>Nonetheless, I cannot bring myself to celebrate the fact that we can
>no longer produce as a matter of course fairly decent numbers of men
>and some women who are at home in Latin Greek, German, English,
>French, and probably several other languages, literatures, to whom
>Dante and Shakespeare and Homer and the Bible are as natural as
>breathing. Certainly not when you see what has replaced all that.
This weekend I was watching a lot of Hitchcock and reading Zizek's "Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture." Zizek goes from Hitchcock to Shakespeare to Homer to Patricia Highsmith and more, then back again, from page to page. Part of my weekend Hitchcock watching was shared with a fifth grader who stayed interested all the way to the end. She may find Shakespeare by way of Hitchcock and Zizek, plus the musty copy of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare I got for her at a used bookstore a few years ago. There are still good ways to get to Shakespeare and Dante.