reading is quite possibly the hardest task that a human being should learn in their life. The ability to scan small symbols abnd draw not only direct meaning from them, but also allusion, metaphor, sarcasm, humor, etc from them is HARD. it needs constant practice. Reading is truly the one thing that, if a person is taught to do, they can enhance their lives and lifestyles more than by learning any other task.

Reading for fun is great. reading for infomation is great. they both take different skill sets and both are crucial for the critically thinking mind.

I get very very sad when I see people that are proud of not reading, as if not having read a book since high school is some sort of badge of honor.

Ok, serious point moment - while, in pricinciple, I don't have a problem with 'lower' literature (if you'll excuse the provocative terminology), I do have a problem with laziness. Which is to say, just as with anything, your skills become somewhat stale if you continue to operate at a single level. I forget who the quote is from, but there's a lot of truth in [paraphrased, badly] "If your favourite book is Lord of the Rings when you're 13, that's ok; if it's still your favourite book at 30, you've got a problem".

I'm not suggesting that everyone should jump from Enid Blighton to Hegel; you're certainly missing out if you don't give some of the alleged 'classics' a bash. I think there's a dual problem at play, certainly in anti-intellectual Britain - the first that 'classics' are treated with a degree of austerity and reverence by those who don't read them - for instance, Ovid, Homer, Virgil, Dante and most Latin/ Greek poetry is not, by any means, the deepest and most significant literature - it's all about fucking, bums, titties, willies, farting and having a good ol' Bacchanalian knees up and a rumpus. The other problem is that those who read it perpetuate the wankishness. Nearly every classics student I've met, and nearly every Lit student I've met can be so unbearably prickesh about literature that is, at core, a good read (to some readers).

People who fear the classics because it's 'too clever' are missing out; people who edify the classics because they're 'too clever' are missing the point.

I think what you're saying about Camus is pretty accurate - you're (supposedly) meant to read it and stroke your chin at how amazing you are for recognising the alienation as a metaphor for [etc etc] and it's disappointing for a great many people if those points pass you by. I found Camus slightly tiring, and I certainly didn't empathise with his characters (a necessary condition for the philosophical tropes gassed on about by the wankish boors, methinks).

On the subject of the Bible (and boy, is that argument dull as piss already), I was going to say, anecdotally, that I know a chap who is cripplingly dyslexic with most Western fonts, but has no problem with Coptic scripts and pictographic languages (Chinese etc). That's something I find fascinating, and slightly weird.

i got 14 pages into gravity's rainbow before i lost track of all the characters and their relationships to each other and gave up. it made keeping track of who's who in crime and punishment later on seem easy breezy, though. so it wasn't a total loss.

Come come, if we are to have a thread on literature, surely we should not allow the written word to be devalued by careless spelling mistakes? Looses/loses is not even a homophone, there's no excuse. Nor will I accept dialectal variation as an excuse. Partly because this would be a variation of accent rather than dialect, and partly because no dialect of English that I am aware of conflates the pronunciation of these two words. Accent tends to vary vowel sounds, rather than consonant sounds; 's' for 'z' is laziness, or, perhaps if you'd rather, lasiness?

I see both sides. The monks in the early middle ages did preserve a lot of literature, and a lot of our knowledge about classical times is due to that. The Catholic church not allowing people to read the bible did put a damper on literature, but when the Gutenberg bible came along the impact was pretty huge.

The monks worked in near total isolation from the Holy Roman Catholic Chruch for a long time , and thank goodness they did.

The Persian empire did more to preserve ancient romana dn greek literature and philosphy than anything done by western nations or the church.

if latin is such a dead language, then why has it been and remains the language of modern science for the past 500 years? I may indeed have a christian view of history, but some things exist regardless of my own viewpoints and perspectives. The Roman Church, and many other Eastern Churchs preserved literacy and writing systems in a time when Europeans could have lost the very concept. Hard to imagine? It shouldn't be, there are only two indigenous scrips in Africa, for a population of 700,000,000 people. People can live just fine, and build fantastic empires and achieve technological wonders, all without a written language, it turns out language itself is powerful enough for that. The written word has another agenda entirely. And in the European tradition, it was the Christian churches which preserved the concept and technology of written languages. I didn't make this shit up to support my agenda, I dont even conform to European christianity myself.

At what point did we abandon reasonable scansion? "Looses/ loses [wasn't it 'losses'?] is not even a homophone [Full stop] There's no excuse [semi-colon or hyphen] nor will I accept [etc].

Judg/e not lest ye['] be judg[e][']d.

*snort*

that was good.

but how about "judge and prepare to be judged" instead? everyone would do so much better...

Cunt off, prickstain.

No, I love you really.

You hippy cuntwaste.

Is this the big tits thread?

i'd repeat the request for a show of tits from you as well, but i've already flogged that dead horse today-- please don't take it as a sign of rejection.

This is all particularly bizarre as my "sigh" was one of defeat and acceptance (my positive rep of his post should have told him) and yet it is taken so horribly wrong. Is humility such a foreign concept to this board?

Call me a "mental slug," "lazy half-wit" (atari's favorite), "moron," "illiterate," or whatever but I will write typos from time to time.

Crumb. . .

the concept of hu... what?

i only know this one:

 

im THE GREATEST at it

Scansion? In prose? Young Joyce really has warped some young minds out there.

pbradley, my apologies, I am so used to a negative attitude to the community support grammar officers that I misread your ambiguous sigh.

On another point, though, one of gender, is it not fascinating that pbradley assumed me to be male? Why do we think this was, hmmm?

Touché. Grave and all.