"Eddings, David - Regina's Song V2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)and I didn't really feel like chewing old soup for my
paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that he'd take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult. Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville was writing Billy Budd, he kept borrowing Milton's Paradise Regained from the New York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels. Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. "I wouldn't hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin," he advised, "but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it." "Am I going for an MA, boss?" I asked him. "You bet your hippie you are," he told me bluntly. "Bippie?" "Isn't it time for you to get back to Everett and make more doors?" he asked irritably. I considered the notion of graduate school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less inevitable-an English major without an advanced degree was still only about two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job at a community college-a distinct advantage, since the idea of teaching high school didn't wind my watch very tight. ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in school. I guess she'd been listening to the ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn't understand certain ugly truths. Her father was a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff in Everett. I don't want to sound Marxist here, but old Karl was right about one thing. There are real differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn't have to take his education too seriously, because there are all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class kid usually only has one shot at education, and he doesn't dare let anything get in his way, and that includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first child almost always means that he'll spend the rest of his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly, sometimes. This is very painful for me, so I'll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those "kegger parties" on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett. I'm not sure who bought the kegs of beer for them, but that's not really important. The kids built the customary bonfire on the beach and proceeded to get red-eyed and rowdy. There were probably forty or fifty of them, and they were celebrating their upcoming graduation for |
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