To a Green Thought

Daddy. Join us as we read him, starting Sept 19. (Scroll down for more info.) Many thanks to all of you who read and commented on the piece about workshop last week. Clearly I don’t think workshop is a good model for aesthetic education, but what I really want to argue is for a greater diversity of teaching models than currently exists.

Marcel Breuer’s Abbey Church STARTING SOON: Why We Love Henry James. I’m getting more and more excited for this year-long sequence of classes on my favorite novelist; I feel like I’m getting away with something, nobody call the cops. Over six seminars we will explore a big swath of James’s career in fiction, early and late, which really does constitute one of the wonders of literature. But if you don’t feel up for a whole year of James, don’t worry—each class can stand on its own.

The young Henry James. Photograph: Alice Boughton/Bettmann/CORBIS [The bits of news and links got a little long this dispatch; scroll down to find them as a PS below.] Quick & dirty version. Starting on September 19, I’m making a longstanding dream (my own, I mean) come true: I’m teaching a year-long sequence of six classes on Henry James. Each class can be taken individually, but they’re designed as a sequence; for more thoughts on the value of spending the whole year with James, see below.

David Hockney, “One Night,” 1966 My social media feeds have been full of the news all morning: the brilliant, prolific artist David Hockney died yesterday. He was 88. He lived an extraordinary life, having found success and enormous fame very young, still in his twenties; somehow he managed to keep doing new things, exploring new technologies, finding new media. With his iPad paintings, he humanized technology that often threatens to alienate us from humanness.

We really do speak it, at least a good part of the time: Salvēte omnēs! we say at the start of each class; then: Quōmodo vōs habētis? Not that there’s a lot of chit-chat; mostly we talk about the week’s reading, taking it a paragraph at a time, our teacher asking us questions (in Latin) so that we (in Latin) can practice the grammar we’ve learned.

On love and poetry; a poem from One Moment Such a lovely evening at Books Are Magic Montague LAST CALL for What is Style? Time is running out to sign up for this craft class on style, which starts June 6. Over three Saturdays, we’ll consider what style is and how we might get better at it. The reading packet for the first session will go out next week, but you don’t need to look at it before we meet; we’ll read everything together in class.

From left: García with Machado at the Leslie Lohman Museum. (Photo: Filip Wolak) Two quick notes before I get to Carmen Maria Machado and Rocío García: What Is Style?I would love for you to join us for this online seminar on style, which starts June 6. One frustration of my graduate education in fiction was that we talked so little about style, even though style is crucial to what I care about most in literature (and in all art): the sense of communion with another human person.

From left to right: Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, and me. (Photo: @danieljacobino) A few announcements: A class on style. Over three Saturdays, beginning June 6, I’ll be offering a Zoom class on style. We’ll try to get as concrete as we can about this nebulous mysterious all-important quality in writing. What makes for a great style? How can we analyze it in the writing we love? How can we cultivate it in our own work?

Office in a Small City, Edward Hopper (1953) ONE MOMENT launch. If you’re in NYC, I would so love to see you at the launch for Luis’s first American book, translated by Idra Novey and me. It’s on Wednesday, May 13 at 7:00pm ET at Books Are Magic Montague, and Luis, Idra, and I will all be there to talk about Luis’s beautiful poems. You need a ticket, which you can get either by buying the book (please do!), or paying $10, which you can apply toward a purchase of any book you’d like.

Michael Spyres as Tristan Class archive. For the first time, we’ve made recordings of past classes available for purchase. We’re starting with three: Mysticism for Writers, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh. After purchasing, you’ll have sixty days of access to all videos and class materials. Until the end of March, To a Green Thought subscribers cansave 15%: just use code SUBSTACK at check out. You can find full information about the classes here. Last call for Tristan.