The Aftermath

Dear All,

So "Reply All" beats the blog hands down (by a score of roughly 30 to 7 by my estimation)!

I had a group of about 30 students yesterday morning (it seems unfortunate that I had so many especially since I know of at least two people who had no students all!). I would estimate that about two-thirds of them had engaged with the book at some point along a spectrum of read-a-couple-of-essays to read-the-whole-book.

A number of the students started with the book in much the same way as I did, which is to say that they struggled through the first essay and stopped reading the second essay after a few pages. Unfortunately, many of them gave up at this point while I just skipped to the next essay. (Perhaps if the students had been given the book and asked to read, at least: 13, 1977, 21; Speak Hoyt-Schermerhorn, and The Beards we would have had a more complete common ground).

A few of the students had read the whole book and many of the students had interesting things to say about Lethem's relationship to his mother and the his use of collecting and obsession as a way of grieving (or not grieving). One student was quite upset with Lethem for not, in her view, "grieving properly." We discussed some issues around repeated exposure to particular art objects (does one student's repeated viewing of Billy Madison count here?), issues of what you do when a text is referring to people/works etc. that you don't know, defining oneself through allegiance to objects/works.

I had a grand time.

And I found out that it is possible to find a group of thirty college students none of whom have ever even heard of Blade Runner.

By my reckoning the experience was valuable and would have been even more so had a subgroup of the essays been chosen for the students to read.

Thank you organisers. See you next year.

Yours,

Michael