Replacing Classic Novels

by James Wallace Harris, 8/12/13

Most bookworms just want to be entertained. They know their tastes are so individualistic that no friend or authority can predict what they will like. However, teachers and literary scholars like to think that certain books should be read, and a tiny fraction of readers are willing to read books because they have a great reputation. We feel reading the classics makes us a better person.

There is no FDA like agency that officially rates books as choice or prime. So, what makes a classic novel? The common assumption is novels that survive the test of time are the real classics. However, you can go on Amazon and order a lot of books from the 19th century that no one considers classics. Some people consider books that are taught in school or college to be the classics. And there is some merit to that, but literary works that get taught are also subject to the whims of pop culture, and English departments.

I mention all this, because I read “8 Overrated Literary Classics and 8 Books to Read Instead” by Jeffrey Davies, especially since it throws four of my favorites under the bus: On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Of course, this is clickbait, but I’ve seen this kind of essay before. A couple other examples are “13 Overrated Literary Classics, and What to Read Instead” by J. W. McCormack and “9 Overrated Classics — And What to Read Instead” by Zoraida Córdova.

I understand why young people rebel and want to overthrow the reading lists of the past, especially a past dominated by white male writers. And sure, sometimes these articles are just giving suggestions as to something different to read. But other times, I do feel the writers just hate the classics they are demoting. I often see On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye listed in these literary rebellions. (A hilarious generational attack on The Catcher in the Rye is the novel King Dork by Frank Portman)

What I would like to propose are rules for this game. If you want to oust a literary classic, you need to provide a proper substitute. All too often, these writers offer alternatives that are just their personal favorites, and usually something from recent decades. Classics have specific qualities that any substitute should have too. They include:

  • A snapshot of history – time, place, and subculture
  • Innovation in writing style and techniques
  • A philosophical or psychological insight

In other words, classic novels offer a view of everyday life in the past, even if it’s inaccurate, slanted, or distorted. That’s why I’m against publishers cleaning up aspects of older novels to make them politically correct for modern woke minds. We need to know both the good and bad about how we were. No censoring or whitewashing the past by substituting novels that agree with your moral and ethical sensibilities.

Classic novels supplement history books to build mental models of the past in our heads. Removing any one of them takes pieces of the puzzle away from the collective images we’re building of our cultural heritage and history.

If you’re serious about offering replacements because you feel an existing classic work doesn’t do the job well enough, then suggest a novel that offers a better view of the same time and setting. One that is more insightful.

The trouble is, doing just this is extremely hard. Readers have spent decades and centuries winnowing out the best novels. You might dislike novels for the views they show, but finding good replacements takes a lot of work and reading.

I would suggest, instead of trying to replace specific classic novels, you offer supplements instead that expand or enhance the classics. For example, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and On the Road (1957) are about alienated youth in America before the youth rebellion of the 1960s. We need more novels about kids growing up in America in the 1940s and 1950s to expand on the views those two famous classics give. I would suggest Horseman, Pass By and The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, among others.

The challenge would be to find novels written near the time and setting covered, ones that have been forgotten but are worth resurrecting and remembering. There is something more authentic about novels written by people who lived in the time of the novels as opposed to later novels that are historical fiction.

Few novels are truly contemporary. On the Road was set in the 1940s, but was written in the early 1950s, and published in 1957. It takes a certain number of years to get the perspective and write things down. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published in 1958, but about 1943. And it’s not the early sixties we see in the film, and neither is the plot or characters. Holly Golightly is a lot closer to Neal Cassidy than most people realize. She is another alienated youth from the 1940s, and another supplement for The Catcher in the Rye.

I understand why young readers dislike older novels. I can understand why they want to promote their favorite stories as classics. But I don’t think it’s an ethical idea to suggest they should replace the older classics, especially with newer novels.

They need to decide which novels from the eras in which they lived paint a worthwhile picture of those times and places, and then promote them as the classics that represent those settings and characters.

If these essay writers need a hook to promote the books they love, please don’t throw the books under the bus that other people love. I’d suggest being straight forward and creating titles like: “The Best Books about Miami in the 1980s.” Or “Novels About People Who Lived Down the Street from Jane Austen.” Or “Characters Who Lived While Jack and Neal Were On the Road.” Or “Novels That Louise May Alcott Read That We Should Read Too.”

JWH

Living With an Aging Infrastructure

by James Wallace Harris, 8/6/23

I’m writing this on my iPhone by typing with just my right index finger because our internet is still out. It’s been over a week now. We feel like we’re living in the 1980s. We know this is a first-world problem and nothing compared to all the natural catastrophes happening around the world. Still, it’s quite educational.

When AT&T came out to fix our internet, we discovered the wire from the pole to the house was on the ground hidden in some bushes. It had been pulled off the pole and the connection at the house by a falling tree limb. The repair guy said it would be no problem stringing a new wire, but I, unfortunately, knew better.

“You can’t climb that pole,” I said to the repairman as he started walking to the back of my lot.

“What,” he said.

“That pole is so rotten and broken that MLG&W guys won’t climb it. The linemen won’t work on it without a bucket truck.”

The AT&T guy tried to use a distant pole but there were no free circuits. So now we’re waiting for AT&T to return with a bucket truck.

We’ve been waiting years for that telephone pole to be replaced. Our block is bisected by power lines on incredibly old poles. They are hollow, with big cracks, and holes. The power company tagged them years ago to be replaced but they spend all their time fixing lines and circuits that are broken. This summer Memphis has had several storms causing several big outages, including over 100,000 customers.

It’s a matter of aging infrastructure. Memphis is built under a sea of trees, and those trees are always falling. It’s an endless battle between the arboreal world and power lines. In the winter, ice storms make a siege on the trees and water pipes and sewers. During the rest of the year, frequent storms rattle millions of limbs. And the extremes of hot and cold wear on everything all the time.

That line of old telephone poles that divides the block is shrouded by trees in backyards segregated by fences of all types. Those poles won’t be easy to replace. And they won’t be replaced until they fall. Which means days of power outages for about seventy homes in this area. I live with the fear of one old dead tree in particular, falling across the powerlines and bringing the whole line of telephone poles down in my backyard.

Last year we had a freeze that damaged many water lines, and the city was under a boil water alert. Many people in Germantown can’t drink their water right now because gasoline got into a leaky old pipe.

I expect from now on as the weather gets more violent and as our infrastructure ages, we’ll all live with increased outages. If you are paying attention to the news, cities all over the world are living with scheduled blackouts and water shortages. The recent floods in China are a terrifying portent of things to come.

Living without the internet is a lesson about the future. Things are going to break down more. We all need to become preppers. As we build new infrastructure and repair the old, we need to design new structures that can withstand far greater abuse from Mother Nature.

I wish 5G internet was available in our neighborhood. Then we wouldn’t need wires. Unfortunately, we only get one bar of broadband in this neighborhood. And I wonder if they could route the power lines under the streets. I know they bring fiber optic cables to old neighborhoods that way.

I believe there will be plenty of solutions to these aging infrastructure problems, but we might have to go through decades of bumpy readjustments.

JWH

How Addicted Are You To The Internet?

by James Wallace Harris, 7/31/23

Our internet went down Saturday, and a technician won’t come to fix it until Thursday. Living without the internet shows me just how addicted I am to the online world. And we haven’t gone completely cold turkey either, since Susan and I have little lifeboats to the internet with our iPhones. We’re like teenagers, with our faces glued to our phones. While streaming is down, we watch the two nightly shows we watch together, but with our separate iPhones. We both love that routine of watching Call the Midwife and A Place to Call Home every night.

Since we’re both retired, we spend a lot of time watching TV during the day – each with our own TV no less. And since we cut the cord a decade ago, we depend on the internet for streaming TV. I think that’s our biggest withdrawal symptom. So, we’re really addicted to television. But that’s been true since the mid-1950s.

Since the router has died, I realize we have two other addictions that are entirely internet dependent. First, is social media. Second, is information.

We have some friends that we spend time together with physically, but we also have more friends we mostly spend time with on the phone or online. I spend hours every week keeping up with my friends who live out of town, or just don’t get out of the house much. But I also have a new class of friends that I hang out with online. My hobby is science fiction, and I have several friends from around the world that I connect with daily or weekly via the internet. I would miss that connection if it were gone.

I was thinking about these internet friends the other day and comparing them with my science fiction fandom friends back in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, I corresponded with other science fiction fans by letter, fanzine, and apazine. And I would meet them physically once a year at conventions. That network of friendship was like my current network of science fiction friends on the internet. But the snail mail network was far slower. I was in two quarterly apazines. Replying to people and reading replies would happen every three months. Now, it’s a matter of minutes.

The internet is also my external brain. I’m forgetting more and more words, people, and dates, but my iPhone or computer lets me look things up almost instantly. I’ve become very dependent on referring to Wikipedia, IMDB, ISFDB, Just Watch and other sites to recall words, facts, and events.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve tried to imagine life without the internet. Part of my addiction is habit. I suppose I could learn new habits to replace internet use. But it would mean living in a much smaller world.

Every day I spend an hour or more looking at YouTube videos. What they do is allow me to spy on what other people and animals are doing around the world. And I see amazing things. I have a far greater sense of what’s going on all over this planet than when I just read the newspaper and watched the CBS Evening News.

The internet is like a sixth sense. That’s a third addiction.

I could go back to living without the internet. I could even live without television and the phone. I might even live without books. But, subtracting each from my life would make reality smaller.

I think about the times in the past, where people never ventured further than a few miles from their homes, and they lived without any kind of distant communication at all. That could be a good life, even a better life. But it’s not the one I’ve evolved an adaptation to live in.

If you’re wondering how I created this blog entry, it’s because we went to the AT&T store and up our cellphone plans to include a hotspot feature and unlimited data. This will also make our phones more valuable during power outages too.

JWH

Thinking Outside of Our Heads

by James Wallace Harris

I believe recent developments in artificial intelligence prove that many of the creative processes we thought came from conscious actions come from unconscious mechanisms in our minds. What we are learning is computer techniques used to generate prose or images are like unconscious processes in the human brain.

The older I get, the more I believe that most of my thinking comes from my subconscious. The more I pay attention to both dreams and my waking thoughts, the more I realize that I’m very rarely making conscious decisions.

I might think “I am going to walk across the street and visit Paul,” but I have no idea how to make my body walk anywhere. But then, I’ve always assumed muscle actions were automatic. It was mental actions I believed were conscious actions. I used to believe “I am writing this essay,” but I no longer believe that. This has led me to ask:

Just what activities do we perform with our conscious minds?

Before the advent of writing, we did all our thinking inside our heads. Homer had to memorize the Iliad to recite it. Prehistory was oral. How much of thought then was conscious or unconscious? Have you ever read The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes? I know his theories have lots of problems, but they do imagine what I’m thinking about.

How often have you worried over a problem, say a math problem, or a programming problem, and gave up, but then later, usually after a nap or sleep, the solution came to you? That’s the classic view of unconscious thinking. But even when we’re thinking we’re solving a calculus problem is it really being done at a conscious level? Are you consciously recalling all your math lessons over a lifetime to solve the problem?

How often when working on a Wordle or Crossword does the word magically come to you? But sometimes, we are aware of the steps involved.

In recent years I’ve developed a theory that when we work with pen and paper, or word processor or spreadsheet, or any tool outside our body, we’re closer to thinking consciously. Sure, our unconscious minds are helping us, but making a list is more willful than just trying to remember what we need at the store.

Writing an essay is more willful than woolgathering in the La-Z-Boy. Authoring a book is far more willful still. Engineering a submarine by a vast team of people is an even more conscious effort. Sure, it involves a collective of unconscious activity too, but a vast amount documentation must be worked out consciously.

I’ve written before about this idea. See “Thinking Outside Your Head.” That’s where I reviewed different techniques and applications we use to think outside of our heads.

Many people want to deny the recent successes with AI because they want to believe machines can’t do what we do. That humans are special. If you scroll through the images at Midjourney Showcase, it’s almost impossible to deny that some of the images are stunningly beautiful. Some people will claim they are just stolen from human creativity. I don’t think that’s true.

I think AI developers have found ways to train computer programs to act like the human mind. That these programs have stumbled upon the same tricks that the brain evolved. Many great writers and artists often talk about their Muse. I think that’s just a recognition of their unconscious minds at work. What those creative people have learned is how to work consciously with the unconscious.

What some creative people are doing now is consciously working with two unconscious minds – their own and an AI. There is still a conscious component, the act of working with tools outside of our head. Where the action is, is that vague territory between the unconscious mind and the conscious one.

JWH

What Gives Me A Sense of Accomplishment at Age 71

by James Wallace Harris

When we were little kids grownups would ask: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That plants a seed in us that we should have a goal for the future, to plan to do something and accomplish things. When we were little, we’d tell the grownups we wanted to be astronauts or rock stars, because those were the exciting glamourous occupations we knew about.

As we got older, we learned that becoming an astronaut requires getting advanced science degrees, and becoming a rock star means learning how to play the guitar and sing which takes ten thousand hours of practice, neither of which we really want to do.

As we got older we learned that just finishing doing anything had its own rewards. The trouble was learning what we like to do. I had to work at many shit jobs before I was 25 to learn what I actually liked doing, which was working in a nice office, messing with computers, and having coworkers who would become friends. Helping someone else accomplish their goals by programming a computer was what I eventually discovered I like doing. I found working at a university that helped other people to become what they wanted to be fulfilling to me.

Before we retire we think about all kinds of big things we want to do after we quit work. I thought about moving to New York City or living in England, or moving to a retirement community with a lot of social activities. But those things were like dreaming of becoming an astronaut when I was a kid. The reality of retirement was quite different. Susan and I decided to stay in the home we had. And my health problems made me not want to travel.

However, the urge to do something is still there. And even as I get older and can do less physically, I still have this desire that I should have a goal for the future, and to accomplish something. What’s rather fascinating is where and how I get my sense of accomplishment every day.

Nowadays, the future isn’t so far off. It’s either, “What am I going to do tomorrow,” or “What will I do today.”

My goals have become smaller and smaller too. A big one recently was cleaning out the attic. Our friends Anne and Tony came over and helped us get everything down, and now Susan and I are going through all the boxes and suitcases stacked up in the dining room to get rid of that stuff. When that task is done it will give me a reasonably big sense of accomplishment.

But I don’t need big things to accomplish to find satisfaction. Even going to the grocery store provides a satisfying sense of getting something done. It involves Susan and I planning our meals for the week, making a list, going shopping, and putting things away. All of that might take just a couple hours, but it wears me out and leaves me feeling I did do something worthwhile. Me and my old friends joke about how doing one thing like going to the grocery store makes us feel like we’ve gotten something done for the day. And the common joke is, “How did we ever have time for a job?”

If I look at my ToDoist app on my phone, I see a list of things to do that will make me feel good when I get to remove them from my To Do list. And most of those little goals are rather mundane: clean out the file drawers, find a new dermatologist, hire an electrician to install the new Blink security camera and light, cull out DVDs I’ll never watch again, get my eyes checked, and so on.

This is a long way from becoming an astronaut. We never hear people ask: “What do you want to do when you get old?” Theoretically, my retirement years could be longer than my work years. At one time I had big ambitions about what I would do with them, but like a kid growing up and discovering the reality of the work years, the reality of the retirement years is very different too.

A lot of what you can accomplish in retirement depends on money and health, and health really becomes the defining factor. I no longer have a bucket list of things I want to do because at some point the scope of life changes. My sister Becky once told me, “You start out life by living mostly in one room with someone changing your diaper and end up living mostly in one room with someone changing your diaper.” At the time that was funny, scary, and depressing. But as you get older, it becomes, “I can see that.”

I could still have a decade or two, or even three. That’s a lot of time. Unfortunately, it’s time when I’ll have dwindling energy and health. But I don’t think I’ll lose a sense of wanting to accomplish things.

I’m reminded of a short story by R. A. Lafferty called “Nine Hundred Grandmothers.” In it, a space explorer visits another planet and learns the beings there are immortal. However, they get smaller and smaller as they age. He is taken to a cave where the ancestors live on shelves in the wall. The further back he goes the tinier they get. That’s what life is like getting older. The scope of every day slowly gets smaller and smaller. You live with it.

Right now I measure accomplishments by how many books I read or essays I write. I like waking up in the morning and thinking of a goal and then achieving it during the course of the day. At 5:55am this morning I imagine writing this essay. It’s now 7:53am and I’ve almost got a first draft. I hope to finish it soon and eat breakfast. It’s great to start the day having completed a goal early.

Before I got up I also pictured cleaning up the house so our friend Leigh Ann could come over and Susan, Leigh Ann and I can spend the afternoon playing Rummikub. It’s not much of a goal, but it is satisfying.

And I look forward to tonight when Suan and I will watch another episode of Call the Midwife and A Place to Call Home. This might be silly, but I find watching complete series from pilot to finale gives me a sense of accomplishment. So each night I feel like we’ve done something by watching another episode from those two series.

Sometimes I even give myself big goals, ones that are daunting to me now. Ones that I have to push myself to finish. Like cleaning out and organizing my email and computer files on my hard drive. You might laugh, but I have thousands of emails and tens of thousands of computer files waiting to be examined.

Finally, there’s a weird symmetry to getting old. Susan and I have collected a lot of stuff in 45 years of marriage, and now we’re getting rid of all that stuff a little bit at a time. I have thousands of books that I still haven’t read. Ones I bought thinking that one day I’ll get to read. Well, that one day is here and I’ve got to get busy reading them. Finishing each one gives me a sense of accomplishment.

JWH (another thing done – 8:35am)