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.?
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."
Get Real!! Our country is FULL of IDIOTS who don’t want to be smart or learned!!
As I say, the inexorable lowering of standards everywhere is a manifestation of the decadence of Western Civilisation.
Those who have allowed themselves to succumb to the decadence are fools.
Some of these fools think that theirs is a "new morality" and a "higher truth", though they are in reality merely immorality and untruth.
Note tagline, and observe: today's circumambient society is one of immorality and untruth. Truth for its own sake is held in contempt. Today's "new morality" reflects this.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
You could substitute Bill and Hillary or George and Laura or any number of couples in the elite class in here and it would be both so true and yet these couples wouldn’t recognize themselves if it was stuck under their noise.
The moral decay of America has been amply exposed already; however no civilisation has ever needed moral restoration more than the USA does today, for America's moral decay is a cancer which, if not extirpated, will destroy America forever.
So overwhelmed by the decadence is the US population, that half of the American People are completely blind to the moral decay that is ubiquitous, relentless, soul sickening, all around them and right before their eyes. Honest, benevolent, profoundly moral people can only gasp in horror!
Yes! So true! I see mad Ahab every day--especially in "the news"!
This quotation from Moby Dick (one of my ABSOLUTELY FAVORITE BOOKS EVER!) is one of my favourites--mad Ahab baptising the harpoon with which he intends to kill the whale:
And this:
“not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.I see Melville's observations and his warnings every day. The woke generation is wilfully blind! Nothing incites hatred like truth threatening delusion, and half of America--the Democrat Party, establishment Republicans, so called "journalists", academicians, all who have allowed themselves to succumb to the decadence of Western Civilisation are as blind as Oedipus and as deluded as Ahab.“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
Moby Dick
Chapter 58, “Brit,” p 298-299.
Our descendants--if they survive it--will be cleaning up the mess made by today's me-first, woke generation for a long time.
>> we found the classics “section” — a barely 10-foot-wide corner where “Hamlet” was shoved up beside “The Catcher in the Rye” in an uneven pile. For all that the store owners and its patrons cared, the sign at the top could have read: “Old Stuff.”
book report assignments/public domain titles