Risqué literature: driving the point home

I recently commented on the history blog about the travails of "The Mount," the estate dedicated to the commemoration of Edith Wharton's home, life, and works.  There, I cited a rather disingenuous interview given by current Executive Director Susan Wissler concerning the organization's disastrous earlier financial and management decisions. However, she also spoke about the organization's future.

Unfortunately, what caught my eye was this equally disastrous typo by the interviewer.  The conversation turned to new cultural programs:

[SW] Last summer we brought a Wharton play back to the drawing room with Xingu It was adapted from a short story of Wharton's by Dennis Krausnick (The husband of Shakespeare & Company founder, Tina Packer). This summer we will also present one of Dennis's adaptations Summer. She called it her "Hot Ethan." It is a story of a young woman's sexual awakening and takes place in the Berkshires.

CG [=interviewer] It sounds steamy.

SW It has a few steamy passages. It is too risqué to be read in school which is why students ream Ethan Frome. It entails such hot issues as teenage pregnancy and abortion. [emphasis added]

CG That sounds like a lively production . . .

1) Ouch.

2) And:  Indeed—though not too risqué for Amherst, I'd wager.

Crisis and Confusion

student in class:

"He was having a mid-life crisis but didn't know what to do"

Hard to argue with that. I mean, otherwise it wouldn't be much of a crisis, would it?

Students & Administration Meet

For the full video experience:


http://www.archive.org/details/HampshireCollegeEmergencyOpenForumOnAshadmissionMovement


Audio of conversation with Admissions interns there, too.

Students try to track down administrators

Students try to crash an administration meeting about changes to buildings and programs—but can't find it.

Here, they wait patiently in Franklin Patterson Hall in the early afternoon.




Eventually,they went to the main administration building and secured a promise of a public meeting at 4:00 p.m. Video coverage of that in a subsequent post.

Communist anti-capitalism

from a student paper:

"The Soviets . . . tried to build authoritarian rule based on the principle that they were protecting these post war countries from the imminent threat of capitalism. Their purge trials would weed out the traders and execute them."

Well, that's one way to solve an economic problem, I guess.

Day 2: Hampshire College STOP THE PLAN, MAN!

Day 2 of the protest:




The (presumed) final action will take place at noon today.

Hampshire College STOP THE PLAN, MAN! protest

Here is day 1 of the protest:

Radical Student Movement

from an announcement of a massive student-faculty protest against proposed changes to the use and configuration of a campus building.

Naturally, there is the typical organizing work to do: draft petitions, draw up demands, form committees—in that order. Hmmm. It would seem a lot more sensible to figure out what your demands are before you draft the petitions (hasn't always happened that way around here, believe it or not), but that may just be my atavistic logocentric, linear thinking at work. Or maybe those items were listed in random rather than chronological order.

Anyway: After that, there's . . . dancing:

"~organizing a samba parade, starting on the library lawn and ending at ASH at 4
pm on Tuesday, to raise awareness, share information, and distribute petitions"

Grow Up!

"the problem is, we have to get the students to show faculty how to behave like adults"

colleagues, in the course of an informal conversation on how to increase civility and intellectual openness on campus

Hard to Swallow

student complaining that French post-structuralist theory is dense and unpalatable:

"it's like mayonnaise on mayonnaise"