You know, I thought I was fairly careful about naming names here. I tried to pick writers who were intellectually complex and historically important, and I subtly suggested that people who would try to argue against the study of such writers were surly curmudgeons. But I forgot that in Canon-Debating World, it’s always 1987, and we always have to be on the lookout for the possibility that some black writer, somewhere, is getting too much attention at some dead white guy’s expense. (Odd, isn’t it, that the allegedly overrated contemporary writer is always black? And if people don’t want to make an issue of this, then they shouldn’t complain about the attention being paid to writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe. They should try complaining instead that everyone has read Don DeLillo’s Underworld but few people have read Book VI of the Aeneid, or something along those lines.) It’s the last part of this formulation—the “at the expense, some argue”—I forgot: since I inhabit a sane and sunny world in which it is reasonable to expect people to read more books every year, I completely overlooked the fact that because the Department of Surly Curmudgeons actually don’t have any good arguments against studying Equiano or Barnes or Hurston, they pretend, instead, that the study of these figures is a “zero-sum game” that will distract us from the real classics. This is—how shall I put this decorously, so that even the surliest curmudgeon will understand it?—ah, yes, I know: this is horseshit.Indeed.
Once again, it's not about culture at all: it's class and race that fuels the resentment of Surly Curmudgeons on the right.
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Listening to: XTC - Funk Pop A Roll
via FoxyTunes
