I am not nearly smart enough for this thread. I used to think I was a smarty-pants, but not after meeting the Buffistas.

Pish and tush, m'dear. You're good enough, you're smart enough, and what with the writing classes and the essays you got to read on the radio, you already have an apartment in the City.

Wow. Literature as Sang Sacré - there's a metaphor I can get behind.

Heather [if you were talking to me], I'll try to find time to do that this weekend. One caveat: the book's subtitle is "why middle-class mothers and fahers are going broke" and it's clearly aimed only at people with children. The authors argue that kids=financial instability, at least as things are set up in the US these days.

I maintain that play is misclassified among Shakespeare's work, and should be counted among the comedies, though it's the blackest of black comedies. It was the Reservoir Dogs of its time.

Aaaand, now I'm adding Sean to my internet boyfriend list. Also thinking about rereading Hamlet for the upmtieth time and watching Resevoir Dogs to flirt with him- and to test the theory.

I am not nearly smart enough for this thread. I used to think I was a smarty-pants, but not after meeting the Buffistas.

I am one with this feeling, also. Confession time: I'm shockingly poorly read, in terms of The Classics. Every single one of my teachers & professors were big on trying to get people to read (yay them), so they gave the students a lot of wiggle room in what we were reading. Which is good and all, but none of them really pushed me to go read anything outside of my fantasy/horror 'hood.

So, oh People Better-Read Than Me, what do you recommend? I've read Wuthering Heights (and wanted to beat Cathy & Heathcliff with a stick), most of the Shakespeare plays (yay!), and Great Expectations (kinda yay, in some parts). I can't think of any other Classics with a capital C that I've read.

Help?

That's cool Dani. I have no kids, and really don't plan on having them. It's just that when I think of us or my married friends having them, I have no idea how they'd manage the costs. I mean doctor's visits alone!

Sean, I will add to your list with this (which should NEVER be split in half. Yes, Mr. Gibson, I'm looking at you):

Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing--no, nor for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i' the throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha!

'Swounds, I should take it. For it cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
Oh, vengeance!

knowledge of a particular book or author doesn't = smartness. Neither does the desire to discuss them in a deep way.

I am not well-read (in the menaing of that term that the most number of people will agree upon, please let's not debate it), but I read a fair amount and I have read a fair amount.

Still in any one week I may not have read one author much less one book discussed or mentioned in this thread, not to mention the science fiction stuff that was discussed in Minearverse the other week.

still smart.

Aaaand, now I'm adding Sean to my internet boyfriend list. Also thinking about rereading Hamlet for the upmtieth time and watching Resevoir Dogs to flirt with him- and to test the theory.

WOOHOO!

Hamlet? I maintain that play is misclassified among Shakespeare's work, and should be counted among the comedies, though it's the blackest of black comedies. It was the Reservoir Dogs of its time.

No shit! I mean, really -- there's a fistfight IN AN OPEN GRAVE! Supah-dupah black comedy.

I am not nearly smart enough for this thread. I used to think I was a smarty-pants, but not after meeting the Buffistas.

Pish and tush, m'dear. You're good enough, you're smart enough, and what with the writing classes and the essays you got to read on the radio, you already have an apartment in the City.

I wasn't looking for reassurance. It's just that, out of the authors you listed in the City, I believe I've read 6 or 7, if I can count Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown.

I feel like I've been a poseur all this time, when I meet people who have read -- and rave about -- authors I've never ever heard of.

I used to think I was a smarty-pants, but not after meeting the Buffistas.

The Internet does this to me in a big way. I'm a better writer than most people, okay? Writing and standardized tests are the only two things I ever felt remotely capable at in school. I earn my living reading and writing, and have never found the writing part difficult.

But if I'm in the top tenth percentile of writers and in terms of intelligence in real life, I'm in the bottom quarter among my internet friends here and on LiveJournal. Which isn't really a knock on myself, and I'm not trying to solicity pity or anything -- y'all are Just That Smart.