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Jonathan Swift is something else. You might like "A Modest Proposal," where he suggested that Ireland might solve its famine problem by simply eating its children, since they had too many to feed anyway.
I'm dragging my college-prep sophomores through our English-department bookroom, which has titles as new as 1975, in numbers enough to supply 100 or so kids at a time, though sadly some of us have closer to 200 students, and many copies have to be read carefully, since they're falling apart.
Right now we're reading Something Wicked This Way Comes, a terrific book by Ray Bradbury. Every time I focus attention on Bradbury, I get all stirred up, as Bradbury does, over what our culture has allowed to happen to mass literacy, language and thought, and I rail at the kids to each battle it personally, by reading and reading and reading and writing. In the college-prep classes, many are on it already, but in "regular" classes. . .och, tamale.
By the pricking of my thumbs. . . .
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Lefty loosey, righty tighty
Ol' Simple, where you at?
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