http://www.Surrealism-artlinks.com

my surrealism directory:

Sorry about that link not going anywhere … it’s taking almost as long as reading one of Broch’s sentences. When I copied the shortcut into a new browser window, it worked… It doesn’t seem to be launching from the comments link, though … odd.

As for UBC … I did my undergarduate degree there. Started in French and Slavonic Studies and then switched to Theatre. But this, it seems, all took place a million years ago.

When we moved down here to California, I went to Berkeley … and once there, I made much the same comment as you just made about UBC. Graduate school at SFU was so much more rewarding for me intellectually than was the experience of the Berkeley of 1985 or so … and not long into my City and Regional Planning studies there, I dropped out!

And I hear you about Harvard! Two members of my extended family went to Harvard … and they do impress me with their ability to drop names — that of other Harvard graduates!

PS: Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil sounds fascinating — thanks for the link! It didn’t open from the comment, so I’ll paste it here again, see if works:
http://www.poetry-reviews.com/The_Death_of_Virgil_0679755489.html

Simon Fraser is a great university! (The brutalist architecture alone is worth a campus visit!) You’re really lucky to have studied there; I consider myself lucky to have gone to UBC — the other slightly bigger gorilla on the Vancouver scene…;-) Once, while researching a seminar paper on Beat artist Wallace Berman, I used the Michael McClure archives at Simon Fraser. They have fantastic holdings from that period, and it’s a way-cool university.

Can I just add that I learned more at UBC than I did at Harvard? That I owe to UBC whatever shred of intellectual discipline and integrity I have? That at Harvard I learned more about social politics (who’s who, what’s what etc.), but nothing very much of substance, while at UBC it was nitty-gritty of the significant kind all the way? That every seminar paper I wrote at UBC topped whatever seminar papers I wrote at Harvard, excepting perhaps the cubism paper on Picasso & Carl Einstein?
Canadian universities are great, eh, and we don’t have grade inflation either! [end of rant]

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect your children to deconstruct Disney films. Isn’t that what they were made for? (We recently watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and yelled about the differences between sexism and paternalism afterwards, and to which degree the one or the other applied here…)

As for kids turning some kind of corner at about age 14: I’ve heard that from other people, too. Without holding my breath, I’m open to any possibilities…

And yes, blogging has led to a new kind of ADD on my part, too. So much to read, so much to read!