- Advocating spelling reform (one of the things that got me among the most angry responses in my brief life as a public writer)
- Coming out as an Esperanto speaker (Especially sends English speaking monoglots who couldn't reliably order coffee or take directions in another language into a rage.)
- Being religious, of course
- Rejecting the idea that Moby Dick is The Great American Novel (I'm going to be reading Lila, the third of Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" novels, next week and will review it. I would say that the first two in the series are far superior to Melville's book. To start with, unlike that more commonly cited "GAN", it actually has women in it instead of excluding half of The American People.) To a lesser extent (another book also rather lacking in female characters) Huckleberry Finn.
- Doubting the demonstrably illiterate Bard of Avon wrote the plays and poems that constitute the greatest body of work in the English language.
- Taking the self-imposed limits of what science is for, what it can and what it can't do seriously.
- Criticizing modernism, including pointing out some of the horrifically bad things so many icons of modernism have said and done and not pretending that they didn't mean it.
Among the things that going online and reading the unedited thoughts of thousands of "free thinking", educated, moderny types for the past dozen or so years shows me is that many of their most basic ideas about the good and acceptable are no more than mere conventions they learned as a sort of requirement of a sort of club membership. Not to be questioned and not to be looked at too carefully
The only one I'd challenge you on is that the "Bard of Avon" was "demonstrably illiterate," or that he didn't write the plays and sonnets.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't really care enough to.....