[lbo-talk] More Good Stuff?

Robert Wrubel bobwrubel at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 26 08:24:51 PDT 2007


Hey, what about War and Peace, Quiet Flows the Don, Moby Dick, or Finnegan's Wake? How about the Canterbury Tales?

I think anything you've read more than three times in your life qualifies as pretty good literature. (Whoops, I have to take off Moby Dick!)

BobW

andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:

Great art is historical and local but rare.

"Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them - there is no third." -- TS Eliot

You might add a few names to the list (we'd both put Homer on, and the Greek tragedians) and we might dispute some (I don't get your thing for Pound, and Ovid's a first class second rater) but I can't see that great works are multiplying at such a madcap rate such that reading them is a bore. Nor has the vast increase in writing, to my mind, increased the quality of what is written.

Wouldst that Milton were living at this hour! Is he? In whom? I like Thomas Pynchon, but really!

--- Carrol Cox wrote:


> Always historicize!
>
> "Great Art" is, mostly, a creation of the last
> couple of centuries. And
> if we go on creating at the madcap rate of the last
> century there will
> be so fucking many Immortal Works cluttering the
> world that they will
> become a bore. What do you do when there are three
> or four hundred epics
> around of the caliber of Homer, Ovid, Dante, Milton,
> Pound. You stop
> reading them at all is what you do and give your
> attention to something
> produced in your own locality.
>
> That's my prediction: that national and world
> literature will disappear
> and poets, composers, painters will produce only or
> mostly for those in
> their own communities.
>
> Arnold tried to reduce radically the number of
> "really" great poets --
> he saw the glut coming. But his ploy didn't succeed.
> Great works
> continue to pour out on us.
>
> Carrol
>
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>
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>

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