Posted on 04/10/2012 2:14:07 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I don’t see the universality of a lot of “literature.” I’m not likely to pick up Dickens or Melville if there is a Clancy to read... even if I’ve read it before.
On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes is great stuff. Is that considered literature?
Bonfire’s EXACTLY like Sanford. Except that the protagonist (unfortunately for the national media) isn’t a stockbroker. But we’ve got everything else—black so-called reverends ginning up hate, the complete blackout by the media of anything questionable about the killed “student,” villification of the killer, courts/prosecutors/advocates all in a tither because of the racial overtones. It just goes on. I paid special attention to those book-scenes because they were created in Mayor Dinkens’ New York City. I drove through that city at night into potholes, rearranged or utterly destroyed traffic signs, and no street-lights. All I could think of then was that it was like Escape from New York (a movie, for those of you who don’t know, about Manhattan’s new status as a penal colony whose leaders have kidnapped the president). Now that I think of it, it’s kinda like what’s happened to our country in recent years.
Same here I don’t think I’ve read an Oprah book club book. I really enjoyed reading Tom Wolfe’s books - searing and meaty great feasts for the mind and also Clancy’s books, entertaining and festive as a 4th of July barbeque. Actually they would make an interesting combo if someone could foist them on Oprah as “must reads.” That might get me to actually watch her for once - out of curiosity.
In my freshman year, we started with Homer and went on to Shakespeare. My sophomore class, at a different school, focused on world literature--more Shakespeare, Dostoevskii, Orwell, Dickens, Karel Čapek, etc.
As a junior, we focused more on American literature, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (Boston: Ticknor, 1850), Herman Melville's Moby Dick (New York: Harper, 1851), and The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (New York: Appleton, 1895). The class also covered poetry by Walt Whitman, Dorothy Parker, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, etc.
To fulfill assignments, I read on my own books by George Stewart, a professor at UC Berkeley whose mid-twentieth century bestsellers are today largely forgotten, and Hector C.Bywater's The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (London: Constable, 1925).
I graduated just in time. Not long afterwards, this curriculum began to be dumbed down and made politically correct.
Marxists took over the academy, destroying art and literature, among other things, while promoting vice, perversion and ugliness.
Tom’s time is past. He can still write but I don’t think people don’t want to read about the Government much anymore.
Lame defense of bad writing, as that is what the likes of Clancy, Steel, Crichton have produced. Cartoon characters, cliche ridden sentences, simpleminded stuff all over.
“...simpleminded stuff all over.”
It is what America reads at the beach...Tartuffe just doesn’t go with sand.
It's a safe bet that Dickens' Christmas Carol will be read and performed long after Clancy has been forgotten. And references to Melville's Moby Dick still pop up in popular culture from time to time.
And almost all of the main characters are richer than Midas and therefore able to pull off feats that you and I would never attempt.
My guess is that the author isn’t old enough to comprehend living in a time when there was only one enemy and descriptions of the technology in Clancy’s novels were like sci-fi themselves.
Any attempt to compare those writings to literature classics is dysfunctional analysis.
The Allegory of Love is one of the seminal works of medieval criticism. It’s still very relevant, and I remember using it in my master’s thesis years ago—I was writing about Chauceriqn allegory and poetics at the time. Now I deal more with early medieval English where Lewis’s work isn’t as important—but it is still a great work price of scholarship and he was so young when he wrote it!
Clancy doesn’t compare to the classics, for example:
The Count of Monte Cristo
Les Miserables
A Tale of Two Cities
Crime and Punishment
anything by Dickens
i loved it. in fact 20 years later i sometimes called my newborn Wan Lo because he had asiatic features ( i guess the mongols took some liberties ) with my ancestors.
Penny Dreadfuls
Right, he couldn't spell Pablum right!
For those of you under 50 or so, Pablum was a baby food, very bland. So very bland literature became Pablum.
Right, he couldn't spell Pablum right!
For those of you under 50 or so, Pablum was a baby food, very bland. So very bland literature became Pablum.
I also loved “The Right Stuff” but hated “A Man in Full”.
Wolfe is so clever——and those white suits fascinate me.
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