Friday, March 04, 2005

In my poetry writing workshop yesterday, we were looking at a selection from Philosophical Investigations, my bright stoner-type student punctuating the discussion with wows and oh-man's, when another student said, "I'm so tired of Wittgenstein. He's not that interesting or new. It's obvious. So what, language fails. It doesn't do what we want it to, or what we think it does. Why can't we read Barthes or Benjamin? I mean, people have been pushing this stuff on me since high school. Why does everybody think he's so great?"

She may be wrong, in my opinion, but the best kind of wrong, the right kind of wrong. Is this what teaching's like in the Republic of Slovenia?

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