Reminiscences on Education

Blue Dragon Pond

Chung-Ang University

The individual who contacted me yesterday and talked about my poem "Crater Lake Blues" wrote again, this time after reading a presentation I'd given at Chung-Ang University's Storytelling Conference in December 2014:

I have just read "The Mis-Education of Horace Hodges" . . . and really enjoyed it, and I think you are spot-on about 'what a story is' in your conclusion; I particularly liked your point about laughter. And I agree, stories are built on expectations and the subsequent subversion of those expectations - even if those subversions become expectations themselves after time. (And if given enough time, does it reverse again, forming some great circle?) The points you make about Bob Dylan are interesting, too, after the chaos of the Nobel Prize last year. I never doubted that Dylan was a storyteller, but plenty of my other peers did and do, so it's a little cathartic to see you neatly point out the 'why' and the 'how' in your essay.

I was glad to receive such words of praise, even if the paraphrase of my words makes me sound more 'radical' than I am. Words of praise always make me feel better, even when I've succumbed to the flu. I could use some cathartic laughter round about now in my own laughing place . . .