[SaltergateBorn]

There you go, Snoots. I`d never heard of a vale guitar either, so you`ve taught me something as well. We live and learn - and never stop (learning, that is).

[Lord Snooty]

I'd never heard of it before but googled it and thought that must be it.

[Devongone]

I thought I had heard of a Vale guitar so I thought I was getting that one. I would never have made the jump from guitar to Lute if you'd isolated me for months.

We now know Snoots has never read Tolkien or seen the films if he has never heard of a wraith.

It's taken me half an hour since knowing the answer to get Burton Albion.

I came up with my answers having glanced through what other people had done and I think I remembered some of Dancing's because I'm not sure how I ever got a couple of them right. I'm shit at crosswords. It's about how your mind works though isn't it? I didn't even have to think about Raith Rovers.

Trouble is it is infectious. Don't you keep thinking of new ones of your own?

1. Aspires to space (German Football Team)
2. Well conditioned greeting (UK football team)
3. Stupid answer separates day-star from earth. (UK football team)
4. Academic mixture of economists (UK Football team)
5. Maureen's bovine bike lamp (World football team)
6. Peripatetic beachcombers (UK football team)
7. Lactating meadows (UK football team)
8. Ruined church (UK football team)
9. Sounds gay; describes Brighton (UK football team)
10. Went through part way to bad breath. (UK football team)

Thank God it's lunchtime, Stop me. This is your fault Salts. I never used to think of this stuff. I'll be glad when I get back to the pornography.

[Lord Snooty]

Never read Tolkien. Not into that stuff. Not read a book for years actually. Was put off reading at school. All that English Literature stuff. Hated it. When I read a book I want entertaining, not having to look for hidden meanings and have to interpret the meaning of the time it was written.
I failed that exam.

[Devongone]

Somebody should just have told you to enjoy it and let your imagination take hold. There's loads of clever people like you who never read a book Snoots. It doesn't matter of course! BUT you are right, interpreting literature is treated as if it is some sort of alchemy with strange rules that need to be followed to the letter. The truth is we are all interpreting the world around us all the time, fantasy and fiction are just a step away from what we understand as reality. You're doing it all the time with football so you could and would do it with a book. Loads of people can't stand Tolkien, but there would have been something truth or fiction that would have grabbed you if our idiot education system hadn't killed it for you.

People used to say I should have been a teacher and the subject would have been literature, but all my students would either have got straight As in the exams for being original or would have failed completely. It's sad when we present something so poorly that failing the exam' does become a badge of honour.

[Lord Snooty]

Wouldn't say I was wearing that as a badge of honour. I went to a boys grammar school in the 70s. Failed at a lot of stuff.
Looking back though with hindsight, it was they who failed to hedjucate me properly.

---

I think by the time they'd finished with me, and again with hindsight, I was a bit retarded.

[Devongone]

I started Grammar School in 1963. Lots of the stuff was great and I had a lovely time finding my way round rules, but there was always an assumption that if you weren't doing well in something it was your own fault. I was in hospital for the second week of Grammar School, when I came back suddenly Algebra and Geometry had appeared. Nobody explained what fkuc was going on. I was 11, in a class with 32 other boys who I didn't even really know. Was I supposed to stick up my hand and say, "Excuse me sir, did the Mekon design this lesson, or what?" That was the end of me as a Mathematician, I just tried to get as many as I could in Arithmetic, where they still had nice, reliable numbers!

I doubt our English lessons would have engendered a love of literature in those who hadn't already found one. My dad read six or seven books a week, so I was already won over, but I remember others who were bright lads who were sort of looked down upon because they weren't naturals ……… But there are books on everything, about everything and then they were the basis of almost everything! Literature makes books into a dirty word. (Gospel according to Dev.)

[Dancingwilldoit]

Love books and reading, hated English Literature. Problem was it was stuffy and boring.
"Animal Farm" and "If" were the in books. When they turned If into a film it was even worse with Whatsisname McDowell practicing for Clockwork Orange. Its no wonder most of my generation turned to drugs.

Just remembered it was Malcolm.

[SaltergateBorn]

I`m another one who loves reading and am never happier than when I`ve got my head in a `good` book. In fact, I was a very naughty boy today; I snuck off down to the library to get well stocked up for the next few weeks / months / years. (That doesn`t really count as `panic buying`, does it?) I`m sure the disguise – blonde wig, skirt, fish-net stockings – will have worked, though, and I`m not expecting a knock on the door from somebody in a blue uniform anytime soon. Unless one of you dobs me in, of course.

I agree with everything you`ve all said, though, about studying literature at school and it`s really sad that so many people that I`ve met over the years have been turned off books completely by the same experience that Snoots and Dancing had. I took English Literature at A Level pretty much because it was the only subject that was feasible and that the syllabus allowed to be fitted in with the ones I really wanted to do; French and Spanish. I have to say that I hated it and really struggled with it; and that is somebody who has always loved books. Why the hell could they not devise a syllabus that made Geography or Economics – which is what I really wanted to do – compatible with Modern Languages? They seem a pretty obvious match to me.

I suppose the question really boils down to one of how do you `teach` literature? Sure, you can probably teach `creative writing` but is that really the same thing? You can probably answer that better than any of us, Dev. The way I remember it is that we had to dissect and analyse virtually every sentence of whatever masterpiece we were studying and then spend twice as much time again reading all the various critiques that had been written by individuals who were all very learned and distinguished, I`m sure, but whose opinions at the end of the day were no more valid than ours were. What a waste of bloody time.

That applied to Shakespeare in particular. My wife and I both love the theatre – we try to get down to Stratford 2 or 3 times a year if we can – but we virtually hacked to death the plays we studied at school. Apart from which, why did they put dark, brooding, lugubrious plays like Macbeth and Hamlet on the syllabus? If we`d done things like Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night`s Dream, A Comedy of Errors – all just as `worthwhile` (whatever that means) it could well have turned us on to the stuff rather than turning us right off.

My advice, Snoots, would be to try to get a few pages into a few books by different writers and see if any of them `grab` you; you`ll know within a few pages if he or she does. Somebody will. A `good` writer to me is one who grabs you by the scruff of the neck – or some other part of your anatomy - and draws you into their world and then you can`t get out of it again until you`ve finished the book. Pure escapism – and it`s great. Tolkien can certainly do it, as Dev says, although my recommendation personally would be Stephen King. Even if the settings are fantastical, they both create flesh-and-blood characters that you care about and you want to know what happens to them after the book is finished. That`s why SK writes so many sequels; because people write to him and ask him what became of so-and-so after the story ended. So he writes a sequel to tell them. And the stories themselves are ones you can`t escape from once you`re in there. SK`s are often more gruesome, macabre, horrific than JRRT`s but they both hook you in good and proper.

And there endeth the gospel according to Salts.

[Devongone]

I got an A in A-level English, but I had to do French A-level because it fitted with English and History.

French Literature was great but I was a very modest Language student, to the extent the BO'K, who you will know Salts, wrote "A direct route to instant failure. E- " on one of my efforts. I did pass but an A was a distant dream, very distant. But I loved old BO'K's comment. I like him better now he's dead.

Embarking on A-level we were told John Keats was our modern poet. Snoots would have legged it at that point.

Doing A-level there were two very separate elements. One was learning to jump through fairly pointless hoops. The other was obtaining any joy. The best part was EM Forster's Howards End. I've loved it ever since and Vanessa Redgrave was as good as Antony Hopkins was ordinary in the film.

Shakespeare, now why can't teachers present interesting, controversial and readable crits? Why can't they show exciting re-workings? Why aren't their students up on their feet, declaiming and even laughing at their own mistakes, instead of being left to feel disabled by and ashamed of their own efforts?

Oxfam bookshops divide their stock between literature and fiction. Stephen King is fiction, so are David Mitchell and Kurt Vonnegut: Trollope, Hardy and Henry James are literature. FCku that! Stephen King is literature as much as anyone else. Literature is elitism polluting and claiming a joy that should be available to every man.

When I was 5 or 6 I was reading the Racing pages in the paper because my dad loved horse racing. A man he worked with saw me and asked my dad if it didn't worry him. It was the only time I remember dad bragging about me. He said, "My lad can read every word, he can tell you about all the horses, he reads the tipster's column. Do you know any lads his age could do that? He's reading and enjoying it, I don't care what it is!" He'd have been a wonderful teacher my dad, he seemed to know everything but he'd left school at 13! And now I can't tip a winner to save my life!

I just finished, for the second time, a novel by an American writer called Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star. It is wonderfully poetic. It is difficult, but if I wanted to set the creative juices running of a class of mostly black students, I'd teach them that.