Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Sina]

Can you just read and tell me the contents of the text? Thank you.

In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport, Ted settled down to his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of Comus.
�I don�t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,� he protested. �Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and read �em� These teachers�how do they get that way?�
Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, �Yes, I wonder why. Of course I don�t want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do think there�s things in Shakespeare�not that I read him much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren�t, really, they weren�t at all nice.�
Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father�s vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn�t really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion. But even at risk of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open controversy.

[asterix]

I think this is an excerpt from one of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt stories written about 1922 or so.
It means, in uncomplicated English, that Ted was sitting in the corner of the sofa to do his homework, which consisted of Geometry, Cicero (Latin) and Comus (more Latin).

He is complaining about having to study old fashioned stuff by Milton (a famous English poet circa 1650) Shakespeare (you've heard of him), Wordsworth (another famous English poet)[/i]
He says he could probably stand to see a Shakespeare play on stage, if it had nice scenery and was really well done, but to sit and read it is not fun. Then he asks, what's wrong with teachers? How do they think we will enjoy it?

Mrs. Babbitt who is darning (repairing) socks agrees. She says she doesn't want to disagree with the professors and everybody, but there are things in Shakespeare that are not very nice.

Mr. Babbitt only reads comic strips in the newspapers with difficulty and does not like to be interrupted while he is doing so. He does not know anything about Shakespeare and has no original thoughts but was not going to let that stop him from joining in the argument.

[advoca]

Beautiful, Asterix. I enjoyed your lovely explanation. Congratulations. Brilliant.

Sincerely,

Advoca.