Blog the Western Canon

I wonder if following this proposed blog would be easier than reading the Great Books?

 

NB: The question is rhetorical.

'Allow Me to Introduce Myself...: [W]hen you face a classroom of young people, newly paroled from the American high school system, and now stepping out of the blizzard of pop cultural nothingness, and start talking about “the canon” with them, it’s a bit like watching two alien life-forms encountering each other for the first time. There’s a total disconnect between their culture and their cultural patrimony. High culture--those elevating works of art and literature that have survived the test of time--are disdained as pretentious and elitist; and in turn seem to have been taken hostage by academics! And yet, while I am of the generation that remains steeped in pop culture, it’s hard not to feel increasingly that, in the words of David Cronenberg, “it just doesn’t feed me”.

How did enjoyment of and engagement with the canon become so specialized, narrow, professionalized, and soulless? Here the culture wars have obscured more than they’ve illuminated. Dating the “crisis of the humanities”: namely, academia’s divorce from the larger culture, only back to “postmodernism” or “the 60s campus protests” suggests that the humanities were in far better shape before that time. But reading the memoirs of people who went through the educational system in the 1800s, one hears the same complaints.... The political debates about the canon overlook the fact that back to the Renaissance roots, the humanities have gone through alternating periods of deadening specialization and thrilling revitalization; we’re just overdue for the second....

I propose to “blog the canon”; from Homer to Hitchcock, Wittgenstein to Warhol, and Plato to Passolini. I want to do is write in a lively, irreverent, and passionate way about “the best that has been said and thought in the world”, and how these works affect me, a relative pisher in many of these areas. I am no expert. (With any luck, I’ll win one of Andrew Sullivan’s “poseur alerts”!) But I do want to write about the Aeneid the way we bloggers write about Avatar--as a living part of our culture...'
http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2010/02/allow-me-to-introduce-myself/


Aeschylus: The Suppliants


'Nevertheless, the quick denouement is a real let down. I felt a bit ripped off and yelled “What are you doing, Aeschylus?!” at the text. My wife has, thankfully, come to expect these sorts of outbursts; the cat was a bit frightened. It’s still very disappointing to me how Aeschylus plays this off as a very easy choice, when the whole play argues that it’s not an easy choice. Sticking our neck out to protect the weak and victimized is never as easy as it should be. Not in this life. Sure, the Argive democracy “does the right thing”. But, it seems to me that the point of the play is that these debates will take place in democracies for generations to come because it’s seldom written in thunder what the right thing might be.'

http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2010/02/aeschylus-the-suppliants/