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The Canons of Culture (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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We are starting this new thread because you are all thirsting to discuss this sore subject and there's nowhere convenient to put it except for Cabinet of Curiosities and for sure Culture is not that. It is mainstream. Not as important as sport or telly but right up there.
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Mick Harper
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My discovery of the rad-i-o has led me to the re-discovery of 'English literature'. I say 'rediscovery' because I knew about it from my very young days when I developed a healthy disregard of it on account of it being placed alongside algebra and cross-country running as being 'good for you'. This turned out to be all too true because when I was young rather than very young, I found myself widely ostracised, not just for a general ignorance of the minutiae of the Classics but for being insufficiently adoring of them.

My comment that "the English locomotive has been of more importance than the English novel so why don't we have university departments studying them instead" was reported to the police and resulted in me being 'put on the register', forced to leave London for a period of years. However that is all in the past. I am now in a position, thanks to the 'wireless', to wax lyrical so I now will.
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Hatty
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You can't get much more canonical than Shakespeare. A couple of days ago a classicist called Dr Emily Wilson tweeted

Here is a lovely story I heard at the weekend, about how to be a good literature teacher.

Eminent Oxford professor, to nervous kid being interviewed for college admission: "So you're interested in King Lear. What do you think of the switch in behavior of Goneril and Regan between Acts I and II?"
Nervous kid, after much hesitation: "I'm afraid I only read Act I."

Eminent Shakespearean, startled: "Really? Surely you have seen the whole play, anyway? Have you even read or been told a summary? Have you skimmed through the rest?"
Nervous kid: "No, my teacher said not to".

Eminent Professor, with excitement and warmth: "How wonderful! I've never had the chance to talk to anyone who had only read Act I! What do you think will happen?" They dug into a detailed close reading of Act I. Kid got into the college, and did great.

Turns out the professor was Emily's mother and there were lots of plaudits for the 'lovely story' and her encouraging attitude. We might think teachers were supposed to be encouraging anyway but why the kid was told to only read the first act of King Lear seems completely counter-productive, the object surely being to pass an Eng Lit exam. It may be teachers' expectations are generally lower or that pupils have found it easier to bluff their way through studying literature than for other subjects such as algebra or cross-country running.
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Mick Harper
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Given the pressures of the Official Syllabus on the one hand and the need to pass exams on the other, there is presumably no room for reading Shakespeare 'for pleasure'. There was in my day and this consisted of reading, say, Julius Caesar with each pupil being given a part (I can still remember I was Casca) and reading it very badly (few of us in Lower Four R had been to RADA). And the teacher pausing us from time to time to deliver a homily on something and to ask questions to make sure we were paying attention. Which none of us were because the whole thing was as boring as shit.

Then it was O-level time and our set text was Twelfth Night (all of it not just the first act as is the modern fashion). So, first week of term, we were all taken to the Old (maybe Young) Vic for a performance. Since none of us knew diddley about the play, this was boring as shit too. No fifteen-year-old (even us fast-trackers from the Remove) can follow either Shakespearean plots or language in real time.

Though it is now the only (non-history) Shakespeare play I can bear to watch because I've spent a year getting to grips with the plots and the language. In fact it was on the radio the other day though I couldn't bear to listen because who the fuck knew who was talking when they were all speaking in RADA accents and pretending to be someone they weren't. And that's when I actually knew (q.v.).
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Mick Harper
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Obviously the peaks that cannot be scaled by lesser nations are the various women's novels of the early nineteenth century (whereupon women vanished until Margaret Drabble). As I have already mentioned, I tucked into Jane Eyre with some gusto but checked out when the coincidences became more science fiction than literary contrivance. Unbowed I took on Wuthering Heights. Now this is all mixed up in my mind with Laurence Olivier and Kate Bush so when Heathcliff turned out to be a complete fruitcake who had wandered into Cold Comfort Farm I headed for my own hills.

I just had time for a dally with The Personal Life of David Copperfield (Channel 4) but, after surviving the shock of him not being the central character in Great Expectations as I remembered, I remembered Dickens makes me vomit no matter how you dress him up. I can safely leave him to the mighty savants of English Literature faculties. ("Can you read? You're in.") He deserves no better and nor do they.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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I recently was recommended "The way we live" by Trollope. I tried sober and failed, so I thought I would retry it with a glass of port or two. I was really getting into it, flying through in fact, but then realised it was more a case of liking to put on a waistcoat, and munch on water biscuits, covered with apricot cheese, whilst drinking my Taylors 30 year old, rather than actually enjoying the prose. Maybe I should have gone full smoking jacket and cigar, but cost of living crisis made me abandon. Still I would rate it as a solid '4 out of 5 stars' until I gave up.
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Mick Harper
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I had a Trollope phase years ago and went through the Palliser novels like a dose of salts. (I was in the bath at the time.) Then resumed my life without looking back. I assume the BBC re-used the tapes of the series they made from the novels -- they did it as a matter of policy 'to save money'. "A fiver for a new tape? Nah, use an old one. It's not our money."
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Mick Harper
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PS I once operated a video news clippings service -- in the days when it was illegal, so there wasn't a lot of competition. As a last resort, when tracking down something obscure, I used to go to a bloke near Putney Bridge who had been videotaping everything for years in a nerdish hoarding sort of way. He, or someone like him, is why you occasionally see grainy excerpts from early Dr Who's and suchlike.
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Mick Harper
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Among Others, a five-part adaptation of his new autobiography. Michael's acquaintances haven't always been other people. How has he got along with ..Radio 4

All my cognitive life I have been aware of two men who are held to be (a) comic masters and (b) intellectual giants. An unusual combination but one shared with me (according to me). They are Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard. I have never found this true of any of their work (including the one above) though some are mildly diverting entertainment (this one isn't). I am satisfied this is a lack in me rather than them.
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Grant



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I saw Jumpers once by said Tom Stoppard. We sat at the front seat in the dress circle and next to us was a man on his own - always a worrying sign.

He proceeded to laugh uproariously at every joke, especially the ones which referenced other works of literature. Was he making sure we could hear that he got the joke? Then he took his shoes off and placed his feet on the balcony.

I was worried what he would do after the interval but to my amazement he never appeared for the second half. This cemented my belief that Stoppard is the playwright for pseudo-intellectuals with no friends.
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Grant



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The only English playwrights worth a damn in the last fifty years have been Christopher Hampton and Jez Butterworth. The Irish have Conor McPherson.

Can’t think of any Scots or Welsh
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Mick Harper
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Stoppard is the playwright for pseudo-intellectuals with no friends.

I said I didn't like him.
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Mick Harper
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The only English playwrights worth a damn in the last fifty years

have worked in television. I'm not talking The Wednesday Play, I'm talking Alan Plater et al.
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Mick Harper
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Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm is one of the canons of (modern) English literature so I was looking forward to her (unknown to me) Nightingale Wood being given a two-hour dramatisation on R4X. It proved to be a thin tale of three 'gals' and their misadventures on the way to matrimony in the late nineteen thirties. I was totally entranced and tried to work out why.

The first is the picture of serene pre-war upper class life, full of out of touch gentry, cads, drones, family retainers, dark goings on in woodsheds and so on and so forth and so familiar. It was not only the anthropology that delighted me but the high comedy that is possible in such a setting and cannot be reproduced in post-war go-ahead egalitarian Britain. But mainly it was the serenity. One instinctively knew that such a timeless world had lessons for us all.
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Wile E. Coyote


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I had a quick look at 100 classics of English Literature, suggested by readers. Now being incredibly well read, I was hoping for a list of 20-30 or so, you know books that I had actually managed to make it all the way to the end, without cheating....

Anyway I quickly spotted The Iliad, now looking back, it was a real struggle to get past the bit where Homer recounts all the Greeks setting off, but I did. Well done moi. A good start!

Wow. This is getting difficult. In Cold Blood, actually enjoyed this one, found it quite easy to speed through. Good job Capote invented a new literary genre aimed at pyscopaths, as we are up to two!

Christ this is not easy. Maybe 30 was a tad optmistic?. I expect Mick only managed 10 or so. Surely Kidnapped must be in there? No. What about Stig of the Dump? Stig wouldnt let me down. Damn. He did. Surely there must be something in that wasn't an Austen or Bronte?

Come on, who the fuck was LP Hartley? The Go-Between is desribed "as a moving exploration by L. P. Hartley of a young boy’s loss of innocence and a critical view of society at the end of the Victorian era". Well, I might have tried it if it was under 100 pages, but who would commit to a couple of weeks about that?

Getting desperate. Wait, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is on their list.

It's a hat trick for Wiley.
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