[lbo-talk] [Not sent] Re: What we lose in translation

[andie nachgeborenen]

Some of my kids' read-alouds _were_ the stuff of nightmares. What are you reading? Five year old Hannah asked me. A book about a man who turns into a bug, said I. That's silly, said she, read it to me. So I read her Kafka's Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung). The kids also liked Twain. Hannah was very fond of The Prince and The Pauper, Puddin'head Wilson, and Huckleberry Finn, which are also, the last two of them especially, rather nightmarish. She went through a  phase when she would hear _only_ scary stories. She liked Bram Stoker's Dracula (edited in reading aloud, it is rather long), thought Mary Shelley's Frankenstein boring. Totally lost interest in Charlotte's Web when she learned they were not going to eat Wilbur after all. Joel from a very young age liked gore and splatter. I read him the Iliad, he liked the stuff about the spear's point went in through the neck, and his teeth bit on the cold bronze, and black death misted his eyes. I paraphrase

 closely from memory. He still collects medieval weaponry replicas, but is a very gentle soul, and I guarantee you he would not stick a spear's point in your neck or other vital organ.

--- On Fri, 8/1/08, shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:


> From: shag <shag at cleandraws.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] [Not sent] Re: What we lose in translation
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, August 1, 2008, 7:37 PM
> At 02:50 PM 8/1/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >I can still recite from memory, deeply ebgraved in the
> neural pathways, 
> >Goodnight Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, Fox In Sox,
> and the like, and 
> >my youngest is 15. My oldest, now out on her own, used
> to protest, now 14 
> >or so years ago, "Daddy, you're not really
> _reading_ the book!"
> >
> >Today was good, today was fun
> >Tomorrow is another one
> 
> heh. my son just used to look at me, cock his head and say,
> "Mom?"
> 
> Because, always go go go running on 4-5 hrs a sleep a night
> in grad school, 
> I'd read him the story and, apparently, with my eyes
> wide open, start 
> dreaming, and talking in my eyes-wide-open sleep. I hope my
> dreams weren't 
> the stuff of a 5 year old's Freudian nightmare.
> 
> Once, I had to read Twain's autobiography. I was taking
> care of a 
> neighbor's kid, too, because we'd swap: I'd
> watched her's; she mine, while 
> we were both finishing up college. I started reading that
> stuff aloud to 
> two year-olds. HA. they liked, they liked! I commented on
> that to my tutor 
> and she said that was a great observation b/c, back then,
> books were often 
> read aloud. People couldn't afford or couldn't
> read, or were living on the 
> frontier with limited access to books anyway, so they'd
> read aloud -- at 
> libraries and other public places.
> 
> 
> i have no idea what this convo is supposed to be about.
> I'm just randomly 
> reading the list while waiting for a phone call. ha.
> 
> shag
> 
> 
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO) 
> 
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