Anny Ballardini wrote:
> Besides this, and answering to Ken, I was shocked when I discovered at
> the age of 14-15 at the nuns' boarding school that our Latin
> Literature was filtered, and that for example we could only read some
> nonsense by Catullus and nothing of his relationship with Lesbia.
Oh you were not alone in facing censorship. We read the bowdlerized
versions of Shakespeare. No sonnets No Othello. No Tempest ("virgin
knot"????). Macbeth was easy: it's just about lots and lots of
murders. Hamlet was freed by editors of its crudities during the play
scene when Hamlet makes his "country matters" comments to Ophelia in
front of the whole court. But this was also the same high school where,
as I've said before, our Honors English/History teacher got away with
teaching us socialist and racially-aware poetry and encouraged me to
read Frank Norris! I don't get it...but I'm grateful for the
mind-opening. I was encouraged to more or less autodidact, and I
followed my obsessions where they took me. I may be one of the few
people around these days (except for 80% of this list:-) who knows
Alexander Trocchi's "Cain's Book," a really nasty tale of drug-addicted
life on a barge. It preceded Naked Lunch by quite a few years, I think.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
|