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Re: The troubles



Tom Wayburn concluded his comment with:

P.P.S. Survey: How many of us have read all of Dickens, Hardy, Walter
Scott, Melville, Garcia Marquez, Borges, Hawthorne, Trollope, Proust,
Baudelaire, Camus, Kafka, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Miller, Durrell, Waugh,
Burroughs (William not Edgar Rice), Shakespeare, Shaw, Marlowe,
Sophocles, Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Dewey, Peirce, Russell, for
starters. WE are college professors. No time for that intellectual
stuff. If not us, who?

Well, I'll bet there's not an English department in the US where the
*collective* faculty have read everyhting you include in your list, let
alone any individual. That is a formidable list. And there are several real
downers on it. I think that anybody who could wade through all of Kafka
wothout committing suicide would deserve some kind of an award. Same with
much of Dostoevsky.

Although I've read a bit of Marx, it seems that modern events have so
thoroughly discredited just about everything he did that spending much
effort at all on him is pretty much a waste of time (unless you are
scheduled to debate a convinced marxist next week).

It is also worth pointing aout that at least some of the authors on your
list got paid "by the word" and thus were under no obligation to be
economical in their prose. One doesn't have to read everything those types
wrote to get their ideas.

While I agree with your assessment of television and its probable effect on
students' reading ability and proclivity (Television is markedly worse now
than it was 40-50 years ago, in the sense that most of the stuff that gets
widely watched has been "dumbed down" to the point of imbecility. It is so
bad that the occasional "average" show stands out in stark contrast.), your
reading list doesn't strike me as one that will bring in many takers, even
among the scholarly community.

While we're on the subject of how we got into this pickle, let me toos out
my candidate for at least some of the blame (no evidence, just a feeling):
the decline in reading aloud to children. My mother read to me and my
brother when we were little. We were read to in pre-school, and in
elementary school up through the eighth grade. I don't mean to suggest that
moms have to quite work and stay home and we go back to "Beaver" and
"Father knows best," and all the rest. thank goodness those days are gone,
but we all need to be conscientious about reading aloud to our children as
often as we can, and so should non-family care-givers. That's not a
guarantee to make kids into readers, but it probably helps, and it couldn't
hurt.

Hugh

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Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I bought a Macintosh.
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