Dispatches from the Culture Wars- Literary Front

So, I'm killing time and half-watching the Rodney Dangerfield movie "Back to School", and there's a scene where Dangerfield is in his first English class, and the teacher starts class by reading the last part of Joyce's Ulysses, the "Yes I said yes I will yes" bit. And I wondered. I wondered if the movie was being made today- and this is ostensibly a relatively low-brow production, Vonnegut cameo aside- would the filmmakers and studio be that willing to trust that a decent portion of the audience would get the jokes here? The teacher says "I think Joyce is pretty hot too", and later, Dangerfield says of Joyce, "she's one of my favorite writers". You have to know that the novel she's reading was written by a man named James Joyce, or at least that there was a novelist named James Joyce, to get the joke, and I'm not sure if a-Hollywood trusts the audience enough at this point to make the joke, or B-that Hollywood is essentially right, that a lot of people wouldn't really get the joke. And I don't know if this pessimism is my basic pessimism, or if its justified, or if it's snobbery on my part. Probably all of the above. I know that even most college students don't read what we might call "the canon" for fun, only when they're assigned. And even then a lot don't. I don't know.

I'm half convinced that text messaging will eventually mark the end of modern English, and that in a hundred years people trying to read Dickens or Shakespeare will be like students today trying to read Sir Gawain or Chaucer. Hell, if someone hasn't already written an epistolary novel in text messages, I'm sure it's going to be published any day now.

I'm not concerned that reading itself is dying out, but that the books that people read are going to collapse into ever increasing banality. I know that this is the intellectual snob's eternal refrain. When the third book was written, the academics were bitching that it was nowhere near as good as the first, and that the form was dying. But when I was at Barnes and Nobel yesterday, they didn't have any poetry by Wallace Stevens, but a bunch of books of "poetry" called "Heart songs" written by some kid with some sad story behind him. I remember the Onion satire along those lines, but I swear to God I had no idea that it was based on something real, and that apparently become more important than WALLACE STEVENS. You just KNOW Oprah is somehow involved in this.

Okay, I know I'm something of a snob, especially about books and music, but I do read things like Stephen King and Harry Potter that sell millions of copies, I'm not as far gone as Harold Bloom in this respect. I don't know. Whatever. Nevermind.