Posted on 04/30/2021 7:56:06 AM PDT by Kaslin
for later
Right now the classic we need to read is ‘1984’.
“Perhaps booksellers who neglect the classics are merely responding to market demands.”
Ya think? They should stock stuff that doesn’t sell at all? That’s what those classics are. The booksellers are keeping stuff on the shelf that doesn’t sell. Good for them.
If the author doesn’t like it the author could start a classics bookstore.
Soon to be named the racist section.
“Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.”
Would those, such as Cornel West, be surprised should they consider that “academia” has been striving for this very outcome for, at least, a hundred years? The dumbing down of the unwashed masses to the place where they can be easily controlled? The end of the middle class?
To quote one of my favorites: Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining!
I far more prefer going to the used bookstore a short distance away from my place than the Chapters which has Bill, Oprah, the Obamas, and such others plastered all over the place. Is it like that at Barnes and Noble and other such venues in the U.S.?
***Right now the classic we need to read is ‘1984’.***
Sadly we are seeing 1984, and BRAVE NEW WORLD unfold before our eyes.
I worry that we’ve lost all momentum.
Previous generations grew up in a general milieu in which people basically knew the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare, and if they had been exposed to Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson. An evolving trend in movies and television — what has gone before helps illuminate what is in front of us now.
Exposure to a “new” poet like TS Eliot works, if you have a background to understand the allusions in Eliot. Even an author like Tolkien really works best if the reader understands Good and Evil and idyllic country settings threatened by industrialization and where personal freedom is a precious thing threatened by totalitarianism. There is a context that people once had that serves as a foundation for a great deal of art.
I think it is challenging to pickup a “classic novel” and just appreciate it in isolation. The classics are part of the “great conversation” which has been going on for thousands of years. But we broke the line. There is a generation or two who have grown up in relative silence (or worse: rap music) and I think it will be hard for them to suddenly discover and appreciate classic works. It takes more than focus and effort to read a particular work and enjoy it (that’s relatively easy) but to really see why some of these works are worthwhile, you need to have some background to get into the swing of it, as it were. We have no momentum now. People are starting from basically Zero and I’m not sure how workable that really is.
The comment about “The Great Gatsby” shows this to some extent — it’s a book written by a rich white guy, about a rich white guy. That’s a comment that comes from a vacuous mind. So superficial. A classic novel reduced to identity politics and found wanting simply because it seems to lack diversity. A mind like that is hard ground to plow.
Well, Sarah, I might have been a little more impressed with your erudition if you hadn’t misquoted that Kipling line.
I've a much more motley congregation of old titles, but "Catcher in the Rye" is not one of them. After hearing classmates gush about it in high school I never had any desire to read it. The protagonist sounds like a whiney loser, and not a very interesting one like Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman."
Oh, and the Shakespearean phrase is “hoist with his own petard”, not “hoisted with their own petard”.
Nowadays Holden Caulfield would be putting out a lame blog from his mom’s basement.
eventually, the younger generations to come will understand.....
how are things in Ottawa?
I think it was more a comment on the state of society, as opposed to the state of bookstores.
My daughter once told me of a well-degreed academic she knew of who wouldn't read Dickens because his writing was so hard to understand ... he used so many "big" words.
It's a fantastic project, and now they've got most of the classics preserved, they need to go back over them and edit them for the terrible errors caused by OCR scanning.
Partly it is vocabulary related. The other day I was reading a Georgette Heyer novel. Not a classic but a book rich in vocabulary. If you can read Christie, Heyer and Sayers or say, Tolkien, Forester and Gray as a pre-teen you will have the vocabulary to read the classics.
But when I was learning to read if I came across a word I did not know I was expected to either figure it out from the context or to look it up in the dictionary. This is no longer the case.
Children are expected to hold up a finger if they do not understand a word and at five the work is considered too difficult for them and they are given something less challenging to read.
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