Posted on 04/21/2011 2:43:04 PM PDT by Borges
Again, I didn’t say it was literature. So stop erecting a strawman.
Yes, Henry Jame was dull.
But not Henry James.
Steinbeck, for example. He sucks. His writing style is ok, but I don’t care for his material.
Thoreau (and the rest of the Transcendentalists, for that matter) - totally irrelevant, to me.
Clancy and Clive Cussler - brilliant writers, to me.
It’s not like Steinbeck is top tier to begin with. Walden is beautifully written and very funny. Thoreau’s fans don’t really have the sense of humor that he had. He did not glorify nature the way people think he did.
When asked to describe which books I have read; my response is;
“Why read when I can write”.
I dropped off somewhere on the way down the article, around "My first exposure to Henry James was the short story 'The Real Thing' ..." which made me think Roger was quite full of himself.
After that it's just too much information about someone I try to remain blissfully unaware of:
Having read Great Expectations under some duress in high school, I went through seven years of college without ever encountering Dickens again. It was in about 1980 that I signed up for the Folio edition of Dickens, picked up Nicholas Nickleby, and was hooked. No one is more compulsively readable. But I had to come to that myself. Oddly, I started sooner on Trollope. "He is such a consolation," Curley told me one day in a London pub. "During the London Blitz, Trollope enjoyed an enormous popularity." Where should I start? I asked. "Oh, with the Barsetshire novels, I should say."
Blah, blah, blah, to the point of self-parody. I'd say "Die already, you pretentious name-dropper!" but given Roger's health problems that could be considered cruel.
Sure, if people still do read, their interest in writers drops off drastically when the writers die and aren't producing any longer. A few writers are picked up again and added to the canon, but no one is as dead as most recently dead writers.
Ebert's wrong though. Critics like Trilling, Wilson, and even Fiedler and Kazin are still read -- if only because people who are expected to know about dead poets and novelists can avoid reading them by looking up what dead critics have said about them. If you have to appear well read, you can get away without reading Mailer or Farrell or Elkin or whoever, if you can dig up what reviewers wrote about them in their own time.
If there is an afterlife it must be very painful to the shade of Alfred Kazin to go from being so talked about to being so obscure, but I'm not aware that Trilling has been forgotten yet. Even Edmund Wilson gets reviewed when new biographies and collections of his work come out. The periodicals he wrote for The New Yorker and The New Republic have an interest in keeping Wilson's name from falling into complete oblivion: they keep him (ever so slightly) alive, because he makes them look good.
I haven’t read any of Ebert’s ‘authors’. I consider myself fortunate.
Never read Shakespeare, Dickents or Twain eh?
Of course most of them are in that group of writers only read by the literati. The problem isn’t that Joyce was a drinker, the problem is that he wrote drunk and wrote like drunks talk, rambling, incomprehensible and pointless. Oh yeah “The Dead” from Dubliners, featuring “An Encounter” a story about kids running into a pervert who jerks off in front of them, indeed high literature everyone should read that. Yeah, that was sarcasm.
I’ve enjoyed Paradise Lost Immensely.
Um, those are fairly popular writers who can be found in abundant stock at just about any chain book store. Foster Wallace is huge with hipsters as well as Literati. ‘The Dead’ might be the best short story ever written in English. There’s nothing rambling or incomprehensible about it. And even Ulysses does indeed have a point. You just have to know what he was after.
Once upon a time, “well-read” meant Plato and Cicero.
Now, most of what people refer to as “great” literature seems to come out of the 19th and 20th centuries, which is when the world began to lose it’s damn mind philosophically.
For me, well-read means John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Frederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams.
(I also love C.S. Lewis).
Heh, I haven’t read her at all. They’ll be a Cervantes, but it’s not her.
You should add Evelyn Waugh, Walter M. Miller, G.K. Chesterton, and Tolkein to your list.
The rise of English Lit. as a field of study coincides with patriotic gestures during the two World Wars when Classical Studies - being so associated with stuffy German Philology Professors - became unfashionable.
There are plenty of flaws in the series, including plot holes big enough to hold a train, however, Rowling is phenomenally gifted in the area of character creation. The characters in Harry Potter, even the minor ones, are remarkably well rounded and deep. They have histories, motivations, fears and desires that are consistent and create a compelling world. In the novels, you believe the characters are alive. In comparison, Tom Clancy characters tend to be very flat and wooden. The plots are well thought out, but the characters themselves seem to simply be vehicles for carrying a plot, not living beings.
In this respect, Rowling went back to the older tradition of long novels in which large passages were written just for the sake of character development. Modern novels tend to get away from that, as most readers tend to be more action oriented and expect many successions of quick scenes.
Course, I have odd tastes. Philip Dick is one of my favorite authors, and much of his writing came out of his paranoid schizophrenia.
thanks, will do. I am familiar with Tolkien, but not the others you mention.
If PKD was any sort of stylist he would be hugely regarded. He had all these great ideas but one of the crudest prose styles imaginable. And he was terrible at naming characters (Rick Deckard, Roy Batty)!
Just because you can find it in the bookstore doesn’t mean anybody’s actually buying it. Modern hipsters, much like their 40s counterparts, are dinks, if I’m going to pay attention to their taste at all it will be as negative examples; and suicides are morons. “The Dead” might be good I don’t remember anything about it, most of the rest of Dubliners is crap, and Ulyses has no point at all. I don’t care what Joyce was after, much like I don’t care what the guy slurring at the bar is after. I have a very simple rule when reading, if I think “what the $%^& is this idiot blathering on about” once a page it’s a bad book. When I was suffering through Joyce in school I would think that about once a paragraph, bad writer.
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