{"id":24466,"date":"2016-12-24T13:31:42","date_gmt":"2016-12-24T18:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=24466"},"modified":"2016-12-25T12:16:26","modified_gmt":"2016-12-25T17:16:26","slug":"the-right-idea-an-illuminating-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2016\/12\/the-right-idea-an-illuminating-essay.html","title":{"rendered":"The Right Idea: An Illuminating Essay"},"content":{"rendered":"

The editors of The New York Times Book Review asked “some notably avid readers — who also happen to be poets, musicians, diplomats, filmmakers, novelists, actors, and artists –” to name the books they read this year. About 50 answered the call<\/a>, listing what must be several hundred titles. I noticed that not one of them named any books by the Beats. No Kerouac. No Ginsberg. No Burroughs. This, at a time when the literary influence of the most famous Beats reached a highwater mark with the Nobelization of Bob Dylan.
\n

<\/a>

Paul Simon
[Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The NY Times]<\/font><\/p><\/div>But there was also no mention of any books by Hemingway or Faulkner, Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. No Tolstoy. No Balzac. No Flaubert. And what of Shakespeare? Only a single mention — by Harold Bloom, who writes that he rereads “King Lear” “incessantly,” adding with a highfalutin sense of himself as the tragic monarch: “In this bad autumn I echo Lear: ‘We cry that we are come unto this great stage of fools.'” Yes, the Trumpishness of the times demands notice. But I’d say that of all the comments by the chosen luminaries, Paul Simon’s essay — singling out Edward O. Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet\u2019s Fight for Life<\/a><\/em> as the most powerful book he’d read this year — made the best use of his opportunity to say something important. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The editors of The New York Times Book Review asked “some notably avid readers — who also happen to be poets, musicians, diplomats, filmmakers, novelists, actors, and artists –” to name the books they read this year. About 50 answered the call, listing what must be several hundred titles. I noticed that not one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,20,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-24466","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-literature","7":"category-media","8":"category-political-culture","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-6mC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24466"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24485,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24466\/revisions\/24485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}