Wednesday, March 30, 2011

We don't need no literary geniuses

Cranky? Okay, I'll admit it: I'm cranky, but you'd be cranky too if---

And that's where I have to stop, because most of the things that are making me cranky (1) are a normal part of my job (which I love) and therefore I need to just deal with it and move on, or (2) cannot be discussed in public.

So, um, nice weather we're having.

How's your basketball bracket doing? Ooh, look who's cranky now!

And speaking of sports, here's something to make all of us literary types a little cranky: in an article in Slate (read it here), Bill James wonders why we're "so good at developing athletes and so lousy at developing writers." Here's his argument in a nutshell:

We are not so good at developing great writers, it is true, but why is this? It is simply because we don't need them. We still have Shakespeare. We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around. We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day....

If that doesn't make you cranky, nothing will.

4 comments:

Bev said...

Because, like, obviously three dead white guys can speak for all of humanity, right?

Laura said...

That's how some folks feel about academic art music!

Anonymous said...

It is because we want our unread display volumes to come in attractive leather bindings. Great writers are like great aunts; it's nice to know they're still around, going strong, but who wants to live with them?

Remember, it takes a crank to start a revolution.

D.

Bardiac said...

Bill James needs to realize that the writers we consider great weren't necessarily thought so much of while they were writing, but over time, in comparison with others, the powers that be have decided they ARE great.

We can suspect the powers that be of all sorts of nastiness (misogyny, racism, etc) in making that choice. But, there's plenty of really good literature being created today. It's hard to pick out which will be considered "great" in the future, because (I hope) the powers that make those decisions will be different than the powers that decided 200 years ago and because there's a LOT of literature being written.