Ken, nice post!
2008/9/9 Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>:
> David Bircumshaw wrote:
>>
>> Judy, yes, Tolstoy can be a bit soap-operatic, however, if you get
>> past the first three hundred pages or so of War and Peace, you get, as
>> Forster said in Aspects of the Novel, 'great chords' beginning to
>> sound. On a smaller scale in 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' a certain
>> inevitability happens, that one only normally associates with those
>> Antique Greeks, or Shakespeare at his best.
>>
>
> I had my community college students read Ivan Ilyich back in 1976. I was 32
> at the time. I had not read the story before, and was surprised that it was
> the first and to date still the only piece of literature I ever read to give
> me physical reactions. That is, I became acutely aware of my body,
> mortality, of the systems at work, of how damned tenuous it all is. The
> story, to put it briefly, scared me half to death. I must've been Count
> Leo's perfect reader.
>
> My students were another matter. They either appeared not to care a damn
> because they were young and had no clue, or as one kid put it, "What the
> fuck do I care? I know I'm gonna die. So what? And I've got my own
> sandblasting business so I don't know why I should be reading this shit."
>
> At that point neither did I. By now he's in his mid-50s and maybe has
> acquired a clue.
>
> ken
>
> --
> Ken Wolman http://bestiaire.typepad.com
> http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
> -------------------
> "I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with a
> strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in
> sunlight, in a beautiful garden."--Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas et Melisande
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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