[lit-ideas] Re: The History of Effects

JK: "I've received replies from the handful of people I shared it with heavily 
criticizing the style, form, etc."


I didn't give up Literary Studies because I was good at it.  : )  But I suspect 
that even if I had been good at it I still would have run away screaming.  
Literaturists are like pathologists and criticism is autopsy.  I prefer messy 
life.   

Mike Geary
Memphis
 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Julie Krueger 
  To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 9:05 PM
  Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The History of Effects


  I'm smiling.  I'm glad someone else loved it!  I've received replies from the 
handful of people I shared it with heavily criticizing the style, form, etc.  
Here's one response from a retired editor in NY:


  <<One of my copywriters fancied himself a poet (and was a Yeats scholar 
working on a grad degree) and tried to develop my ken of poetry.  He'd recite a 
line or two and asked me what I thought and I always seemed to say the wrong 
thing.  Exasperated, he would say: "But can't you see? It's so obvious!"  And 
I'd reply, "Not to me."  I guess I just don't have that kind of mind.

  He was attending Columbia at night and taking a class with a noted Yeat's 
scholar whose name I have forgotten.  He claimed to have seen something new in 
a set of three short poems by Yeats.  His teacher doubted that anyone could 
find something new in Yeats, but let him do a grad thesis on the poems.  The 
poems added up to a few hundred words.  He did a fifty-page monograph on them 
that I could not even begin to understand.  It was the slow season, so I let 
him work on the thesis on company time.  How industrious he looked! LOL. 

  He left Ronald Press for academia.  The last I heard of him was that he had 
married a very wealthy woman.  Way to go!>>
    
  I guess I just don't know enough to not love that poem.


  Julie Krueger





  On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

    Thank you, Julie.  I loved that.  

    Mike Geary
    Memphis
      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Julie Krueger 
      To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
      Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 4:24 PM
      Subject: [lit-ideas] The History of Effects


      From today's "Writer's Almanac":

      The History of Effects
      by William Greenway

      The Bible was created by Bishop Ussher
      in 4004 B.C. Then Galileo cooked the universe
      too long, and the earth, like a yolk, slipped off
      center and everything began to wobble.
      Freud needed a reason to talk about sex,
      and Marx wrote a bestseller
      so he could retire rich.
      When the species started to hunt
      for their origin, they discovered Darwin.

      So now the ears of corn put down 
      tethers to the earth, trees rake
      the wind into piles, the sun turns the world
      like a ballerina, the way a magnet whirls
      a rotor. Silence squelches the radios,
      and darkness the bulbs. Automobiles are invented 
      to reach the malls, and choppers to haul
      body bags, and animals come to live with us
      to quench our loneliness and nourish our hunger.
      We've begun to love the people who need us
      as dandruff rises from sweaters to infect our hair, 
      and parachutes are the white flags
      of suicides that fail.
      Julie Krueger

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