"1776 Unites curriculum" Topic

Let's not hold up the Crusades as an ideal for Christians.

John, no indeed -- but who is doing that?

My ideal would be Lutheran halbardiers holding the breach at Vienna, a Catholic capital, against the janissaries. And Don Juan at Lepanto.

Lepanto
BY G. K. CHESTERTON
White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate ;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael's on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

n/a

link

And if you haven't read Fletcher Pratt's account of Vienna, why not?

Well, I don't know what could possibly come next here in this battle of the widely read. My academic work in history was focused on the Imperial Japanese Navy. I will assume this is not about to come up any time soon and just try to follow along.

Don't be surprised if it does…😁

Speaking of Vienna, I would like to see Matt Damon play Brian Duffy if Hollywood ever makes a movie from The Drawing of the Dark.

Or Russel Crowe. He would work too.

I think it's heartwarming that some people continue to read bad Victorian writers. Pssst. Will someone tell Doc that Victoria died 120 years ago and most of that self-satisfied white man's burden and Christian sanctimony and saccharine sentimentality is now buried with her. Let Kipling and Chesterton rest peacefully in their graves.

"Hmmmm… What rhymes with ‘sloop'? Ah!"

We do have a hint of what his English literature syllabus would look like, and that gives me even more misgivings about his history courses.

It would make for an excellent Victorian education. I thought some people only wanted to go back to the 1950s, but it appears there are some that want to go back to a more remote time!

Bob, we know what you think of Kipling.
TMP link

Heh heh heh.

As long as there are soldiers and engineers Kipling will be read.

"And polka will never die!"

Okay, Bob: give me a list, three or four titles will do, of what YOU would include in your lit class. Advanced high school, let's say, or college freshman.

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN would be on mine; it is a battle worth fighting.

Three or four of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, for certain.

I did a course on "The Christian Imagination" at a nearby prison, and one week we read (a week's homework) and then discussed (90 minutes) O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." That's the one where the Misfit murders the Granny and her family. The class included at least a dozen murderers. They were all over that story, like the dog pack with the turkey in A CHRISTMAS STORY. One of the best classroom experiences I ever had.

I do not share Bob's view that poetry should be impenetrable, but this one, also a favorite in my "Christian Imagination" class, certainly demands some thought:

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

or did Emmylou say it better?:

O the dragons are gonna fly tonight
They're circling low and inside tonight
It's another round in the losing fight
Out along the great divide tonight.

We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
Seeking out some half remembered shore
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there's no heaven what is this hunger for?

Our path is worn our feet are poorly shod
We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God.
And we cry allelujah, allelujah
We cry allelujah.

Sorrow is constant and the joys are brief
The seasons come and bring no sweet relief
Time is a brutal but a careless thief
Who takes our lot but leaves behind the grief.

It is the heart that kills us in the end
Just one more old broken bone that cannot mend
As it was now and ever shall be amen
And we cry allelujah, allelujah
We cry allelujah.

So there'll be no guiding light for you and me
We are not sailors lost out on the sea
We were always headed toward eternity
Hoping for a glimpse of Gaililee.

Like falling stars from the universe we are hurled
Down through the long loneliness of the world
Until we behold the pain become the pearl
Cryin' allelujah, allelujah
We cry allelujah.
And we cry allelujah, allelujah
We cry allelujah…

I always ask kids where, in the song, is the hand of God? Eventually someone will get it.

I'd be happy to teach any of these to a high school class, and their parents. I broke out the American and English writers separately, and carved out a place for American poets. No essayists ( Thoreau ) or Dramatists( O'Neill ) just fiction writers. The others are a seperate class next semester.

Huck Finn, unexpurgated, of course.
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Hemingway, A Clean Well Lighted Place, The Sun Also Rises
Melville, Moby Dick
Baldwin, Notes of A Native Son
Wharton, The Age of Innocence or Ethan Frome
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Anne Patchett, Bel Canto
Annie Proulx-The Shipping News
William Faulkner-asI Lay Dying
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Crane, The Red Badge Of Courage

Poets
Poe and his short stories
Sylvia Plath
Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
Langston Hughes
Walt Whitman
T.S. Eliot (See below)
Jack Kerouac

English Lit. The English poets, dramatists , fiction writers are all lumped together. It is a survey course. I'm afraid No Kipling or Chesterton, but I regret not finding a slot for A.C. Doyle and some more modern playwrights.

Shakespeare
Milton
The Lake Poets
Oscar Wilde
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Harold Pinter
T.S.Eliot (Honorary Englishman. He tried very hard to be one)
Bobby Burns
William Golding
Joseph Conrad

PS I don't like impenetrable poetry, I'm just not very fond of lead footed, jingoistic, and sing-songy poets who wrap themselves in pathos, bathos, and overly embroidered sentimentality. It could send a diabetic into a coma.

I do like Tennyson's Ulysses, which, in part, reads:

"Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

My ideal would be Lutheran halbardiers holding the breach at Vienna, a Catholic capital, against the janissaries.

Which time? 1529 or 1683? And the Germans were landsknecht pikemen, not halberdiers. They copied the Swiss who had evolved weapon-wise from the halberd to the pike because of its longer reach.

There was also a siege of Vienna in 1485 but it was not by the Ottoman's.

Your quoting Emmy Lou Harris, just gave me a thought that Kipling might have written some country-western ballads that share his sentimentality and predictable structure. My dog died, my pick up has broken down, and my waterboy stole my woman, I guess you are a better man than I am Gunga Din!

And I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison.

Still, we both started with Huck so perhaps there is hope.

Actually that's too tough on Emmy Lou, she was a formidable effect on several genres of music.

Still, we both started with Huck so perhaps there is hope.

As long as we stay on the raft and don't go ashore.

YouTube link

NO! It's not a David Allen Coe song!
It's Steve Goodman and John Prine!!!!!

Emmylou is a goddess and an Angel.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but nobody is entitled their own facts.

Doc thinks so. Maga thinks so. The GOP thinks so. Quanon thinks so. Anti- vaxxers think so. COVID deniers thinks so. Facts are no longer facts.

As one of the advisors in the last administration articulated, the use of 'alternate facts' is fine. And that means they didn't use facts at all…

OC +1