I wanna talk about how every once in a while I’ll end up seeing some elected officials make public education even stupider by getting rid of good books, and what’s worse is that they generally hire illiterates to teach public school English. I knew a pair of teachers, righteously upset at John Steinbeck’s The Pearl because they said it had violence against women and that is bad. I find it hard to get my mind around this stuff because it presents such a challenge to what I think one of the major points of writing is, which is to take a kind of snapshot picture of humanity so that we can look it over and really exam ourselves. If women are getting beat in The Pearl I think that’s probably because they get beat in real life. PS before closing this paragraph off, to that young one who felt sad that one girl gets hit by a car and dies half-way through Fahrenheit 451. I didn’t have time to explain it properly, but I consider that Ray Bradbury was trying to show us what that hyper-escapist reality is like for children, and it turns out a society like that is very dangerous for children.
I think what’s at stake when we talk about a literary education is very much tied in for me with questions of what a human being is, and anything less than complex just isn’t true.
I found a Dr Scott Masson on Youtube and he was talking about how the dying of the literary cannon is like an on purpose amnesia. I take that as meaning because books are like containers of our collective memory over the last who knows how many thousands of years… like, if I had to try and make reading a more interesting thing to do for the movie only people, going to the library is like jacking your consciousness into the World Tree from Avatar. So, now, when you see some dumb foo talking about why the Bible doesn’t belong in schools, think about how the US Government bombed the shit outta that World Tree in Avatar.
Anyways, I’d really like to get another paragraph or two out for ya’ll, but it is Friday and there is a PS5 next to me with Fallout 4 loaded on it. I’ll see about writing ya’ll again tomorrow, maybe Sunday.
-Danny