Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id796514535
The Romance stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for over a thousand years. Some people claim (without citing sources) that it was the #2 most-read book of antiquity and the Middle Ages, after only the Bible. The Koran endorses it, the Talmud embellishes it, a Mongol Khan gave it rave reviews. While historians and critics tend to use phrases like “contains nothing of historic or literary value”, this was the greatest page-turner of the ancient and medieval worlds.
✏️ Beyond just the insanity that is this book, the takeaway from this is that literary criticism is kinda pointless, or at least, should never be held up as some objective truth. Critics and historians are making stuff up just like the rest of us. 👓 propaganda 🔗 View Highlight
id796525950
We divide “high culture” from “mass culture”. High culture, those books that plumb the depths of the human spirit, go from the Iliad through the great Greek tragedies through Dante and Shakespeare and so on to Tolstoy, Proust, and Knausgaard. Mass culture - those books that the average person finds entertaining - might also start with the Iliad, but ends up at Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, and Batman comics. Mass culture follows somewhat different rules than its more prestigious relative: War And Peace sits perfect and untouchable in the temple of genius, but Batman is invented anew every few years. Really Batman is less of a specific book or movie and more of a genre. The genre has some conventions: the protagonist must be a man named Bruce Wayne with a secret identity as a bat-themed superhero; he should be accompanied by a butler named Alfred and a sidekick named Robin; he should live in a city called Gotham. And it has some suggestions: if you need a villain, how about the Joker? If you need a style, how about dark and gritty? Beyond that, anything goes. You can write a story of his origin only tangentially related to anyone else’s, you can add in new adventures, you can shift the tone from gritty to campy and back.
id796525970
The Alexander Romance is bad in exactly the way comics are bad, and for the same reason. The absolutely bonkers plotlines, the hopelessly bungled continuities, the confusion about its own theology and metaphysics, even the tug-of-war adaptations by cultures trying to claim the hero as their own