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The Canons of Culture (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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Your error was to admit to being English. A rookie mistake.
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Mick Harper
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The death of Martin Amis prompts the question "Is he in the canon?" As a novelist, obviously not. As an essayist, probably not. As a general all-round Man of Letters he'd probably get in because it's such a dying breed.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Your error was to admit to being English. A rookie mistake.


I am rather swarthy, so will switch to Fangio Drako, a lover of Cervantes and Borges. I actually now think I am in with a much better shout. Thank you.
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Grant



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Martin Amis taught me more than any other author.

I was ploughing through his "Times Arrow", which is about Dr Mengele, I think, but written backwards in time. I found it very hard-going, pretentious crap. Up to this book I had always felt that once started a book must be finished. And this was a Martin Amis.

But one day I got off the train after another thirty minutes of struggling through his turgid nonsense and noticed a litter bin. In went the book and ever since I've followed the rule that if a book isn't entertaining I don't persist.

Thank you, Martin.

Having said that, Dead Babies and Money were very good.
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Mick Harper
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I couldn't even finish them. There is an AE point. It is impossible for either a reader or a reviewer (or for that matter, a publisher) to forget he is Kingsley's son. My third favourite author after Waugh and Anthony Powell. Many people said he couldn't forget it either.

I would think his early works got more enthusiastic receptions for 'literary mafia' reasons and his later polemical stuff more nervous ones on account of him being so good at polemics. Still and all, a mini-giant. Hey, not a bad blurb for the tombstone.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Grant wrote:

But one day I got off the train after another thirty minutes of struggling through his turgid nonsense and noticed a litter bin. In went the book and ever since I've followed the rule that if a book isn't entertaining I don't persist.


The problem with older books is that they contain lots of scene setting descriptive passages, which are boring to the modern reader who is now much more travelled, or has watched thousands of hours of TV and films, so simply doesn't need two and half pages of descriptions of a Scottish highland, or even an Indian mountain range bordering Afghanistan.

We need dialogue and action.

I suspect many folks are skimming or speed reading the descriptive bits in the classics rather than binning them like Grant.

I know I shouldn't judge others by my own low brow, trailer trash standards, but I do.
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Mick Harper
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This is a good point. If true. It surely isn't true of a contemporary writer like Martin Amis but may be increasingly true as we amble back in time. Discuss.

I was listening to an 18th century drama when everyone was, according to the modern dramatist anyway, speaking in enormously long sentences full of windy honorifics and jaw-aching circumlocutions. Once you got used to, it was absolutely fine, indeed enjoyable. Whether that was the skill of the dramatist or acceptable because of 'period colour', I couldn't say.
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Mick Harper
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Les Miserables has, I suppose, some chance of being World No 1 in the literary canon, alongside War and Peace (send in other candidates, but you'll be stretching). I've never had any time for 'Lay Mizz' (ugh) despite having a vague family connection with Victor Hugo thanks to his exile in Guernsey. I wouldn't dream of reading the wretched thing (I expect Hatty has, in the original) and I gave the TV adaptation a firm miss. I even went along to the West End musical -- I believe the world's most successful of that noxious genre -- with a young protégée who was obsessed with it on record but whose mother was a quantum mathematician and uninterested in culture of any kind, so dispatched me to ensure her little poppet wasn't sold into the Piccadilly Circus white slave trade. A curious choice but anyway we left at the half-time interval by mutual agreement.

However, now I come to think about it in the round, I have a rooted aversion to anything nineteenth century. Does anyone else suffer from this affliction?
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Wile E. Coyote


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You won't be surprised to hear that Wiley didn't get far with Les Miserables.

Don Quxiote would have to be up there, as a world great.
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Hatty
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Haven't read Les Mis or any Hugo books but had to read Don Quiixote (I and II) in Spanish and was entranced by both. Certainly one of my all-time greats.

A retired English teacher recommended Middlemarch as a way in to Eliot's canon but for some reason I also had no interest in reading nineteenth-century novelists.
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Mick Harper
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I welcome Dox Quixote into the Big Three despite not being written by Cervantes. Since all three are non-English we can accept this as definitive.
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
Les Miserables has, I suppose, some chance of being World No 1 in the literary canon...


I read it. Enjoyed it. But can't remember it. Only the singing.
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Mick Harper
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This is deeply unhelpful. I know you're recovering from dengue fever -- and nobody truly recovers from dengue fever, though like syphilis it can have the reverse effect -- but try to get with the programme.
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Mick Harper
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My family and I (as the old queen used to say) spent yesterday's Zoom discussing the 100 Great Books. I had asked them specifically to come up with their own total of 'read' to confirm my own thesis that it will always be 20-30, though always a unique 20-30. Most had done so and confirmed the thesis, one hadn't and said vaguely 'more than sixty' and one began with "I shouldn't have thought more than ten' but later when we were going through the list, said 20-30.

We were all of the same age, all tertially educated, except one grande-dame (who just scraped in). We all agreed that my sub-thesis -- nobody under the age of fifty would get anywhere close -- was correct. "My kids wouldn't be seen dead" etc. This is all the more striking because the list itself was so arbitrarily chosen: "Too American", "Too English", "Too lit-crit", "Where's x or y or z?" etc.

I was surprised at the general level of discourse and shows what's possible when you don't spend your time discussing the growing of vegetables. Not that I will be allowed to repeat anything of a similar nature in future. For that I will have start a family of my own and deny them the use of electronic devices. Which includes smart phones lest they ring the Social Services hotline and beg to be taken into care.
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Mick Harper
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The bands you have to see live before you die Guardian Saturday Review

We must not be sniffy about what canons are canons but the problem with popular music is that the canon shifts with bewildering speed. Does that render them uncanonical? I don't know but here's an illustration of how it works.

The Guardian lists twenty-eight bands that ya gotta see, which I take to be the present canon. The Guardian is rarely wrong about these things despite having a readership of people who overwhelmingly do not go to live performances except occasionally 'taking the kids' to the Rolling Stones or somesuch. I am even past that stage but what I found interesting was, not that I had seen none of the twenty-eight bands, but that I had not even heard of twenty-three of them. For morbid aficionados the ones I had heard of were

Taylor Swift
Beyoncé
Bruce Springsteen
Iron Maiden
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

I'm still hanging in there.
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