Moodles re
I had my community college students read Ivan Ilyich back in 1976
Gosh you were a teacher as a child! Wow!
Poodles
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Kenneth Wolman
Sent: 09 September 2008 00:15
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: hello, again
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
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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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