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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (45838)	7/16/1999 1:07:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 108807

My mother-in-law doesn't care for Kipling either. <vbg>

To: jbe who wrote (45838)	7/16/1999 1:16:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

"A matter of taste" Ah, Kipling, sitting there listening to the paddles chunking, thinking of his Burma girl, turning aside from the beefy face and grubby hands of the Chelsea housemaids, just akipling (eating his kippers), dropping behind the battle with a bullet where his breastplate ought to have been. I don't think it's a matter of taste, I think it's a matter of testosterone, appealing to soldiers and sailors too. Both T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound loved Kipling and hated themselves for loving him. It has always been the touchstone of a superior critical sense.

To: jbe who wrote (45838)	7/16/1999 1:19:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 108807

No point to this whole story- except that it's about "literature- or not" When I had just graduated from high school, my college sent me a recommended reading list. On it was Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. I dutifully went to the library and took it out with several others. My father, who was not well-educated but was an inveterate reader of anything and everything, happened to pick it up. He was incensed; he went to the libary and shoved it in the poor librarian's face, asking if she had read it, and why was she allowing such trash when they didn't even have all the great classics on the shelves. Her made quite a scene and was very proud of himself. He wanted to write to the university but I begged him not to---(today I would do it for him). I did go back and later sneak the book into the house to read it. I have no idea whether this was great writing, though I have heard people say that it is; I was so thoroughly horrified and disgusted by the material, if it was well-written, it never registered. Kozinski received, if I remember correctly, a great deal of recognition and was even talked about as a Nobel candidate. It was supposedly based on his life, but there is a lot of controversy over whether he just made a lot of it up and also whether he used ghost writers. If he wrote the truth, then I suppose it has some historical value, but if he made it up, then to me it is the work of a sick man, and had no place on a college freshmen reading list. Actually as innocent as we all were in the 60s, I'm not sure it had a place at all without a professor to give it context. I wish I had never read it. The only things I remember were the descriptions of a gang rape where they pushed a bottle up a woman and jumped on her stomach. And the horrible man who painted the bird wings and then let the bird lose to be rejected by the other birds. Which of course made me cry. Would you consider material like this to be atrocious? Or only something that has evil in its intent? DOes it make a difference if it is real or just fiction? What do you think of having young people read horror- true or not?