Sto in the dig age

free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Storytelling in the Digital Age WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com List of Previous Publications The Absence of Angels, novel (1994) All My Sins Are Relatives, narrative essays (1995) The Telling of the World: Native American Stories and Art, selected and edited, with new translations and stories (1996) As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity, anthology, edited and introduced with a contributing essay (1998) Killing Time with Strangers, novel (2000) This is the World, stories (2000) Feathering Custer, narrative essays (2001) WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Storytelling in the Digital Age W S Penn WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com STORYTELLING IN THE DIGITAL AGE Copyright © W S Penn, 2013 All rights reserved First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN: 978–1–137–36528–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Penn, W S., 1949– Storytelling in the digital age / W S Penn pages cm Includes bibliographical references ISBN 978–1–137–36528–6 (hardback : alk paper) Literature—Appreciation Storytelling Popular culture and literature Storytelling in literature I Title PN56.S7357P46 2013 809Ј.93353—dc23 2013024525 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India First edition: November 2013 10 WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This Book is dedicated to the memory of George P Elliott Writer, Teacher, and Friend WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This page intentionally left blank WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com CON T E N T S Preface ix One The Anti-conspiracy Two Homecoming’s Not a Dance Three Truth and Beauty: When Divine Horizons Shrink and the Gods Pack Up to Leave 13 Four Sex, More Sex, and a Little Corruption 23 Five The Nibelungenrap 35 Six Separation of Life from Life 45 Seven Dublin’s Polonius 57 Eight Censoring the Censor 69 Nine Death by Hot Air 83 Ten Unsanforized™ Time 89 Eleven Hamsters with Liquid Eyes 101 Twelve Simplifying Our Days 115 Thirteen Weary Work 127 Fourteen The Life of Swans 143 Fifteen Inversions 159 Sixteen In a Hole in the House of the Famous Poet 171 Afterword: Remembering What We Don’t Know We’ve Lost 181 Notes 191 WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This page intentionally left blank WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com PR E FAC E If I could have what I want, it would be for you to enjoy reading this book If you take something from it, even better Kind reviewers of former books said that I refuse to take refuge in jargon or double-speak while the order of my books emerged from the association of ideas and emotions Organic: that’s the word a writer might use to indicate a book that reveals the writer’s cast of mind, and I hope this book is organic, a book about literature written by a person who finds it necessary to be a writer For writer I am I have always said that I had to write and that writing made me a better husband, father, and sometimes friend Certainly, it has made me more willing and able to laugh, again, I hope, sometimes at myself Virtually all of the reviews of my earlier books have noted largely the humor, so if something here makes you laugh, please go ahead and laugh, even if it is not with me but at me I prefer satire, but even burlesque is better than f lat-faced dullness If books can’t make you laugh, if you don’t get joy out of the privilege of being alive as a thinking Human Being, then I am sorry Humor, not always “ha ha” humor, but amused or delighted attitude and outlook is one of the perspectives that literature’s Times and the awareness of death, not so abstract in my experience, was one of the driving forces behind this book If you laughed, if you enjoyed it, if you think you see something more or other even if you disagree with me, then I am content I have Norman Mailer’s “Enough.” When you reach my age, you realize that Time may well what people have been unable to and that is shut you up, so you want to thank everyone, whether they desire such blame by association or not So here goes: thanks to my wife, Jennifer, and my two children, Rachel Adams and Willy Penn, who have given me all the reasons and love on the road, at home, and everywhere else, and who somehow always seem the same age WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 184 Storytelling in the Digital Age that a Quaker like George P Elliott had, giving students frank though kind realistic assessments of their possible futures)—but you may never erase a “D” grade and believe me, take a look at what a “D” does to a G.P.A But more than the obvious: he may refuse to write you a letter of recommendation (or worse, write a bad one or even worse than that, write a lukewarm one that with innuendo and implication suggests that Sandi is, well, not stupid because no one is “stupid,” but she sure isn’t up to cleaning those cans) If he is unprofessional—wait a minute, isn’t that what you’ve just asked him to be, just classified him as being by not recognizing the slightly formal structures of education? Or he may become like the clerk at the DMV and tell you he cannot anything to help because, well, those are the rules And here is where you need to understand T S Eliot, one of the places, and that is that you, as student, accrete to his experience of the body of students I keep telling myself not to give “overrides” (of prerequisites, educational class, or major/minor) because every single time I have given one I have ended up with an unprepared student who lowers the conversation in the classroom and makes me sound like Stalin on his student evaluation, as though students, apprentices, might adequately and disinterestedly evaluate what a teacher does, and every time I get asked I everything I can to allow the student into the class because, well, because I not want to work for the DMV So because of your so complacent claims about the evolution of language, not be fooled into altered structures Make sure that you understand the processes in which you participate, whether small dayto-day ones or large lifelong ones How have we gotten to the point that you—the student—think you know what goes into teaching? How have we gotten to the point that parents think they know what goes into teaching their offspring? For isn’t that what they are, offspring, often un-reared, uncivilized, and without the humility and curiosity it takes to learn? Even there the common “vernacular” is “raised” not “reared,” as though children were heads of corn or cattle fed on corn in the bovine ranges of Nebraska You raise corn You rear children Good teachers not make for good students who learn Good students And who rears good students? Parents Parents who the hard work no matter how tired they are of being parents, teaching, guiding, modifying And how may they that? One way—one major way—is reading aloud to them, from in utero to however old the child gets still wanting to be read to Reading also teaches us the slow and sometimes cyclical evolution of language It allows us the pleasure of words—did you know that WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Afterword 185 “cool” once meant a “tub of butter” and does that say anything about the slippery fattiness of being “cool” (or these days), “hip” (which is a replaceable body part)? It strengthens our abilities to use that evolving language to see—as Joseph Conrad claimed he wanted to make us above all else, in his “Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus” (in which James Wait, the “nigger,” is that which holds the entire ship— the Narcissus—af loat) And just as another example of language: a student—bright, nice, talented—saw a book on my shelf in my office titled, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, but she saw only “Nigger,” and her immediate reaction was to worry that I might secretly have a pointy white cap and gown in my desk drawer We have killed off language, killed off thinking, made our children frightened and timid, and in doing so have encouraged them to believe (though based on what, I not know) that changing the words changes the realisms, the perceptions, the understandings (perhaps that need changing) and that we are just uncool Oh, it has always been thus? Some old fart offers criticism, digs his heels into the dirt like Wile E Coyote and says “Enough?” Well, in one way you are right, since Aristotle people have been doing this But I am not certain how or why that makes it something to be desired To continue the polemical nature of this, murder has always been around and probably, once the cavewoman’s cousin moved into the cave next door, so has rape But that makes neither right, and if it makes it acceptable, you have serious problems that ought to be drugged And when the earthquake of technology—which does so many great things for all of us—overtakes you and inverts the world, trapping you in a cone of rubble, what then? I am not complaining from my “hole” that language is evolving— that is the way my unique and witty students try to skirt the issue I am complaining that both the language we already have and the language as it “evolves” is losing its meaning, and we are allowing that, even helping it along Do you realize that when “Bitch” is used in reference to women—and there was a professor who taught Rap as “art” and “bitches” seems to be one of the words you can make out in rap “lyrics”—in a class that is seriously pretending to analyze and discuss Rap—this is an English class, for heaven’s sake—it evidently is okay to use the word to make reference to women It is, after all, the vernacular—and the vernacular must be right Yes? And just imagine all the words that rhyme with “wussy” in Rap The words lead to conceptual thinking, indeed they represent concepts, and the concepts may not be excused by laughing in ad hominem attacks on someone who complains about the words WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 186 Storytelling in the Digital Age But “bitch” and cat-likeness aside, take the other words we use that are less vernacular and yet just as stupid Take “deserve.” We are told over and over by our digital gods that we deserve (1) better, (2) a Lexus (this in a quiet, textured wealthy snooty voice), (3) an education, (4) better health, (5) everything else, evidently But we are told these things not as truth but as conspiratorial trick: if you spend immense amounts of time and energy trying to get something you deserve (like a new driver’s license), you are too busy and preoccupied to figure out that you deserve nothing at all beyond a cosh upside the head for being so freaking dumb The language of advertising is brilliant, inventive (note not “creative” because it creates nothing perceptually or actually, but invents new ways to fool us into buying things we don’t need or thinking in terms that obscure the object of our thought): the picture of men you get from contemporary advertising is of helpless, sentimental little boys who service the other sex and are so emasculated by their bovine lives that they need chemicals—at 40?!—to get a stiffy and keep her hopping on her one foot and smiling with tepid sexuality while she puts on her go-to-work clothes Love is a chemical? Language does evolve—and much we take from the digital age is creative and useful—but language also can devolve—adverbs are lost, images are replaced with complacent bovine banalities, perceptions become utterly confusing for all but those who read and study The word “parent” no longer means someone who rears his or her (or best, “their”) children It means monetary enabler, action enabler, helicopter apologist, and it teaches kids to “D.A.R.E.” to stay off drugs while drunkenly—well just a little tipsy—weaving down their paths of life unable to see where they’ve been or where they might be going They not bear examination, they refuse responsibility, they ignore their children because they are weary They buy televisions and screens to keep the kids busy in the van, on vacation, at home, anywhere the kid might be (and yes, a “kid” is a baby goat and we as parents are raising herds of their bleating kind) They not use language properly or try to use it well; they are so weakened and replaceable like Henry Ford’s interchangeable parts that they seem to need learned children to tell them what to eat, wear, think, feel, how to vote, and once they manage to renew their license how and what—really what—to drive and it had better not be one of those trashy cars the Jensons who live across the tracks drive They listen, accept, munch over, and pass through their double stomachs—on the way to its becoming fertilizer—the mantra of more Math and Science education, while they think that teachers’ WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Afterword 187 salaries ought to be tied to “performance.” Do not be fooled by the Republicans in Michigan’s State legislature and their pay for performance plans: they are not interested in improving education (it might embarrass them); they are interested in so eviscerating public education that their children, the children of stupid legislators, will have a better than equal chance by crippling the children who had 30 or 40—why not 50, with an armed guard and noontime lockdowns?—in a classroom These legislators support education programs because education programs make teaching into a production line, force-feed their students such ridiculous—that means laughable—novelties, using bureaucratic foolery and ludicrous—that means laughable—language, that mainly the weakest, the least imaginative, the most incapable of anything else would allow himself to succumb to the career of teaching And just think, teaching is not a “career,” it is a vocation, and only because of that we have any good teachers left for “60 Minutes” to report on Math and Science, of course, are extremely important Your fingers on your hand are fairly essential But they work best if the have an opposable thumb, and the thumb is literature, stories and poems, the thumb lets you hold things, pick up new things, and golf, the thumb allows you to be human, indeed, as imagination itself, is the thing that along with the ability to express what has been imagined, to tell stories of it and about it, is the thing that distinguishes us from other mammals What is the use of technologies if we lose, in the process of bowing down in worship to Science and Math, our Humanity? What is the use of S & M (couldn’t resist, again) if we lose our humor or if we not engage with being alive, being a Human Being? Everywhere I go, I see and hear people of reasonable intelligence asking whether this or that leads to a good job Or worse, they say, “But that’s what is” or “That’s as it has become,” as though acceptance and passivity were wands that Harry Pooper waves to make it all okay Some get angry: You think you know so much or you think you’re so right, often verbally suggesting that they know that some of what I say is right, but that their feeling of overwhelming helplessness or disappointment that they didn’t hear it or think about it sooner (when they might have chosen different roads not taken) makes them want to feel anger in the face of loss, and I am the one pointing out some of what they have lost Some are simply sad and require medication to replace the feelings that they could have had for $15.95 (well, maybe $24.95 plus tax—there is inf lation) while they read and enjoyed a good Jane Austen novel or perhaps sunned themselves in the rosy-fingered dawn of Homer Others seem to be in a hole and yet not know it because they WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 188 Storytelling in the Digital Age have “aps” on their cellular phone that can keep their robotic personalities having fun, until the battery wears down And still others want to laugh, to denigrate, to make ad hominem attacks on the messenger Maybe they ought to Of these latter, I think of my respected colleagues, a few of whom actually like meetings where they help at last by tossing verbal nonsense into the air like juggler’s balls, carrying their laptops and iPads around with them, tapping and playing in an exercise of what they might call contemporaneity There’s an anecdote my wife likes to tell of a friend who told her that she and her husband read together on their iPads and just the other day, curious about why a baseball diamond was named X, looked it up, and it was really interesting how the field got its name, although she couldn’t remember now how that was or even what it was Similar to my students who claim that their electronic devices are “necessary,” though all I have seen them use is their antisocial media (you see how we are tricked by language? Not unlike the “Death Tax,” is it, to call that which unsocializes “social” media?) to interrupt other peoples’ lives with uncommunication, photos of them half-naked at a drunken party, photos of them shouting “Whoo!” as they parade down Albert Street inebriated late at night, or participate in the American Dream of Shopping Not one of them is willing to admit that brain function studies have already shown that when looking at f lashing data on a screen the brain stops functioning pretty much at all None is worried because using screens releases dopamine in the brain, dulling any kind of assimilative, connecting knowledge or wisdom they might have had There are already books on these subjects, Distracted and The Shallows are two that come to mind, and any parent who loves his or her child enough to bother may turn off the television beside the crib and go out and buy them at their local bookstore and—Quel ideé— even read them and, turn off the telephone, Sheila!, even think about them So we are not really surrounded by information, we are surrounded by the potential ease of acquiring information, and with that ease comes a kind of brain-death, the result of which causes us first to cease to learn and retain that information, second to excuse our never acquiring the information, third, a kind of self-satisfied stupidity that allows some of us to be complacent in our uninformed existence, and fourth, a need for drink or drugs or cultish religions because we hear—out there, way beyond the reduced horizons of our screens—the stalking muttering growls of the Sabertooth Tigers Test this out: with all the data available on the Internet, how many people (including yourself ) have any WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Afterword 189 idea what happened economically to common household incomes during and after World War II? Most of my students, horizons shrunk to what they hold in their hands which may be dumb “smart” phones or atrophied parts of their bodies and personalities, maybe even decorated with tattoos, not even know what World War II was, how World War I or Vietnam and Korea relate And worse, even when you bring up the subject, they are too lazy to look up data on their tools We are not surrounded by information, we are given brain-deadening toys to keep us complacent And the purpose of thinking, the direction of wisdom, is in the opposite direction Look up “complacent” in Roget’s Thesaurus and you’ll find that one of the synonyms for that state is “bovine.” Dissatisfaction—not commercial but intellectual—is skepticism, but not skepticism for its own sake where we not believe any authority The kind of skepticism that may react, “But wait a minute, something is wrong, there,” and then goes on to examine what is wrong or decide whether it is Skepticism requires each of us to realize how much we don’t know, and it demands that we separate ourselves from the people who argue apples and oranges—there is knowing how to run a sheet metal press and there is knowing what and how other people have thought and concluded for centuries Persons who lust after contemporaneity or “That’s what is,” need to stop being childish— we’re all getting older, shocking as that may be—and realize that it is not modernity we need to understand (we can’t) but history, even antiquity Changing your technologies, as useful as technology can and may be, is only changing your empirical clothes and like the Emperor, you may find yourself naked on parade Where may we begin to acquire the dissatisfaction and language that leads to wisdom? Where may we find help in putting what we learn together so that we see and see more clearly? There is one answer, and it includes all the others (such as Philosophy or History as a discipline), and by now you know it: Literature Poetry that helps us purify our languages And Realistic Fiction, which gives us temporal and structural perspective, assimilates and distinguishes, gives us points-of-view from which we may look differently, lets us live in the skin of a character for a manageable period of time, allows us to see how our lives, once stripped of all the advertising falsehoods, are very similar to the lives lived in books To that, we not only have to forego like Ivan Illych our limited self-loving egos and seek knowledge, but we must also realize that there is no such thing as “reality” for the common reader There is truth And to that, our storytellers have to be honest, perceptive, and yes, even wiser than we are—if we are able to WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 190 Storytelling in the Digital Age set aside our egos and agendas long enough to distinguish between good storytellers and rotten (often in the body of the same writer) Truth is real, beauty is real, and the language of truth and beauty is used uncommonly well It is not the lying language of bureaucracy or agenda, nor is it the obfuscatory language of theory, nor is it the grunting of childish complacency Literature is the half of ourselves, storytelling is that part of us and our culture and our relations to our children that guides us through the thickets of data and allows us to transform information into knowledge Realistic literature not only guides us humanely, increasing our empathy and wisdom as we go, it is the one thing that offers the hope for happiness and wisdom while shaping opportunity and understanding, often giving us the humor that makes us smile or laugh, see ourselves in relation to all the selves that have come before and might come after, gives us the lens through which we see the fissures in getting and spending as well as in dishonest language Realistic literature gives us or helps blossom in us compassion and empathy, not the phony empathy of the meddling Liberal or the constricting judgment of the rightwing Conservative Literature takes all of us on the train and tells us where we are—and where we are is at a place where we might consider the truth of the world, if we are willing to waken Literature is a little work for a lot of joy WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com NOT E S One The Anti-conspiracy Educational bureaucrats are also known herein as “educationists” and “edificationists”—those bureaucrats who would teach others how to teach and then try to invent measures for “edification” that quantify “learning,” which is unquantifiable For my people, the Nez Perce, storytelling doesn’t record or transmit culture and meaningful teaching alone, it also creates the world Circe, the witch in The Odyssey whose draughts cause men to lose all thoughts of home, is one of a set of interior tales used by the singer to illustrate cultural values and not dramatic human behavior Two Homecoming’s Not a Dance All references are to Robert Fitzgerald, trans., The Odyssey by Homer (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998) An apocryphal story about the poet Adrienne Rich was that when asked how all the photographers who excitedly met her in an airport knew she was coming, she replied, “My dear, I hired them.” Synecdoche is, I would maintain, not contradictory to this statement Synecdoche is essentially mimetic language phrased in taglines that need no interpretation Thus, “a thousand sails” hardly needs us to stop and wonder or admire, the way Frost’s apples in “After Apple-picking.” See James Boswell and Frederick A Pottle, eds., Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–63 (London: Folio Society, 1985) See Anthony Burgess, Clockwork Orange (New York: W.W Norton, 1963) WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 192 Notes Three Truth and Beauty: When Divine Horizons Shrink and the Gods Pack Up to Leave See W B Yeats, The Collected Poems of W B Yeats, definitive edition with the author’s final revisions (New York and London: Macmillan, 1956), p 117 Miss (and she insisted on the “Miss”) Marion McNamara taught Latin at Henry Gunn High School in Palo Alto, CA circa 1966 She possibly was the strictest teacher I ever was lucky enough to have Caesar’s words translate out as, “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” “Fere libentur homines id quod volunt credunt” translates as, “Men almost always believe that which they wish.” Four Sex, More Sex, and a Little Corruption Life insurance does not insure your living; it insures someone else’s living after you’re done with dying Not unlike the “Death Tax” being, in truth, the “Greed Tax.” A “stiffy” is what Caterina calls a “nightingale” in the fourth story on the Fifth Day of The Decameron, though it only has tumescently sung eight times in one night This is the opening to The Inferno See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Italian Text with English Trans And comment by John D Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) All references for Boccaccio are taken from Giovanni Boccaccio and Charles Singleton, The Decameron, The John Payne Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) There are other and many good translations of The Decameron Why I feel preference for Singleton’s revision of Payne’s may have to with the sentence structure that is at times as convoluted as late Henry James, but which slows me down and makes me pay close attention to modifying clauses, authorial intrusions, and so on If not those intelligent reasons, then it’s a bleeding mystery See the brilliant review article by James Woods, “The Blue River of Truth,” New Republic, August 1, 2005 Though I have always believed that Realism is the overarching umbrella of fiction under which even nonrealisms shade themselves, Woods adds clarity and insight to the argument I am not against these donations I am critical of the too-easy easing of our consciences Five The Nibelungenrap All references are to Helen Mustard, trans., “The Nibelungenlied,” in Medieval Epics (Random House: Modern Library, New York, 1963) See W B Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W B Yeats WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Notes Six 193 Separation of Life from Life See X J Kennedy and Dana Gioia, An Introduction to Fiction (New York: Longman, 2005) All page references are to this edition Percy B Shelley and George Woodberry, Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton, Miff lin, 1901) Seven Dublin’s Polonius Gabriel Conroy is a main character in “The Dead.” See James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Modern Library, 2012) All references are to this edition e e cummings, Collected Poems (Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library, 1977) Eight Censoring the Censor I not mean Roosevelt Republicans but Rove-Norquist Republicans And I not apologize for profiling any group with “tea party” in its name James Pickering (ed.), “Fiction 100” (New York: Prentice Hall, 2001), pp 589–610 All page references are to this translation A “poshlust” is a philistine who lusts after posh-ness See Valdimir Nabokov’s essay, “Philistines and Philistinism,” The New York Review, September 24, 1981 Nine Death by Hot Air Tomasso Landolfi, Gogol’s Wife and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1989) All references are to this edition Note that I am not criticizing Frey who showed fools their foolishness A literary Confidence Man who allowed Oprah’s prurient caring (which may be very real) to trick her and 3.5 million readers The real response to Frey is not whether it’s good or bad, true or false, but “Who cares?” Ten Unsanforized™ Time My apologies to George Smoot and all the physicists whose teeth I have just set on edge “Heli-vets” is a comedy sketch on “That Mitchell and Webb Look,” on BBC television See W S Penn, “The Tale as Genre in Short Fiction,” in New Short Story Theories, ed Charles May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994) WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com 194 Notes See W S Penn, The Telling of the World (New York: Stuart, Tabori, and Chang, 1996) Graham Greene, Collected Stories (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005) All references are to this edition See José Antonio Burciaga, Drink Cultura: Chicanismo (Santa Barbara: Joshua Odell Editions, 1993), p As for praise of a book, there needs to be a course on deciphering book-jacket “praise for” blurbs If they are about the book, they are often written by people who don’t actually read the book If they are about books other than the one in hand—her former books—it probably means the one in hand is as dull as ditchwater It just happened to me: I bought a new novel by a writer I praise in passing in this book with praise all over the back cover about the writer’s earlier work— only to discover why the praise was all for her other books Am I going to tell you which writer or what book? No I am upset enough by what I say about Grace Paley at this book’s end “Five years”: I now believe that no book by writers who are still alive should be taught in English classes Eleven Hamsters with Liquid Eyes Ted Hughes, “The Rain Horse,” in The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, ed Malcolm Bradbury (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1987), p 126 With all their so-called information technology at hand, few knew when World War II occurred and what it was about, other than the Jewish kids See Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) Carson McCullers, The Collected Stories (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987), p 119 All references are to this edition Twelve Simplifying Our Days George P Elliott, Among the Dangs (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961) All references are to this edition Thirteen Weary Work Greene, p 162 Heinrich Böll, The Stories of Heinrich Böll, trans Leila Vennewitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986) All references are to this edition WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com Notes Fourteen 195 The Life of Swans Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1960) All references are to this edition Fifteen Inversions A reference to Mugatu in “Zoolander,” directed by Ben Stiller, Paramount Pictures, 2001 Mugatu is the evil fashion designer who claims he is important because he “invented the piano key necktie.” Sixteen In a Hole in the House of the Famous Poet Muriel Spark, The Complete Short Stories (London: Penguin Books, 2001) All references are to this edition WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This page intentionally left blank WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This page intentionally left blank WWW.EBOOK777.COM free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com This page intentionally left blank WWW.EBOOK777.COM