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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 3h

Thoreau, 1862

John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 4h

Has had me thinking about this book, by a prof who taught me how to read like a serious person

www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

Word by Word — Harvard University Press

One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few excep...

www.hup.harvard.edu

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 4h

Everett didn’t just, like, make up this character out of nothing

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 4h

Have read tons of reviews of James for this unit/a thing I’m writing about it, and it’s interesting how often his literacy is talked about without any reference to people like Frederick Douglass. Kids who read him with me last year and are now reading James did not have a hard time seeing it.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 13h

Will never forget, after like my first week interning there over a decade ago, cracking open “the melancholy of resistance” on the metro north and being like, Well what the fuck have I been reading before this

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 16h

Taking the kids outside for ~transcendentalism journaling~ in the park

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 16h

Thank you Nicholas! Ideas downloaded.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 16h

Amazing. Thank you!

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 1d

2016 really was a big year

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 1d

Ah yes the time of year when I remember that Bob Dylan won the Nobel prize for literature

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 1d

Teaching Oedipus and Antigone in a month or so, and want to steep my brain in the most interesting commentary on these plays. Way outside my wheelhouse here. Any recommended books/essays?

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 1d

✨K-16 education discourse✨

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 1d

Has anything great happened in your life because of social media?

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

Met him once in a bookstore and he helped me decide to get Merwin’s translation of Il Purgatorio since I told him I was going to Italy—not kidding

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

This NYRB edition of Thoreau’s journals is so good! Also a little wild how widely Damion Searls, who introduced and edited the volume, has enriched my reading life—everything from Septology to Anniversaries to this.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

Dropping the deep nerd stuff on them in journalism tomorrow, introducing AP style. Also pray for me as I introduce the phrase “nut graf” to a room full of teens.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

Voltaire/Locke were kind of shitty, actually

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

The intertextual stuff here is so rich and interesting to think about—kids are into it so far

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

On Thursday, will be exploring one of my favorite things about James w kids: while Twain satirizes writers like Walter Scott and so undermines romanticized notions of hierarchy, Everett satirizes Enlightenment figures to undermine romanticized notions of “rights” and the people who “came up w them”

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

No but I should! Doing lots of handwriting this year

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

Agreed! Not dunkish at all.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 2d

A+

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 3d

Hah! Also I did not know about this website—this is amazing

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 3d

Easier to have this convo with them about him than about, like, Sophocles, who we read next. But it’s cool that he’s opened up that convo that will go on for the rest of the year (whole class is basically about how some stuff gets famous/how it is then adapted for contemporary audiences)

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 3d

So interesting—I have a lot more to say than this, but will say that basically what he’s given my kids is the ability to think about the contingencies of canonicity. Like in a weird way the fact that he’s so famous is almost as interesting as what he’s famous for, if that makes sense.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 3d

Like I ~know~ these people now. We recognize each other. We’re a community.

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