The Future of Great Literature

[mortalterror]

But Mortal, things would be different. The extremelly unlikely present we live is a result of very unlikely combinations of occurances, which even being the same, could be completely different. All you needed is a blow of wind and we could have the entreteia and not internet and Harold Bloom would have to write about the cult to Lope de Vega. Imagine changing a little, like moving Michelangelo out of Italy, or even if Goethe didnt had Faust.

Of course, this also makes the argument by Stlukes not strong, more like: things must be as they are. But the truth is that art only happens in a medium and literature (just like visual arts) is deeply affected if society starts to use another medium. And it will happen again.

You know, you are right, Lope de Vega should be way more well known than he is. But Calderon should be even more popular than that. Those two are both near Shakespeare's level but they get snubbed for being Spanish. Meanwhile, Cervantes writes Don Quixote and has no such problem. Explain that? Lope de Vega and Calderon are as ignored as Jean Racine, which is weird because we don't tend to snub the French tradition the same way.

I also have to commend you for cutting to the heart of the facebook/twitter issue earlier when you said that short stories didn't kill the novel or lessen it's popularity. They just added a new layer to the conversation.

[JCamilo]

It may happen. If english declines, who said guys like Racine won't move to the center because we will demand his precision and the french (or latine) writting style, because society got tired of english improvisation, fast and we will need more classical writings again? The idea of a fixed center for the canon is much faith judaico-christianism applied.

I picked Lope by chance, and even more because his poetry is nice, but could be Calderon, but Cervantes is a good example to this topic: his book is just suitable to the printing age in Europe. It was not the bible, it was an easy reading, a bit universal, a novel in chapters, so good to printed. Meaning probally Cervantes found the best-seller and Lope and Calderon the academy. Probally the same reason which explain Dickens or Poe popularity over some guys who are maybe better, they had a formula adapted to their society technical demmands.

Edit: a side note, you know, we do tend to snub French literature. How many talk about Marguerite de Navarre narratives? François Villon is not so well know, Richelieu political notes either, If I say here Moliere wrote better comedies than Shakespeare, it will cause heartattacks, when you bring Racine (and as matter of fact, Racine Drama and Moliere comedy did manage to keep Shakespeare out of France for a century) people shoke, Rabelais is rarely compared with Swift, Victor Hugo with Dickens, even the philosophers, Proust always under Joyce or Woolf shadow, got a little nod to english or german. Sure, you have some Baudelaire, Voltaire and Rousseau, but the first is almost like like the only french poet poeple talk, Voltaire is heavily underated, but then, he is fine as such and people only know like 10% of what he wrote, and Rousseau people just know he invented America. Sometimes it seems like french literature is great, but without great names, but that is hardly the truth. (not to mention, we snub Canada too. They are a little french after all)

[JBI]

But then, the dominant form of literature is not romance or novels, but journalism. And Twitter and facebook are pretty much taking its place, since journalism narratives is about easy access, speed and not quality.

I do not know if we are going to see a chinese flux, because this demands a interest on chinese language, translations and internet is english dominant, and I do not know if west has more interest on china than china has on us, and it is possible the western works are entering in china more than otherwise. Something like, one JBI for 100 millions NBA chinese fans.

The opening of internet does not imply better writers, we kind of are in the Gutenberg momment, Cervantes still need to come. So far the main impact is about distribution and copyrights, and this affects too little Dante and cia. I suspect politcal changes and economical will be more important than Internet - Europe and USA are moving down in the tables, its not as easy to impose cultural dominance asking money to the third world. And with a proper politic, third world countries literacy will give a jump and i am certain they will form a mass of readers that will be more interessed on modern works than past works, and this may be the impact, a bit similar as the impact caused by USA on XIX-XX century.

Only half true - China is not interested in the Non-Chinese world, and will never be culturally interested as long as the system of culture they have in place remains. Their government discourages learning about the world beyond its borders (and select places within its borders keep in mind), because they fear the outside world (a tradition going back to the building of a Giant Wall to keep the world out which has only intensified). Linguistically, Chinese readers do not scratch the surface of any culture that is not their own - the acceptance of Cinema (and the worst of cinema too, mind you) is perhaps the most significant, but even that is completely dubbed, and edited when it enters the borders, and only allowed in by its ability to not cause any significant response.

As for the NBA etc, well, to an extent, but I feel even that as a general trend has been ebbing in favor of their local Basketball league, which is far more televised. The NBA just allowed a self-proud racist country to brag about having a Chinese National playing in a major American League (though I hear there is a big stir with Jeremy Lin now playing for the Knicks).

The idea that Chinese people are the least bit open minded is totally ridiculous - they do not know anything beyond their own borders - they know nothing of literature or music that is not their own (or Korean and Japanese as the influence begins to affect them, though not as significantly as Taiwan, which rehashes the trends from the other two), and have no desire to. Most people in China don't even know the countries that border China, let alone their capital cities.

The internet in China, ironically, is its own contained beast. It is only half accessible in other parts of the world, and is all a Chinese citizen will ever end up reading on the internet - though one can hop the firewall, most have no reason to, and will not, and if pornography is what they are after, it is sold on the street in bootleg dvds from Japan. There is a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, of Skype, of Facebook, of Youtube, and of Blogspot. There is no major Western website that does not already have its Chinese knockoff - which is exactly the same thing, usually with the same colour scheme.

[JCamilo]

Ah, by no means I wanted to suggest China is very open, that is why I thought the NBA example, as it is less cultural, a bit economical and somehow part of a governament agenda. China is pretty much the other kind of empire, the kind that the metropolis is inacessible, distant and just high in heaven, if we compare with the American model (which is the british model, roman model, etc) which encourages trade and therefore impose culture at the sametime is modified by it.

But as USA is becoming less empire, more self-protectered, I see a tendecy of cultural protection and not so much interest on China culture and literature, while china is playing with trying to spreed influence.

I see India and Brazil of the economic new powers (I am not counting Russia) as those with a more open road of exchanges for quite a while, India also with the english language advantage.

[stlukesguild]

Think about what you are saying though, and think about all of the exceptions to it. Think of all the composers you admire who wrote concertos, lieder, and requiems when it would have been more fashionable to write symphonies. Or what of the great artists who came almost out of nowhere to have huge effects on culture such as Neruda and Ibsen? Their cultures weren't so rich and influential.

How many know Schubert primarily for his 8th and 9th Symphonies, his late quartets, his "trout" quintet, his late piano sonatas and impromptus, and the choral arrangement of Ave Maria as opposed to his lieder? How many bring up the lieder when discussing Faure? Why is Schumann relatively ignored in contrast to Brahms or even Dvorak?

Michelangelo, as you well know, was corralled against his will into the Sistine frescoes by Bramante, the architect of St. Peters who hoped to take Michelangelo away from work of Poe Julius tomb sculpture (that was eating up too much money in his opinion). The further intent was to embarrass Michelangelo, due to his lack of experience with fresco, thus allowing Bramante to recommend his young relative, Raphael for the job. Michelangelo initially spent his evenings writing rants against this commission and even attempting to employ various powerful connections to get him out of the job. For a period of time he even walked away from the work. But with time, he recognized the value of this commission... a giant canvas unlike that which almost any other artist had ever been given in the Pope's private chapel. This was the equivalent for the artist to the Superbowl Halftime Show. Perhaps his achievements may have been just as wonderful had he been employed in Norway or been commissioned to produce a book of hours instead of paint a ceiling. But then again... how many artists from Norway can you name? How many artists from Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Britain, etc... made the pilgrimage to Florence and Rome vs Norway? Arguably, the Limbourg Brothers magnificent Tres Riches Heurs is in no was artistically inferior to the Sistine... but how many artists did it impact? How many casual art lovers have even heard of it?

Is Picasso important because he painted in the Cubist style, or is the cubist style important because Picasso painted in it? I choose to think the latter.

I have asked that question... or variants myself. To my eye, Picasso was already a brilliant artist by the time Rose Period kicked in. He had produced any number of "masterpieces" prior to Cubism. But had he continued in the manner of The Family of Saltimbanques would he be considered as central a figure to Modernism... and thus 20th century art as a whole. There have been critics that have pointed out that Matisse was the more innovative artist early on... and by most standards is a clear rival to Picasso... so why did Picasso become the dominant figure? A good part of this reason may have simply been that a great deal of Matisse' finest paintings were sold to Russian collectors, and disappeared after the revolution, whereas a majority of Picasso's finest paintings ended up in American and French collections where he could become the central figure of MoMA.

What are we to make of Diego Rivera. Rivera was working in Paris with Juan Gris at the start of Cubism. When the war broke out he traveled to Italy where he was stunned by the large frescoes from the Renaissance and developed the idea of creating a similar visual narrative history of Mexico... which by most standards, he achieved... brilliantly. And yet today he is largely recognized as the husband of Fridah Kahlo and an inspiration to the American Abstract Expressionists. Why? Partially because his greatest achievements exist in Mexico as opposed to Europe or the US... and partially because the visual language in which he chose to work became thought of as "outdated" and reactionary.

A movement is not a movement without it's geniuses. Stated more simply, genius leads a movement not vice versa.

Perhaps... but it is rare that an artist rises to a great level of influence working in an art form outside the major art forms of the time.

How important is location really? Like I said earlier, Ibsen is from Norway, Neruda is from Chile, Dvorak is a Czech, Sibelius is from Finland.

Neruda is from Chile... and wrote in Spanish at the moment when Spanish literature (in Spain and Latin-America) was becoming a force to be reckoned with. Nevertheless, as you yourself have been forced to recognize, Lope de Vega and Calderon are quite underrated... and quite likely would have been far more central figures had they written in English... or even French. Sibelius? Dvorak? How many composers from Norway or Finland can you name before the late Romantic era and the rise of "nationalism"?

You say that Michelangelo wouldn't have been as important if he'd painted on a smaller pallet but how big is the Mona Lisa? How big are Vermeer's paintings?

You do know that Vermeer was largely forgotten until the Impressionists (especially Manet) rediscovered him? Such an example doesn't seem to say much for your argument that scale/form don't matter. Again, I'm not saying that one cannot create the greatest of art in the most obscure art forms... but whether others will pick up upon your achievements is questionable.

You say "It is also doubtful that [the Sistine chapel frescoes] would have been as central to art history had they been painted in Norway." But I say that once Michelangelo paints The Last Judgement and the Book of Genesis, wherever he does this becomes the center of the artistic world.

That's but wishful thinking. Picasso recognized this well enough and left provincial Spain for Paris.

The Elizabethan age is known for it's plays. But for Shakespeare, it might just as easily be known for it's epics like The Faerie Queene, Jerusalem Delivered, and The Lusiads, or for it's sonnets by Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Ronsard, Raleigh, and Donne. How can you say that there is just one appropriate medium or style for a time?

I wouldn't suggest something as simple as a single dominant art form for a given period of time. As you noted, the short-story did not spell the end of the novel... but merely offered one more possibility. But the same can be said of the novel. Initially it was but one more possibility. By the late 19th century it was the dominant mode of narrative literature. If aspects of today's society challenge the novel or offer up new possibilities, I doubt that they will replace the novel any time soon.

[JBI]

I thought the Lieder were just lesser known outside of the German world.

As for the Renaissance being known for drama - which Renaissance. The great decade of the 1590s in English was known mostly for its Sonnets at the time, as the dominant force. Petrarch, its king, granted, was known for a good 200 years prior primarily for his Latin work. The Romances, as were mentioned, were quite dominant, as everyone rushed to read Ariosto. Look at Cervantes! He clearly is writing on a tradition immersed in the Romance primarily, and the Drama secondarily.

Most of this talk of movements and forms is just wrong. The actual movements tend to be named after the artists finish what they are doing. Most just belonged to societies, as that was how to get commissioned, or published back in the day. The place of presses and scenes is also important as that ensures a circulation.

As for size mattering, well, that depends where and which medium. Ornate small things have always captured certain audiences, especially since they are collectable - China exported 100s of millions of pieces of porcelain mind you, and it was all the rave around town - Japanese woodblock prints have been dominant as a form for the past 150 years despite people usually being unable to name specific artists.

As for replacing the novel, well, what we did was just redefine it. The generic tropes have been so altered that nothing is the same as it once was. We call it novel out of convenience, but The Satanic Verses is definitely not the same genre as Pamela.

My understanding of things will be to combine genres and mix and match - prose poems, or poetic novels, or comic-novels (graphic novels) or illustrated books and the like. We are on the dawn of a new romanticism of sorts (a return to sincerity), so it will be interesting to see what the poets cook up, and how old poets are "discovered" again (Wordsworth will be the bard ones again, even if he has been less popular than Wallace Stevens).

[mortalterror]

Perhaps his achievements may have been just as wonderful had he been employed in Norway or been commissioned to produce a book of hours instead of paint a ceiling. But then again... how many artists from Norway can you name?

Edvard Munch is the only Norwegian painter I can name, though I'm not sure what that proves. It's a very small country.

How many artists from Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Britain, etc... made the pilgrimage to Florence and Rome vs Norway?

If Michelangelo's frescoes and statues were all in Norway, there would be a lot more.

Arguably, the Limbourg Brothers magnificent Tres Riches Heurs is in no way artistically inferior to the Sistine... but how many artists did it impact? How many casual art lovers have even heard of it?

It's in every art textbook isn't it? I must confess I'm not as informed about where the Tres Riches Heurs was kept all these years, whether artists had access to study it, and who it might have influenced. Likewise, I am not sure just how influential other masterpieces of book arts such as the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp fared in other countries when compared with Italian frescoes.

I have asked that question... or variants myself. To my eye, Picasso was already a brilliant artist by the time Rose Period kicked in. He had produced any number of "masterpieces" prior to Cubism. But had he continued in the manner of The Family of Saltimbanques would he be considered as central a figure to Modernism... and thus 20th century art as a whole. There have been critics that have pointed out that Matisse was the more innovative artist early on... and by most standards is a clear rival to Picasso... so why did Picasso become the dominant figure? A good part of this reason may have simply been that a great deal of Matisse' finest paintings were sold to Russian collectors, and disappeared after the revolution, whereas a majority of Picasso's finest paintings ended up in American and French collections where he could become the central figure of MoMA.

So you think that Picasso painting in a cubist style and Matisse being a practitioner of Fauvism had more to do with their respective positions within the canon than their actual talent levels?

Nevertheless, as you yourself have been forced to recognize, Lope de Vega and Calderon are quite underrated... and quite likely would have been far more central figures had they written in English... or even French.

As I told JCamilo, location isn't the only factor. Cervantes is huge though Lope is little known outside of Spain. And as I said earlier, Jean Racine wrote in French and we ignore him too! Think about it. England is generally considered a cultural hub of Europe, but when it comes to fine art and music it is a pigmy compared to some of it's neighbors. What's that about? If it's so rich and politically important, and that's all that matters, then why don't we have a culture structured around English painting and music?

Sibelius? Dvorak? How many composers from Norway or Finland can you name before the late Romantic era and the rise of "nationalism"?

Composers, none. Most countries in Europe seem to have had a golden age in the 19th century for one reason or another. Norway is a really bad example to compare to places like England, France, Germany, Italy, or Spain because they had no nobility, national culture, sovereignty, or language for about 450 years prior to that time. Even if they weren't 1/10th the population size of their neighbors, any talent of theirs in that time would be brain drained to foreign courts. Seriously, they went through a dark age. A lot of these little European countries, were little more than satellites of other bigger nations until that time and shouldn't be compared to the larger wealthier nations with their own native cultures and traditions. A lot of them didn't speak their own language or have their own schools. Criticizing them for not having more composers in the sixteenth century is about the same as doing that to the USA. It's not a fair comparison.

You do know that Vermeer was largely forgotten until the Impressionists (especially Manet) rediscovered him? Such an example doesn't seem to say much for your argument that scale/form don't matter. Again, I'm not saying that one cannot create the greatest of art in the most obscure art forms... but whether others will pick up upon your achievements is questionable.

Again, what about the Mona Lisa? Small painting, big impact.

That's but wishful thinking. Picasso recognized this well enough and left provincial Spain for Paris.

Goya didn't. Velazquez didn't. It was good enough for El Greco. Another compelling reason why Picasso left Spain is because he didn't like the Franco regime.

[Darcy88]

This conversation is way, way, way beyond my depth, but I have to say that Racine is far more well known than Lope De Vega or Calderon. I see Racine every time I walk into a used book store but hardly do I ever come across those masters of Spain. Maybe Corneille would work as a better example but even he seems more popular than Lope De Vega or Calderon.

[mortalterror]

This conversation is way, way, way beyond my depth, but I have to say that Racine is far more well known than Lope De Vega or Calderon. I see Racine every time I walk into a used book store but hardly do I ever come across those masters of Spain. Maybe Corneille would work as a better example but even he seems more popular than Lope De Vega or Calderon.

I see Racine too if I go looking for him. Most stores have 1 copy of Phaedra. That's it. If you have more than that, it's probably because you are in Canada with it's dual French-English heritage. But I own copies of Calderon and Lope de Vega too. You can find most anything these days, but the point is they don't circulate, they don't fly off the shelves, they don't get taught in the curriculum. When you converse with other literary people there is a better than average chance that they will not have read books by those authors.

Edit: a side note, you know, we do tend to snub French literature.

I don't know about that. At least in the Anglo sphere of influence it appears to be the only language on an equal footing with English literature.

How many talk about Marguerite de Navarre narratives?

That's just one writer. I think that authors like Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, De Maupassant, Sartre, and Camus are some of the most famous names in all of literature.

François Villon is not so well know, Richelieu political notes either,

I think Villon is not unknown, and we don't have as much cause to know Richelieu's political notes. We prize things like Montaigne's Essays but asking everyone outside of the French speaking world to care about Bossuet, Bouleau, and Sainte-Beuve is going a bridge too far. This is starting to sound like JBI's constant harping that we don't have 100% of what China wrote. We don't need every minor 16th century poet, or fifteenth century letter writer. Not everything in one nation's canon belongs in a regional or world canon. I love Thoreau, Nathanael West, and Thomas Love Peacock but they just won't make the cut.

If I say here Moliere wrote better comedies than Shakespeare, it will cause heartattacks,

I think most people would be fine with that. Comedy was Moliere's specialty, and Shakespeare's tragedies were better than his comedies anyway. I think that Gargantua and Pantagruel is a better comedic novel than Don Quixote and Catch-22 is funnier than either, but that would probably give people heart attacks.

when you bring Racine (and as matter of fact, Racine Drama and Moliere comedy did manage to keep Shakespeare out of France for a century) people shoke, Rabelais is rarely compared with Swift, Victor Hugo with Dickens, even the philosophers, Proust always under Joyce or Woolf shadow, got a little nod to english or german.

I've always thought the conventional wisdom was that Rabelais was better than Swift and Hugo and Dickens were more or less a tie, though my personal preference is for Hugo.

(not to mention, we snub Canada too. They are a little french after all)

I don't think we snub Canada at all. I think they are still a small young country that never produced much worth reading. If you divided the literature of the United States into ten sections, representing roughly the same population size as Canada, those sections wouldn't be much to look at either.

There is a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, of Skype, of Facebook, of Youtube, and of Blogspot. There is no major Western website that does not already have its Chinese knockoff - which is exactly the same thing, usually with the same colour scheme.

You can't really get mad at the Chinese for knocking off Youtube with Tudou and Youku when American's knocked it off with Vimeo, and the French with Dailymotion. Blogspot itself is just a Livejournal clone, and Facebook ripped off Myspace, which in turn ripped off Friendster. Jonathan Abrams should have been Time's Man of the Year not Mark Zuckerberg, and the Social Network should have been his story, except American's don't celebrate failure. It's all just big fish eating little fish, the snake eating it's own tail. There is no originality. These corporations all steal each other's ideas and then lecture consumers about copyright infringement.

[Emil Miller]

[QUOTE=JBI;1116506]

The idea that Chinese people are the least bit open minded is totally ridiculous - they do not know anything beyond their own borders - they know nothing of literature or music that is not their own (or Korean and Japanese as the influence begins to affect them, though not as significantly as Taiwan, which rehashes the trends from the other two), and have no desire to. Most people in China don't even know the countries that border China, let alone their capital cities.

This is probably true with the exception of those in government who are quite aware of what the west is about and conduct China's affairs accordingly.
There is a tendency in the west to imagine that by watching China we will be able to detect weaknesses that we can exploit, without realising that the Chinese are watching us to ensure that we don't.
But it is not correct to say the Chinese know nothing about music that is not their own, as witness the incredible demand for western classical music and the multiplicity of Chinese performers on the world concert circuit. However, I would agree that this interest has not become a facet of Chinese culture itself.
It is more like some fascinating toy that they have come across and continue to play with increasing dexterity without assimilating the cultural context within it.

The internet in China, ironically, is its own contained beast. It is only half accessible in other parts of the world, and is all a Chinese citizen will ever end up reading on the internet - though one can hop the firewall, most have no reason to, and will not, and if pornography is what they are after, it is sold on the street in bootleg dvds from Japan. There is a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, of Skype, of Facebook, of Youtube, and of Blogspot. There is no major Western website that does not already have its Chinese knockoff - which is exactly the same thing, usually with the same colour scheme.

This is true. There has been some comment in the UK and French press about the US wanting to engage with China on a more 'positive' footing but this runs parallel to articles about Chinese 'paranoia' over the west using the Internet to undermine Chinese government control. The Chinese are not being paranoid, because that is exactly what is happening, and any increased 'co-operation' with the west will be carried out with that in mind.
If the Chinese want to see what a disastrous effect the implantation of a foreign culture can have on an indiginous one, they need only look to their own history or across the East China Sea to Japan.

[JBI]

Well, China may like Western Music as you say (in Shanghai maybe), but they still always jump at specifically the Chinese pianists - Yundi Li is almost a god there, despite being one of the driest, one of the most generic and boring concert pianists around, who can no longer sell seats in the west. Long Long is not a bad player either, but I want to hear him play Tchaikovsy, not some third rate Chinese composition like the Yellow River Concerto, which is basically a mediocre knockoff of better works, yet is a required piece of any Chinese concert repertoire. The actual act of learning the Piano now is more like this: you are some rich kid in Beijing, whose neighbours all learn how to play the piano at age 4 because their parents bought a book that teaches them how to parent you for Harvard, so you need to learn piano as all harvard graduates are proficient at piano, and therefore your friends parents will not be allowed to play with you unless you know piano too. It is not even about playing well or not well, or making progress, it is about the act of playing the piano itself, showing that you are richer than the kids who cannot play - and you are in a school environment that thrives on its public private nature, where the rich kids always end up somehow in better classes, and with positions of authority over their classes, despite the profession of free education (which ends at the beginning of what they call high school).

My comment on the knockoff was not that I think knocking off is bad, as I am a strong supporter of internet freedom etc, it was that, having something completely isolated allows the Chinese web-user the ability to actually never interact with the Global world on the internet - the one great thing of Facebook is it is international (well, not China tsk tsk, where it is fully blocked). My point was our websites have knockoffs, and then they block the original, ensuring the website that does not move well at all in the West is forever the only website in China.



In this world, the hardest thing anybody will need to learn is how to laugh at themselves. Some countries do a better job than others I would wager, but some countries yell at every insult, and are obsessed with their own image and propaganda. If people want to talk about literature mixing in the world, and cultures being exchanged, first people need to understand that this is a new phenomenon, and has been a failure almost everywhere it was attempted. I am a big fan of the notion that art has no borders, but I am constantly dissuaded and led to believe that art is part of the scheme that creates borders. The comfort zone, as I call it, for culture extends to everything - the British mentality of hop in a carriage and don't stop until arriving in Italy and bipassing everything on the way still rings true to how most places interact culturally - we have an excepted group of tropes, and we just don't bother with the rest. Racine is not translated into English, and not widely available because Racine is not liked by the English, who have never liked French poetics at all, regardless of whether or not they realize that their poetic tradition has felt French influence far more heavily than any other outside force (Chaucer was reading French, which developed earlier, the early Renaissance authors were reading French as well, which developed there before England, and the court of Charles the 2nd were writing in modes taken straight from the French lands they were exiled to, and ironically in the mode if not directly from the classicist Racine).

[Emil Miller]

[QUOTE=JBI;1116640]

Well, China may like Western Music as you say (in Shanghai maybe), but they still always jump at specifically the Chinese pianists - Yundi Li is almost a god there, despite being one of the driest, one of the most generic and boring concert pianists around, who can no longer sell seats in the west. Long Long is not a bad player either, but I want to hear him play Tchaikovsky, not some third rate Chinese composition like the Yellow River Concerto, which is basically a mediocre knockoff of better works, yet is a required piece of any Chinese concert repertoire. The actual act of learning the Piano now is more like this: you are some rich kid in Beijing, whose neighbours all learn how to play the piano at age 4 because their parents bought a book that teaches them how to parent you for Harvard, so you need to learn piano as all harvard graduates are proficient at piano, and therefore your friends parents will not be allowed to play with you unless you know piano too. It is not even about playing well or not well, or making progress, it is about the act of playing the piano itself, showing that you are richer than the kids who cannot play - and you are in a school environment that thrives on its public private nature, where the rich kids always end up somehow in better classes, and with positions of authority over their classes, despite the profession of free education (which ends at the beginning of what they call high school).

Well what we think of individual performers is subjective. I happen to think that Yundi Li is an excellent pianist and you can hear Lang Lang playing the Tchaikovsky on Youtube. The Yellow River concerto is frequently played in China but it's merely a reflection of Chinese national identity in the same manner as the Pomp and Circumstance marches of Elgar. I recently went to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London to get a ticket for a recital by Yuja Wang and they were practically sold out two months in advance. She's also appearing at another London concert hall during that week but as it's the ghastly Bartok 2nd, I will have to give it a miss. I'm aware of the cachet attached to playing the piano for the parents of Chinese children but I don't think that was a factor for the professor of music who organised some concerts that I attended in Shanghai for his very young students of both piano and violin .

My comment on the knockoff was not that I think knocking off is bad, as I am a strong supporter of internet freedom etc, it was that, having something completely isolated allows the Chinese web-user the ability to actually never interact with the Global world on the internet - the one great thing of Facebook is it is international (well, not China tsk tsk, where it is fully blocked). My point was our websites have knockoffs, and then they block the original, ensuring the website that does not move well at all in the West is forever the only website in China

.

Given the propensity for propaganda, something the Chinese know a lot about, becoming a major disruptive force, I don't think we will be seeing a great deal of change in the current situation vis-a-vis Chinese government control of the Internet and social networking sites.

[JCamilo]

Mortal:

I think you misundertood me, I do not mean we ignore french literature, but it is often something with dust or I seems as a little brother of england. Just think, you are basically the only Racine's champion around, and people will say it is just your clacissim talking because Racine apparently is just a imitador of Classical literature. And it is not just in the forum, a bit world wide. I have more than once mentioned Moliere among the great writers and I got some very "eh", "just vulgar humor", etc reactions.

I recall the surprise when we mentioned Victor Hugo poetry, and yes, if you talk with a few, Hugo is easily as good as Dickens or the russians, but it is true overall? It is a bit funny people love the witty of Oscar Wilde and quote him in epigrams, as if he wrote them as such, and French do have a real good tradition in epigrams, so maybe they will have some golden twitter age...

Anyways, I do get the impression french are well know, but it is really something like: Genius in English, in france power in numbers reaction here.

[Alexander III]

Mortal:

I think you misundertood me, I do not mean we ignore french literature, but it is often something with dust or I seems as a little brother of england. Just think, you are basically the only Racine's champion around, and people will say it is just your clacissim talking because Racine apparently is just a imitador of Classical literature. And it is not just in the forum, a bit world wide. I have more than once mentioned Moliere among the great writers and I got some very "eh", "just vulgar humor", etc reactions.

I recall the surprise when we mentioned Victor Hugo poetry, and yes, if you talk with a few, Hugo is easily as good as Dickens or the russians, but it is true overall? It is a bit funny people love the witty of Oscar Wilde and quote him in epigrams, as if he wrote them as such, and French do have a real good tradition in epigrams, so maybe they will have some golden twitter age...

Anyways, I do get the impression french are well know, but it is really something like: Genius in English, in france power in numbers reaction here.

I know my opinon does not matter much, but I would take Racine and Moliere over Shakespere any day. Shakespeare is master of the charcter, but for pure poetry Racine is the greatest dramaturg, maybe only aeschylu can surpass him.

[JCamilo]

Which would lead you to a Joan D'Arc destiny, as apparently, Shakespeare invented drama and introspection.