Terry, TMW, tagged along Thursday night to hear Michael Krasny’s literature “bus tour” at Stanford Continuing Studies. There were six texts on the syllabus, by four authors: Flannery O’Conner (1925-1964), Eudora Welty (1909-2001), Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. I read the first two acts of “A Streetcar Named Desire” plus watched about 30 minutes of the Marlon Brando interpretation, and read “Barn Burning.”
I am meaning to update here with my notes from the class (or the namecheck: the over-under line is 20), lord willing and the charger works.
In reverse order:
Adrienne Rich
Robert Lowell
Allen Ginsberg
Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton
Garrison Keiler
Mae West
Willie Lowman
Stanley Kowalske
Sophocles
Lear
Aristotle
Blanche DuBois
Mitch
Karl Malden
Joe Biden
(Budd Schulberg — “he could have been a contender — more an allusion than a namecheck, but I like Budd. I met Budd)
Levin (the editor of Norton Anthology)
Betty Frieden
Petrified Man
I think he said “anec-dotage” — like in your dotage you tell too many anecdotes?
Major de Spain
Bill McKibben
Abner Snopes
Colonel Sartorious Snopes
W. J. Cash (?) who wrote “psycho-history”
Absalom, Absalom!
Lillian Hellman
Little Foxes
Manley Pointer
Good Country People
Good Man is Hard to Find
Edgar Allen Poe
St. Cyrus
(something I cannot read (Bruker Yvrz): “god doesn’t exist, anything is possible”
Blanche DuBois
Kafka
The Misfit
Nathanael West “saragossa sea of dreams”
Marlon Brando
Rossecky
E.A Robinson
Camille Paglia
A Rose For Emily
There’s also a list of two titles that a student mentioned: Evelyn Waugh, TK
And the list of things I mentioned, plus a list of things I put in my notes but decided not to mention.
But for Krasny per se, I count: 42