Avoid

I have a few minutes to kill, so I feel like writing about my Lit. Hum. project.

Literature Humanities is a mandatory course I pretty much blew off when I was at Columbia University, and I am going back over the reading to punish myself. So far, it has worked really well. I feel I have been punished greatly. I suffered through Plato’s bizarre tribute to homosexual predators, and I waded through the tedious, venal muck of Homer and Virgil. I am still buried in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and if memory serves, I will soon be tormented with Dostoevsky. I dread that like you can’t imagine.

I loved literature when I was young, and then I got over it. It looks like I’m not going to get a relapse any time soon. Literature is full of whining and self-pity. It’s unrealistic. It takes place in imaginary worlds where there is no loving God. It reinforces just about every type of evil urge a person can have. It tends to promote sexual sin, socialism, irresponsibility, and atheism. I’m starting to wonder how much of it a person can be exposed to without harm.

It kind of reminds me of rap music.

I liked Boccaccio when I started reading his book, but love has withered on the vine. His book goes on forever. It would have been much better had two-thirds of it been burned by his editor. It contains dozens of highly similar stories, and they’re not very imaginative. In terms of literary quality, I would rank it right up there with the Nancy Drew mysteries and John Grisham.

That’s not a compliment. John Grisham writes very badly, and his work doesn’t show much familiarity with the practice of law, which is odd, given his original profession. The wealthiest writers make up one set, and the best make up another. The intersection of these sets is small.

I think I can say with confidence that no one was ever moved or inspired by Boccaccio. There are no memorable quotes, either. You don’t put down the book and exclaim, “Wow! That’s brilliant!” He will never make anyone forget Joseph Heller or William Shakespeare.

Now that I’m farther into the book, I realize there’s a lot of filth in it. I mean real gutter porn, with no real literary value. It’s not even clever porn.

He reminds me of Cervantes. I haven’t read Cervantes since college (I took Columbia’s famous Don Quixote course, which was a farce and a waste of money). I don’t think Cervantes was much of a writer. He was just windy and irreverent. You can’t seriously commpare him to a French homologue such as Rabelais. He isn’t as erudite, nor is he as funny. If you want to read a brilliant, offensive book written several centuries ago in a place other than England, try Voltaire’s Candide. Don Quixote functions best as a doorstop.

Sometimes I think Cervantes gets air time simply because people are desperate to pretend Spain has a rich literary tradition that compares with northern Europe. Were that true, we would have found out about it by now.

I was going to read all of Boccaccio, even though the syllabus doesn’t demand it, but now that I see what a drag his book is, I am adhering to the schedule. I guess I’ll be done in a week. I would be moving faster, but I have other books on my plate, and they’re actually entertaining and/or full of useful knowledge, so they get priority.

I wish I had more good things to say about Boccaccio, because that would mean I was enjoying the book.

The moral, as always, is that you should read certain books in order to be educated, not in order to be entertained or impressed. And of course, they are useful to people who want to be punished.