First of all, let’s not accept the current definition of “literature.”
Mostly because it makes no sense. If you dig into “literature” as opposed to “genre” what you get is two non-falsifiable statements: “Literature is bigger/deeper/more important than genre.” and “Literature is what literature professors anoint as literature.”
In both cases, if you try to pursue it, you are met with stompy feet and “because we said so.” Now it’s stompy feet and “because we said so” dressed in a lot of verbiage that means “stompy feet and because we said so.”
Look, not only do I have a degree in literature, and read up a lot of literary criticism (look, it was that or read the miserable books their assigned us.) but I also read a lot of how to write books, a lot of whom are written by precious, precious literary fiction authors and professors, who at some point in the book — often after sharing really good craft tips — go psychotic and start screaming about “genre trash” and how they don’t write that.
One of them, which I finally threw away — one of three books I actually threw away instead of giving away or selling — ten years later, when I couldn’t get over my anger enough to continue reading the book, went on wonderfully till the middle of the book. I can’t remember the title, because I do this to books that really p*ss me off, but it was something like “by hook or crook”. It was about how to write immediate fiction and hook the reader. To the middle of the book, it was really excellent. Stuff like not using “he thought” but just giving us the character’s thoughts, or showing emotion through actions rather than telling us he was happy or sad.
And then in the middle of the book, out of nowhere, the author goes on a snit about how if you aim to write genre this book is not for you, because you don’t need his instruction to write that simplistic, formulaic, etc. etc. etc. “trash.”
Other than reaching through the pages of the book and grabbing the author by the throat and giving him a reading list, there was nothing I could do with my angry. I knew for a fact, however, that he was running on what he’d been told genre was, or perhaps on two or three very OLD and bad novels.
Look, I have a sort of proof of this. In my long careen through college, I kept meeting professors and teachers who would say this. I would approach them after class, very politely, and ask them if I could change their minds. I was even willing to LOAN them the books, etc. After pouting, screaming, or sneering, most of them agreed. (I was young, cute, and very very polite.) I will admit I tailored my point of attack to each professor by their weaknesses. I have yet to meet someone with a poetic bend who won’t fall headlong for bradbury, or someone of a philosophical bend who won’t fall for Phillip K. Dick. Anyway, in every case, regardless of how resistant they were to begin with, I got a science fiction (or mystery. I didn’t read romance till my mid thirties. As in not a single one. Shut up. Sit down. that’s another post called “What women read and write.”) book on the curriculum if not that year the year after. They were in fact sneering at genre fiction that existed only in their heads.
Recently I came across someone sneering that if you need a plot you’re obviously not a grown up, and how literary fiction is “life” — by which they mean “slice of life.” Except of course, this excludes Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen and practically everyone before the 20th century, so again, I think we’re dealing with weaponized ignorance.
Everything fell into place when I realized as a professional writer that “literary fiction” was a genre, with genre rules. The rules, other than some newly created to distinguish them from “genre trash” could be summarized as “reading this makes me sound like an educated person.” (This is interesting, so put a pin in it.) That’s fine, except for its devotes insisting it’s the only valid and important one, and the only one that should be taught.
In the late twentieth century “makes me sound like an educated person” given what higher education had become usually meant “is either Marxist at its inception or is possible to interpret adequately through a Marxist lens.” No, that’s not what it was described as, but it was what it was. I spent countless hours talking about the power relationship between two characters, or how it illuminated the plight of blah blah blah. (Look I can spin the babble on command, but I just ate, and I don’t want to get queasy.)
What it used to be until um…. WWI was “has markers that the writer has read and studied classical myth and other foundational works of Western civilization.”
Both of those amount to “Shows the writer — and by extension the reader — had an expensive education.”
Why it switched between classical culture and Marxism has a lot to do with WWI and disenchantment with Western tradition as well as a particularly active and successful communist agit prop. And the fact that, as a just so story with its own language and easy to superimpose on reality — and more so on literature — theories and power dynamics, Marxism is like catnip for academics.
Ignoring that later part and the utter weirdness of post-modernist-literature, that mostly aims at hysterically claim superiority because they read books without plot, or dialogue, or characters, or whatever the heck the newest innovation is (I actually was forced to read a novel where the novelist had removed the element of “time.” It was acclaimed as super-innovative, but it was two people having a never ending discussion in a car. Sophomore drunken babble as literature. That was a thing. (Drinking helped with reading it too.)) because that’s just posturing with pages, let’s look at the function literature provided before.
Let’s say that whatever “literature” is for, it has nothing to do with ludic reading, and it’s not designed to get you to read for fun. I propose that they should be completely separate classes. English or Language Arts or whatever they call it these days should stick to its knitting and concentrate on literacy 101. Provide a variety of books. Ask people to read and write about the ones they actually enjoyed and help students become familiar enough with reading to read for pleasure. In elementary school this might include providing boys with comics, because being more visual boys tend to love comics. (And let me enjoin mothers of little boys to seek out Don Rosa’s Disney comics. They’re perfect for that awkward stage where the kids need more story than their reading ability allows them to enjoy. Let them free on those, and I guarantee they move on to real reading. (Defined as reading for all purposes one uses reading, from information to pleasure.)) But at this stage, really, except for keeping age-inappropriate stuff (like detailed descriptions of sexual acts out of the hands of pre-pubescent children) teaching reading should be the offering of a smorgasbord, and the teacher should be more of a concierge, with a deep knowledge of what’s available, and the ability to guide the kid to what will work for him or her. (As well as teaching grammar, proper sentence construction, clarity in writing, and the like.)
At around eleven or twelve, a new class should be introduced. I have absolutely no idea what to call it. Calling it Study of Literature confuses it with the “Literary” genre, and in point of fact there is very little — if any — overlap.
The purpose of this class would be the reason to “teach literature”.
Allow me a digression: I didn’t realize I had eidetic or near eidetic memory until I had a head injury that robbed me of it. The reason I didn’t realize it is because I knew what eidetic meant. My brother was eidetic. He could, effortlessly, tell you what had happened on any given day, who had won soccer games on a given weekend three years ago, etc.
What I missed: You don’t remember what you never paid any attention to, and being ADD AF and liable to get distracted by internal story telling, I never heard/paid attention to most of life.
Anyway, I should have realized I was eidetic, because from the moment I started tearing through the family library (by which I mean accumulation of books. They weren’t in any particular room, but everywhere and also in crates in every storage space in the family houses) my brother and I talked entirely in literary allusions.
By which I mean, we could sit at the table and one of us would quote the three musketeers, to which the other would answer with a line from Hercule Poirot, at which point the other would quote the Bible in response.
It all made perfect sense to us, because we had a vast fund of reading the same books, which only got deeper and vaster as we both dropped into science fiction at the same time.
It was however utterly and completely opaque to everyone else. I think my dad caught most of it, except the science fiction, but mom who doesn’t read fiction was completely baffled and annoyed by it. (Which made it more fun. I mean, we were her kids.)
I remember being confused as to why my parents got very embarrassed by our bringing out our act at big family parties or when we had guests. You see, having grown up like that, it never OCCURRED TO ME that other people didn’t understand it. They were adults, so of course they’d read (and memorized, duh) all of it, right?
It wasn’t till I was in high school and made significant friendships outside the house that I realized not everyone read the same things, and most people didn’t memorize every word they read.
Let’s say part of what predisposed me to marry Dan is that despite not having read the exact same things, he’d read things similar enough to catch the allusions and surf through my various references without losing the thread.
Now, that is the reason to teach literature at all, as opposed to “reading” which is not the same thing.
“What?” You say. “So kids can baffle adults at table?”
Um…. No. To provide people with a cultural vocabulary of allusion and situation and character that they can refer to, one that everyone else understands.
To a great extent that has been lost in our society, except for movies or for … um… subgroups within the society. Geeks have their vocabulary and cultural touchstones. Romance and rom com affictionados have theirs. Adventure or thriller movie fans have their own.
That’s fine. I’m not an anti-genre or even anti-other-forms-of-storytelling fanatic. I’m an “And that too” type of person.
However, there is a thing we’re missing, and it keeps coming back to bite us in the ass: A common cultural background, a common referencial archive, a commonality of archetypes that we can access AS A CULTURE and speak from as a culture.
We’re missing our TRIBAL lays, as it were.
Movies that were really big across every portion of society in the past provided a bit of that, say “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” has a force brought on by the scene in the movie. For that matter so does “come to the dark side.” But as audiences and movie interests have become more fragmented, both by interest and generationally, it stops working. (Watch people lamenting that no one gets “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” or other touchstones of previous generations.)
This is where there is a place to study literature — and I suppose at this point, some of the older movies. Like, yes, Gone With The Wind. — because most of the founding stones of our culture were written. (Or declaimed, if you go back long enough.)
Start with Greek Myth. At the very least the Odyssey and the Iliad. In this diminished time, it is allowable to do it in translation, though at the very least Latin should be encouraged. Greek if people have a bend to– Okay fine. Vulgus language, in our case English will do. But I want you to know I’m stompy footing and rolling my eyes, even though I have little Latin and small Greek.
Yes, sure, you can sanitize it for kids under 12. If you must. Though I’m here to tell you that the castration of Saturn did not particularly shock me at 10, because these were obviously not humans.
Sure, you can throw Norse myth in, if you absolutely feel like it, but I’ll point out that if we’re sticking to the “foundations of the West,” that’s not a thing. That’s Johnny came lately and falls under “Oh, Timmy enjoys mythology. Let’s hit him with Norse myth and maybe Egyptian too.”
After that, I’m sorry, but yes, we need the Bible. No, this is in no way establishment of religion, first because I’m not proposing analyzing it from a religious POV (one can say “well, for that, you might want to talk to your parents/minister about that if the kid wants to discuss that part) but as literature, as “how does this story work, and how has it influenced every other story in the West?” And because I don’t propose reading it cover to cover. Genesis, sure. Some of the other more salient stories, including the parables of the New Testament, which are delightfully evocative. (No? Go re-read the Prodigal son.) And a discussion can be had on how attitudes changed over time/etc. Yes, it will offend some parents, but if one keeps drawing the line at “these are the foundational stories of the west” you’ll be fine. It can (and should) be done. Oh, and I’m intransigent in this, the Bible that should be taught is the King James Bible. Why? Because this is literature, and it has the best language.
The Bible will then prepare us for the chansons de geste of which some should at least be introduced, since the invention of romantic love is kind of important. From there, we should go into Shakespeare with both feet. (And recordings of the plays, yes.)
Then the field is more open. I absolutely think one should teach Dumas, because it opens the possibility of discussing the aristocratic society as portrayed, the picaresque form of novel, etc. I’m agnostic on Don Quixote.
A lot of things open from there, including, yes, possibly Jane Austen and yes, unfortunately likely the Brontes. (Sorry. I don’t actually enjoy the Brontes.)
All of it in context and in its own time. Yes, yes, Americans as a unique sub-group of the Western experience SHOULD study Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and LIKELY Little House on the Prairie.
Before that and as the opening salvo to “We are Americans, begorrah,” we should study the declaration of independence, because that Jefferson fellow sure wrote purty but also because it will help understand Twain and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Note this is in no way an exhaustive list, and I would leave it open to have other classes, catering to the kids… and er… young adults interests. It should be possible for someone to lose himself utterly in, oh, the writing of the quarttrocento or “south American poetry of the nineteenth century.” That would fall under “the common language culture of this or that interest group,” and might culminate, if you’re me, in a group of one.
But this much would give us a common reference, a common series of touchstones from which we could branch out. The idea is NOT to flaunt your excellent education, but to have something in common with everyone who grew up in this country and is older than x.
It gives you the national set of archetypes; allows for the assimilation of those whose parents were born abroad, and whose religion is more outre so they don’t sit in the pews every Sunday hearing certain stories, and create a foundation for “this is the thing we all know.”
Before anyone screams at me, I don’t object to the teaching of other passages from other holy books, mythologies, national tales, etc. Those are cool. But they shouldn’t be in the required core.
And nothing, absolutely nothing younger than 100 years should be in it, simply because it’s not been digested through the culture, and we don’t know what to take or leave.
None of these books should be presented as “we read this because it’s how all books should be” but as “these are things people repeated, and read, and based things on for centuries. They’re sort of in the DNA of our culture, and are referenced in later story telling. Knowing them will make it easier for you to communicate.” (Yes, I would absolutely throw Uncle Remus in the basics, somewhere before Mark Twain. And yes, I realize I hesitate to put it in because people will scream. But both as historical context and reference, it’s now part of our culture. (Don’t throw me in that briar patch.) Also it’s part of my personal tradition, as a translation of the stories was one of the very first books I read by myself. So racissss, etc. Bite me.)
The truth is that we’re teaching literature all wrong, teaching it as an aspirational “this is how you should write, and this is what is appropriate to read.” What we should teach it as is “This is the common foundation of our culture. Yes, some of it will read super-boring to you because of out-dated language or because you lack the mental furniture. But his is how you acquire a familiarity with the language and appropriate it as your mental furniture.” And “This is why this particular work is important to have read, and this is the context in which it became widely read.” Oh and “this is how people of the time saw it, and why they liked it.”
(Why, yes, I’d love to start a series of videos teaching just this stuff, that way, and it might yet happen, if the health stabilizes. It could happen. I know, I know what it looks like from the outside, but from the inside, despite sudden collapses, it’s improving.)
I still have no idea what it would be called.
But it would forever end the literary/genre wars and the bizarre idea there’s a divide. Genre that survives long enough becomes literature, and in my lifetime, if I live another 10 years, Agatha Christie will be “literature” if she’s not already. (And there is a reason to study her and other mystery writers (and some science fiction) under a cultural history of the 20th century. There are … fossilized opinions and situations that are better at explaining how people thought and felt than any theorizing of historians. But that’s not “literature.”)
And that’s how and why I think “literature” should be taught. Perhaps “foundational documents” would be a better name for it. Or … Tribal Lays. (Imagine what fun teen boys would have with THAT!)
Anyway, this is my opinion and how I’d change the teaching of stories, if I ruled the world. Oh, and my list is in no way exhaustive and I’m not married to it, except for the Greek Myth and the Bible. And the declaration of independence.
According To Hoyt 
Long, long ago, I was a tutor at a community college. And one day, when an English instructor came into the tutorial center, I happened to mention science fiction, and he dismissed it as trash. He had two points to make about it: (1) No science fiction writer had a Library of Congress number (was that even true back then?) and (2) science fiction writers just wrote for money. Oh, I asked, you mean like Dostoyevsky frantically cranking out serialized novels to pay his gambling debts? He didn’t seem to have a response to that but he rather dismissed it.
I’m not sure about that definition of “literary fiction.” At least not as the alternative to “genre.” I mean, best-sellers that go on the general fiction shelves don’t often seem to be all that literary or to have that many classic references (okay, there’s A.S. Byatt, though she’s an odd one with her toes right at the edge of genre but not getting wet), but I’m pretty sure they’re not “genre.” Is there a territory that’s not literary and also not genre? (And there are genre writers who write specific books aimed at the bestseller territory. Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer or Brin’s Earth. There are certain qualities of style and characterization that aren’t quite standard SF.)
The Odyssey in Latin? Nah. It’s just another translation, and if I’m reading a translation, why not read it in my native language, where I don’t have to pause regularly to look up words or, worse, decode each sentence word by word? That may be productive in learning a new language, but it doesn’t seem the best way to acquire the source material of our culture. And neither Latin nor Greek is necessarily the optimal choice if you do want to learn a foreign language—I don’t rule them out, but there are other options. (My own experience is that Greek literature is unusually hard to read, even with a dictionary at hand. The New Testament is significantly easier linguistically; its sentence structure is less recondite. Probably it should be included in the reading list for anyone who does learn Greek.)
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Latin has some value as a “starter” language for introducing people to grammatical concepts that English lacks or only uses in a disorderly way that is difficult to teach systematically. It gives a leg up on learning the three most prominent non-English languages of the Western Hemisphere (Spanish, Portuguese and French, in what I would consider descending order of usefulness), and on gaining insight into a culture the Founding Fathers studied intensively, for both positive and cautionary lessons. Additionally, it’s deep enough in the history of Indo-European languages to be a reasonable starting point for learning about how languages develop and split (compare Latin vir, “man” with Hindi veer, “hero”) if the student decides they want to get into philology.
What are the allegedly more useful alternatives? Going directly to Spanish? Arguing that it is super-duper important to learn the languages of our rivals, so…what exactly? Lerning Russian, when the student might be better off starting with ancient Greek, the basis for a big chunk of our culture and for the Russian alphabet? Mandarin, which is so different in writing system and finer details of pronunciation from anything spoken in the West as to be only a “starter” language for linguistic prodigies and immigrants from China?
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I don’t rule out the study of Latin by any means, or even Greek; I have a Greek textbook on my shelves and I hope to refresh my decades-old Greek. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the best choice. For many people’s purposes, if they’re going to learn a language at all, why not learn a living one and get their ancient culture and mythology in translation?
For the minority who want to learn a language that gives them linguistic breadth, I might favor Japanese (large number of speakers, and really interestingly different grammar) or Hebrew (used by an important and commercially significant ally, and also relevant to the sources of Western culture). For just something you can speak with present-day foreigners, I’d say Spanish (large number of speakers, and reputedly easy to learn—though I don’t think French is really much harder). Or if you want a leg up on Indo-European language history, German could be a good choice, nearly as good as Latin and you may actually meet living people who speak it.
I’m just saying that there are multiple choices.
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I was mostly joking. Though Greek and Latin do feed a lot into our culture, so a touch of it can be helpful.
In the unlikely event my kids manage to spawn and allow me to educate the spawnlings (one set has already asked me to, in the event) I intend to give them a modicum of Greek and Latin, to make the learning of other languages easier and — yes — pour epater les bourgeois.
But no, it’s not necessary. I was being silly.
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Oh, I’m all for the Odyssey in Greek, though I don’t seriously hope to ever learn that much Greek. But if I learned Latin I would be reading Lucretius and Catullus and Martial, not somebody’s translation of Homer.
I learned my Greek mythology primarily from Bullfinch’s, though I did read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retellings of selected Greek myths.
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It is important to read the later myths, simply to understand that carried long enough humans make EVERYTHING into a soap opera with the soap opera vices, like bringing characters from the dead, etc.
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Dorothy Sayers points out corruptions or later versions of myths in her commentary on the Divine Comedy. One involves Achilles being killed by Paris when he tries to sneak into a Teojan temple.
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I learned Spanish first (elementary school enrichment that I barely remembered, then junior high, high school, and a little in college — Spanish history in Spanish), then Latin (2 years in high school, set me up for really learning it later by myself), then Russian (summer course in high school at a state university), a year of Japanese (in college), scraps of Irish and Welsh by myself, and then a little Homeric/Koine Greek (from Greek 101 on the Great Courses, highly recommended). Oh, and Old and Middle English, but that barely counts as a foreign language.
I just learn languages so I can read stuff, honestly. I’m terrible at conversation in my best languages, because I’m only slightly less terrible at conversation in English. (I’m actually better at Latin composition and conversation when I’m asleep or really tired, or if I have a sudden attack of poetry/songwriting.)
Learning enough Greek to “get” the prologues and the good bits of the Iliad or the Odyssey? Holy crud, yes yes yes.
Learning enough Greek for the Gospels and St. Paul, and for the Septuagint so you know what the NT writers are going on about? Yes, yes, yes, please. Otherwise, you literally don’t know what you’re missing.
The Virgin Mary doesn’t just say “Fiat” or “May it be done to me.” She uses the optative mood, the way you talk about something you very much want to happen.
And the Annunciation doesn’t just reference OT birth announcements. It also references people getting sent off to do big things for God — and especially the announcement to Gideon that he’s being tasked to do battle and win.
It’s really hard to notice stuff like this in English, but it comes right up and talks to you in the Greek text.
But there’s also the interplay of Early Christian literature with classical Greek literature. Euripides really does seem to have gotten some kind of poetic prophetic hotline to say stuff that would later turn out to be about Christ, and he’s such an unlikely guy to have had such a visitation that it’s really eerie! But fun!
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So, the only time I was FLUENT in Latin was when I was zonked out of my mind on painkillers, after three days of hard labor (birth, not prison) and while feverish.
Go figure.
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Maybe people need to have language classes when drunk as well as when sober, heh! Very Persians/Medes.
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I still think that it’s hilarious that the prologue to Hebrews includes a reference to the prologue to the Odyssey, especially since it creates a parallel between Jesus and Odysseus.
The Eastern churches say that Hebrews was originally in Aramaic, and that St. Paul’s crew got a little jokey or Greek culture-y when translating the thing into Greek. There are other Greek rhetoric fun tricks in Hebrews, apparently, but I don’t really know enough classics to understand the stuff said about this online. Something about how it sounds when read out loud, too.
Reading Greek just makes me happy. I always read stuff from various 19th century guys about how Greek was fun, but I never understood it until I started learning Greek too.
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I’ve let it lie fallow for 21 years and remember almost nothing, but man, learning ancient Greek in college was so…much…fun. (Educational? Yes, that too.)
Always said that if I had it to do over again, I might’ve majored in Classics instead of English (could’ve gone deep into both Greek and Latin, would still have been able to make forays out into the British Romantics, and could’ve avoided most of the proto-SJW fuckery). Oh, well. I did what I did, didn’t what I didn’t, and it ain’t so bad anyhow being here where I is.
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I’m afraid you’ll have to point out the references to the Odyssey in Hebrews, because I’m not seeing it.
OTOH, when I realized the author was referencing Plato’s Cave, I was rather amazed.
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Hire a Japanese company to do the Odyssey, in either Greek or Latin, with subtitles.
Accurate subtitles.
I’m picking up Japanese, my kids are picking it up faster, and I actually spent years actively studying Japanese without it sticking.
But attaching it to an animated story has worked.
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that’s part of how I learned English. Everything was subtitled in Portuguese. So, once I had a year of English, with the basics, I dropped into it head first. By the end of the first year, I was thinking in English.
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Odd. When I watch subtitled works, I remember people saying the English subtitles.
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If we’re treating foreign languages as strictly optional and chosen at the discretion of the student, I have no problem with German, Hebrew, Japanese or the modern Romance languages. (Although modern German speakers study English extensively in school, have a leg up on pronouncing it relative to Romance language speakers, and would REALLY rather show off their English than let their American acquaintances practice their German. Source: stories from the family linguists about meeting German people).
I just can’t see the case for making any specific foreign language mandatory except one of the Western Civ foundational dead languages (Latin, classical Greek, biblical Hebrew). Between the the writing system, and the impact on English vocabulary, Latin remains the most workable choice for that role, if it is deemed necessary.
The one thing that makes Spanish possibly easier than French or Italian is that if there’s a letter in the word, you pronounce it. You may not pronounce it the same way you would pronounce it in English, but you don’t have to perform consonant swallowing maneuvers as seen in the Italian “gli” or most French word endings.
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I’d probably put Latin in the “how language works” slot, so kids can learn word-roots and what conjugation is.
But not having to read it fluently, and not having to for heaven’s sake speak it.
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This, tbh. Being able to re-translate the Vulgate isn’t necessary, but Latin — at least a certain amount of it — should be mandatory if we want people to really understand Western culture and the English language.
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I was joking on the Latin and Greek, and partly joking with myself, because I’m almost as ignorant of those as Shakespeare was. (Little Latin and Small Greek is how he refereed to his knowledge.)
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My “qualified for the foreign language requirement for college applications” year of High School Latin was mostly because I was a lazy gifted-track kid and, as a “dead” language, Latin had no verbal testing requirement, just written, so I figured it was less work.
That said, while I doubt I could do any declensions anymore and can only barely puzzle out written Latin with a lot of lookups, my Latin studies absolutely helped me both with structure and with various word root meanings. I suppose any of the Latin-based languages would have done me as well for the structure stuff just because they are actually structured and so different than English. And Spanish definitely would have been smarter given living out here, just for instances of daily communication, but overall Latin has done pretty well for me.
And as to the basic definitional distinction, I have always thought of “literature” as something they have to make you read.
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My best buddy and I in High school both took Latin and used it as a private language This worked well given that of the 250 or so students about 10 had taken Latin at any level. Plus there was the teacher and oddly our Gym teacher who was able to read things like Julius Caesar and Cicero with ease. Speaking Latin really warps an English speakers mind, we ended up in what was likely pidgin Latin as trying to get the declensions right (especially in some of the more fiddly cases) was hard. Also we just didn’t have the vocabulary, we tended to merge things in as if they were third declension words borrowed from other languages, but that could ruin our intent to obscure what we were discussing.
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Imagine trying that with Finnish — 15 cases if I remember right.
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I’m very glad I wasn’t actively drinking when I saw that…😜👍👍
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I can’t believe I didn’t have it saved in my memes folder yet!
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My favorite little piece about German word forms (declension — “conjugation” applies to verbs) is this poem: https://literaturkritik.de/einzigartiger-fall-der-faelle-christian-morgensterns-gedicht-der-werwolf,23902.html
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Oh, I’m saving that one.
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There’s a recent time travel book, which I can’t locate on my ‘zon right now, where they get sent back to the Marcus Aurelius Roman Empire, where to qualify for the (surprise) trip all the travelers had to speak classical Latin – and then when they get there the Romans of the day could hardly understand them, with all their very odd pronunciation and such. There’s a scene where the Emperor and Galen are talking about these suspiciously technically advanced “people”travelers” (their cover is they are travelers from very far away) and how it’s as if they only learned Latin from books, with Galen saying he’d seen the same thing from people who had only read Greek and never spoken it to (then) Greeks.
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While I haven’t read it, that sounds like “To Turn The Tide” by S. M. Stirling.
IIRC there was a review of it that brought up that “problem” for the Time Travellers.
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That’s the one. It’s good. Waiting for the next one (as with everything else, all things are a series nowadays).
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He has I think Galen say something about how these new people pronounce the “S” on the end of words, instead of it being silent like it’s supposed to be, and I went “aha” on Spanish and Italian derived words.
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That will be ‘The Winds Of Fate’ to be published in July.
(Why did my fumble fingers try to type ‘punblished’?)
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Indeed it is To Turn The Tide by S.M. Stirling. A good read with a couple hidden homage to Lest Darkness Fall .
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“To Turn the Tide” (Book 1) and “Winds of Fate” (Book 2) Haven’t read what the 3rd book title is going to be. by S.M. Stirling
The (newly minted) Phd in Roman history and classical Latin fluent reader/speaker, was chosen because of this and had been requested to bring 4 graduate students Latin speakers of various Roman era sub specialties. The requester gets more than that as is slowly reveled. The 5 do not know what they were walking into. 100% duped into coming. In fact the professor is pissed he was lured away from home as the world is coming apart. They land in the outskirts of Roman 3rd century AD territory, modern day Austria, to be exact. Modern day is alternative timeline 2030.
Yes. Their spoken Latin comes across as both educated because spoken as if read, but wrong, barely understandable, because that isn’t how Latin is spoken. OTOH from the travelers view no one had ever heard a 3 century Latin Roman read aloud by primary sources.
Eagerly awaiting the second book to release. First 3 chapters of book 2 is available on S.M. Stirling’s web page. Not giving away anything by stating that the Chinese stole the technology and go back at the same time to the same time, but in China.
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Similarly (being from MN), Norwegian, Swedish and German immigrants passed their languages on to their first- and second-generation descendants, but it was not commonly used in everyday conversation and did not change. Effectively they spoke the language as it was nearly a century ago.
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IIRC Pope John XXIII created helicopterum in 1959. Neologism is fun, if confusing for the un-initiated.
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Interesting that appears to be the second declension neuter (plural would be helicoptera). Latin had 3rd declension which was often used for borrowed words (Latin was a bad as English for thieving words) and would have yielded Helicopter, Helicopteris (with 3rd declension you always show the genitive so you know how to form the root for other cases as it is not regular like other declensions, I think its plural would likely be Helicopterii). Pope John XXIII may have been an excellent Pope (I don’t have a dog in that fight) but I question his Latin linguistic derivation :-) .
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My best friend in HS did much the same, but in German. Not sure how much he had, but for me it was 3 years. Most of it went away so when I was in Germany a quarter-century later, I could barely get by. This was in a small city in Bavaria–Wasserburg am Inn. The actual job was in Amerang, a tiny down further south. English speakers were rare in Wasserburg, and outside the client’s place, nonexistent in Amerang.
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Mine was (having had high school German) was stopping occasionally to visit an old man of German descent in an assisted living home. He asked if they taught High or Low German. I was unaware of the distinction.
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Pulling this from really old memories (with major backup from Wiki) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German, Low German is a dialect from the lower altitude portions of Germany. Wiki says N Germany, NE Netherlands, plus the Russian Mennonite Diaspora.
Great-uncle Thorkild came for a visit to Grampa Pete in the mid 1960s, and the Danish language bore some semblance to German. (Similar sentence structure, and some of the words were similar.) We got by with my high school German and the tiny Danish/English dictionary. My Semi-SWAG is that the Germanic languages in surrounding countries are derived from Low German. OTOH, linguistics ain’t my thing, and it is a wild-ass guess.
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Oh, they are very different. Snow White of the Seven Dwarfs fame, and Snow White and Rose Red don’t actually have the girls with the same name, it just looks that way in translation
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Job I had in late ’90s, early ’00s, had a French office (access to European markets). I did not do well with their accents. OTOH their English was a lot better than my non existent French.
Had Spanish, with HS teacher distinguishing between central American/Mexican and Castilian Spanish, from 4th through HS graduation. Could read it through college. (Now? Huge probably not.) Although we practiced a lot speaking it through HS (English free zone during class and required activities), wasn’t any better at conversational Spanish than I am at conversational English. Just not in my wheelhouse. (Yea, if I’d worked at it, would be better. Now ask if that is going to happen now at age 68? Hint: Not!)
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My high school used a specially-designed telenovela program for learning Spanish. One of the conceits was that the main character, a lawyer, had to travel to a whole bunch of different Spanish-speaking countries to track down family that a patriarch had lost contact with (he thought they were dead) during the Spanish Civil War. That way, you could show off some dialect differences, though I think any accent differences wouldn’t be very noticeable to the beginning student. They also spoke slowly and clearly at the start and sped up through the series.
It’s called Destinos, and I think it’s still publicly available.
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Classmate at college had a Basque last name. I learned to not mangle his name. I mangle his name now, although not as bad as most, even after 46+ years (no practice). Hubby ran into him a few times over the last 40 years professionally. Guy just grins when he hears hubby yell out his last name (hubby does not have the same no practice = problems, defect). Because other than family and close friends, his college buddy’s are the only people who do not mangle his last name.
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Having learned both Latin and Greek in high school, I found the sentence structure of these two about equally hard. A couple of points come to mind.
First of all, both are inflective languages, which means the syntactic role of sentence elements is marked by a word suffix. As a result, word order is no longer critical and writers may flip things around for various reasons.
Related to the above: poetry has a specific meter (rhythm) and poets are quite likely to shuffle words around “metri causa” (“because of the meter”). Homer writes poetry, the Bible is prose — that may be one reason why the latter seems to have a simpler sentence structure.
I found Latin very helpful in learning other languages (note that I was starting from Dutch; English is my third language). Especially when dealing with other inflective languages, such as German or Russian, the precedent of Latin is quite handy. And Greek offers a mild introduction to the fact that a language may make grammatical distinctions not found in some other language: consider the specific Greek tense “aorist” which makes a distinction not so easily expressed in Latin or English. SF author Rolf Nelson used that fact to make a point about correct interpretation of certain Bible verses. If you want to get more exposure to these differences, it helps to look at entirely different language families. Consider Japanese, which barely bothers with number, but has linguistic marks to denote the social relationships between speaker and listener. And I’ve read that there exist languages where the word forms indicate whether a stated fact is something known first-hand to the speaker, or reported as hearsay.
For classical Greek you’re dealing with a variety of significantly different dialects. I mostly read Homer, which is different enough that it came with a “supplement” to cover the anomalous grammar and significantly different vocabulary compared to classical “Attic” Greek. And the “koine” Greek of the Bible is different yet again. Conversely, the Latin I have been exposed to is all a single dialect — the only variability I needed to deal with was prose (Livy, Cicero) vs. poetry (Ovid).
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Since grammar as taught for other languages uses Latin as a base (dative is dative is dative, genitive is always possession, and so on), I found Latin very useful. Greek is sort of fun for theology, but I read older translations of the Illiad and Odyssey in English.
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True, for other Indo-European languages that are inflected. Languages in other families, not so much. I still need to study more to wrap my head around “ergative” languages (Basque, Sumerian). And they are by no means the wildest ones out there.
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I’m also English as a third language, and I HATE inflected languages, including German. I mean, I hate learning them. But I understand it’s good for you.
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dryly isn’t Portuguese technically inflected?
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er… NO.
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But you’re a native Portuguese speaker, yes? Doesn’t Portuguese have all the different verb forms, like French, Spanish, and Italian? That was a bit of a challenge when I first ran into it. Not like English, where the most complicated verb has only the forms be/am/art/is/are/was/were/being/been and most verbs have only five or six, and you have to tack on auxiliaries for every other job.
I expect what you mean by “inflected” is “languages where the noun is inflected, not just the verb.” Because German does have that. I kind of like it; it marks the function the noun is performing in the sentence more explicitly: agent, patient, instrument, destination/recipient, location, origin, possessor, and “Hey you!” in Sanskrit, for example. And consciously recognizing those categories can be helpful in parsing a sentence.
But I think even languages that decline their nouns usually do so in less complicated ways than they conjugate their verbs. And I can tell you that native English speakers generally find it really trying to have to memorize amo/amas/amat and all that! But I expect it seems easy to you because you’ve been doing it all your life.
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Verb forms, yes, but NO nouns. Which is what drove me nuts.
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You’re allowed to like it, but for a dyslexic it’s a form of hell.
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Sister it ain’t much fun for those of us who aren’t dyslexic either :-) .
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And I hated verbs in languages not English. For the same reason of dyslexia.
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The aorist was not explained well when I took Greek, and I long was puzzled over why there were two past tenses. Then I started reading serious linguistics and learned about verbal aspect, as distinct from tense. In English, for example, we have simple or punctual aspect: I go, I went, I shall go. We have progressive aspect: I am going, I was going, I will be going. And we have perfect aspect: I have gone, I had gone, I shall have gone. Aorist seems to be a question of aspect: It’s punctual rather than progressive. The progressive describes a past general condition that was ongoing; the punctual describes a specific event. “Yesterday I was going to the store [progressive] when somebody ran a red light and nearly hit me [punctual].” The progressive sets the scene; the punctual narrative events within the scene. (Among other things.)
In Greek the imperfect seems to be progressive, and the aorist seems to be punctual. I think it’s akin to the Spanish distinction between imperfect and preterite, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about Spanish to be confident of that.
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There’s a Pacific Northwest tribal language (Coast Salish?) that has a linguistic difference between “creatures that are fictional” and “creatures that we know to exist.”
Apparently Bigfoot is in the latter category. ;)
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There are hundreds of Library of Congress numbers just for Isaac Asimov books.
I’d bet nearly all the Golden Age SciFi authors had them for each of their novels.
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As to boys and comics/visual learning, I have a now 19 year old with better Biblical literacy than I have (despite having worked my way through the whole thing several times) because we got him copies of both volumes of The Brick Bible as a Lego-loving pre-teen.
It’s a comic book style retelling of the Old and New Testaments illustrated entirely with Lego. While obviously abridgement is a must, it does present many of the touchstone quotations intact and is surprisingly unexpurgated in content. Like a bunch of minifigs with their hands over their crotches in the buildup to the revenge of Dinah’s brothers unexpurgated. Kid-appropriate? Well, it did him no harm and helps inject some humor in a pretty grim tale.
He loved them enough that he read them entirely on his own, not as something we did as part as part of a curriculum or pushed on him, in fact he may have bought the second volume himself after reading the first, I don’t remember anymore.
Anyway, he will bring up bible stories that illustrate certain points he’s trying to make, or cross reference something from a sermon with another example that supports what we just heard in church, because learning them that way means he *remembers* them in a way that I don’t/can’t from reading alone.
Obviously a labor of love for the artist. We used his Brick Shakespeare when the kids were studying the Bard, and I thing there’s a copy of Brick Greek Myths floating around the house somewhere too.
Do I hope he delves into the real thing later? Sure, but he has multiple classical cultural touchstones already and got them in a way that inspired him to further interests.
As you say, play to boys’ strengths, not to trying to make them learn like girls.
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That’s obviously fine. I didn’t know about the existence of this Lego Bible…
I should point out some very Christian families are the worst for this. I found myself talking to one of older son’s friends, then in 12th grade, gifted, etc. who told me that you shouldn’t read anything but the Bible and that the BIBLE had NO SEX OR VIOLENCE. I eventually figured out he’d been given a bowdlerized version, and that’s all he knew.
People! For the love of culture, if not G-d, don’t do this to your kids.
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Man much of Genesis must have been tweaked and the Song of Songs totally excised. Oh and anything about David in Kings/Chronicles must have been heavily tweaked. I mean maybe we avoid telling 2nd graders the story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah but at some point that kind of stuff is critical to understanding David (let alone Absalom and his half sister).
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Yeah, Genesis may be the world’s first, “family saga,” and it gets pretty intense.
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RIGHT?
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Yup look up dysfunctional family in the dictionary and you’ll Jacob’s. David’s and Solomon’s families as illustrations. One thing to note is that all three have polygamous marriages greatly complicating the relationships. That “who is the favorite wife/child” thing NEVER ends well.
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It’s interesting that before the time of Christ, the Jewish people went to “While polygamous marriages aren’t against G*d’s Law, they aren’t a Good Idea”. 😁
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Proof that with enough bad examples nearly anyone can learn :-) . Although currently our democrat “friends” seem to be bound and determined to disprove that.
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Even the big book of kid’s picture Bible stories at the veterinarian’s office had violence in it. And I’m pretty sure David and Bathsheba was in it, although they just said “David fell in love with Bathsheba, even though she was already married, and then he decided to kill her husband so that he could marry her and make her queen.”
I’m pretty sure that they included the bit about her getting seen bathing. I know for sure that there was a picture of the rooftops of Jerusalem where David was looking down on a roof where Bathsheba was bathing. She just wasn’t shown naked or anything – more like underwater with her head out.
Now, I’m also pretty sure that they didn’t include Bathsheba getting pregnant while Uriah was away, and the baby dying, and all that. (I remember getting surprised by that part of the Bible, because I didn’t realize there was another baby before Solomon.) But they definitely had Uriah getting murdered, and a bunch of other people getting murdered. Lots of pictures of soldiers with swords, including Uriah, and definitely David fighting and killing Goliath. All kinds of pictures.
There was a lot left out (Catholic things, in retrospect), but they sure didn’t leave out historical violence.
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Here it is! I remember this cover! It’s “The Children’s Bible” from Golden Press, 1965. There were reprints.
They consulted Jewish and Christian scholars of various denominations. Big thick book.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-golden-childrens-bible_anonymous_samuel-terrien/248411/item/58950470/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_everything_else_customer_acquisition_16970393167&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=593719077582&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw-e6-BhDmARIsAOxxlxVh_jL9_SPhVoh8vEeTJ4rmNCufXVe4D-SYdCdfGyLnXaUTnUPtvS0aAvDHEALw_wcB#idiq=58950470&edition=55129822
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It was either this one, or another picture Bible that had a different cover, which I also remember from childhood. But I can’t find the other cover online. Pretty sure that one had Noah’s Ark on it, or something like that, with a blue sky.
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Yeah, I don’t know what sect this kid was, but he both thought we shouldn’t read anything but the Bible and that the Bible was this … anodyne thing. I now wonder if he ONLY learned the new testament.
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Sarah, even if he just read the New Testament, how did he avoid the Slaughter of the Innocent and Jesus chasing the moneychangers out of the Temple with a whip?
🙄🙄🙄
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I don’t know. THAT KID WORRIED ME.
He was the same kid, who, having heard older son saying he went to cons with us, decided we were con men and tried to get son to tell him “what cons you run on people” with “the obvious intention of going to the police.” I mean, seriously.
And no, he wasn’t stupid. He ended up in honors.
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Ah, yes. The people who hear you say “medieval” and think you’re talking about “evil.”
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That reminds me of the time a guy in our shire (when we were active; it’s been a while) gave our phone number as a point of contact to the cable company, which listed it on their public information channel. It never occurred to him to ask us if we minded.
Now, the girl who called and told me she was a telepath and did I know anyone who could train her was, um interesting. Though I wish I had told her, “Honey, don’t ever say somthing like that to a total stranger. You have no idea who I am and you could get into real trouble.”
But the one your comment reminded me of called ( they all called when my beloved wasn’t home) and said something like, “Hello. I am looking for people who play role-playing games. I am very interested in role-playing games. Is your or-gan-ni-za-tion involved in role-playing games?”
Now, imagine these words spoken in a completely flat, robotic male voice, with no trace of any sort of emotion. It was creepy.
So I told him the SCA didn’t work off scripts and was not that sort of, “role-playing game,” and he hung up.
I wondered if he was from some tiny Pentacostal church trolling for Satanists. Much less naive than the kid with the bowdlerized Bible, but really..
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And there’s the little thing called the crucifixion.
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Oh my goodness…
:head in hands:
You’ve managed to escape the folks who are violently against showing Christ Crucified, because we serve a living God?
I wish I were so fortunate!
The story goes something like– and imagine this as the entire story just needs some more pictures– Judas turns Jesus over to the Bad Guys, Jesus heals one of their servants, Jesus is taken to the Roman Judge who says he’s innocent but on urging says fine we’ll kill him, skip to the empty tomb.
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I ran into them via folks waxing lyrical about how a crucifix was horrific and gruesome and lingered over the improbable injuries, etc etc….
It didn’t even have the wound in His side. And the arms were tied on. There wasn’t even freaking BLOOD on the feet.
Yeah, thinking about it is very unpleasant. IT’S FREAKING DEATH BY TORTURE.
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At this point, queueing up Kipling’s “The Disciple” is almost mandatory….
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_disciple.htm
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I hate WPDE: that quote was laid out correctly when I typed it….
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Actually…that would make sense.
The NT is relatively easy to clean up, especially if it’s the Protestant edition, and even easier if you are combining “the same stories” such as some of the unified-timeline ones do.
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The Brick Bible actually has a disclaimer somewhere on it pointing out that it is not necessarily a “kid friendly” edition. And while careful about the secular content the kids consumed when they were younger, that certainly didn’t apply to the Bible (or the palmier aspects of Shakespeare for that matter. Teenage boys like Much Ado About Nothing a lot more when they understand that the whole thing is a series of filthy jokes).
But I do know exactly what you mean, I grew up in an area with a lot of fundamentalists with some odd? intense? views of religion, the bible, and what kids should know about sex, even in the context of marriage.
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i must find this
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It’s still in print and available at the big river or other booksellers. I just looked and apparently he has has now done some “kid editions” which I assume tone down the sex and violence, as well as some deep dives on the first 2 books of the Pentateuch.
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Weirdest bowdlerization of the Bible I’ve come across is Veggie Tales doing “King George and the duckie” for the David and Bathsheba story.
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Somehow we missed that one when the kids were in their Veggie Tales phase, which admittedly was before Visher disappointingly decided he’d rather be liked than orthodox.
But that does sound both weird and dreadful.
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Music to go with those Don Rosa Comics:
Written by Tuomas Holopainen of Nightwish fame. Music that made Don cry at the beauty of it.
I have the CD and the Box Set of Scrooge comics.
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As far as the racist stuff, we should be teaching things that make students understand the historical context. Removing every hint of history about race just opens us up to “It’s so horrible right now, we need to burn it all down!”
Half of the objection to stories like “To Kill a Mockingbird” was the portrayal of “the others” as people no different than ourselves, at a time when the race baiters saw their source of income fading away as skin color became less important to the culture.
I read a number of academic opinion pieces lamenting that kids were growing up color blind, oh, horrors! and that’s when any hint of unfiltered racial history was suddenly anathema and must be eliminated “for the children!”
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PRECISELY.
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“Foundational Concepts through Ancient Literature” or “Foundational Documents of Western Culture”
Not that I wouldn’t have avoided anything that sounded like that.
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Yes. We need something easier, since this would start in middle school.
Common core would be perfect ;)
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Flyby c4c.Whoosh!
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Whoosh back!
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”Watch out for that TREE!”
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How many people here remember “George of the Jungle”?
That’s where FM’s line came from.
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Raises paw.
And I got some of the in-jokes, too.
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i remeber. I taught my kids before the live action movie came out. I alsondug the original cartoon opening off youtube. Absolutely couldnt be made today
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Attended tech school in Mississippi for the Air Force. We marched to and from barracks – having to move several thousand people around on foot requires some organization.
Noontime march took us past a reviewing stand (with a bored 2LT) and the local AF Drum and Bugle Corps. I always enjoyed when they would play the George kettledrum riff for us.
In 1971, George was still recent, though just off the air.
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My 8th Grade English teacher encouraged us to write down the titles of every book we read during the school year. We each had a piece of paper in a folder in the filing cabinet in her room.
Just that simple encouragement made me increase my reading to voracious levels. I think I read 89 separate books, not counting re-reads during that year, (re-reads put it well into the100s) while still maintaining a high GPA.
She didn’t turn it into a contest, or make it mandatory. She’d occasionally make a comment about content or titles but didn’t make a big thing about who read what or who didn’t read. Never anything disparaging.
She still taught the books from the reading lists and had to have us do the essays and “literary” stuff but that quiet encouragement probably cemented my enjoyment reading far more than anything else.
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Just encouragement AND HAVING BOOKS AVAILABLE make a huge difference, once the kids are proficient on the basics.
I taught ESL and also in various clubs and organizations from second grade on, I started libraries. This was important because there were no public libraries as we understand them, in Portugal (The public library is more like the library of congress.)
I found JUST having the books available, and letting people explore made a world of difference.
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A mild competition like that motivated me to become my school’s official reading champion in fourth grade. Not that this is a huge deal in itself — it was a tiny rural school, so I only competing against the 27 kids in our combined grade 3-4 classroom — but I read that school’s little library right out of books. (Books they’d let me check out, at least.) They had to make a special exception to let me count a bunch of them twice because there just weren’t any new ones left and I’d started rereading my favorites. The competition tallied pages, not books, because some kids were just barely out of short picture-books and others were on to novels. Can’t remember how long the competition lasted, but I don’t think it was an entire year; maybe half? Anyway, I had over 24,000 pages to my credit…and I’ve never been the same since. :)
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Perhaps this was the Read-a-Thon? I teach the math/science middle school curriculum at a small private school, so I experience it from the outside, so to speak, meaning I don’t know for sure how long the Read-a-Thon has been a thing.
This year the middle school won the enormous prize of a pizza lunch followed by ice cream. The whole school read as though the prize were a king’s ransom. It is a wonderful place to teach while retired from full-time work. The teachers, supported immensely by the parents of the students in this school, have achieved the goal of having students learn to love reading.
My colleague who teaches the English and history part of the curriculum actually follows to some extent what Sarah has outlined, which proves that Sarah’s ideas for promoting a love of reading work in practice. I think I will share with my colleague this blog entry.
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I refused to let my kids enter the rewards for reading program. Instead, I took away their reading privileges and made them work for books.
THINK ABOUT IT. What are you teaching them, when you reward them for reading? It’s all backwards.
Both of them are readers.
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My two younger grandchildren are involved in that; I pledged a nickel a minute. Pizza party for the class, and the chance for the winning class in school to pie the face of their teacher. (The phrasing on the take-home announcement was that they would get ‘to attend a class pizza party’; I asked if they would get to eat any pizza. I was assured they would get to eat.)
Mom (daughter) is tallying minutes. Runs through March 21. I hope to send them a bunch.
Older brother of those two (12) just finished Huckleberry Finn.
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It’s about time I reread Huck and Tom’s books. Both are in Kindle form (listed as unabridged/non-censored) for $0.99 each). Just bought them.
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Mid-70s. Dunno if Read-a-Thon was a thing then, but I’m pretty sure our little competition wasn’t called that. I do remember my younger siblings doing those…
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I’ll leave y’all gals to discuss Jane Austen, while me and the boys ponder the Romans…
Just kiddin’ :D
I agree with our hostess’s post.
Let kids learn to read and enjoy something before you make them rip apart “The Great Works” like a fetal pig in Biology class. Thank God I learned to read before I went to school!
Tie the reading to the common history. Shakespeare is much more interesting if you have some context.
And make history interesting long before making the kids memorize massive lists of names and dates for tests. Plenty of fun action movies based on mythical, Biblical and historical events.
Boys are more attracted to war and warriors. I read the “good parts” of the Bible before I realized the actual intended messages. I read a popular histories, biographies, historical fiction, before encountering the text books. Did 50% of my WW II reading in high school. Read “Pillar of Iron” before any deep historical texts.
And understanding the Roman Empire helps understand the growth and decay of the modern empires. Plus Gladiator is just a kick-ass movie among many others.
:)
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This is hilarious, as I came to Jane Austen in my twenties, but cut my reading teeth as soon as I graduated from comics, on dad’s history books and biographies and memoirs of war. Also Roman Mythology where I could find it.
HOWEVER my reading was much more biased towards war and action. Part of being ALMOST the lone girl in a passel of male cousins. (My cousin-sister — she is a cousin who was raised with us — was the other girl. but at 14 years older than I, she was no longer in the scrum.)
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Eh, Jane and the Roman Empire are by no means incompatible (although I believe it’s one of the less sympathetic Mansfield Park characters who throws shade on someone else for not knowing the Roman Emperors “as low [late] as Severus.”) And unlike Ridley Scott, she probably knew that Marcus Aurelianus had no plans to restore the Empire to a republic-style political form.
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Forget it, Jaglionpress. It’s Hollywood.
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Jane and the Roman Empire is now stuck in my head as a story title. GAH
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OMG. What if Julius Caesar really really liked Austen novels, a la the Prince Regent in real life?
There was a market for Greek and Latin novels, back in ancient times. Mostly Greek ones, but some of the Latin guys did all right. There were probably more than what survived.
And technically, the Greek ones were mostly romance-adventure.
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They are often called the Greek romances, but that’s chivalric romance, not the modern meaning.
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To quote a certain not-yet-canonical writer, THIS. ALL OF THIS.
Though wasn’t the quotation not “little Latin and small Greek” but “small Latin and less Greek”? And you call yourself eidetic. (And now I have to crack open that big Shakespeare book to see if I got it right myself.)
(Okay, I checked. Technically it’s “fmall Latine and leffe Greeke,” with the usual medial-s nonsense.)
This silly digression, of course, only underscoring the point you were making about a common culture. It is so valuable, we can only measure its worth when it is absent.
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Oh. I’m no longer eidetic. I really lost it when my head got hit twice in five years. While it’s good to be able to read a book again not remembering it, it’s also very annoying.
And you are correct. I misremembered the quote. Drat.
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I think I like your version much better.
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Take it up with the author of the tributary verse, Ben Jonson. (Or as it’s rendered in the First Folio, Ben Ionson. Seriously, I’d accuse them all of trolling us if it didn’t violate causality.)
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Just after John Ringo’s “Road To Damascus” came out, I commented in Ringo’s Tavern (on Baen’s Bar) that the title “gave the plot away”.
It was “interesting” that very few people had heard about “A Road To Damascus experience”. 😒
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I was watching an episode of Jeopardy at a relatives house a few years ago. None of the contestants got a single correct question in a Biblical category. ???
We aren’t taking hardcore trivia, but the basic pre-school Sunday School answers. Simple bits of info that might fill a single piece of paper in large font. Common cultural references like Noah, Moses or Lot.
But they maxed out on the Modern French Marxist Lesbian Literature category.
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Yeah, but that Bible Quiz gameshow that they had for a few years? That was super-competitive.
It was also kinda harsh if you weren’t familiar with the specific translation that was used for the quiz, although many teams seem to have overcome that.
(The judges were fair about people giving answers that fit a different translation, but it was just hard to get into the right mental frame without the right mental triggers.)
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Sigh.
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My senior year in college I needed a simple course to complement my Senior project and some complicated courses. Thus I threw in “American literature of the 18th and 19th century”. I was the ONLY senior in the class, most folks took this to fulfill requirements freshman/sophmore year while struggling with Calculus and Physics/Chemistry. We read Billy Budd there is a scene where our protagonist is hung up on the mast with his arms splayed out and says (paraphrase) “Captain forgive them for they know not what they do. Teacher had us read the passage OUT loud and then was trying to get us to discuss. Not ONE person of the other 19 in the class saw any symbolism in it. I suspect I was rolling my eyes hard and was avoiding answering as the class often devolved to a discussion between myself and the professor but she gave me a nod and I noted that Billy Budd was being shown as a Christ figure with what I felt were seriously heavy handed methods. The Prof was so exaspertated she said “Apparently not heavy handed enough for most in the class”. Trying to tackle 19th/18th century literature without some basic knowledge of Christianity is like trying to handle E&M Physics without decent calculus and maybe 5th grade arithmetic. This was 1983 the kind of issues my daughters saw in high school in the 2000’s and 2010’s were orders of magnitude worse, even their teachers often missed subtle allusions to biblical sources.
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I took freshman physics my senior year. I had originally been a bio major and taken chemistry. Then I switched to math and realized I had to take physics. So I was taking the physics designed to be taught side by side with calculus, after completing the whole calculus sequence and something like eight courses past that, which made it a lot easier.
I first read the entire Narnia series in my teens. Partway into The Last Battle I figured out that it was a Christian allegory.
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Chemistry was easy for me. Physics OTOH I put off until my last term. In fact it was my last required class. By then Physics that had terrified me, didn’t.
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I think the issue in my classmates in that class not understanding was threefold
All that saved me was I had spent 4 years at a hippie dippie private high school and had decent self esteem and had done this kind of thing before. And I had a strong knowledge of Biblical texts having briefly had an interest in being a pastor (which disappeared when I realized a large portion of their job was dealing with people, not a calling for an intense introvert) .
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Literature isn’t pulp and isn’t genre?
Pull the other leg. It has bells on it.
Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Walter Scott, and Mark Twain all created literature. At least they were considered to have when I was in school through college in the 1970s.
What they all have in common is they wrote serial, genre fiction in newspapers. Pulp fiction. For pay. By selling entertaining stories. Dumas even tailored his fiction to generate the greatest amount of column inches (since he got paid by the column inch) with the fewest words. (Lots of one to four word paragraphs.)
Literary types who claim literature isn’t made up of genre trash have their heads so far up their posterior orifices they need a glass navel to see where they are going. Or maybe that’s why the have excluded the Western Canon from the realm of literature. It contradicts their worldview.
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Agreed.
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A Christmas Carroll not withstanding, Dickens was a pulp writer whose schtick was Marxist political polemic fanfic.
Along the lines of writer who won the Nobel for the Wide Sargasso Sea…which was Marxist deconstruction of Brontes Jane Eyre, as well as hitting on colonialism, feminist hatred of men and women and so on.
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For a writer with a socialistic bent (not sure how established the Marxist view is as first volume of Das Capital isn’t published in German until 1867) Mr Dickens was quite happy to have his texts serialized in the magazines of the day and take money from speaking engagements. He lived very well indeed.
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It’s interesting that in the Christmas Carol, Scrooge was in favor of the government’s Poor Houses and wasn’t interested in helping the poor with his own money.
Government helping the poor is a very Socialist theme (IMO) but using your own money to help the poor is more religious than Socialist.
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Er… every socialist and communist I’ve ever known is not only okay with getting paid but usually wants money more than non-communists or socialists. EVERY ONE.
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Indeed they are so blind (by their own choice) to the nature of human self preservation and greed that they don’t see it. Socialism’s/Communism’s inability to see built in human nature is a large part of what dooms them to always fail horribly. I have always argued that if the early saints of the Christian faith in the time of Acts of the Apostles who were filled with the Holy Spirit couldn’t overcome base human nature other than briefly ain’t no one making it work. But to believe that you have to accept that Acts is at least semi-historical and not some pretty fairy tale as most liberal scholars view it.
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“Socialism’s/Communism’s inability to see built in human nature is a large part of what dooms them to always fail horribly.”
It’s inbuilt in the philosophy, which harps on the “perfectibility” of humans; if it’s not flawed in a particular way it can’t be “perfected” by their methods. (Actually, it can’t be “perfected” at all; “New Soviet Man” was a chimera, but a perfect expression of the fallacy.)
Bad assumptions/premises always lead to bad results.
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Bob C. I think we are dancing around the same point. One of the fundamental points of the Judeao- christian bible and tradition is the nature of the Fall and the fact that humanity is tainted by it (There are major disagreements on precisely the continuing source of that other than taking things we shouldn’t have, but hey that dissension may be part of the Fall itself :-) ).
But whether you believe in the Fall or not mankind’s observable nature shows the problem. And the Soviet/Socialist experiment to fix it has failed more epically than the Snow White “live Action” remake. And Like Disney inc they just spin the failure…
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Agreed. My intent was only to expand a bit on your comments. And FWIW I believe that stories of the Fall, whether taken literally or not, simply put human nature in a clear context as I believe they were intended to do.
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My main reason for not wanting the last 100 years. We need to get past the infusion of Marxism into everything enough to see it with clear eyes. Sure, people who want to pursue the study, should. But we shouldn’t push it on school children.
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Indeed trying to explain the immense Charlie Foxtrot that walks astride the end of the 19th century and into the 20th and 21st centuries is probably NOT a way to teach young children but only to confuse and terrorize them. Much of it is nightmare made real.
Teach them to read (and perhaps enjoy it), be able to have a natural feel for numbers and complexity of systems and most of all teach them how to reason from basic principles. Then we can use the failings of the 20th century and the Crazy years as an examples in a more advanced course for High School or later, perhaps History and Moral Philosophy :-) .
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Thinking ofmthe parables, we had the parallel of the Pharisee and the publican as a Sunday School lessons, presented by someone of ambiguous gender (“Jan”) who appeared to have had any trace of a sense of humor surgically removed. I love that parable because it’s Jesus displaying humor; sarcastic humor maybe, but humor. The Pharisee is funny, even if you’re wincing because you just recognized a bit of yourself in his self-congratulatory prayer.
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The “eye of the needle” parable is just kind of stern when taught in a vacuum. If it is true that the “eye of the needle” was a nickname for a small side entrance into Jerusalem (with I hope and assume smaller entry fees than the main gates), which you could only get a camel through by completely unloading the animal, herding/leading it through (they are not considered cooperative beasts at the best of times), and then dragging its cargo through the passage and reloading the camel…then the parable becomes hilarious. And it’s true either way.
Or Dives trying to get out of Gehenna so he can warn his brothers…so weaselly, so amusing.
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Actually I saw Dives as displaying a trace of decency even in hell…”It’s too late for me, but–“
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In Aramaic, there’s “gamla” meaning both camel and rope, and in Greek there’s “kamelos” for camel and “kamilos” for rope. And apparently in Egypt, Greek speakers just called a thick ship cable a “kamelos”, also using the same word for camel and rope. (St. Cyril of Alexandria talked about it.)
It occurs to me that, since Jesus spent some toddler days in Egypt, there’s no reason He wouldn’t have used some of His vocabulary from childhood if he was talking to Aramaic/Greek-speakers. (I mean, obviously I would argue that He was God and knew all vocabulary from everywhere too; but it’s more artistically fitting, that way.)
Either way, it’s still a funny image.
The odd thing is that “in the Talmud (BT 6, 601, 1. 16) we read that the people of Puimbedita deemed themselves so clever that they could put an elephant through a needle’s eye….” Which is a really weird cultural/quote crossover.
And there’s no gate called “the eye of the needle”. That’s an urban legend/factoid.
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There’s what the body would have recourse to. Language is body and mind. I almost wrote body, soul and divinity. Eh.
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And Kipling captured that pretty well.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dives.htm
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Definitely in the same spirit as the Founding Fathers’ idea that mankind is going to do bad/selfish things regardless, and the trick is to take that into account.
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Yep. I caught myself thinking like that during a service manynyears ago and…well, “mortified,” is as good as word for it as any.
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Epiphanies come in many forms, but they come to all of us at times.🤔
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Then you get those who thank God that they are not as other men, smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, or even as this Pharisee, and you have to roll your eyes because at least the Pharisee was not actually committing the sins he was so proud he was not committing.
And you try to avoid them because they are an occasion of sin.
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As a teenager I read Jane Eyre. I’m the sort of person who when I read a book which has explanatory endnotes will flip to the back of the book to read the comment before returning to the text, and one of the things I found fascinating was how many of the endnotes referenced Biblical stories, with the inherent assumption that enough of the readers wouldn’t ‘get’ the references without assistance.
As might have been stated above, the ‘old’ texts don’t exist in a vacuum. They all built upon the foundations of the ‘older’ texts that were current knowledge in their times.
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Which is why this is one of my favorite Kipling poems.
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/when_omer_smote.html
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I’ve decided recently that if you have a King James Bible and the complete works of Kipling you’ve got 90% if what you really need to know in life covered.
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Seriously, use Kipling as an English poetry base, with Gilbert and Sullivan.
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Curiously, I’m running a tabletop roleplaying campaign set about 8 years from now, in a future where technology is gradually ceasing to function and the supernatural is taking its place, somewhat as in Stirling’s Emberverse but not as fast. And one of the NPCs I’ve created is a Pentecostal pastor who has persuaded several churches to come together to fund an inexpensive private school, using his gift of the spirit (enhanced charisma, communication with spirits, and visions of the near future). He’s named it the Lamb School, which is (a) a reference to Christ, (b) a reference to the lost sheep who need to be saved, and (c) perhaps an allusion to Kipling’s poem about “gentleman rankers” (“We’re poor little lambs who have gone astray”)—assuming he’s read it, but it’s accessible enough so that a man who’s not “literary” might know it and like it, maybe?
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” I still have no idea what it would be called.”
Literary Foundations of Western Civilization?
Make it a prerequisite for History and Moral Philosophy.
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I see you and I are fully on the “Starship Troopers” might be the best alternative at this point?
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I think “service for citizenship” is not necessarily an unreasonable idea.
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Anything that instills a functioning moral compass. That’s what’s at the heart of all or nearly all our ills at this stage. Too many people with weak, aberrant, alien, or absent moral compasses.
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One problem I see is, since RAH had public service qualifying one for full citizenship, that GS schedule guy who was in charge of the Independent Bureau of Graft and Nepotism who refused to leave his office (in the dedicated building his kingdom solely occupied) when so ordered, ordering pizzas delivered for sustenance, would qualify.
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Oops, oopsie, typo – I completely inadvertently misspelled the “Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service”.
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I would include Edward Bulwer Lytton. He was a hugely popular author in the early 19th century and, I discovered, a lot of phrases are used as cultural touch stones as you described. It was a dark and stormy night being the one that most people recognize.
I read a couple of his novels and his descriptions are distinct and evoke a deep emotional and visceral feeling. I suspect this is why the first gendrstion of lit professors and critics tore him apart. He could reach people at the gut level, not as an intellectual. Though he knew how to do that as well.
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If Only…LOL… Stopping the egalitarian tendencies of humans will never stop. If we could do anything, teaching the next generation how to think, instead of what to think in all aspects of education should be our prime focus. Alas teaching has become an industry and is no longer a vocation, although many teachers do care and try, they do so at great risk. From their lesser paycheck peers, unions, and administrations that want mediocrity instead of excellence. Mediocrity is easier to control than excellence, that works for teachers as well as the students they teach. Some of us will never make excellence, that doesn’t mean we should give up on that goal, the competition and failure is what brings excellence in the end. Everyone has that grand story they are trying to tell, they spit out lesser stories until they learn how to write that epic, be that story the written word, or their job or life.
The bible is also five thousand years of recorded human history, even if it is badly documented and from oral tradition.
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“I still have no idea what it would be called.”
Mental Furniture
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Uncle Remus is the only real archive we have of authentic “african american” culture–the stories told by people of african descent who were brought to the US in various ways. I think it’s a vital part of our cultural heritage, and should not be dismissed as “racist”.
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If you look, the progressives screams of “racism” erase black people. The screams of “Misogyny” erase women. It’s like that all the way down. Almost like there’s no truth in them.
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Notes the disappearance of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and the Indian Lady by (un)popular demand.
Almost? Nah.
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I also think they get a lot of criticism for being written in dialect, which far from being racist was actually because Harris was trying to preserve stories that came down in *oral* not written tradition and wanting to write them as best he could in such a way as to reproduce how he *heard* them told. I feel like he is unjustly maligned for doing so much to make sure these stories weren’t lost, nor the voices of the people telling them. I finally found a reprint recently of the illustrated edition that I grew up with and loved. It never occured to me what color he was (I mean, I assume grey) I just wanted to be smart and tricksy like Br’er Rabbit.
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“Unjustly malign” is what they do. All the time. And (I’m 100% sure) with malice aforethought. They never have anyone’s interest but their own in mind, and are the embodiment of everything they accuse others of, from malicious racism (“I’ll have those n*****s voting Democrat for 200 years!”) to Nazism, Nazis and Communists being merely two sides of a single defective coin.
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…one of us would quote the three musketeers, to which the other would answer with a line from Hercule Poirot…
“Shaka, when the walls fell”
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
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TNG, when it occasionally was worth watching.
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I watched a few seasons before embarking on a 4 year trip through Earlybird MSEE fun. (Classes ran 07:00 to 09:00, thence to work. The more strenuous classes made for a 23:00 bedtime. Whee.)
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Yep. It’s how we talked. We thought it was normal.
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My 5 siblings and I were like that too.
About a year after we started dating my now Dear Husband remarked, “Being around your family is like being in a pod of alien beings who don’t always speak normal English. I understand all the words but I have no idea what any of you are talking about.”
Our children do the same thing, to the confusion of their spouses.
I didn’t actually know how strange it was until one day I was in a store and a family with 2 teen boys and a teen girl were trading quips back and forth about whether or not the sister should be allowed to buy pomegranates or what might happen to her if she ate some. I got the references, but because they were different than the ones my family would have used, it was a sudden insight into how we sound to other people.
It was kind of shocking to see how we must sound to everyone else.
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Oh, yeah. The boys do that too. They ALSO do skits at the drop of a hat. Much to their spouses amusement.
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It isn’t?
Bugger.
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Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
I’ll be back.
Well, do ya, punk?
You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this game.
This time fer sure!
——
I wonder if we are already on our way to the alien culture in that TNG episode.
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our version of Cockney
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literature
languages
add
rhetoric!
because this was an utter bloodbath on camera:
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1806087719174492269
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looks like we are reinventing the classical education
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Missed it by that much!
And now you know– and knowing is half the battle!
I love you! — I know.
As you wish.
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“You use that word a lot. I do not believe it means what you think it means.”
“Have fun storming da castle!”
The Princess Bride has contributed to the culture, while Avatar has not.
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Absolutely, but it’s GEEK culture. Normal people would look at us like we were crazy.
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Would?
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DO
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“Like”?
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Let’s not be bickering and arguing over who killed who. This is supposed to be a happy occasion!
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Inconceivable. ;)
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“I am the dread pirate Roberts and I am hear for your soul” Andre T G
Guards look at each other and run away.
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(raises eyebrow) Get in line. My ex and her minions are still trying to collect.
(grin)
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“Let the Wookie win.”
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I let him go.
Nuke ’em from orbit.
Use the Force, Luke.
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A newt? I GOT BETTER!
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I shall taunt you once more
‘E’s pining for the fjords
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If he weren’t wired to the perch, he’d be pushing up daisies.
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The Fish Slapping Dance
“I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them f*king each other over for a goddamn percentage.”
“They mostly come at night. Mostly.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
“My advice is to start drinking heavily.” “You should listen to him, he’s pre-med!”
“This…is my BOOM-STICK!!“
“Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”
“What knockers!” “Vhy, sank you, Doktor.”
“Frau Blucher.” (Wheee-hee-heee-heee!)
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Quibble.
Norse myth is not foundation, Norse legend is maybe informative abotu foundation for US strain of western.
The murderous feud stories are a little informative about a culture, that is similar to a culture historically relevant to how the English developed. IE, the sagas about human feuds with no magic or elves.
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“Genre that survives long enough becomes literature….”
And you summed it up right there. The myopic dodos who think that the “literary” genre is what will pass the test of time are so deluded it’s laughable. I remember long ago reading one review of a literary genius™ that praised the profound revelation at the end of said story when the main character had a dream where he heard the word Toyota in a dream and thought it explained all of life, the universe, and everything.
I certainly agree with you on both reading the bible and, in particular, the King James Version. Why the KJV? Because it was written by poets. I’ve read the Jerusalem Bible and the Orthodox Study Bible, and, despite their claims to better accuracy, I find their refusal to use perfectly good poetic phrasings from the KJV annoying. Yes, I could do without the thees and thous, but unless it’s a rare mistranslation, leave the pithier phrasing in. Don’t kid yourself that it is a more accurate translation to say, “Take away the stone,” vs. “Roll away the stone,” in Lazarus’ raising. There’s no conceivable theological distinction between those two translations, but the latter is what is referenced in literature and song.
As to your lament about universal (at least in our culture) references being lost, all I can say is I definitely share your lamentations.
Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
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I have no opinion on whether God would prefer that English speakers use the KJV or Geneva or RSV or whatever translation. But I like the KJV because it and Shakespeare serve as markers for the beginning of modern English. We can read Shakespeare or the KJV without great difficulty. The same cannot be said of Chaucer, who wrote only a couple of centuries earlier.
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I’m convinced that Jesus taught in parables because parables are stories and their point is not muddled by a poor translation.
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On the subject of translations, I argue any teaching of a translation should also include all the other possible ways key phrases could have been translated or lost in translation.
The King James version is evocative prose, but one does need to appreciate the nuances of the different words that were translated into ‘love’ to fully appreciate the dry humor of the entire ‘Do you love me?’ exchange.
There are many weird and interesting allusions that get lost when something is only translated. And if they’re going to be locked in class with the book, they’ve earned the right, at least, to be let in on the joke.
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A cynical definition of “literature” is “fiction that is not enjoyable to read”.
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If you cut your literature curriculum off at 100 years ago as you propose, you’d be excluding Steinbeck, who is as digested as he’s ever going to be, and if finding references to his work all over Warner Brothers cartoons doesn’t establish him as a cultural touchstone then I don’t know what could.
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Indeed I am. BECAUSE I’m not cutting off the literature curriculum.
Go back and read.
You can continue the studies. THIS is just all I’d impose on people who aren’t particularly interested in literature.
(Rolls eyes.) It’s not a literature curriculum. It’s a “Common culture” curriculum.
As for Steinbeck, I’ve read worse communist propaganda.
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I understood your point just fine, but you seem to have missed mine. In a curriculum targeted at understanding American common culture, understanding early American socialism is every bit as important as understanding the Enlightenment. I’ve seen enough of your blog to know that you know this already, even though we both wish it were otherwise. So either you’ve temporarily forgotten this, or the curriculum you’ve laid out is really meant to reshape culture according to your ideals rather than to help people understand it for what it is, in which case you can admit that and our only remaining disagreements will be over minutia. I named Steinbeck not because I’m any particular fan of his, but because he was an extremely influential apologist for a movement that has shaped our culture for better or for worse (mostly worse), and also because he’s a clear counterexample to your claim that nothing in the past century has been adequately digested.
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Early American socialism is super dooper to study in history.
NOT in the basic reading, required of everyone. Adequately digested my sore patootie. We’re still submerged in it.
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History teaches what people did. Literature teaches how they thought. When you learn the early history of American socialism in school, you’ll learn about the Knights of Labor and their succession by the AFL, the New Deal, and America’s military alliance with the USSR, and if you’re an eager student at a good school you might remember Eugene Debs’ name. If you read history and not literature, you’ll probably come away with the impression that the friendship between FDR and Stalin was a temporal political convenience, rather than that they were two peas in a pod. Only by reading actual socialist writers are you going to understand why any of this history still matters today, and be able to notice things like the fact that there’s barely any daylight between the ideologies of JD Vance and Francis Bellamy. For understanding contemporary culture, that strikes me as being about as valuable as reading Jefferson, and considerable more valuable than Homer.
We’re still submerged in the impact of it, which is exactly why it belongs in your curriculum. We’re likewise submerged in the impact of the Thirty Years War but I don’t think you’d call that “undigested”.
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No, it doesn’t.
Maybe it’s supposed to, but it’s just a bludgeon to try to control how they think, these days.
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Also, no. I’m trying to come up with essentials that people who aren’t passionately interested can go through in two or three years.
Honestly before Steinbeck, I’d include all of Louis L’Amour.
Obviously this is stupid. We can’t study everyone. No one can. And then the teachers pick the horrors they like, and here we are.
I said foundational texts. I MEAN foundational texts.
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Have some kind of a test like “Ok, exactly how much bang for the buck does this get for showing culture-wide touch stones?”
Even though it’s still being quoted 30 years later, “Behold: The Power of Cheese” and “Where’s the beef?” are probably not solid enough.
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Is your dog getting enough cheese?
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Hey, you feed the dog cheese, you get to clean it up. :-D
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It’s like people think “Captive audience. MUST inflict everything I love.”
If I were doing that, Heinlein, Pratchett, Enid Blyton, Rex Stout (Btw, Dorothy, initially it was supposed to be an amoral protagonist. He couldn’t keep it up, when it turned into a series, so it gets better. That first book is odd.) Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, etc. etc. etc.
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Well, nothing to keep me from trying again.
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It shocked me when I listened to the early radio plays. The tone they used made it obvious they thought it was horror….
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Mind you, it’s hard boiled, so the detective is not simon pure ever, but still.
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Both these things are true. What this comment tells me is that you’ve been traumatized by the all-too-typical experience of having reading picked out for you by teachers who demand agreement with whatever perspective they’re handing you and mark you down if you write critically of it, and you never got past it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Reading old books (“old” here being broadly construed as roughly “dropped off the bestseller list long before the reader was an adult”) becomes an entirely different experience once you learn to approach them like you’re studying an accident report rather than imbibing from a font of wisdom.
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Hon?
There’s nothing in your comments thus far that would make me care what your “insights” are; you can’t even make a decent case and stay on topic in a response to Sarah, much less the next couple.
The voices in your head are not a reliable source of insight.
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Ah, actually, in US history classes we back to the Utopian Socialists, and the Shakers and Amana Colonies for socialism and religious communism in the United States. Some teachers go farther, to the Separatists of Plymouth Colony and how communism failed for them.
None of which have to do with the larger sweep of Western Civilization and what is needed to give people a cultural foundation that allows them to build out into other areas.
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If he’s that much of a cultural touchstone then Of Mice and Men will survive another 12 years.
There are a bunch of TV shows referenced in in WB cartoons, too. That’s because it’s what was popular at the time.
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The reason he’s all over looney tunes is because Warner Bros was making movies of his works at the time. And because Lon Chaney Jr was a great Lenny.
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Oh, so it’s like when there’s there’s easter eggs for other properties in a modern movie!
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/rapunzel-cameo-in-frozen-surprises-the-director-of-tangled-91634.html
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“Tribal lays” – and nary a mention of Rudyard. Was that deliberate?
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no. Rudyard is essential for Britishers.
Again, I was limiting myself to “what justifies getting kids to read it.” I LOVE Kipling, obviously, but I’m a word nerd.
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Hmm. I must disagree. One of my most tattered HARDBACKS is “The Jungle Book” (which also has “Rikki Tikki Tavi” in it). Read for pleasure, but pushed me into more “serious” works.
As for the poetry – NOT my “thing” in general – much of it is about the basics of maintaining a flourishing civilization. “The Sons of Martha,” “Tommy,” etc.
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okay, UNDERSTAND I’m not dissing Kipling. Older son has adored Kipling since he was 3.
No, the problem is that I’m trying to keep this to the extreme basic, that which we can demand of everyone, even people who never open another book in their lives.
So, it should be highly targeted.
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Sarah, I would have to say that Rudyard is essential for the English speakers, the Anglosphere. I think that’s why most of the writers I like (Pournelle, Drake, Stirling, etc.) use his poetry so much. It’s part of the English speaking culture.
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Reminds me of an argument I got into some years back on the subject of political philosophy. The other person had cited some left-wing web pages. I responded with Aristotle’s “Politics”, Cicero’s “On the Commonwealth”, some observations on the historical setting and outcomes of both. (Cicero’s “ideal mixed government–the Roman Republic–which he thought would break the cycle of Aristotle’s inevitable decline to bad forms, was about to decline into empire).
His rejoinder was “thanks for the propaganda.”
Well, one of us had familiarity with foundational works of Western civilization. ;)
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I think it’s deliberate that government schools keep Aristotle‘a “Politics” as far away from students as humanly possible.
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THIS!!! ALL OF THIS!!! I nearly fainted to see public high school reading lists including Woke crud from 2017 as “school reading.” What?! No, seriously, what?!?! How do you expect them to acclimate to the wider culture by reading THAT, of all things, for school?!
Of course, they don’t want anyone to have the mental furniture or framework to acclimate to the wider culture. They cannot control anyone if that happens. Keep the kids in modern/post-modern muck, make them read stuff that bores them to tears while telling them they should love it (no one said I had to love Animal Farm, just that it was important to read it, and I agree even though I wanted to pitch it straight through the wall).
If you cannot connect with your civilization’s canon tomes and touchstones, then all you have left is your local subgroup or local culture. Which leaves you isolated and easier to herd (manipulate) than you might otherwise be if you had a wider mansion between your ears. Which is exactly the desired result, I think.
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Exactly. Devolve the culture to groups of warring tribes and you can steer the ones you choose wherever you want; cultural genocide (cultucide? Sounds like a Great Old One…) by design.
Divide and conquer (or divide and rule) isn’t a cliche for nothing.
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My college professor explained that Milton decided he was going to write the great epic poem of the English language. And he did. That’s how we got ‘Paradise Lost’, which – afaik – is the only significant epic poem in English.
It has a plot, and anyone who claims it’s not a literary work is nuts.
And Word Press keeps deleting my comments regarding James Fenimoore Cooper, so I shall end this here for now.
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WordPress does what?
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Likely the shift-backspace-deletes-paragraph “feature”. I too have written far, far more words today than appear in these philosophies…
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Oh, don’t get me started on that “feature.”
Each post is taking twice as long to write, and sometimes when I control Z it either doesn’t come back or brings back an old typo. ARGH.
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Whoever came up with that “Feature?” killing is too good for him. He should be flogged, hanged, chopped into little pieces and forced to read Das Kapital.
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Cue Hannover Fiste.
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I made multiple attempts to write some additional text talking about Cooper. On each occasion, when I hit backspace to delete a typo, everything past the word ‘nuts’ was deleted.
I’ll add it in a different post when I’m able to access the site from a computer instead of my phone.
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Yeah. I HATE that feature.
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Would Spenser’s The Faerie Queen count?
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Dunno. Not really familiar with it, aside from the title. I know ‘Paradise Lost’ is considered *the* English Language epic, but I’m not familiar with other possible candidates for the title of English epic poem.
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Surely The Ballad of Eskimo Nell…?😃😃😃
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The Faerie Queene might be a contender, but I think your professor was right. At least I could finish Paradise Lost. (The Faerie Queene was the work that finished convincing me C.S. Lewis was not a good guide for recommended books in my case. He loved Spenser and I couldn’t get through the first section).
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I HATE The Faerie Queene. With a passion.
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What?1? Belphebe! The Blatant Beast! Harold Shea!
Ummm….wait…
Oops. Never mind.
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Are you citing The Compleat Enchanter?
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Yep.😎
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When I took the Introduction to the Ancient Near East course in college, one of the things they discussed was “canonical” literature, that is the literature that forms(or at least describes) a foundational basis for a culture. Thus, you could call your literature course something like “The Canon of the West.”
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The Potter books provided a common touch-stone you could figure folks had heard of, even if they haven’t read the books/seen the movies.
Thus the attempt to destroy them, and the really stupid hot-takes.
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I think what a lot of it is (apart from New England snobbery that America has always had) is simply the envy of the incompetent. “That can’t be any good, it’s popular,” is a confession that one thinks that one cannot create something that is popular. And that envy turns to contempt. And leads to idiotic beliefs like “talented people are never recognized in their own time” and therefore “if I’m a failure, that means I’m a genius”.
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Far, far more untalented people never get any recognition — and they don’t deserve any. So, if the hoi polloi fail to recognize your genius, it’s more likely because you wrote worthless crap than because ‘my genius was beyond their grasp’.
90% of everything is crap, after all. :-P
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Yes, but that doesn’t apply to them. Obviously.
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Why we need common touchstones:
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Ok… and Good Grief! I really appreciate all the discussion and the initial post/ideas presented by our delightful host – but! As an average schmuck I was lucky enough to be in a family of “readers”. Dad devoured books on everything/anything, Mom read ‘popular’ stuff, Sister was into a lot of fiction and mystery writing. Me, I was the kid who got together with his neighborhood buddies to swap and read comics was the one actually reading the dialog and often had to explain the ‘pictures’ to the less inclined. I then devoured all the SF I could find. Even today I have three library cards, a Kindle, and nook that keep me busy – Barnes and Nobel is just four blocks away from the house.
Anyway, I read a lot of various things history, biographies, SF, etc. and still do today. One segment I enjoyed (still do) was the “police procedural” and even true crime books. Joseph Wambaugh was a huge hit with me. I’ll not dismiss any of the above ideas or thinking – heavens, no! I’m just an example of the reader in the street.
One thing about the ‘cop stories’ is having been working in the criminal justice system for many years I can speak the lingo. Such as: 10-8, 10-15,10-6,10-19 in five. To me, that was a complete sentence. So, my point –
All of the foundation reading being discussed is great and I fully agree however, I would love to spread and few unexpected new/old, current/historic and popular “trash” books in there too just to keep it interesting and maybe spark something sort of like Joseph Wambaugh did for me. In addition – the huge number of independents now putting out books also give me additional ways to enjoy the pleasure of reading and ‘bait’ to get others to read something else one day.
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The only problem I have reading about stuff I know is when the author writes something so totally wrong it kicks me right out of my “ludic” read mode.
Unfortunately there is not a “throw this ebook off the train” button on the Kindle interface, so it subsequently takes a short menu quest to make the offending book go away.
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of course. The whole point of a basic foundation is that you build on it.
Look, the times we live in, people who like a genre or subgenre can have a youtube channel talking aobut it, and be entertaining and funny, and PEOPLE WILL LEARN.
My kids follow channels on history and historical cooking, and drawing and heaven only knows what all.
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Let’s just say dracihnfel is a national treasure
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I thought it was hilarious on that podcast from the Naval Institute or whatever, to see a bunch of crusty old Annapolis naval guys fanboying Drachinfel, in a sort of old guy way.
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This could actually be a TV show.
“I UNDERSTOOD THAT REFERENCE!”
And then actually freaking teach the context and the jokes and stuff.
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The television equivalent of footnotes in books?
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Basically, yes.
Really good footnotes.
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Objection: There are certain books younger than that which deserve to be included. Jack Shaefer’s Shane, for example. It was published in 1949, but it is arguably the purest distillation of the American western myth that there is.
Granted, “it must be in the public domain” seems like a good rule, if only to prevent trendy things from being forced into curricula.
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No. Just no. Not because there aren’t worthy books, but because I’m just trying to have the “basics” be mandatory.
Imposing a curriculum is a taking of sorts. And we should take as little as possible, be it time or money, from the individual.
People would be free to continue, and in the free informational economy more specialized studies would be easy.
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Fair.
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I’d argue that anything not in the public domain cannot possibly be a part of the cultural canon.
Because intellectual property rights to a cultural foundational block is just– silly.
That would be proof that the copyright system is completely perverted from the original purpose, and in fact has inverted so that it actively harms the cultural creation and myth-building which it was invented to defend.
:turns to look at the 4th wall:
And that can’t possibly be the case, could it?
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If we knock copyright terms back to twenty-eight years, then I’m game. Because, for example, it’s silly to say that The Godfather is not part of the American cultural canon. Or, as Sarah herself used as an example, Gone With The Wind.
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Mainstream popular singers can talk about “A pinch from a man called Mr. Spock” and not be even a little obscure.
(And that was when I was a kid!)
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Superman and Green Lantern ain’t got
Nothin’ on me…
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Who’s getting rich off Elvis’s songs? Not Elvis, that’s for sure. Walt Disney isn’t getting a nickel from Mickey Mouse these days.
Copyright should expire shortly after the artist does. Let the family milk the property for a few years, but that’s it.
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Makes it too hard to make money off of the work– “I just invented this thing, but I’m already past the average age of death” is a cruddy reason to die in poverty as nobody will buy it.
Going closer to other intellectual property would simplify things, and avoid manipulation for emotional reasons.
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How about “25 years or 5 years after the artist’s death, which ever comes first”. Gives the artist 25 years to capitalize on the book, song, poem, whatever, and gives the family 5 years if the artist dies before 20 years after the copyright date. And copyright does not follow purchaser, so there’s no advantage for a publisher to get extended copyright (which I believe is the reason for our current “One eon after the heat death of the universe”.)
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I favor the KISS theory, and 20 or 25 seems very reasonable in the modern time/with the modern ease of profiting from a story.
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:points at George Lucas:
The ability of one person to own the work of a group is not super awesome, and “it depends on who is doing it” is so easy to corrupt, that a flat number of years seems to be the least abusable.
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“Work for hire” situations are kind of unavoidable, but yes, the scope of them probably needs to be scaled down.
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I prefer not to get lifespan of the author involved, due to pseudonymous works and such. Establishing that something written under a pen name was was actually by X individual is a cast iron bitch to document. There are a few western pulp authors who, as far as anyone can tell, wrote under their own names, but their dates of birth and death are undocumented, and the names are not unique enough to narrow it down. T.W. Ford, as an example, has some known pseudonyms connected to that main name, but nobody seems entirely sure if he was Thomas William Ford, a freelance writer, born in New York on 22-Feb-1904, or not. And since he stopped publishing in the 1950s, anyone who would have been likely to know is also dead.
Now, with a hard limit of 25 years, I have less objection, but still, things should be as clear and easy as possible.
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OK, that makes sense. So a hard limit of 25 years from copyright date it is.
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It’s barely possible that one could trace financial records from checks to writers (at banks or the magazine companies), but of course most records of that sort were probably shredded a long time ago.
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In the timeframe I’m talking about, even that would be dicey. Robert Heinlein had at least one pen name that was entirely unconnected to him, to include the cashing of checks. I don’t know how he did it, but his letters make it clear that, for a few of his worst stories, he wanted to make sure editors couldn’t connect them to him.
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So, pen names have a flat copyright. Now that’s too long, but it’s flat. It’s 90 years.
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Everything is too long right now.
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I remember a comment by Robert Ludlum about that. When he wrote “The Road to Gandolfo” his [publisher?] came to his house to read it. After a couple of hours, marked by hoots of laughter, he came out and had one thing to say, “Not under your name, we won’t!”. If you’ve read it you know why: It’s very good, but definitely not his usual type, and the publisher didn’t want to dilute Ludlum’s “style”.
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I seriously disliked that book, actually.
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No. Look, when you start publishing no one knows you. I’m JUST now at the point of making regular money from the stuff I wrote 30 years ago.
NO.
This is when we’re starting to need it.
Ten years after the author’s death. This gives the kids who suffered through it (TRUST ME) time to reap a little bit, but saves them from becoming professional descendants.
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(glances meaningfully at the gravestone of James Thurber)
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Maybe three levels:
Journey to the Western, Tricks, and then various focus-studies.
Because CS Lewis and Chesterton and such have some really good “how to recognize these tricks” type things…and they’re readable.
https://www.c-s-lewis.com/clear-thinking/2012/03/22/bulverism/
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I can add nothing of substance, so I shall Meme
https://i.imgflip.com/9o3cy8.jpg
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Perhaps a writer should be considered as an artist painting with words. Using just the right words to create a vivid image to the reader, and like Japanese/Chinese art, achieving it in the equivalent of a few graceful brush strokes.
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hehe he. When I was writing that post, I found myself wondering what her novels would look like in a late roman empire setting, and decided I was better offshoving that into the plot bunny hutch.
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Jane would get herself martyred, no doubt. But in a really creative Early Christian way.
I expect she’d write some really devastating satirical thing….
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Oh, you said “late Roman.” I guess it would depend on how late.
I mean, if it was really late, you’d be martyred by Islam. Earlier, you have a wide choice of pagan barbarians, and there’s always Arians and some others.
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LOL. I was just thinking of Jane Benet and the Benet girls invent war table top RPGs
Eh.
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Hey, please write it when you have time and energy! it’s a funny and ironic idea, especially since the Bennet daughters lived during the Napoleonic wars, which I gather are one of the favorite wargaming settings for the Brits.
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It would be hilarious if their talk makes Mr. Darcy suspect them of being spies!
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Exactly!
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Would totally read that
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When I was a freshman at BYU, I hate to admit it but literally half a century ago, I took a course called “Background Readings in the Classics” that sounds a lot like what you’re proposing. We started with Homer and the Bible and worked our way up to Kafka. I thought it gave me a good foundation for understanding our culture and would recommend it without hesitation.
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I thought that too (and possibly that interpretation is the inspiration for Marley interceding for Scrooge to meet the Christmas ghosts), but Dives only brings it up after he’s failed to wheedle a drop of water, of water so his motives are kind of sus.
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As I was trying to write earlier…
One of the reasons why Mark Twain should be slapped upside the head is his mocking snark regarding James Fenimore Cooper. I suspect that boys would like reading better if their introduction to early American literature was ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, and not ‘The Scarlet Letter’. And from what I’ve read, Twain’s comments regarding Cooper alternate between exaggeration on Twain’s part (regarding things like twigs constantly snapping), or a misunderstanding based on dissimilar backgrounds, particularly when Cooper writes about certain kinds of geography.
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I tend to agree (and yes, I’ve read Twain’s screed). My “starters” were the Altsheler Civil War series* (well, the two in the school library), Tom Corbett, Penrod, and the early Asimovs, starting with the Foundation trilogy and later The End of Eternity. I discovered RAH and many others a bit later, but I was already hooked.
*Highly recommended
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Twain also not only hated Jane Austen’s writing, he assumed that whenever she was funny, it was by accident.
Love his books, and he seems to have been a decent fellow, but he had his blind spots for sure.
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To the best of my knowledge the Reformed Church acknowledges the same New Testament as the Roman church. The differences between the two have to do with Old Testament books, the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books. The Anglicans print and study these books (and parts of Esther, etc.), but do not consider them canonical. My Bible is the King James Version as published in 1609 (albeit with modernized spelling and word substitution when the word’s meaning has changed – originally prevent meant to go somewhere before somebody else . . . ) so I have all those missing books to read and study even though I belong to a rather conservative Presbyterian church.
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May I suggest Villette, by far the best of the Brontë books. Somewhat like Persuasion, it is a better book in my view than the better known works. Much as I love all of them.
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I also think that some knowledge of the original languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek, helps with understanding nuances in the Bible. Recently two members of my prayer group, a current elder and retired minister were talking about understanding Hebrew idiom while studying the Book of Ruth. What exactly is Ruth doing when she “uncovers Boaz’s feet”? They had to go back to the Hebrew to get a feel for what is being said with that phrase.
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*Beavis and Butthead voice* hehhehheh, feet.
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I’ve had several job interviews where they asked me about working on the weekends, specifically Sundays. I always replied that while I preferred not to work on Sundays, that I understood the need when the ox was in the mire. Twice I had to then explain what I meant by that allusion because those people had no idea what the ox in the mire represented. It baffled me that they didn’t know.
I tell people that English isn’t my first language. My first language was sarcasm. The main modes of communication in my house are sarcasm and movie/book quotes. If you haven’t seen the majority of ‘nerd movies’ from the 80s to the present a lot of what we say will go right over your head. Because the adults in the house all talk that way, we made a point of introducing the kids to those same movies/books so they could understand us.
There are people in this world that are technically ‘adults’ that have never seen The Princess Bride. This confuses and frightens me. There are people who look at me in total confusion when I bleat “Wi-i-ll-l-ow, you id-d-i-iot!”
I am totally on board with making sure that Western Classics are taught to the rising generations to make sure we have a common base for not just understanding, but basic communication. It can be highly entertaining to explain that the conversation during the swimming contest in the Odyssey is essentially two gang leaders throwing shade at each other. Teen boys perk right up when they hear that and really start to try to understand what sorts of insults are being exchanged.
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Not to be insufferable, but…
Beowulf.
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In the original Old English? Possible to do, but far easier if done aloud, even more so than Chaucer.
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It has monsters and dragons. Of course everyone should read it.
SOOOOO COOOOOL!
But yes, translations are an okay thing. I kinda wish school editions would print the Old English on the facing page, though, so kids could go back and forth as much as they felt like (probably not much, but still).
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How can you possibly be agnostic about Don Quixote?
I was amazed when I read him, and realized how much of Shakespeare’s works were elaborations of Cervantes.
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Picaresque stories are kind of rough for plot-centered readers to deal with. Even trying to think of Quixote as episodes in a TV series with two characters having new adventures every few chapters didn’t help me when I read it.
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I believe this is a fair illumination…
https://xkcd.com/556/
😉
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That’s in the first forty pages of a thousand page tome. It’s literally the first incident after Don and Sancho set out. I think that, more than anything else, is why it’s remembered so widely. Nobody gets much further in the book than that.
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For the Bible, I recently went through The Bible in a Year podcast (though I did it while working, so it took a lot less than a year.) I recommend something like that, because what they did is put all of the Old Testament narrative books in chronological order, and paired them with the poetic or allegorical books for thematic reasons.
This means you get a coherent history of the Hebrew peoples, and there is a lot of history. If you think about it, we’ve got genealogical records from more than 4000 years ago, which is frankly astonishing.
You can search that title and come up with a printed reading order, if you don’t want to listen to Fr. Mike Schmitz. (He’s fun to listen to, though.)
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