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18 March 2006: When I started my computer this morning, it crashed. I'm now waiting
for my tech to answer my voicemail to him. I'm using my old computer to write this. It
seems to work okay except that the keyboard is lousy. I can't find the address of the site where I edit my blog, either, and I have no links to it from this computer, so can't post entries to my new homepage. I don't know when I'll be up
again, but can probably keep this blog more or less up-to-date off this computer, or at the
library. Expect periods when I disappear, though.
Today, I'm just gonna vent some more against Charles Murray--as representative of the
Cultural Establishment's imbecility. My gripe this time is specifically against his list of the
top twenty literary figures of the West: Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, Virgil, Homer,
Rousseau, Voltaire, Moliere, Byron, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Petrarch, Hugo, Schiller,
Boccaccio, Horace, Euripides, Racine, Scott and Ibsen, in order from top to bottom.
Shakespeare and Moliere are the only ones who'd make my top twenty. Unless Goethe's
work is a lot better than my impression of it, admittedly incomplete. Dante,
Virgil, Rousseau, Voltaire, Byron, Tolstoy, Racine and Ibsen wouldn't make my top
hundred. I'm not sure about Scott and Boccaccio. Byron and Ibsen would not make my
top two hundred.
Note that Petrarch is the only one pure lyric poet on the list, Moliere the only specialist in
comedy. Conclusion: High-Minded hormoneless Victorians are mainly responible for
setting the standards this list is based on, and the mechademics responsible for reference
books in literature have been servilely sticking to them ever since.
My list, I should point out, would be of creators of the greatest works of literature, not of
the most important writers. Homer would surely be in the top ten on the latter list as
would a few of the others I wouldn't have in my top hundred. I'd have almost only writers
from the past two hundred years (and none who flourished after 1950 or so because,
though many are deserving, I'm too close in time to them properly to evaluate them.
Actually, I think I could properly evaluate many of them, but want to make things easy for
myself.
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