02 November 2007

Enough for Cocktail Parties


Another quilt (called A Rose By Any Other Name) with no relation to this post.
My English teacher in my senior year of high school made us all learn to recite the first 3 lines of Beowulf in old English. He insisted that one need learn no more than that to get by at cocktail parties. This gave me a rather strange notion of what adults were up to at these functions. But he wasn't done-- my teacher allowed us the additional wickedness of "making it up after that because nobody would know."
It was, in a sense, license to dabble, to get the first steps right and then improvise, to join the club legitimately and then break its rules.
I can still quote those lines and it gave me a sort of relationship to that text that has me reading it again now.
And come to think of it, there probably is a relationship between that quilt and this post...

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