Comments on: Catechisms and cliches

By: g

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:27:59 +0000

I read the poem before I read the book. I’d guess, completely at random, that at least twice as many people have read the poem than have read the book (even if we restrict attention to, say, the last 10 years so as to make up for the fact that the poem has been around for much longer).

The fact that the NYTRB writer feels the need to gloss “Things Fall Apart” seems to me to give the lie to the idea that “everyone” has read it, even in the rather attenuated sense of “everyone” that’s presumably being used.

By: paideia

paideia — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:08:30 +0000

sadly, I learned the Yeats poem because I liked the Joni Mitchell song [which was, yes, from Night Ride Home. I seem to recall buying a volume of Yeats specifically for that poem. This was around the high school era; did not read the poem as an assignment, despite my rather drunk (and very good) Irish AP English teacher. [We did read “To His Coy Mistress, Number 43]

Achebe’s TFA was the assigned book for my college first-year orientation [circa 1996]. I think I was the only one in my group who knew the reference.

Apocalyptic fun inevitably comes up when teaching religious studies, and I’ve yet to have a student catch any reference I have made to the poem.

By: Danny Yee

Danny Yee — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 08:59:22 +0000

I've read Arrow of God and not Things Fall Apart, but I have a copy of the latter on a shelf somewhere. It never occurred to me that it had a link with the Yeats poem. (I've read through an anthology which had a couple of dozen Yeats poems, though I'm not a big reader of poetry.)

By: Anderson

Anderson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:24:28 +0000

Let’s not forget Dan Savage’s double-play with Skipping Towards Gomorrah.

By: JP Stormcrow

JP Stormcrow — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:37:28 +0000

Ooh! Ooh! Slouching Towards Fear and Loathing!

Or Fear and Loathing in The Gyre.

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:24:08 +0000

I thought I hadn’t read the poem but then when I looked I recognised it.

I’d seen practically each line quoted repeatedly in various contexts where they looked irrelevant, and they stuck.

I’ve probably seen most of “The Hollow Men” in quotes too. It’s something you can’t get away from just by not reading it.

By: Theron

Theron — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 01:51:03 +0000

My English prof parents would be embarrassed to know that I don’t have a clue if I read that poem at any point. I took multiple literature classes, so I’m sure I must have, but I have no clue. I know all of you didn’t just get out of school last week, so I’m impressed that so many of you can be very precise about what you read and when. Maybe it’s because I read far more science and history than literature – we remember what we are most interested in. As a professor myself (history) at a less-than-stellar institution, I can bet that a very high percentage of my students have read neither book nor poem and could identify neither one unless they had one or the other coming up next week on an exam. And even then, they might struggle.

By: nnyhav

nnyhav — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 01:39:40 +0000

Ooh! Ooh! Slouching Towards Fear and Loathing!

By: vanya

vanya — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:48:18 +0000

I graduated an Ivy League college as a lit major in the late 80s. I’ve read the Yeats poem, I’ve never even heard of the Achebe novel (although I know Achebe by reputation). Needless to say, I don’t know anyone who has read the Achebe novel. I know plenty of people who read Yeats. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or maybe I hang with a very different crowd than Alan Wolfe.

By: trane

trane — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 23:44:12 +0000

Henry:
“there are many worse things in the world than Alan Wofle, but I reserve the right to find him highly annoying.”

Right. But do you have to make it show so inelegantly? You are usually – fortunately – much better than that.

Oh, the Danish high school system/college, how is that now? Lots of poetry, also in the English language, But I must say nay, have read neither Yeats (at least not that particular poem) nor Achebe.

By: JP Stormcrow

JP Stormcrow — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:33:25 +0000

Surley the defining shark-moment was the publication of Robert Bork’s, “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,”

Don’t call me surley ….

Did give me the idea to check out other “Slouching Towards” completions, (205,000 total hits) – not all are books:
Tehran, Bedlam, Utopia, Adjournment, Creation, Kalamazoo (A DeVries book), Big Brother, Wisdom, Consensus, Ganache, Extimacy, Consensus, Dublin, Nirvana (Bukowski), Liverpool, Birmingham ….

In fact, a test of your cities chops is whether you have a Slouching Towards xxx hit on Google. Pittsburgh, for instance, does not.

But my forgettable favorite is Bork going to the well one more time with a piece in the WSJ in 2005: Slouching Towards Miers- “Bush shows himself to be indifferent, if not hostile, to conservative values.”

Maybe he is trying to establish a “Slouching Towards” franchise the way Hunter S did with “Fear and Loathing”

By: aaron_m

aaron_m — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:28:46 +0000

James!

Shush for f**k’s sake. Letting them know that some Canadians go to grade 13 is gonna make us seem like boneheads even if “The Second Coming” was assigned reading.

By: James

James — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:54:13 +0000

As a Canadian, the poem was on my curriculum in Grade 13, although I think I had read it already. The book I had never heard of.

Oddly, although I have an M.A. in English, I don’t think the poem was on any university courses I took (and I did at least two courses involving modern poetry, including the entire Cantos, so it wasn’t simply avoiding the period).

By: Mark Schmitt

Mark Schmitt — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:38:38 +0000

I have a B.A. in English literature from an Ivy League school, and while I’ve read Yeats, I don’t think any of it was in the course of my formal education, either high school (crappy public) or college. I’m pre-p.c., so did not read Achebe either, and have not.

I discovered recently that lots of well-educated people don’t seem to have read “Dover Beach” either. Half the titles in the world come from those two poems!

By: rea

rea — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:26:02 +0000

I always thought that “The Second Coming” had jumped the shark after Joan Didion used Slouching Towards Bethlehem as the title for her essay on the the “hippies”

Surley the defining shark-moment was the publication of Robert Bork’s, “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,” a reference to the poem everyone else in this thread seems mercifully to have forgotten, or at least, suppressed . . .