After having read CoL49...& Hunter S Thompson on 911

[blackcat1346]

"I can't believe that we actually had to read this book. It was based on an obsession over an underground mail system. (How exciting...)

Exciting?
What if it was back in April of 2001 and you read Lot 49 and came up with the idea that trystero to you meant terrorist / and if you put an 11 after the 4 and 9 you get 4/1/1 on 9/1/1. Does trystero become more real? more exciting? Could you have saved the day? Before Sept 11th happened who would believe you?

It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the seperate, silent, unsuspected world. (124-5)

Welcome to my world
Stanley Fish in “theres no such thing as free speech and its a good thing too” wrote:
English Studies cannot itself be made into a branch of inquiry that has direct and immediate social and political payoffs at least not in the way that the United States is now structured. In other countries and other traditions, it would have been more possible for there to be a direct connection between literary activity and social and political activity, and perhaps in some transformation of our society that has not yet occurred it could be the case that the kind of analyses we’re performing in class could have an immediate impact on the larger social and economic questions being debated in society.