You guys can't envision the final collapse of capitalism? Incredible!
-- NPC in the Stoic Club, EarthBound
If you read much new writing about writing these days, or from the past generation or two, at least, you'll inevitably come across a statement along the lines: I realized I needed to read more books by women, or writers of color, or Latinx authors, or what have you. There has been a deserved discovery and rediscovery of the importance of diversity, and an equally inevitable resistance put up from people who continue to care about all the other very deserving works they might like to study, but which are diverse only in a narrow, intellectual way: the canon, which includes Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Montaigne and Machiavelli, Woolf and Wilde--but not nearly enough women or queer people, etc, embodied behind the ideas for contemporaneity to be OK with. And so what are reading? has become a loaded question. If you read old books instead of new ones, your social bona fides are suspect. If you expect people to read for pleasure at all, to have time to do something so decadent, your entitlement is probably showing. Whenever woke commentators even mention a thinker like Socrates--possibly one of the most woke people ever to wake--they can't help but do so in a way that broadcasts loud and clear the mentioner's utter lack of pretension, their distaste for any whiff of aristocratic valuations of thought or spirit; whereas on the other side, conservative and reactionary types have doubled down on their defense of the canon and their haste to align themselves with it, to appropriate it wholly, as if that were possible, within their ideology--which imagines itself, of course, to be free of ideology. It isn't possible, I think, because the value of art transcends political ends, but speech about art never truly does... But maybe my saying so in the first place only brands me a conservative despite my protestations to radical neighbor-love of a very idealistic, lefty sort--I just think the left jettisons the canon at their peril--while the latter half of the statement makes me sound like a total relativist, perhaps. I'd submit the Dude's critique of Walter is valid for much of what the popular right-wing apologists have to say: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."
Which is all a long-winded way of saying, I was browsing in Bloom's (Harold's, not Allan's) Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (though, to brazenly if tongue-in-cheekily acknowledge there might be differences in intelligence, and that some stories and poems might not be for everyone, probably already sounds borderline fascist to many of my fellow educators) and I thought I'd read some stories and poems by women. So I read some lyrics by Christina Rossetti, and then I came upon this fairy tale by Mary de Morgan, "The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde." In it, people are turned into objects, the beads on the magic necklace, and then finally the evil princess herself gets turned into one, and the others are all freed. They are all tempted by her, and its, beauty--the spell is cast by encircling the gold necklace with one's fingers--but she is finally tricked by a servant who claims that his necklace of acorns and stuff he found in the woods is more beautiful than hers. He knows the secret, you see, having been warned by the princess' maid, who then fell victim to the necklace after all. In her greed and incredulity, the princess agrees to trade necklaces, and so is caught as she goes to take hers off. One way of reading this, I thought, might be as a critique of capitalism, the golden collar par excellence, which has a tendency to convert its admirers into trophies. But if that's the case, the chain can only be cut once the capitalists are so glutted with their own wealth that they run after an authenticity, a natural alternative, whose attractions haunt them by their very commonplaceness. But that even so doing will only usher in a return to the status quo ante, a feudal model, basically a much less efficient form of capitalism where people are much less free, but feel much better about where they are. And in the rise of environmentalism and influencer-media, and in what is happening in public schools and halls of power, the crass ignorance of unions and populists alike, it strikes me that a good portion of this reading is borne out. Only who the brave and clever servant will be who finally cuts the cord, remains to be seen.
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