the cultural canon

I was looking at an ex-pat friend's bookshelf the other day, and it struck me that lots of the people I know have the same range of authors on their shelves. For Christian books, for novels, for poetry, for popular science and travel writing, we all read the same books. Even for cookbooks everyone reads Delia and fish-heads read Rick Stein.

The American canon is different. We share a language (almost) but we don't share our books. Isn't that interesting?

In France there's a "cultural canon", too, but the authors are different again of course.

So it seems to me that globalisation hasn't yet effaced the national canons of culture.

(Now when does that Potter book come out ?)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A bit about music exams in UK and France

They're really different. I think I have already mentioned that while in the UK people generally find a private teacher for their instrument, or do it through a school scheme, here there are municipal music school, conservatoires and so on. The situation is a little more complex than I had first understood, because the schools vary in the rigidity of their organisation: the most, the conservatoires, next the municipals, then the associations. Our music school is an association, but it tends to apply the standards of the municipal schools with its programme of cycles, etc. Britain - grade 1 to 8, grade 8 being roughly equivalent to A-level, pre university/conservatoire. France - 3 cycles, each taking about 4 years, with 3ème cycle being roughly equivalent to grade 8. Theory of music - UK to take grade 8 you need theory grade 5. In France you study theory alongside your instrumental studies, very slowly. Catrin's flute music is MUCH more difficult than the stuff she does in theor
Read more

A brief sortie to North Wales

 Following the Great Keswick Debacle, when our volunteering at the Keswick café was sabotaged by our assorted indispositions, we had airline tickets to use up. Yes, we had not taken travel insurance, so we paid even more money to change our tickets to fly for a short visit to North Wales. This time we were able to go. We passed extremely slowly through a very crowded Bordeaux airport but in good time to get our plane. All seats in the terminal were taken so we leaned against whatever we could find while waiting to board. Hey, bags need seats, too! though sometimes pointing out to Pat, "No, that's a bag seat", makes the bag find a new refuge on the lap of the person sitting next to it... Once on the plane we quickly found our allocated seats - right at the back on the left hand side - stowed our bags and the flight was smooth and uneventful.  We had 30 minutes in Manchester to disembark, get through immigration , hustle off to the station and board our train for Shotton. I
Read more