Posted on 09/17/2007 12:32:54 PM PDT by blitzgig
PING - An Ashley Herzog column not to be missed.
Thankfully, I don’t remember any of his books when I was in high school. If I were to remember them, I’d probably consider them boring.
Bravo to the author, but I wonder if this is akin to shooting oneself in the foot before the race.
Glad I saw this. I just requested the Paul Johnson book from the library!
Miller was a phony til the end. He also badmouthed his former wife, Marilyn Monroe.
Well, when you have no standards, no one can accuse you of being a hypocrite...
Well said and so true. I’m going to use that in the future if you don’t mind!
The presmise is stupid. The ideas should be the target of criticism not their personal lives. Shakespeare apparently abandoned his wife. And since when are Tolstoy and Hemingway ‘Left Wing Intellectuals’?
“Miller’s pompous liberalism has been forced upon high school and college students ever since he wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949.”
I’m of the opinion, having recently seen No. 1 son safely through high school English, that the only reason books such as “Death of a Salesman,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” and “East of Eden” have any market at all is the requirement by leftist teachers that they be read.
There are infinitely more books that provide a positive and up-lifting message, and which have much more to recommend them from a literary standpoint, relative to this dreck.
For really bad insomnia I would use Jean-Paul Sartre.
‘Catcher in the Rye’ pops up on Conservative favorite lists. There’s nothing leftist about it.
You could dispute the "intellectual" part about Hemingway, certainly. But Tolstoi was a socialist and Hemingway fought for the Communists in Spain in the 1930s.
The Rousseau story is also covered in Florence King’s “With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy.” Rousseau sounds like a truly loathsome individual.
Tolsoty could be called a Christian Socialist. The Soviets certainly had no use for his philosphical work which they found counter-revolutionary. I don’t exactly where Hemingway told people how to live their lives or what his part in the Spanish Civil War has to do with the merits of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ or lack thereof. He’s about the least preachy of all great writers.
I’m wondering if Chomsky is as averse to soap as Marx...
The description of Marx pretty much sums up the value system of the left...
The key is that the main character is not supposed to be terribly sympathetic. He’s a selfish little twit who learns that the world doesn’t revolve around him.
I’m not saying it’s leftist, I’m saying it’s trash.
When you have no moral standards, everything is acceptable. That's the liberal mantra.
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