozens of podcasts like this 


Not a great title but the idea that we raise our girls to fight stereotypes and pursue their dreams, but don’t do the same for our boys is worth considering. 

This is the best video essay on film I’ve seen in a while The Legacy of Paranoid Thrillers.  

Fintan O’Toole won the Orwell Prize for his writing on Brexit Britain: The End of a Fantasy for the New York Review of Books is a good place to start reading his work.  (@fotoole for @nybooks)

This is a very good accounting of where the ASTI was, is and might be heading by Katherine Donnelly. 

One more history story to finish about how Mike McTigue took on ‘the Battling Siki‘ during the Civil Wat to become a world Champion. 

The picture with this post is Blue Horses (1911) by Franz Marc, a German artist who was killed in World War One. We went to an exhibition of his work in Madrid in 2008 with Child One and brought home a stuffed red horse we christened Frank. Child Three sleeps with it now. 



Reads of the Week #45

  
More great writing, an extract from each should whet your appetite. (I reckon that’s the first time I’ve written the word whet.)

How much thought and effort do you invest in making sure you look good, popular and happy on Facebook or Instagram, asks Michael Gonchar

Oliver Burkeman says young people today, along with their Snapchat and their selfies and their sexting, apparently engage in a practice known as “phubbing”. According to Sherry Turkle, the American sociologist of digital life, this involves maintaining eye contact with one person while text-messaging another.

How unusual is it for a gun owner to have two AR-15 assault rifles and 2,500 rounds of rifle ammunition—the “arsenal” police found in the possession of Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, asks John Weiner. 

Donal Fallon writes about a  funeral procession without a corpse: the Manchester Martyrs and Glasnevin Cemetery. 
When it comes to teaching poetry, Andy Tharby asks how much should I tell them and how much should I elicit from them?
As a child, Freya McClements had 16 library tickets. 

Image credit 

Reads of the Week #44

This week I’m going to let some extract speak for the exceptional writing I’ve picked speak for themselves. 

There are plenty of ways to help children who have miserable lives but making excuses for them is not one of them, says Heather Fearn here.

Let us not make people at the margins into scouts or spies for the mainstream. Let us stop asking people to speak for the entire cacophonic segment of humanity that shares their pigmentation, genitalia, or turn-ons. Katie Coyle is insisting we do better.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were killed at sunset on 19 June, 1953. It was their 14th wedding anniversary. A few days earlier, they had said goodbye to their children, Michael and Robert, who were 10 and six. They were young parents. They were people who loved. Their fate was awful. This is Sam Jordison on EL Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel.

The first poems I read by a poet who was not dead or a writer of hymns were by Ted Hughes, writes Anthony Wilson, discussing Hughes’ impact on his life.

This is an except from “Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories” by Rob Brotherton on autism, vaccines and why some people believe Jenny McCarthy over every doctor.

In this year alone, Russia has seen the appearance of a new Stalin museum in Tver Region and a monument to the ‘Big Three’ (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) in Crimea in memory of the participants of 1945 Yalta conference. Statues to the Generalissimo have been unveiled across the entire country—in Lipetsk, Mari El, North Ossetia, Stavropol, Vladimir and in the Kuban region. Stalin is back writes Dmitry Okrest.
Image credit

Reads of the Week #43

This week we have quiet in the classroom, linguistics, poets and their public, the myth and reality of being Celtic, memory and fiction, and Jimmy Fallon.

Kenny Pieper on the sound of silence in the classroom.

Ana Menéndez asks: Are We Different People in Different Languages?

Clive James: ‘Poets in the free countries don’t get famous’.

Mick Heaney: Cúchulainn, Roosevelt & what it means to be Celtic.

Isabelle Cartwright: Chinese whispers, or reshaping memories to create fiction.

Jimmy Fallon Does Not Have to Cater to Anyone, says Scott Raab.

Image credit 

Reads of the Week #41

Reads this week from Dublin, Baltimore, boxing, the web and the workplace battleground…
From Alan Kinsella here’s an inside view of Croke Park.

In this interview Peter Fleming discusses neoliberalism’s war on workers.
Kate Crane wants to know: what happened to her father Eddy?

Roddy Doyle on Paris under attack.
Lydia Monin writes on Dan Donnelly, Irish boxer, scourge of English fighters.

And finally, Tech is raising our kids, so what? asks Alex Balk

Image credit