Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, V1-6.

If I ask, RonPrice, you'll probably say I should read it. What would I get out of it if I did?

That's a serious question. I only get so much reading time.

roger,

I spent 30 years as a teacher discussing what people should and should not read, what they might or might not get out of a particular book and, as I hit the age of 60, I'm inclined to suggest "try whatever on for size" and if it fits go for it. If it is just beyond you(for whatever reason) just leave it, that includes all the great works of fiction and non-fiction.

There is enough print out there to sink a proverbial ship. Just take on what meets your current interests and tastes. I could write more. But this is enough. This is what I do. The advice, too, on this subject is burgeoning.-Ron

"In Falluja, Americans have established themselves as the barbarians of the 21st century."

M. A. Hegazi

Some Reflections on the Barbarians
AMBIVALENCE

I find reading poetry in public an ambivalent act. Being the entertainer, mixing laughs and knowledge, I have enjoyed for years. It's like classroom teaching, although the pleasure of the interaction is losing its dynamism after ten thousand appearances. There's a certain range of human types you must deal with when working with an audience, in the classroom or a public place for reading poetry, if your emotions are to remain intact. There are the loud types who laugh immoderately in the wrong places, or talk to themselves or others in the middle of your oration; there are the people who buttonhole you with questions about every conceivable topic under the sun, with some thoroughly unappetising anecdotes along the way in which a certain fained interest is essential.

I enjoy reading poetry in public, although I don't go out of my way now after all these years. But I do not enjoy going to poetry readings given by others. I get bored and listening, I find, is hard work. Occasionally, I go out of a sense of duty and solidarity. I prefer to read in private or get a poetry reading on video or cassette. With the great burgeoning in all fields, with the explosion in population, with the new channels of accessibility to poetry on the internet, there are more people today reading and writing poetry than ever before. We have before us, as in all fields, the greatest audience in history. -Ron Price with thanks to John Metcalf, Kicking Against the Pricks, ECW Press, Downsview, Ontario, 1982.



Most poetry is incomprehensibly
below the threshold of meaning,
or trivial, so muddy the words
I cannot quite connect with......
Perhaps the very act of writing
a poem is so artificial and irrelevant
now that it's beyond resuscitation
in this world of commercial fashion,
technology and change. It can't
compete with the on-off button
on the TV and stereo, McDonald's,
with a generation of busy eyes and minds
that cannot follow ideas without pictures.

Some other muse tells me, John,
it is not as bleak as this: this is
the age of the great awakening,
burgeoning. It has really only just begun.
This renaissance may last for decades,
ages yet to come. But you must take
your eyes off the mass of yahoos,
barbarians; the mass is filled with coteries,
dozens of coteries with rich and fertile life. 30/8/ 97.
_______________________________________________
Civilisation's Seed


If the decline of classical culture was identical with the victory of Christianity, what will the decline of those powerful strongholds of orthodoxy who still keep a claim on the thoughts and consciences of humankind be identical with in our age? -Ron Price with thanks to Ludwig Feuerbach in Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay, Patrick Brantlinger, Cornell UP, Ithaca, 1983, p. 91.


The fall of civilization is the most striking
and the most obscure of the events of history.
Perhaps this is due to the intertwining of the
new, the root, the seed, the growing, twigs,
branches, trunk, fruit with the old, the decaying,
the dead generations weighing like a nightmare
on the brain of the living as violence becomes
more and more evident as more and more people
fill the space of this planet. Who, then, are the
barbarians? Who, then, are the Christians of this
latter age who will put away the bread and circuses
and raise us on a new faith, a new morality and give
us the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal
judgement of the world: how will this appear on video?

Ron Price
2 February 1997 :wink: