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Joined: Aug 2005
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Carpal Tunnel
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read us a bedtime stowy
Ah, yes, reading a borgesian lexicon to the wee'uns. Was it old Jorge Luis hisself who wrote that he read the 10th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica when he was a young lad in the Argentine. He read it "like a novel". Or mayhaps he meant like Novalis' fragmentary and encyclopedic Heinrich von Ofterdingen? Or am I am confusing this with that famous Argentine author, William Henry Hudson, who wrote Green Mansions auf Englisch. Somewhere along the line, of course, my grenouillian narratology got run over by my shlovskian device.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Joined: Jul 2003
Posts: 3,230
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
Likewise, I learned a long time ago that getting people to read books they a priori don't like is about as much fun as bathing a pig. No, where did I put that Hurro-Urartian Hydronyms Dictionary?
I read a quote from some English. Lit. pro once who was asked why he'sd never read "War and Peace". He said that "It's one of those books you have to read before you die. The longer I put off reading it, the longer I live." Now I must get back to the Mahabharata.
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Back in college, I took a class that spent an entire semester on James Joyce's Ulysses. I've never slept better in my life. While many of my classmates proclaimed it an unprecedented study of a multifaceted work so complex that not one of them ever knew what the hell they were talking about, I was quick to point out that this was hardly the first time such a class had been tried.
"My fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Lofton, dedicated an entire term solely to studying the modern classic "Blinky on the Lam." In this picture book, Blinky, an English-speaking frog with an eye moisture problem, is captured by an overzealous child, cruelly spirited from his beloved pond, and dumped into a cold, cramped aquarium. With the aid of a wise goldfish and an excitable hamster named Mr. Chewy, Blinky breaks out and finds his way back to his lily pad.
"Mr. Lofton was an eccentric, gray-haired older teacher who would "ding" you for being off in "Hooky Pooky Land," a tactic my college professor never bothered to employ. He spent many long hours covering every aspect of "Blinky on the Lam," from the symbolism of an amphibian who couldn't stop blinking to the many allusions that filled every sentence. The narrator was considered unreliable since s/he never identified his/her relationship with the characters in the story, and Mr. Lofton instructed us to read between the lines to identify Blinky's loneliness in a world with no God. Ultimately, it was even decided that the happy ending was illusory and was merely Blinky's dying hallucination as he lay mangled under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler that hadn't missed him on that highway, as the unreliable narrator had claimed.
"That was Mr. Lofton's final year of teaching. I've read "Blinky on the Lam" many times since, and concluded that, while he may have misread the ending, it is a tale that is infinite and contains many more multitudes than anything written by James Joyce. To this day I can scarcely drive past an eighteen-wheeler without checking the tires for a streak of green crushed between the treads."
—Brockman, blogmaster PowellsBooks.blog
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Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210
Carpal Tunnel
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thanks for bringing this one back, Steve. good stuff. air you dight, and all that.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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"....you study him " (Joyce)
Ohmygawd! you study him?
No No darlin' boy. He's having you on.
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