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Jennifer Howard

Writer, editor, journalist.

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Milton Out Loud

November 18, 2008

Scenes from a marathon: My story about St. Olaf College’s all-day reading of Paradise Lost is now up:

In between his reading stints, Chad Goodroad, a senior majoring in English and political science, hawked black “Milton Marathon” T-shirts at a card table. Someone asked him how sales were. “Crazy,” he said. “Actually, kinda slow.” A student in one of the shirts knitted her way through Book III. A professor’s toddlers played nearby on a harvest display of pumpkins and sheaves.

…Participants fortified themselves with coffee and Subway sandwiches. Another English professor contributed a devil’s-food cake and a pair of devil’s horns. Somebody drew a picture of the archangel Michael on the chalkboard.

“It’s cool,” Mr. Goodroad observed midafternoon, when the group had made it to Book VI. “It’s kind of like a purging.”

Miraculously, nobody’s energy flagged. It wasn’t just the coffee and sandwiches; read out loud, Milton’s blank verse can be propulsive, and the readers had caught the rhythm.

Filed Under: The Classics

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Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more ยป

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