Frank: Agreed. A part of what’s so irritating is that college students actually do wish to be taught to be higher writers — I see this in nearly all of them — however they really feel {that a} brutally aggressive world places a dangerously excessive worth on errors. In consequence, a lot of them do their finest to keep away from programs that require intensive writing.
Duke pushes again. It in actual fact requires first-year college students in its school of arts and sciences to take a writing seminar, however so as to add a spoonful of sugar to that medication, Duke lets them select amongst shocking, amusing, quirky themes. One such possibility lately? A writing course titled “Dolly Parton for President?”
Bret: Bringing us to crucial, and by far the saddest, information of the week. I’m struck by how exhausting the information of her dying hit me. I bear in mind as a child, watching “9 to five” in a theater, and falling for the pressure of her character. Nevertheless it was solely once I had children of my very own — significantly my daughters, who’re into nation music — that I actually started to like the songs, like “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colours,” not only for their musicality however their emotional honesty and depth. Additionally, for those who’ve by no means heard it, watch Parton, with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, cowl Neil Younger’s “After the Gold Rush,” on this 1999 efficiency on David Letterman. It’ll convey you to tears.
Frank: Oh, I’ve heard it. Seen it. Misted up throughout it. However to me and plenty of others, Dolly Parton was a lot greater than music and films. What I maybe appreciated most about her, Bret, was this: I had no thought what her politics have been. I barely had guesses. And whereas retaining them opaque clearly labored to her industrial benefit, minimizing the chance that she’d anger and estrange any followers, it got here to appear a form of ethical assertion: We are able to have pockets of house and intervals of grace through which we savor a shared pleasure and put our variations and our rancor on pause. Her performances have been that pause, that house, that grace.
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