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"spike" <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:spike66@att.net"><spike66@att.net></a> wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote>>Many or perhaps most of us here are techy types. In
our school years we were required to take lit classes but plenty
of us just went through the motions. (Did you do that too?) Then
when the college days were over, some of us looked back at what we
missed, and learned that it requires a different way of thinking.
The math, the physics, the chemistry, all those comfort zones for
so many of us, didn?t help in explaining why some kinds of
literature makes us feel. I didn?t really learn to feel until
after they had already handed me a diploma and an invitation to go
off and invent things. My vocabulary is still limited in those
gray-area fields, for I didn?t even start developing those areas
of the brain until long after those synapses were already being
occupied by calculus and details of astronomy, programming
languages and all the usual cool stuff.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
I hated 'English Literature' (and still do. That Hemingway stuff,
for example, is just incomprehensible to me. Some guys in a bar,
talking about what? Nothing. What's the point? What's the story?
I really don't get it. Most short stories are the same: Meaningless
rambling. Ditto poetry). Maths is also a foreign language to me,
which I'm still not comfortable with, and only know some of the
basics, so I don't really know what the hell my synapses are
occupied with!<br>
<br>
Adrian wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote>> even adults, but definitely children, might
appreciate certain forms<br>
> of art more if they have at least dabbled in the rudiments of
the craft,<br>
> rather than leaving the whole thing as a black box to them.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Well, that doesn't seem to work for me. At least not with
literature. I've written short stories of my own, here's one:<br>
<br>
Last night, I woke up in the small hours. There was a fly buzzing
at the window. When I went to let it out, a cat in the street
looked up at me.<br>
<br>
That's what short stories are like. I see no difference (apart from
length) between that and the Hemingway one that Spike posted. What
do people see in them? I have no idea.<br>
<br>
Ben Zaiboc<br>
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