Purging the Classics From the Local Library

American Spectator ^ | 04 Jan 07 | G. Tracy Mehan, III

[rellimpank]

My mother never had the opportunity to attend college. Yet, on her nightstand, next to her bed, could always be found books by the likes of a Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, or Robert Louis Stevenson. The product of parochial schools and an America that still treasured high-quality literature, my mother breathed the healthy air of culture not yet polluted by the corrosive effects of the radicalism of the 1960s, rampant egalitarianism, consumerism, or postmodernism.

My mother's literary tastes, an inheritance, really, of the society into which she was born and raised, came to mind as I read of the purging of the literary classics by the public libraries in one of America's wealthiest counties, Fairfax, Virginia.

Evidently, the librarians in Fairfax County have adopted some hard-nosed marketing practices to give the customers want they want -- or at least get rid of the titles they don't want.

[rellimpank]

--while I can't speak to any other urban center, the Clark County, NV (Las Vegas) library system has become a huge distributor of video disc material---

[BenLurkin]

The Works of Aristotle, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Virgil's The Aeneid.

[kenavi]

I think it has something to do with the breaking down of the public space.

Remember the Judge who ruled that a library could not evict a homeless man who stunk?

There have to be more efficient and warmer ways to invite the public to knowledge, such as lending libraries through churches or fraternal organizations. Our classical heritage is more important to us than ever.

[Pondman88]

In this day and age, with bookstores everywhere, the internet, massive information resources available over cable TV, libraries are quaint relics. Dinosaurs of a bygone era.

[redpoll]

If you think this is bad, come inside your local high school and see what's on the required reading list for your son or daughter.

One of the jobs of the school is to educate young people about the foundations of their culture. This is my opinion; unfortunately, many of my colleagues believe it is their job to change culture for the better.

I do teach the classics whenever I get the chance. This makes me a little odd, but I make it clear to students that they need to understand the traditions of American and Western culture in order to be better citizens. My units on The Iliad, the Odyssey, and Beowulf are some of the most popular at the school (yes, they're modern translations - YOU try making a classroom of 15-year-olds read 300 pages of iambic pentameter). I do the same thing in World History - we spend gobs of time on ancient Greece and the Roman Republic because they are critically important. No offense to the Hittites and the Moguls, but for my students, judgments need to be made about what is important and what isn't.

Don't even ask me to waste my time with Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, either. Tripe.

Actually, we're on the cutting edge here. We can see the impact of cultural cluelessness with the barbarians in Tehran and the caves of Tora Bora lined up to destroy us. At some point the majority of Americans are going to understand the critical need for knowing about our heritage, and we'll be here.

[RightWhale]

Amazon sells the classics. I expect to find them on Amazon at a good price, and to find them ranked 2,000,000th. Does this indicate that the classics are no longer widely read? One guess.

[rellimpank]

--even though I am a havy user of any nearby library, I have to agree that my reading shouldn't be subsidised by the taxpayers,but I'm sure not going to pay thirty dollars for a book I can read in a couple of hours---

[livius]

Glad you're doing this! I can't believe the garbage they read for "literature" in public schools now. And their idea of world history is so bizarre it defies logic (I remember hearing a CA highschooler assert that all Western knowledge came from the Mayans - and it did indeed say that in one of his PC text books).

[CholeraJoe]

come inside your local high school and see what's on the required reading list for your son or daughter.

Probably includes those evil Harry Potter books replete with murder, torture, kidnapping, slavery, theft, grave robbing, child abuse, animal cruelty, voyeurism, underage drinking, drug use, and inter-racial romance.

[detsaoT]

Look at it this way: The esteemed librarians of the Fairfax County Public Libraries are offering you the once in a lifetime chance to own a truly classic novel, privately, at a very low cost. Now's the time to stock up on your own personal, private library.

(I don't think anyone will be missing Mz. Angelou's works, though. Or Mr. Lincoln's, here in Virgina! -- okay, so that last one's a joke. And a bad one at that!)

Seriously, this isn't a disaster. The books aren't going away, and taking them out of "the public's" hands doesn't mean "the public" will no longer be reading them.

[ClearCase_guy]

Clifton Fadiman had a book "The Lifetime Reading Plan" which listed (I believe) 100 books with which well-read people ought to be familar. His guide went through multiple editions, and the books in the list would change (a little) because the world is not static.

But overall, there used to be a sense that "David Copperfield" and "Wuthering Heights" were sensible books for mature people who considered themselves educated.

Now, those books are forgotten, and whatever Oprah Winfrey tells me to read is good enough for me. Today, literature is ephemeral and the notion of a time-tested classic is quaint.

This is not good. And schools and libraries are to blame.

[CatoRenasci]

I quit supporting our local library when they built a large addition and almost all the space was for things other than books - there are fewer actual books than were packed into the library 20 years ago with half the space.

The potential inability to find particular classic works - especially in reasonably good scholarly editions - and serious works of history, mathematics and literature is the reason I have never been willing to trust to the availability of library books when needed, and part of the reason I maintain a personal library of some 3,000-3,500 volumes, many of which are not readily available outside of university or other scholarly libraries.

[twigs]

I'm now middle aged, but just finished an English major at a rather conservative little college that has a surprisingly good English department. But the classics, while included in some required courses, were not mandatory. After I completed my courses, I realized that I wasn't really educated in Western Literature until I had read the major western works, which I continue to do today. It's astounding to me that any education system can even pretend to do its job and not include these foundational works.

Congratulations to you for continuing to teach them and in a way that kids today enjoy.

BTW, I have to admit that I think Toni Morison is a wonderful writer. I think that I'm mostly envious because I can't write like that. But I would never teach her works because of the content. She is a waste of a very good talent IMHO.

[Little Ray]

Sorry, it makes sense to me. If the books are not being read, they might as well not be there.
You can always order 'em out of the stacks.

[RightWhale]

I browsed the library and the bookstore until one fine day I stumbled across the right book for me. From that book I made up a preliminary reading list and read all that and am working on the primary sources referenced in those books. Eventually we all seem to end up having to read Plato and Homer, but the rest between then and now can vary depending on our own thread. Point: everybody has to make up his own reading list, but there are guides by Bacon, de Montaigne, Goethe, etc., that can as a minimum show the basic idea.

[linda_22003]

"This is not good. And schools and libraries are to blame."

I agree, but add one more to the blame list. How many parents keep good home libraries, set the example of reading, read aloud to their kids? How many nights does the television stay off for story night?

[TruthConquers]

"Hay, Hay, Ho, Ho
Western culture has to go"
Jesse Jackson, Stanford University,1990's -80's?

This just the continuing saga of destroying our culture,
and has been going on in public schools and universities for many decades.

I believe even Bork's book "Slouching towards Gomorrah" discussed this trend.

[RadioAstronomer]

I have "The Great Books of the Western World".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

Love grabbing one at random and reading it. Many hours spent with those.

(Ping)

[longtermmemmory]

all the out of copyright classics are downloadable from the internet.

Part of the problem is many larger libraries actually LEASE the books! They don't actually have/own the collection so it does become a space/money/use equation.

[CatoRenasci]

It's difficult to read everything one would like to. And, of course, one man's (woman's) classic is another's dreck -- for example, despite several attempts and even enjoying some minor works, I simply cannot stand Dickens or the Bronte sisters. On the other hand, I've spent much profitable time with German classics (Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, Mann, etc.) that most English-speaking readers avoid like the plague. Who's to say which are more "classic"? Trying to put together a canon for literature seems very difficult to me much past the 18th century - it's easy enough to agree on the importance of Homer, the Greek tragedians, Vergil, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Beowulf, Chaucer, Mallory, Niebelungenlied, Boccacio, Dante, etc., but once you get into the 19th century, taste becomes much more variable. How much should be originally in English? How bad are the various translations?

Still, I think colleges should require something similar to the "Great Conversations" program my daughter took at St. Olaf College - a 2 year integrated course that covered a fair bit of the Western canon in philosophy, religion, history, etc. It was a pretty good introduction to the key works of the West.