ive been listening to c-span, currently playing (but a minute away from ending) a college class taught by ian underwood, experiences of soldiers in wwi. hes been focusing on memoirs (graves, carrington, chapman, others), and some fiction (hemingway, whom i dont like) and his students are lively and engaged. i am sure they have mostly forgotten theyre being recorded for c-span; perhaps underwood, in his enthusiasm, has also forgotten. its pretty cool. it brings me back, not so much to my student days as to my teaching days, but one thing underwood said brought me back to the former: he compared (as did one of the authors they were discussing) the war experience, for the ordinary british foot soldier (these are americans, by the way, studying at gettysburg college) to his experience in public school, and concluding that public school was worse. (keep in mind that in england, public school means what we here in the usa mean by private school.) he then laughingly compared it to dorm life (and at least some of the students he was addressing chuckled). thats what brought me back. i concluded that i did not view my time in the fdu dorms as worse than war, or resembling war. for the most part i liked it. from everything ive read and seen (in film), english public schools ARE hell, but that was not my college dorm experience at all. but then my mind turned to my first attempt to get high smoking pot. (it didnt work. it took six tries for me to feel a darned thing, and the successful attempt did not take place in the dorm.) i remembered visiting my across-the-hall neighbor and her boyfriend and their other male friend, the parties who offered me pot and waited patiently for me to have the guts to accept the offer, and learning, eventually, that they were quite surprised that i had never tried it. they told me they had always just assumed, whenever they met me, that i was tripping! and now, a WHOLE lot of decades later, i laughed to think that i was not even remotely insulted by that estimation of my affect. i took it to be a reflection of their limited perception rather than of my bizarre presentation. i think i still take it that way. and see how far from war my ruminations have taken me... except now i have a hankering to read carringtons memoirs. oh, and by the way, folks, since congress is on vacation for the month of august, c-span is running this kind of stuff even on weekdays this month, since there are no congressional sessions to broadcast. i love it! g p.s. it also occurred to me that i often explain to people why as a student i had no interest in history, which interests me greatly now. its simple: history, in high school, was nothing but wars and dates, dates and wars. and in my imagination i was confronted about that: but you are listening with huge interest and involvement to a lecture about a war! and i reply, still in my imagination, you mistake my meaning. we didnt actually study wars. we just learned what dates they were wages, and who won. thats not the same thing.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 17:31:20 +0000
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