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Notes -
I was a literature major. I enjoy reading but can't match the encyclopedic range of reading of many I used to know. One past girlfriend in grad school it seems had read everything, and took pains to remind people of this, though I suspect that had something to do with her having been transplanted from a high-performing, competitive undergraduate program on the east coast to my unassuming program in the south full of relative dullards like myself. My beerswilling, football-watching friends tolerated her (but only just) because she was exceptionally beautiful.
I enjoy reading and I like more poetry than is probably considered healthy by most people; I have committed a few sonnets of Shakespeare to memory, can quote Roethke, and have attended more than one poetry reading without even getting a little drowsy.
Still, of all my classes, literature classes were often the worst, unless the teacher himself was charismatic enough to hold my interest (I say he only because none of my female literature profs ever really connected with me). Reading your post about the gout interpretation makes me recoil in what is the effete version of PTSD, where I recall the similar highspeed intellectual wheelspinning of many of my lit classes, perhaps especially poetry classes.
Having been an assigned a Burgess essay on Shakespeare, I remember going into class and the professor (another transplant, but from the west coast, and this was to be, for me, the highlight of her class) asked us if, on reading Burgess' suggestion that Shakespeare was partial author of the KJV of the bible, any of us looked up the relevant passage?
Dullards all, no one had. Her response, that echoes to this day: "Well FUCK YOU!"
I say with no trace of sarcasm that I was not fortunate enough to have as many teachers of her spirit. Even she, after this one outburst ( and a subsequent dropping of her course by many Alpha Chi and other sorority girls) became much more dry and uninteresting as a lecturer.
Psalm 46, by the way.
Edited for clarity
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