Robin Hamilton wrote:

><<
>That's something else again, Ken, and nothing whatsoever to do with anyone
>I've mentioned.
>
>        I know.  I added it anyway:-).
>
>
>
>So I'm dumb.  So shoot me.  (Or blame it on how email cancels out tone.)
>
>
I am opposed to the use of firearms in any causes save self-defense and
income supplements from robbing stagecoaches.  Any jerk can take off a
convenience store; it takes skill to brandish a .57 calibre dueling
pistol while not getting the hammer entangled in your silk cravat.

>I got through an 18th century field exam never having read Tom
>Jones.  Too
>effing long     and too much to do.  Wild served me just fine.  Long may he
>gallows-dance and       whoremonger.
>
>
>
>Shame on you.  TJ is long, sure, but it's easy reading -- you could have
>managed it on a longish train journey.
>
>
Indeed.  Though Tristram Shandy absolutely rocked, even though there
were moments where I felt like it was rotting my brain.  TJ is of those
books I need to go back and read to lay any claim to intellectual
honestry.  But you might be surprised (or perhaps not) at how much you
don't have to know to write a Ph.D. field exam in the States while
omitting many classics from both sides of the Atlantic.  The examinees
were mired in reading some perfectly awful stuff prior to the "comps."
Now, I just had to look this up: "Wieland," Charles Brockden Brown.
Even the "recovered memory" cries out "Shoot me."  Brown was the only
man who could bore you to death with a yellow fever epidemic in
Philadelphia.  I was TOLD to read it by a Full Professor who was
involved in writing the Early American field exam.  He said "Screw
Hawthorne, screw Melville, read 'Wieland'."  Then it wasn't there.
Neither were Hawthorne or Melville in any formal sense.  I worked Billy
Budd into some question or other and some of the Hawthorne short stories
(which I like far better than the novels) into another.  It was 1972--I
don't remember what was on it.

>My favourite is +Joseph Andrews+, which I developed a complicated
>post-modernist Borgesian theory of fictions around.
>
>I never really liked JW, partly because I came on the Brecht/Weill version
>earlier, and partly because of the complicated 18thC political subtext.  Who
>needs it?
>
>
We never talked about Wild as a political novel by any definition.  I
forget: is Wild a social climber who uses criminality as a way to buy
himself up?  Probably more complicated than that.  I would not be
surprised if Fielding were not using JW as a way to parody and attack
some forgotten British PM or other minister.  This in fact is the first
I've heard of any political level.  You need to understand that the guy
who taught this course, the late William Bysshe Stein (I could not make
up that name), was entirely into verbal trickery, and did very little
you might expect.  He was interested strictly in language games that
authors played.  There seemed to be some basis for this in the idea that
the 18th century English novel was just that...novel...and that writers
were learning by farting around with levels of meaning in language and
the perverse uses to which it could be put.  A huge program of Earn
While You Learn.  I forget what he had us doing with Robinson Crusoe but
probably nothing it didn't deserve.  As for Tristram, I left each class
feeling like I'd spent an hour in a mental institution warming up the
bed for John Clare.

Stein was the one who told me to eschew evil and Hawthorne and read
Brocken Brown.  Bastard.

>The Brecht/Weill version -- That Whorehouse That We Once Called Home --  is
>easily better than the Fielding original.
>
>They based that on Fielding?  Hmmm.  Talk about a couple of
>highwaymen...
>
>
>You're joking?  Of course they did.
>
>
Oh, I know about Threepenny Opera going back to Gay but I wasn't aware
of how much they swiped.

>It has my two favourite songs, and I suppose more for Weill's music than
>Brecht's words, which I can only get (being strictly sans-German) in
>translation -- The Chambermaid's Song and the Pirate Jenny/Wild duet about
>the Whorehouse.
>
>
About 2 weeks ago I heard a radio interview with Marianne Faithful, and
they played a relatively recent recording she made of "Pirate Jenny"
that made my skin crawl up and down my bones.  Which is to say she was
superb.  "As tears go by" may be forgotten.  This was at the
Lenya/Lemper/Stratas level where you inhabit Weill's music.

Ken <young but not quite 16 then>