Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[alice wellintown]

I'm sorry your grammar teacher taught you that fragments are wrong or
mistakes and need to be corrected. Fragments are quite useful. It
doesn't need correction. Read it as written or not. You can insert a
colon at the end,  where the long quote from Thoreau begins. This is
the P-List. I don't edit what I draft here. I've not the will nor the
time.

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>  alice wellintown wrote:
>
>>Would that a reader understand not drugs and the foolishness of
>>youthful experiements that crack and chip away at the indoctrinated
>>exceptionalisms and predjudicial pedantries of the privleged college
>>crew who may choose to discover the class issue in their own slow
>>learner yarns by jolly jack tarrying, wondering in the towers of
>>scholars, touring the ghetto, chatting with volubtuous feminist, and
>>reading Resistance to Civil Government or Civil Disobedience
>
> long as it is, that's still a sentence fragment.
> I'm tempted to doctor it up, because I like where I think it's headed:
>
> "Would that a reader understand that Pynchon's fictions are about
> not drugs but about the foolishness..."   would that be an acceptable
> interpolation after "Would that"?
>
> or, "Would that a reader understand not drugs [et al]...but instead
> the sensuous convolutions of prose, the reactions to poets and thinkers
> and other novelists, the observations of daily life, the savoring of experience,
> and the essential good-heartedness that shines through all of his work!"
> Would that be a reasonable completion of the sentence that begins with
> "Would that"?
> --
>
>
> - "The whole point of life is to have a story" - Jeremy Cioara
>