Questions, Questions, This Time abt. Eng. Lit. Dying

"Reading" in this context usually means "the reading of novels by adults," or, in some cases, by students, K-16.

Reading in this sense, particularly in the last 25 years, has been simultaneously dumbed down, hollowed out, fetishized and promoted. What is read has been greatly determined by corporate mergers from the mid-'60s on, which has left us with the Big Five... Four... Three... publishers, tasked with making e-media levels of profit. This has narrowed the range of work widely available.

What's left of the adult reading population has also been fragmented beyond belief by identity politics and age cohort. The drive for inclusion quickly became a means to cultural clout and whatever cash rewards were left in teaching and commentary* – and this has led to ever diminishing circles of content and whatever style was lying around.

(Identity politics/political correctness has more than half killed the endeavour. Saw a rack of featured books at my local library branch & turned to examine them for something interesting to take home. It was XX ethnic group month. My blood turned to a taste of metal and my skin felt burnt from within, exhausted exhaustion.

Why can't anything just be a good book? Why does it have to be a good [ethnicity here] book? Why do I have to read a fucking sermon?

Why does someone's book have to be a sermon, or presented as a sermon?**

This approach is self-destroyingly narrow, even as it claims to be widening the reader's experience. As though anything widely distributed & sold for profit is going to seriously challenge manufactured consent! I turned away in another tired & beaten fury. So much for "always had her nose in a book".)

Teaching literature is in an abysmal state. All sorts of mad non-systems replaced phonic in schools & kids were left permanently unable to decode the words on the page with any certainty and fluency.*** People turn away from that kind of experience, and "don't read."

There are all sorts of specialized sub-bits of reading people do do: nonfiction of general and specialized nature, schematics for car repair, science journals, etc., etc.

But "reading" in the sense it is usually meant is a product of the Prussian-inspired move to mass education and literacy from the C19th onwards: it was necessary for the workforce in a technological age.

The pic of Shakespeare as the personification and symbol of English Literature tells you what is really going on. He wrote plays. People watched them & heard them. They attended or performed "English Literature" such as miracle and morality plays. Now "English Literature" is on the BBC & HBO & Netflicks & Canal+ & ...

Literacy of the sort that is in decline has never been necessary to a population of peasants, serfs, tradies... Universal literacy no longer serves the State, and the State is retreating from its former functions in the mass of ordinary lives.

Which leaves ordinary people where they have always been: creating oral traditions.

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For Extra Credit:

1) Which do you think would be more frightening to the status quo?

a) a book written by a member of an under-represented community set aside and identified as a good [ethnicity here] book
b) a book written by a member of an under-represented community displayed, without ethnic designation, as a good book like any other good book

2) If you watched the video: At the beginning of the 19th century, why would a nation with a nascent empire suddenly start studying the literature of empire?

a) policies, job descriptions and manuals
b) self justification in the face of a near-universal Christianity, which would advocate loving your neighbour / rescuing the man who fell among thieves

Justify your answers on the sheet provided.

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*Attributed to Mark Twain: "You can make a fortune but you can't make a living." Truer now than it was then. The only reliable money in writing is teaching.

**If you want a sermon, go to church.

*** One of the great grifts perpetrated on the Dept. of Education in the ealier days of public-private business opportunities, begun under Bush the Younger's unfunded mandate, "No Child Left Behind."

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

I was feeling a bit crook yesterday afternoon – I’d been cutting the weeds at the kerb before the truck could come for the green bin. I’d been out in the sun and humidity for about ten minutes, and clearly that was too long.

I came in. It was early enough in the afternoon to be able to watch Coriolanus. Because it’s about demagoguery I wanted to understand it, but it sends me to sleep at the same moment every time, like Le Samourai with Alain Delon and The Makioka Sisters. I looked at the streaming options.

And there, like an exhaled breath and a great bath of relief, was Top Gun Maverick. Tom Cruise charming, half-smile utterly disarming –

This time he’s a US Navy test-pilot. We don't know where he lives: he first appears alone, in a hangar in a desert. The hangar is a perfection of focus and intention, a cathedral of space and peg-boarded tools and the mechanics of kinetic transcendence – a mid-restoration P49, a heavy motorbike. Per a DOD contract, he’s scheduled to take the latest fighter prototype to Mach 9 today.

He wears a white t-shirt and jeans; he gets his leather jacket from a metal closet; he picks up his keyring, a winged insignia and one key. (Dressing/arming the hero, at least as old as The Iliad.)

He takes the bike and to the bike – the closest thing to flying without leaving the ground – flies helmetless along the road beside the airstrip, unencumbered as a god.

The rest of the movie, the test flight in spite of a rear admiral’s plan to junk manned flight, the triumph of Mach 10 and the disaster of Mach 10.2, the new impossible assignment instead of dishonourable discharge, the personal and mission-specification-driven tensions, the old flame, the new marriage (Hermes-Hestia), the defeats, the victories and reconciliations, are all remarkably slick and well-handled. It’s The Dam Busters and Star Wars and Mission Impossible feats of running, all in IMAX.

TGM is a very late version of the military sub-subgenre of the subgenre America Dea – movies treating the United States of America as a not quite secular religion, Washington and Lincoln its formative angels. The civilian version produced Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

TGM is a lovely and dangerous fantasy, where the machines sing together like Blake’s morning stars, a captain can beat jealous and narrow-minded admirals, the government is great and good, the enemy is defeated despite its technological superiority.

The intermittent musical theme sounds at first as though it could be a handful of muted horns, in a soft, slightly jaunty military register: it is actually very softly and skillfully voiced choral music, a smooth and quiet undertone, a bedrock of quiet reverence.

The enemy has no justification for doing what they’re doing; what they’re doing is wrong: the enemy is a number of undifferentiated silhouettes, bad guys bad because they’re opposing the United States.

There’s racial diversity, often in the background in the bar scenes, more visible in the IMDB credits than in the movie. The people who make the running are the white guys. The conflicts and struggles and victories, the characters who create the framework of the plot, the ones in positions of real emphasis, are the white guys.

It’s a very Trumpian flick: a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and vice versa.

New Roses

I happened to pass a rose festival display the other day, long tables of prizewinning roses in slender cut crystal vases. My parents planted rose bushes in the front garden and by the back gate when they got married eighty five years ago, and so I stopped to look.

Of course there were new strains, colours: lemon to litmus-paper mauve, blushed, edged, and single-tone, skillfully produced. That kind of grafting had begun by the late ‘50s with the Peace rose and others, lemon sherbet and slight pink grading and washing delicately on the petals. They had little fragrance.

At the festival I saw roses trying to be hydrangeas, daffodils, carnations, orchids, daisies, lotus, fungi, crepe paper, plastic. They smelt of wet stem and vase-water.

I remember the dark red, almost-black roses my mother grew, the scent of three buds in a bedroom filling the house.

Prophet Song

Prophet Song is warning become handbook.

Set in Dublin, it tells us how the military phase of a fascist takeover proceeds outwardly, what it feels like to endure. It’s not just the plot, the start of the disappearances (trade union activists first), then the gathering suspicion from neighbours, the eldest son over the border to become a paramilitary, the effect on the younger children, the eventual and inevitable descent into ever worsening situations –

It's the manner of the telling. The vertigo of the loss of fact, certainty, information, stability, control; the dissolution of perspective, the mingling of the outer and inner, the endless nausea of barely suppressed terror.

Mam, I tried his phone. Mark’s phone, the number’s been disconnected. Something has rolled across Eilish’s mouth, she is moving through the room bending to collect the clothes on the floor, she is standing in the bathroom staring at the steaming water, what rises and dissipates, what comes into expression moment by moment yet cannot be known, this feeling always of possibility giving rise to hope. She wants to go into the bedroom and take Molly’s hands and say everything is going to be fine, she remains before the wicker basket and drops the clothes and feels herself falling from her arms, this feeling they are all falling towards something that cannot be defined by anything she has known in her life. (p. 170)

Everybody Knows

 

A terrific mystery set in contemporary L.A., the 5th most self-mythologized Western city of the last thousand years after New York, London, Paris & Rome.

Harper’s plot threads through some of the many ethnic subcultures of the city, but its real focus is the L.A. Police and Sheriff’s departments, their daily deputies’ and plods’ desires and drives. Truth and Justice are a long way down the list... One of its strongest virtues is that it continually evokes Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels of the 1970s.

But it’s fifty years later now, and the situation is fifty years worse.

Everybody Knows shares its title with that cynical, elegant, distantly furious Leonard Cohen song about corruption as an open secret, and it does the subject proud.

A Very Private School: A Memoir

A boy made to lie naked across the Headmaster's knees to be caned, so severely the marks were still visible sixty years later.

That's why I value this book.

When I ws a child it was almost impossible to see beyond the British Empire, or very far into it.

And now it's crystal clear what the pain and blood and labour and poverty and ostracism of millions of people, bought.