| 2009, viewed grouchily, two |
[Jan. 8th, 2009|10:55 am] |
I feel for the twentysomething readers of this blog (there are one or two such) who must acquire a basic knowledge of what was once contemporary even as they keep up with what they really prefer to be reading about and experiencing, viz. the contemporary plus whatever parts of the past they find intriguing.
All of us had to do the same thing in our respective generations, of course, but I always want to find ways of bringing folks up to speed as expeditiously as possible. I am flabbergasted to learn that high school students are being made to read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, a book I found irrelevant to my experience back when it was the hip (or the hippie) thing to be reading. (Heck, I remember thinking The Catcher in the Rye was sadly dated when I was made to read it lo these many years ago.)
I bring this up because the New Yorker essay on the continuing relevance of Hannah Arendt fills in the knowledge gap for some people, while rehearsing things that many of my readers remember all too well about Arendt; as readers of joculum know, I am a fan of essays that spare people the necessity of plowing through books purely for the sake of acquiring basic background information, since there are too many books (including many by Arendt) that deserve to be studied in depth:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/01/12/090112crat_atlarge_kirsch?currentPage=all |
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| Comments: |
I read Siddhartha for the first time a few months ago (I had fought my way through Steppenwolfe a few months before that), and I thought it was interesting in the same way that watching TV shows like X-Files or The Honeymooners is interesting now - you've just got to keep asking yourself how or why the item was popular back in prehistoric times.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/75071943/10543636) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) joculum
2009-01-08 06:51 pm (UTC)
Re: Twentysomething Reporting In | (Link)
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The strange thing is that Hesse himself interests me...it's just his novels I can't deal with. He fits as interestingly into the intellectual life of twentieth century Germany as any of his contemporaries, but the novels are better dealt with in paraphrase and discussion of their milieu rather than having to read them. (I was always going to get round to The Glass Bead Game, but had the feeling that the premise for it was better than the embodiment of it in fiction.)
The best one-liner I ever heard regarding Hesse was the proposal that he was born in Thomas Pynchon's fictitious spa town, Bad Karma. That shows you the scarcity of one-liners regarding him. | |
