User:Trimalchio/The Fritz List

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This is a list that my students usually ask for after a semester of hearing me yack about how great literature is. I am posting it here because I frequently lose this list and have to replicate it. Also, it will be easier to update from any terminal this way. Obviously, by posting this, I am submitting it to the public domain (not that it is any great achievement on my part) but I would appreciate it if you didn't mess the list up. If you want to argue with me about the list (how vain of me to imagine you even care) then go to User_talk:trimalchio. Thanks.

THE FRITZ LIST

As requested, here is my list of books and stuff that you might find interesting as you while away the summer of your lives.


This is what I think someone needs to have under their belt if they want to think they lived in the Twentieth Century. It's completely idosyncratic, does not include music or vacation spots (the other great mediums of the Twentieth Century) and it stretches back to a few key pre-modern classics that are vital.

Also, bear in mind, there is a huge Rock of Salt that needs to be swallowed when regarding this list. I am WHITE. I am MALE. I am MIDWESTERN AMERICAN. I grew up a happy, Norman Rockwell life on a farm with chickens and cats and dogs and corn and parents that stuck it out. I was an Eagle Scout. I have Blue Eyes fer crisssakes! The only thing that keeps me from being a complete white-bread facist is that I am aware of who I am and where I am from. I realize how small and narrow my place is in the world. But it is still my position.

So, from my white, male point of view, these are important Movies, Books and TV shows. I think they are good, beyond their personal interest to me, and I think they go a long way toward educating a person about where the world has been. The white world, anyway. But that's a point of view like any other.

So, again, let me foreground my almost transparent WHITENESS. I like vanilla ice cream and four door sedans. But I also secretly have a fetish for serial killers and fireballs.

Broken glass, sand in the face, surfboards, hula girls, imperialism, the metropolis, and McDonalds.

Anyway, I think you get my point.

Also, keep in mind that I think genre is bullshit. I use genre here to give you a sense of where you might find things at the store. But, for example, The Lord of the Rings is perhaps the greatest novel of the Twentieth Century. Written by a World War I veteran for his son to read while fighting in World War Two... LOTR is the strongest, realest inheritor of the Western Canon. But no one reads it in college. Most of the english speaking world is conversant in it, or has read it, or has been influenced by it, but no one reads it in school. So, I say, read the damn thing. It's better literature than Hemingway.

So, this list strips away some of those borders. Trust me, I believe these works are GOOD. I'm not just pressing my taste on you (I am doing that, but it isn't the ONLY thing I am doing).

As always, this is an incomplete list. I am sure it will seem to be too long for some, and too short for others. do your best. use this email group to ask questions if you feel like it. Have a good summer.

-Fritz

Sanbox:

A few Wikipedians have gotten together to make some suggestions about how we might organize data in articles about states, cities and towns. Here they are: WikiProject U.S. States These are only suggestions, things to give you focus and to get you going, and you shouldn't feel obligated in the least to follow them. Mainly, we just want you to write articles!

See also : User:Trimalchio