The bit where Liza's boss didn't like the vocabulary she used in her ad copy reminded me of similar experience of my own. I had just been graduated with B.S. degrees in math and physics, and I decided to take a year off before grad school. I applied for a job as an actuarial assistant (which required a B.S. in math). However, as part of the job interview I was given a vocabulary test. Result: I didn't get the job because I did too well on the vocabulary. They actually stated that that was their reason. I knew the difference between "meretricious" and "mendacious," which apparently was a show-stopper for them.
A lot of people have told me that the great works of Western literature are full of horribly racist ideas, sexist themes, violence, ignorance, and misogyny. I'm always like "I already love the stuff! You don't have to sell me on how great it is."
This piece is one of the most moving things I've read. It makes me want to give your mind a big hug and say, "thank God you came through this."
It is a love story, Liza and Literature. It even has the plot of a romance: the initial innocent infatuation, the malign other who breaks up the relationship with lies (Columbia literature faculty as Iago, perhaps), the breakup, the separation, the breakthrough, the rekindling, the final mature love.
Probably this hit me so hard because it is so much the way I feel, too. Just last week I wrote a poem in praise of the ardent love of scholars for their subjects, because that kind of love never seems to get its fair share of love songs. It deserved an ode, so I wrote one.
That love is just as real, just as intense, as heartbreaking and satisfying as any love between individual people. I simply do not understand those who cannot love an abstraction as much as a person; it seems to me that an essential piece of their humanity is dormant.
And no, I'm not going to post that poem here. I'm not trying to self-promote, it's just context. Besides, then I'd have to withdraw it from publication. ;)
The homosexual reading of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian is particularly galling. It is such a perverse reading. The whole point of Charles's narration is that he does not understand what he is looking at. He does not understand Sebastian's unhappiness. He does not understand his faith. He does not understand Julia or any of the rest of the family, for that matter. And he is a perfectly frank narrator. He makes no bones about Anthony Blanch seeing through the vacuity of his painting. He does not hesitate to relate his adulterous affair with Julia. He is not an unreliable narrator, covering up what he does not want us to know. He is a baffled narrator, reporting what he does not understand. If he had had an affair with Sebastian, he would have told us so, and he would have understood far more than he does. And if all that were not enough, Waugh tells us who Sebastian was sleeping with: Aloysius, his teddy bear.
Every time I hear bad things about an author, I read a biography; every time, I find out that what these people say is a load of bs. (Biographers tend to be very understanding and fond of their subject) Started doing this ten years ago when I started growing sick of all the anti-Kipling bs but didn't know what to say in return. Then they dared to say Steinbeck was racist and that was the last straw. I think these ideologues understand that this is a threat to them; I've been told more often than one might expect that I shouldn't read author bios. Hmm. I wonder why.
Evelyn Waugh is a great way of purging oneself of intellectualism without degrading one's own intelligence. Though I have the opposite problem; instead of needing to devour his books, I'm still enjoying the high from reading Black Mischief. Ironically, a professor recommended it as optional reading; an old school professor who wasn't a crackpot ideologue. Couldn't quite resonate with Decline and Fall, however; I think it's just too British for me. But Waugh is a treasure and I look forward to my next read.
1. The cultural bent may be unique to the humanities; but the bitterness of academia is built into the university as a whole. I recently advised a young dental student not to get sucked into the petty drama of bitter self-centered professors. Yeah, at dental school.
2. David Bowie was a profound human being!… one of the few artists with true cultural and reading chops to go alongside his artistic spirit.
I love how you fell in love with reading again through a literary allusion in one of David Bowie's albums! There is a goldmine to be found in the connection between music and literature. So many people I know say that they discovered J. R. R. Tolkien's novels through listening to Led Zeppelin or Ayn Rand's novels through listening to Rush, and so on.
I read some literature up to high school, liked a decent amount, but had limited tastes and a limited ear for it. However, when I was 15 I fell in love with classical music, and I fell in love with poetry a few years later (starting when I was 18-19) thanks to all the song cycles and art songs I was listening to--Barber, Britten, Berlioz, Brahms, and even some not beginning with B. That was the beginning of my second life--that and other things.
I had a cross-art epiphany in HS while listening to the Band "If I thought it would do any good I would would stand on the Rock where Moses stood" at the same time I was reading "As I Lay Dying" by Faulkner. The bleak world view of each illuminated that of the other.
I did the exact same thing when I finished my Masters’ Degree. I was exhausted from reading and also being forced to skim so much. I couldn’t focus on the words anymore. I used to love reading a thick book really slowly and slowing down even more at the end, to savour every word and make it last. When you take Five courses a semester, all with required readings, you get your highlighter out! I agree with everything you wrote here, and I find I am ditching every bestseller I’m borrowing from the library. Just can’t do it. It’s been so long since I read a really good thick book from cover to cover. A short one I’d recommend is Held, by Anne Michaels.
Thankfully, I went to a moderate state school and we weren't shoved all of this down our throats. But then again, I also went for science, so this way of thinking wasn't really relevant to my area of study. I had a much better experience at the smaller university than what I hear from people who went to the big, prestigious colleges.
I find it so absurd that the same people who think it's OK to expose young children to complex sexual themes in books think it's necessary to post trigger warnings or limit college students' exposure to classical literature because of potentially "harmful" language.
Doesn’t something really have to stand the test of time to be a “classic”? How can books written in my lifetime or my century be classic? I am catching up on reading actual classics this year.
Worse, when we look back at the classics, we know that many works held in contempt for their day are modern-day classics, while esteemed works fell to deserved obscurity. It's wise to be wary about modern day works.
Wonderful. And awful you had to go through the Red Guards of Literature at Columbia. I got my lowly BA in English at Temple University in 1976. But not only did we students love lit and writing, but our prof did as well..
I had a similar experience of disillusionment at university, ultimately I ended up dropping out (good choice, seeing how bad things have gotten). At the time I remember hearing people studying literature saying they could no longer read it for fun, or rather their initial pleasure was gone. I felt so sad for them.
What jumped out at me was the way that popular art (music, literature & artwork) no longer seem to interact with each other the way they used to. As you mention with Bowie, it wasn’t uncommon for pop artists to be referencing great works of fiction. Most of what we get these days is focused only on the self. It also seems the overall quality has reduced as well - I am shocked at the poor quality of writing/story in some of the ‘best selling’ books currently.
I hope this recommendation is not out of place. The movie ‘Grand Theft Hamlet’ documents an effort of its protagonists to stage, during late covid (indeed, in 2021), Shakespeare's Hamlet inside (the world of) GTA online. I had watched productions of Hamlet a few times before, but watching the film was the first time that I was crying facing the Bard's words. It came alive, ironically or not.
The bit where Liza's boss didn't like the vocabulary she used in her ad copy reminded me of similar experience of my own. I had just been graduated with B.S. degrees in math and physics, and I decided to take a year off before grad school. I applied for a job as an actuarial assistant (which required a B.S. in math). However, as part of the job interview I was given a vocabulary test. Result: I didn't get the job because I did too well on the vocabulary. They actually stated that that was their reason. I knew the difference between "meretricious" and "mendacious," which apparently was a show-stopper for them.
A lot of people have told me that the great works of Western literature are full of horribly racist ideas, sexist themes, violence, ignorance, and misogyny. I'm always like "I already love the stuff! You don't have to sell me on how great it is."
This piece is one of the most moving things I've read. It makes me want to give your mind a big hug and say, "thank God you came through this."
It is a love story, Liza and Literature. It even has the plot of a romance: the initial innocent infatuation, the malign other who breaks up the relationship with lies (Columbia literature faculty as Iago, perhaps), the breakup, the separation, the breakthrough, the rekindling, the final mature love.
Probably this hit me so hard because it is so much the way I feel, too. Just last week I wrote a poem in praise of the ardent love of scholars for their subjects, because that kind of love never seems to get its fair share of love songs. It deserved an ode, so I wrote one.
That love is just as real, just as intense, as heartbreaking and satisfying as any love between individual people. I simply do not understand those who cannot love an abstraction as much as a person; it seems to me that an essential piece of their humanity is dormant.
And no, I'm not going to post that poem here. I'm not trying to self-promote, it's just context. Besides, then I'd have to withdraw it from publication. ;)
The homosexual reading of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian is particularly galling. It is such a perverse reading. The whole point of Charles's narration is that he does not understand what he is looking at. He does not understand Sebastian's unhappiness. He does not understand his faith. He does not understand Julia or any of the rest of the family, for that matter. And he is a perfectly frank narrator. He makes no bones about Anthony Blanch seeing through the vacuity of his painting. He does not hesitate to relate his adulterous affair with Julia. He is not an unreliable narrator, covering up what he does not want us to know. He is a baffled narrator, reporting what he does not understand. If he had had an affair with Sebastian, he would have told us so, and he would have understood far more than he does. And if all that were not enough, Waugh tells us who Sebastian was sleeping with: Aloysius, his teddy bear.
Every time I hear bad things about an author, I read a biography; every time, I find out that what these people say is a load of bs. (Biographers tend to be very understanding and fond of their subject) Started doing this ten years ago when I started growing sick of all the anti-Kipling bs but didn't know what to say in return. Then they dared to say Steinbeck was racist and that was the last straw. I think these ideologues understand that this is a threat to them; I've been told more often than one might expect that I shouldn't read author bios. Hmm. I wonder why.
Evelyn Waugh is a great way of purging oneself of intellectualism without degrading one's own intelligence. Though I have the opposite problem; instead of needing to devour his books, I'm still enjoying the high from reading Black Mischief. Ironically, a professor recommended it as optional reading; an old school professor who wasn't a crackpot ideologue. Couldn't quite resonate with Decline and Fall, however; I think it's just too British for me. But Waugh is a treasure and I look forward to my next read.
1. The cultural bent may be unique to the humanities; but the bitterness of academia is built into the university as a whole. I recently advised a young dental student not to get sucked into the petty drama of bitter self-centered professors. Yeah, at dental school.
2. David Bowie was a profound human being!… one of the few artists with true cultural and reading chops to go alongside his artistic spirit.
I love how you fell in love with reading again through a literary allusion in one of David Bowie's albums! There is a goldmine to be found in the connection between music and literature. So many people I know say that they discovered J. R. R. Tolkien's novels through listening to Led Zeppelin or Ayn Rand's novels through listening to Rush, and so on.
I read some literature up to high school, liked a decent amount, but had limited tastes and a limited ear for it. However, when I was 15 I fell in love with classical music, and I fell in love with poetry a few years later (starting when I was 18-19) thanks to all the song cycles and art songs I was listening to--Barber, Britten, Berlioz, Brahms, and even some not beginning with B. That was the beginning of my second life--that and other things.
I found John Berryman through Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
"Bukowski was a jerk! / Berryman was best! / He wrote like wet papier maché / But he went the Hemming-way"
Bukowski I had encountered many years earlier via Poison Idea.
I had a cross-art epiphany in HS while listening to the Band "If I thought it would do any good I would would stand on the Rock where Moses stood" at the same time I was reading "As I Lay Dying" by Faulkner. The bleak world view of each illuminated that of the other.
I did the exact same thing when I finished my Masters’ Degree. I was exhausted from reading and also being forced to skim so much. I couldn’t focus on the words anymore. I used to love reading a thick book really slowly and slowing down even more at the end, to savour every word and make it last. When you take Five courses a semester, all with required readings, you get your highlighter out! I agree with everything you wrote here, and I find I am ditching every bestseller I’m borrowing from the library. Just can’t do it. It’s been so long since I read a really good thick book from cover to cover. A short one I’d recommend is Held, by Anne Michaels.
This sounds much like my own journey through the liberal arts. Thanks for sharing.
Thankfully, I went to a moderate state school and we weren't shoved all of this down our throats. But then again, I also went for science, so this way of thinking wasn't really relevant to my area of study. I had a much better experience at the smaller university than what I hear from people who went to the big, prestigious colleges.
I find it so absurd that the same people who think it's OK to expose young children to complex sexual themes in books think it's necessary to post trigger warnings or limit college students' exposure to classical literature because of potentially "harmful" language.
Doesn’t something really have to stand the test of time to be a “classic”? How can books written in my lifetime or my century be classic? I am catching up on reading actual classics this year.
Worse, when we look back at the classics, we know that many works held in contempt for their day are modern-day classics, while esteemed works fell to deserved obscurity. It's wise to be wary about modern day works.
Yes. Only time can make something a classic.
Wonderful. And awful you had to go through the Red Guards of Literature at Columbia. I got my lowly BA in English at Temple University in 1976. But not only did we students love lit and writing, but our prof did as well..
Best!
I had a similar experience of disillusionment at university, ultimately I ended up dropping out (good choice, seeing how bad things have gotten). At the time I remember hearing people studying literature saying they could no longer read it for fun, or rather their initial pleasure was gone. I felt so sad for them.
What jumped out at me was the way that popular art (music, literature & artwork) no longer seem to interact with each other the way they used to. As you mention with Bowie, it wasn’t uncommon for pop artists to be referencing great works of fiction. Most of what we get these days is focused only on the self. It also seems the overall quality has reduced as well - I am shocked at the poor quality of writing/story in some of the ‘best selling’ books currently.
I hope this recommendation is not out of place. The movie ‘Grand Theft Hamlet’ documents an effort of its protagonists to stage, during late covid (indeed, in 2021), Shakespeare's Hamlet inside (the world of) GTA online. I had watched productions of Hamlet a few times before, but watching the film was the first time that I was crying facing the Bard's words. It came alive, ironically or not.