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November 23, 2003
The Old
I'm reading Dickens these days having just finished Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code'. This particular Dickens is 'Great Expectations'.
This is part of my standard recovery process, but I am accellerating it. Having decided that nothing new under the sun is worth long watching is part of my official acknowledgement of middle age. I'm making sense of all the stuff for which I had no patience when I needed to get out and see the world. All those concertos I barely recognized, I am now really getting to know. Same with rock and now, old standards of English Lit.
What is middle age though? I'm certainly an old man by Dickensian standards, not halfway through my 40s but too gray to fake anything much younger.
Last week, I watched a great deal of MTV. More than 3 hours if I remember correctly. As Doc and I were talking this afternoon, I tried to convince him that the reason young people are so stupid with regard to cultural literacy is because they have their own culture. Scarier still, MTV's dramas are good. It is actually an interesting bit of human drama to watch some kid try to be 'made' into a drill team dancer. It's great fun saying young people are stupid but it's another thing altogether to take MTV seriously for a moment. I mean what do you say about people who get their news from somebody named Sway?
Anyway, on this astral plane over here, I find it a real blast to recognize a good 80-90% of Hirsch's Appendix. When the blogging muse gets moody and distant, I'll pop over to the bookshelf and pick a goody from Cultural Literacy. In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out what's up with Miss Havisham.
Posted by mbowen at November 23, 2003 05:55 PM
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