Louis said:
I think some of us are being too harsh. We aren't
very understanding of our very young students.
We're not walking in their shoes or remembering how
we were like at those ages.
At my students' ages I had my own apartment in the East Village, was
about to be married. For fun I read T. S. Eliot, Marx & Engels, Hermann
Hesse, Karen Horney/Erich Fromm, Raymond Chandler & Hammett, Robert Musil,
Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann (on occasion only), Herman Melville, Norman Mailer,
Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Kerouac, and Marvel Comics
(especially the Silver Surfer). I knew the works of Bach, Debussy, Charlie
Parker, and Charles Mingus. I watched the films of Truffaut & Goddard,
Fellini, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Demy, Renoir and others. I went to museums.
I played music.
I also used drugs, got drunk, dropped out of college because it was
"irrelevant," had sex as often as I possibly could, and went with my wife to
live in a commune. I misbehaved. I danced naked in Central Park. I
opposed everything around me that I perceived as ugly. By age 21, I was a
father, was working various radical groups to try to change the world.
I was not alone in *any* of this, including dancing naked in Central Park.
Louis, I do remember how I was like at their age.
Paul Okami
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