Frederick Pollack wrote:
>>>
>>> "A Dream Play" and "A Ghost Sonata" were huge early influences on me.
>>>
>>
>> Ah, old favorites. Not a sense in them of any touch of helium, however.
>>
>> k
>>
> But much Misery ...
One of my sections involved the kids writing "off" literary works.
After we went through "The Lottery," one of the young ladies asked "How
come so many stories are depressing or sad?"
That did not quite throw me, but made me pause. Related I suppose to
the question of why depictions of Evil are so much more interesting than
those of Good. I referred the class back to an earlier story, "A Good
Man Is Hard To Find," and threw back at them the unanswered question of
why Flannery O'Connor, a Georgia-accented Lady Marchmain who believed
profoundly in redemption, found one of her greatest characters in an
invincibly evil bastard like The Misfit, someone so "gone" that he is a
type without a name.
I don't know how many people see the tangle as far more interesting than
the clearing, but it's hard for me to come up with optimistic Happy
Ending tales.
They would love Strindberg's *The Father* or *Miss Julie*. We'll get to
*The Glass Menagerie* in a few weeks and see how that one flies.
I avoided, i.e., copped out on, saying "Real life, folks. It ain't
necessarily shits 'n' giggles."
Ken
--
Ken Wolman http://bestiaire.typepad.com http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"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
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