Starting the Group Read

[alice wellintown]

Why not just spend the next two weeks dipping into and ripping into
the new book. Open it up. We have a very different book. It calls for
a very different approach. Reading the AtD archives, and again, I
appreciate all the work people put in, I'm convinced that the big book
exhausted even the determined and serious. When  I began to post on it
here recently I was met with--been there and done that, and oh
Terrance is a kill joy. Neither is true. The archives, as interesting
as they are on AtD, are thin and often uninspired. And, I'm no killjoy
or kilroy or Jack Kennedy, but I know that there is no such thing as
educational value in the abstract (Dewey) and that sometimes the kids
just don't get it. Sometimes it's beacuse they have not done the
reading. Sometimes it's because the guy at the front of the room needs
to sit down, or at least get some new joke material and stop alluding
to so much damned literature and art. I mean, people don't really read
poetry and shit. Rap, brother, rap on. How about them Obama military
bases in Colombia? Yeah, health care .... and ....

Penis!

Always works. Did notice the Tom manages to toss in that long feminist
set-piece; he starts off with the dame not getting the yab cause she
ain't got a penis, then has her pose as a white slave and then the
penis hats and so forth. He's gotten better at that; kinda Wharton's
House of Mirth descriptions of the body language and the subtle female
particulars of phrase and the class languages and the world of females
and males in NYC circa 1900.

Rhis new strength, his feminsit touch and the, what Nabokov praised in
Jane A's spider webs, is refreshing, but he doesn't do nothing for the
boyz. His males remain types: Vibes moving to Traverse or Traverse
moving to Vibes with a cold Daddy in the middle adjusting his assets
or losing them.

Now, on that Democracy in America stuff, see Lewis's The American Adam
(online), the stuff on Emerson, Jefferson, Skidmore, Paine ....



 http://www.gutenberg-e.org/greenberg/IntroductionJRG.html