Avoosl Wuthoqquan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Maybe I’m going off too much on a tangent here,
> but your mentioning a “broken set of Scott or
> Robert Louis Stevenson in the bookcase†really
> hit home with me. I grew up in a household with a
> piano (my father is a killer pianist) and an
> encyclopaedia and so always assumed that those
> were typical accoutrements of a middle-class
> household. I remember visiting a friend in the
> nineties, whose parents did not strike me as
> particularly avid readers, but who still had a
> complete set of Shakespeare on the shelf. It may
> never have been opened, but it signalled a kind of
> middle-class intellectual ambition as well as a
> sense of continuity with the past.
In my opinion, this is key, Avoosl.
Formerly, whether a middle-class, middle-brow adult actually aspired to reading and enjoying Shakespeare (two distinct aspirations), it was a common assumption that one is bettered by at least having the works on hand, to sort of ground the household in a shared cultured, so to speak.
My parents, who, although born here in the US, spoke a first language was not English, had an encyclopedia set, a general reference set, and a small literature collection.
To the best of my knowledge, I was the only person in the family to even crack these volumes.
> This ambition
> seems to have disappeared completely. Talking
> about Treasure Island with a friend a few years
> ago, we were saddened to have to conclude that
> today’s ten-year-olds would be bored out of
> their tiny skulls by it.
It was a sad day for western culture to have ever allowed the kids to think that the world's job was to entertain them.
>
> Since 2014, I’ve tried to make a habit of
> reading The Best American Poetry every year, and
> even though the introductions are sometimes
> plagued by post-modernist nonsense (what age was
> ever so arrogant as to consider itself ‘post’
> anything? -- never mind that we are still in a
> Romantic/Enlightenment society!), there is still
> much poetry of real quality to be found there.
>
> This, for example, is a masterpiece:
>
> [
www.trystero.demon.nl]
> .html
>
> Yet this is what the current US president finds it
> worthwhile to have recited at his inauguration:
>
> [
indianexpress.com]
> ture/amanda-gorman-full-poem-7155406/
>
> As Samuel Beckett so memorably put it: “drivel
> drivel drivelâ€.
>
> I was reading a fascinatingly empty article on
> Forbes.com earlier today, in which sexually
> desirable looking young people engaged in
> advertising were unironically referred to as
> “content creatorsâ€, as well as that buzzword
> du jour: “influencersâ€.
A sickeningly self-aggrandizing, sycophantic term that would be laughable in a rational and discerning society, but is instead shocking because it is apparently taken seriously by multitudes.
That's really representative of the most profound change in common, popular culture (the only kind I am familiar with): today people routinely express thoughts/desires/opinions that are so patently solipsistic and narcissistic as to have been terminally embarrassing to utter aloud 30-40 years ago. Maybe even less.
One would have died of shame...
>
> [
www.forbes.com]
> /tiktoks-highest-earning-stars-teen-queens-addison
> -rae-and-charli-damelio-rule/
>
> This made me appreciate your point about kids
> returning to still pictures “again and againâ€
> even more. To quote Ezra Pound’s famous Usura
> canto:
>
>
> no picture is made to endure nor to live with
> but it is made to sell and sell quickly
>
>
> [
www.poetryfoundation.org]
> -xlv
>
> That’s internet culture predicted in 1935!
>
> One last point (because I’m really rambling here
> after three whiskies). I am pretty sure that if
> you would compel a child, say from the age of ten,
> to memorise one poem every month, two things would
> happen:
>
> 1. the child would hate you for it and be totally
> bored;
> 2. twenty years down the line, the adult would
> thank you from the bottom of their heart.
>
> I don’t really have anything to say about
> Tolkien -- apologies.
--Sawfish
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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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