American classics

The Weekly Wrap: June 21-27

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The Weekly Wrap: June 21-27

Reading the Classics

In recent years, humanities programs in many universities excoriated “the Western Canon,” the classic works that had provided a common vocabulary for generations of educated persons. More recently, there has been a resurgence of the classics among home schoolers, and private schools. Recently, states like Texas have prescribed curricula incorporating a number of classic works. While many of these lean conservative, there are other exponents of reading the classics. Ted Gioia has created a 52-week classics reading program. Classical philosopher Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John’s College has launched a program called the Catherine Project.

A few of my thoughts about this:

Firstly, I have a broad definition of classics including the ancient Greek and Latin writers, great works of philosophy and theology, and great works of literature spanning the gamut from Homer, to Dante, to Austen, Melville, Steinbeck, and Morrison and many more. Classics are works that have endured and are part of our ongoing civilizational conversation.

Secondly, I won’t say one ought to read the classics. Rather, the question is, how important to you is that civilizational conversation. I’ve come to appreciate reading the stories and ideas that form our cultural fabric.

Thirdly, I recognize these are human works that range from our noblest ideals to baser ones. We do need to read critically. Often that occurs in the conversation.

Fourthly, I also want to read diversely. Given our global village, I don’t just want to understand the western enclave, even though that is where I live. And I wouldn’t want to miss the explorations of human nature in mysteries, and of the future in science fiction.

Finally, I’ve discovered that there were some “great books” I read too soon. More life has brought deeper engagement with many of the ideas and stories of which I was oblivious in high school.

I say read these works not because you must but because you may. So many free or inexpensive editions exist. As for lists, I won’t prescribe any–I’m too profligate a reader for that!

Five Articles Worth Reading

Speaking of lists. A number of book critics were asked about the essential works of American literature in our first 250 years. Publishers Weekly published the results in “15 Essential Works of American Literature.”

“Diversity” is a bad word in some quarters. But in “How Babel Thrives,” David Sugarman reviews a book that studies one of the world’s most diverse communities, Queens, New York. It argues that by allowing diverse communities to live side by side without erasing differences, they’ve managed to forge a robust pluralism.

At one time, figures like Reinhold Niebuhr and Billy Graham appeared on the covers of Time. But no longer, as Ed Simon notes in “Where Have All the Protestants Gone?“

Helen Lewis, in “Paradise Revisited” re-traces Charles Darwin’s journey in the Galapagos. The essay is punctuated with gorgeous photographs and videos. In addition, Lewis gives the lie to Darwin’s brief journey being the time when he figured out natural selection, which came only on subsequent reflection.

Finally, it is actually possible to acquire a library of 20,000 volumes just studying the Greek and Latin classics. You can tour David Butterfield’s library in “The Largest Bookshelf Tour Ever Filmed: Inside a Classicist’s 20,000-Volume Library.”

Quote of the Week

Pearl S. Buck, who was born June 26, 1892, pithily summarizes the case for studying the past:

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I featured Theo of Golden by Allen Levi on my Facebook page. I have never had so many positive reactions to a book, especially from friends I respect for their reading judgment. That only whets my appetite to read it.

I’m starting Jill Lepore’s We The People as my America’s 250th reading. However, I don’t think I’ll finish it by July 4. The book is a history of our Constitution, an imperfect but amazing document, as crucial as ever to our national life.

Daniel Silliman’s Reading Evangelicals is an interesting study of the fiction Christians were reading over about a twenty-five year period from the mid-1980’s to the late 2000’s. I’m interested to see how he thinks those books, only one of which I read, shaped evangelical identity.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Michael D. Clark, Woven Tales of Greek Mythology

Tuesday: Gerald Hiestand & Joel Lawrence, Power and the Pulpit

Wednesday: William Kent Krueger, Desolation Mountain

Thursday: Hannah King Miller, Feasting on Hope

Friday: Daniel Silliman, Reading Evangelicals

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap  for June 21-27.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: Cannery Row

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Cannery Row

Cannery Row, John Steinbeck. New York: Penguin Books, 1992 (originally published 1945).

Summary: Steinbeck’s Depression-era narrative of the residents of Cannery Row, eking out an existence on society’s margins, and forming an unlikely community in the process.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

Steinbeck had me at this first sentence and drew me in with his ensemble of oddball characters–Henri the painter who has been building a boat for seven years; Lee Chong, the grocer whose emporium has a little bit of everything from every when; Doc, the marine biologist who collects marine life for research, and functions as a kind of doctor for the bodies and souls on the Row; Dora, the madam of the Bear Flag Restaurant where sailors and others could get far more than a sandwich from her girls; Mr. and Mrs. Malloy, who turn an abandoned boiler into their home; and Mack and the boys of the Palace Flophouse, whose exploits drive the narrative of this book.

For the most part, this is a group scraping by during the Depression. Mack and his boys might be described as “discouraged workers” taking odd jobs or even working a stretch at the canneries–just enough to get by and buy some cheap whiskey (“Old Tennis Shoe”) from Lee Chong. Eventually the boys get the idea to throw a big party for Doc, a sad man who listens to music as he reads at night unless he has a lady friend in, but who cares for delinquents, girls from Dora’s who get “in trouble,” and anyone else in need. The party ends up a comedy of errors. There is an elaborate tale of borrowing Lee Chong’s decrepit Model T, nearly getting run off an old captain’s property until they heal the captain’s dog, drink up his whiskey with him, and clean out a pond full of frogs they plan to sell to Doc to raise money for the party. The night of the party, Doc is recovering from finding a young girl’s body and doesn’t arrive home until the morning, to find his lab trashed, his record albums broken, and the remains of the party everywhere.

A pall settles over Mack, and the boys, indeed over the whole Row. Doc lashes out and busts up Mack’s mouth. But the boys are undeterred, and plan another party, at Doc’s place, of course, and all the residents get involved. How it all ends, I will leave for you to discover.

Behind the madcap exploits of Mack and the boys and their interactions with other denizens of Cannery Row, one gets a sense of what it was like for those on the margins to eke out a life during the Depression, how hard and sometimes tragic it was. This strange set of characters somehow help each other survive. Doc, the best off and most educated, shares the hopelessness of this group, finding a beautiful young girl dead in the water and finding himself unable to help a young delinquent he’d befriended. Like the others, he anodizes the pain in alcohol when books, music, young women, and his marine expeditions are not enough.

In the end, what seems to get them all through are the relationships, the bonds they form with each other in this crazy assemblage of humanity. There is no thought here of the possibility of a deeper Relationship or a Higher Purpose that can make sense of life. Nevertheless, this group of people faced with the challenges of their lives,  decides they must celebrate a birthday, and in doing so that there is some meaning, some worth to their existence, because you never care about or celebrate something without worth.