Quote Originally Posted by Breukelen advocaat
The books and authors that you are espousing as worthwhile would have been tossed in the trash by him.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Stupidity at work
by James Bowman

Stupidity at work by James Bowman

........What can account for such a lamentable failure of literary perception? The answer is hardly far to seek, and is neatly summed up in a brave piece in the September Harper??s by Francine Prose, ??I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read.? That brilliant title, just a smack at Maya Angelou, is both a positively Angelouvian mixed metaphor and a synecdoche for Miss Angelou??s disastrous influence on the teaching of English in this country.

Basing her assessment of that influence on the experience of her own two sons and a collection of some eighty high school reading lists, Miss Prose deplores the ??lemminglike fervor with which our universities have rushed to sacrifice complexity for diversity.? The result is that kids have ??slogged repeatedly through the manipulative melodramas of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, through sentimental, middlebrow favorites (To Kill a Mockingbird and A Separate Peace), the weaker novels of John Steinbeck, the fantasies of Ray Bradbury.?

.......The result, as we now see, is that we have books about irony by twenty-four-year-olds whose knowledge of the subject comes from television and whose bibliography does not include even the names of Chaucer or Cervantes or Molière or Voltaire or Dryden or Swift or Pope or Johnson or Dickens or Twain. What he sees as the ??irony? of ??Seinfeld? is actually, like that of so much of the popular culture (see, for example, Kurt Andersen??s new novel Turn of the Century, which is full of it), a double irony??irony about being ironic. This undercuts (as it is intended to do) the moral seriousness and purpose of simple irony and so produces the Seinfeldian nihilism which is what Purdy really objects to. I suppose it is something to be hopeful about that the moral hackles of this ??Generation Xer? (a title which, to give him his due, he deplores, though Douglas Coupland??s name does appear in the bibliography) have been raised, but it would make us feel a lot better if we thought he knew what they had been raised about
Unless your real name is James Bowman, this means nothing to me in the context of this debate. I want to know why YOU, Breukelen, feel the way you do. Don't be upset simply because you gave a pat answer, and I asked you to explore it further with me. I merely seek to understand.
Mrs. Greenjeans Reviewed by Mrs. Greenjeans on . Oprah a god? Okay, many soccer moms and other girls worship Oprah like a god, personally, I dont give a crap about Oprah or what she does, Id do the same if I had the money, charity and all that I just dont see how so many people are obsessed with her Rating: 5