(no subject)

[liadnan]

Mad day with BigScaryNewInstructions from proper solicitors with shiny offices in the City. Have warped my brain trying to understand heinously abstruse stuff...

***

A.S.Byatt was on Start the Week on Monday. She said she'd spent much of her writing career arguing that a life of books and education made you weird (I paraphrase, and she put it much more elegantly) but she'd now come full circle and believed that books, and education for its own sake, were important because they stopped us all turning into Nazi stormtroopers (a relevant comment in the context of the other books that were being discussed). Well, I've been a huge admirer of AS Byatt for years, but she seems to be a tad slow catching up with that one...

Comments

[fairymelusine.livejournal.com]

Why one or the other?

Certainly, books made me odd - or, if nothing else, incapable of relating to normal people properly ... but have also done wonders for my empathy for humanity. But perhaps it is too much to attempt to an argument I haven't heard ...

... but you just KNOW fairymelusine couldn't let a Byatt post go by without comment. I mean, it's kinda obligatory on my part, or they throw me out of the pretentioussensitivegirlunion.

[liadnan]

Wweell, you're roght, it isn't a clear opposition. But I've argued long and hard before that the point of education isn't, or rather shouldn't be, to find us all gainful employment but to make us civilised human beings (notoriously, our Education Secretary made some comments about teaching of the arts and humanities that went against everything in which I believe...)
Byatt has a new shorts collection out, and I think her best writing is the shorts. Plus I haven't read her latest novel. But at the moment I'm rediscovering just how good Vanity Fair is...

[fairymelusine.livejournal.com]

Well, of course not. The point of education is to teach us all how to live (and for some of us, to create unrealistic expectations that life will never quite live up to) ... if one needs to provide practical justification within this, it can be done by reducing 'how to live' to definable points that have some sort of relationship to being a productive member of society, or some such rot. But, really, education is our shortcut to tapping into all of the collected wrangling with life itself from all those who have come before us ... theoretically moving us along the evolutionary chain but really just making us dissatisfied with the ultimate limitations of humanity ...

or something.

Also, they will throw me out of the union for admitting that I hate shorts - I find it supremely annoying to be just hitting the point where I'm involved with something only to have it end shortly thereafter. I prefer a book that lasts forever. Not unlike the aformentioned Thackeray, as a matter of fact ...