Best:

Kiera Knightly is very easy on the eyes.

There are swordfights and seafights.

Ships fall off the edge of the earth and issue blast for blast while spiraling in a maelstrom.

Captain Jack Sparrow duels Davy Jones atop the yard-arm in a thunderstorm, with the monster’s heart beating in a chest held in his hand.

 All the characters from the original two movies are remembered, even the minor ones. It is hard to do as a sequel, and really hard to do well.

The Nine Pirate Lords must gather to undo the curse the first Pirate Lords wove, and therefore must find the mystical “Nine Pieces of Eight.”

The scene where the ghosts of all the slain are shown in boats, lit by little lanterns, afloat upon a calm sea, was as eerie as something from a children’s nursery tale, or a Homeric epic.

The weird mythology surrounding the pirate magic gains depth: it was (almost) like a Tim Powers novel. I have heard reviewers complain about this: I unstopper my nose at them. Pfui. The plot had to introduce an additional background to Davy Jones, or else the film would have had nothing to do and nowhere to go: the East India Trading company simply wins the day if there is not a One Ring to throw into the volcano to stop the dark lord, or a glowing green space-rock to stop the evil superman.

There is a marriage at sea, which is now officially my favorite ten minutes of film in all of filmdom. (my previous favorite had been the scene where James Bond is thrown out of an airplane without a chute, and must wrestle a parachutist in midair to steal his chute from him.)

Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barboss. Great job. Nuff said.

Bill Nighy as Davy Jones. Great Job. Hollywood, please sign this actor up for many more films.

The scene where the HMS Endeavor is being shot to piece in slow-mo, while her captain stands among the flying shrapnel, unharmed, was memorial, eerie, almost Akira Kurasawa-like in its beautiful unrealism. Wow.

There is many a time during this fine film when I turned to my wife next to me, clutching her hand in mine, and whispered: “This is just GREAT!”

Worst:

Kiera Knightly as Xena the Queen of Swordfighting makes me cough in my coffee. Sorry, I don’t believe it. Stab a man with a rapier, if you have been doing nothing but training in the Italian Academy since age six, sure, maybe. Shoot a man with a flintlock: of course, if you have the cool eye of a hawk and the heart of a killer. Use a whip to dash out the eyeballs of a miscreant at twelve paces with Zorro-like aplomb? Sure, all fanboys like gorgeous girls with whips. But the daughter of the Governor, trained in High Tea and minuet, locking a blade in a cor-a-cor while kicking an ape-sized goon in the butt and knocking him headlong over the taffrail? Unless she is from planet Krypton (or Argo, take your pick), nope, she ain’t going to dish out a can of whupass on a trio of brutes twice her size (for a sum total of six times her size, unless I miscount). One too many scenes looked like the writers were indulging in the modern fetish for masculinizing womenfolk. I don’t like seeing pretty little girls get punched in the face over and over again, so why should I want to see them in a prizefight? If the girl does not need rescuing, why is Orlando Bloom there?

No: I want to see Keira, Queen of the High Sea, parley her way out of (or into) trouble like she did inthe first film, or think her way out. No one character should be both Jane AND Tarzan.

None of the swordfights had that over-the-top cleverness of the duel between three men on top of a turning mill wheel that the second movie had, or the scene where three characters with two swords had to keep passing them back and forth to fend off their attackers.

Norrington dies a chump death. It was not as chumpish a death as Wash the pilot died in Serenity (which was merely Josh Whedon’s biting his thumb at his audience) but it was pretty chumpish. Norrington should have gone down like Boromir under a hundred swords while holding the pass to let the good guys escape.

The scene where Captain Sparrow is talking to himself (and/or stabbing himself) while in the land of the dead was boring and overlong. (Sorry, I am not a Jack Sparrow fan: I do  not see the appeal of the character, who looks like a smelly drunk to me.) I would have liked more Orlando Bloom, who had a truly noble motivation, and less of Johnny Depp, who comes across to me like Uncle Fester.

It is innately hard to have a film where the main good guys are the pirates: where Keira the Beautiful tries to make a “St. Crispen’s Day” speech, she refers to ideals not really in keeping with the whole piracy thing, which is about looting and killing.

Also, Keira does not convince me she means any of it — her oratory just sounds shrill, not rousing. Unfortunately, when women raise their voices in anger, it sounds like screaming, not like a marine sergeant  putting backbone into fainting spines. For women to orate, they have to stay calm and regal a la Queen Elizabeth the First (But I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too — and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; the which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms…). That is the kind of talk that makes men stand in the breach and receive grapeshot.

The main baddie, after being so sinister and  calm during the last film and the first half  of this film, merely gets blank eyed when his final defeat looms. It was not convincing, not set up, and it made no sense.

The end was disappointing. If Keira the Supergirl is the equal of any man in swordfight and seafight, why exactly is she left behind on the beach waving bye-bye with her hanky, instead of sailing off in the sunset aboard her husband’s ship?

No follow-through on several plot points: what happens with Calypso and Davy Jones? Even a momentary reaction shot of grief or whatever would have done wonders. What was that bit about the singing at the beginning? Why was Bootstrap suddenly all bonkers in the, what, two month or less since the events in the second movie?

Now, let us assume for the sake of argument that the market pays equal pay for equal experience. Assume we have all been working twenty years, but my wife took off ten years to raise kids. Assume we get a raise of ten percent every year, so that we all start making ten talents of gold, by the end of year one, we make 11 talents, year two 12, and so on.

Add up the salaries of the two women (my wife, my friends wife) and add up the salaries of the two men (me, my friend).

I and my friend make the same: twenty years experience means we make 30 talents of gold at the end of the year. Average male salary = 30 talents.

Add up my wife and my friend’s wife. My wife was making 20 talents when she dropped out of the work force; my friend’s wife makes 30. Average the two: 20+30 / 2 = 25. Average female salary = 25 talents. Aha! Women get paid less than men! Sure, but only in the aggregate average due to their behavior in the marketplace. Each individual woman is being treated fairly.

The average becomes is more outrageous if some women never work at all. Suppose you have five women and five men of equal age. In ten years, one women only works five, and a second woman works zero, having married just out of highschool and devoting her whole career to homemaking. At the end of ten years, the five men will have 50 years experience between them; at the end of ten years, the women will have 35 years experience between them. If we also assume the same pay rate and pay-raise rate as the last hypo (1 talent per year, a raise of ten percent per year) At the end of ten years, the five men will have 150 talents sum, which is an average of 30 per. At the end of ten years the women consist of three women making 30 per year, one woman making 20 per year, one woman making zilch. They will have 110 sum, which averages to 22 per.

Ergo, under this hypo, if men and women both get the same pay and the same rate of pay raises for the same work, and only two women out of five devote half or all of their time to home-making (and in real life it is far more), the man is making on average 8 talents more for “the same work.” Obviously if the homemakers are factored out of the equation, the salaries are equal.

But let us further suppose for the sake of argument that Woman A could do job A with efficiency level A and she is getting paid 5 talents less than Man A doing the same job A at the same efficiency level A.

You are boss of a firm who pays Mr. A 5 talents to do job A. If you hire her for for 2 talents more, she gets 2 more talents take-home pay, you get to pocket the 3 extra talents her labor is worth to your business, and you fire the guy. But your rival will offer her 3 extra talents and pocket the 2 talents value added; and she will leave you to take home and extra talent per year, unless you offer her 4. In other words, if she were actually doing the same job for less pay, she would clear the market, and pay rates would seek a new level. In other words, no matter WHAT YOU DO, you must pay her the going rate, or she will find other work elsewhere.

Even if nine companies out of ten practiced institutional discrimination, the tenth company would have a talent pool of half the population to draw upon, and, in this example, could pay the women force 2 or 3 talents per worker per year LESS than their competition: in other words, making the same number of widget, but able to sell them for one third less the price. The customers do not and cannot know the sex of the factory hand who made the widget: all the customer sees is the price tag. How long would you remind in business if your rivals were putting out the same product at 66% of your overhead?

Figure it out: You charge three bucks a gallon and they charge two bucks a gallon. Ten gallons costs the customer 30 bucks (you) or 20 bucks (them). A man wants to buy one hundred gallons a week. He look at the price tags. If he drives up to the Femmotopia All-Woman’s Amazon Bargain Emporium, he saves himself one hundred bucks he can spend on ice cream in Disneyland. At the end of the year, 53 weeks, he saves five thousand bucks. How long do you really think the nine discriminatory Boy’s Only Women-haters Club companies could compete in that kind of environment?

If women cost the company more in terms of health insurance or other extra costs, then they are asking higher pay than a man doing comparable work, even if their take-home pay is the same as the man’s, or less. Generally, women see the doctor more than men, especially during child bearing years. If the woman is an unwed mother, the health insurance and other extra costs on the company go up again. SHE IS GETTING THE SAME DOLLAR VALUE BENEFIT from her employment, but she is getting less take home pay than a bachelor. Those are just the facts of life.

Institutional discrimination cannot exist for long in a free market, under any conditions; ergo it can only exist where and when the market is not free. If there is institutional discrimination going on in the marketplace, all the government needs to do is remove what ever it is they, the government, is doing to create the discrimination.

If inequality of pay is happening for a reason unrelated to institutional discrimination, such as, for example, women in the aggregate cost more and work fewer years than men in the aggregate, not only ought the government do nothing, in fact the government can do nothing,no matter how badly it wants to, that will not make the situation worse.

Adding regulations will merely act as a transfer payment of one sort or another, shifting and hiding the burden of the extra cost: all the extra costs are carried out on the backs of the poor eventually, because all that happens is employers raise their prices to customers to make up for the increased inefficiency and cost, whatever it is, of the regulation. All a quota system or meddling with wage rates or benefits will do is create unemployment.

Some three hundred-and-thirty years ago, a great dreamer named Andros, son of Alcinoüs, of High Aerie, was possessed of the Night-Hearing, so that the thoughts of men, and also of the beasts and dire Powers of the Night Land were known to him. He was huge in muscle and mighty in thew and sinew, said to be the strongest man ever to dwell among the folk of the last Redoubt. He was beloved of the Monstruwacans of the tower, both for his gifts, and for the humbleness and courage of his soul, the purity of his heart. Because his spirit was sensitive, he could sense the works of our enemies, and he could report to the Monstruwacans the moods and motions of the creatures and powers in the Night Lands.

One nightwatch as he stood on the balcony, six miles above the darkness of the world, he cast his mind back through time, reaching earlier than any other dreamer had dared to go, and he remembered his former life as a man in the days of light. He changed his name to Xenochthon, which means, Born in a Strange Land, for he then spoke of himself as if he were a visitor from the past aeons.

He was granted not one gift, but three: for he had not only a Great Dreamer, who knew his past lives, and also the Night-Hearing, but his past self was a Predictor. Andrew Eddins of Kent was his name, and he had dreamed, in that life, of Xenochthon in this. When the memories of Andrew came forward in time to join with those of Andros, that gift was brought as well.

He wrote of his memories in a great book, which astonished the theosophists and antiquarians, and brought great hope and cheer to the common people, for it made tales of the Days of Light no longer a matter for scoffing.

For this alone, he would have been accounted as one of the greatest figures in our long history, but greater deeds and greater fame followed: for one night, reaching with his mind beyond the zone of quiet created by the House of Silence, he heard the voices from a second and lesser redoubt, still alive, and still occupied by humans.

There was one in that Redoubt who also had the Night-Hearing, and was able to send her thoughts winging across the aether to him. She was named Naäni daughter of Nausicaä, although he knew her from a previous cycle of incarnation, and called her by the old love-name Mirdath the Beautiful, which is unlike any names we use. But she knew the Master-Word, and so all the Monstruwacans knew that this was no deception sent by the enemy. The bond of their true love, preserved across uncounted aeons, had bridged the distances and barriers no lesser thing could bridge.

Andros departed to seek the Lesser Redoubt when Naäni called out to him, for the Earth Current had failed over the aeons in the Lesser Pyramid, and the men fell under the sway of the thought-pressure of the Fixed Giants who besieged them. Because he had the Night-Hearing, Andros could sense, even in the most utter darkness, the souls and powers of evil things about him, and could avoid them as he skulked among the rocks and moss-bushes of the Night Land, or, as he slept, be awakened by his sensitive soul if a monster crept nigh.

For many a-day, he was gone, and all folk accounted him dead. Some three months were gone by. Then Andros returned out of the darkness from the North, and was seen by the great spy glass of the tower of the Monstruwacans. His armor was bloody and dented on him, and in his arms was a dead girl.

The instruments in the tower also showed that a malicious and superior power from the House of Silence was boiling and surging through the aether around him, and the measuring tubes were shattered merely from the echo, so great was the spiritual force sent to consume the hero. The Monstruwacans were certain he was soul-slain, or possessed, for no man in the records could withstand the naked force of all the stares of the Watching Things, the malice of the House of Silence, the deadlier essences and telepathic radiations coming from the windows of the Dark Palace, the thoughts of infinite hatred burning in the windowless interiors of the mile-high Towers of Night. Yet on he came.

Not only was he under an aetherial assault which surely should have slain any man such as men are now, but also dangers of tooth and claw, blood and bone, were come for him. Dozens and scores of the malformed half-men, giants, troll-things, and night-hounds came roaring and slithering, galloping and stalking down from the fire-hills and glaciers, out from shining clouds and up from dark doorways of the surrounding lands, and all were set upon him. Yet on he came.

His strength was the thing of legends, and it was made double by his grief and fury. He was like a demigod, and the spyglass saw him slaying monsters at one stroke, behemoths and grendels, Great Gray Men and Putrid Pale Mounds, monstrous serpents, cockodrills and hydrae and amphisbaena, and dire-worms, crested centipedes and white-eyed scolopendras, and slug-things as great as a train of loaded mine-wagons. All these monstrosities are noted in our bestiaries as too well-armored for even a company of men to slay. He neither looked to the right nor the left as he strode forward, coming toward the Pyramid gates, and he made no attempt at stealth; nor did he put aside the dead girl he held, but he cut a pallid giant in half with a one-handed stroke when it rose up against him. His spirit was in his weapon, and the blade was too bright to look upon, and spun so rapidly that it made no noise a human ear could hear. And when it struck flesh, his anger made a hundred lightning-bolts fly from the blade.

The Council of the Watch was inspired to set aside the rules and protocols of the Gate, and, with hardly any Preparation at all, thousands of Diskos-men were sent out to break the siege, and the ancient weapons-of-power that were too gluttonous of Earth-Current to employ, despite the risk, were cabled up to the Core Supply Axis. Four of the five exploded on their carriages, killing their gun-crews, but the fifth one held, and lighting was sent down the sides of the pyramid, and slew monsters by the score.

It is also said that there are Good Powers that dwell in the aether, who, from time to time, moved by benevolence for mankind, exert their unknown properties to deflect the malice of the dreadful powers of the Night Land. It is said that the Good Powers were not absent from the field of battle on that night: strange signs were seen in the air.

Andros won free and crossed the Circle; the purity of his soul, the utter and selfless love that had sent him across a world of horror and darkness to rescue his one own true love, had somehow protected him from the malice of the House of Silence. The girl in his arms was indeed none other than Mirdath the Beautiful. Although she seemed to be dead for many a-day, when she was taken for her last rites, and exposed to the benevolent radiations of the Earth Current, she stirred and opened her eyes. Either because her physiology was different than the men of the Greater Pyramid, or because of the divine intervention of some good power, or because the love of the hero, which had reached across a million million years to find her again, reached now into the unknown we call death, she rose again and embraced her one true love.

A monument was placed in the Agora for his honor, in an alcove next to the Three Founders, on the side facing the Lawgiver Iaseon; and the hero was acclaimed to join the Table of Notables. Later was elevated to the rank of Master of the Watch, and he also served as Aedile of the Houses of Man. His wise laws are still studied by professors; the books of maxims he wrote, the histories of the before-times, are read both by the hearth of private places, and in the public courts of the peace.

Mirdath is not any less revered. She is the only woman known to have crossed the Night Lands, and her nine scrolls of the histories and customs of the Lesser Redoubt are the only record of any kind we have for the history, literature, folkways and sciences of that long-lost race of mankind. All the mathematical theories of Galois we know only from her memory; the plays of Euryphaean, and the music of an instrument called a pianoforte, the incandescent tube and the shunt valve and all the inventions that sprang from them, are due to her recollection. Her people were a frugal folk, and the energy-saving circuits they used, the methods of storing battery power, were known to them a million years ago, and greatly conserved our wealth. Much of what she knew of farming and crops we could not use, for the beasts of our buried fields were strange to her.

She knew more of the lost aeons of the past than Xenochthon, and was able to tell tales from her dreams of the time of the Cities Ever Moving West, of the Painted Bird, and of the Gardens of the Moon; she knew something of the Failures of the Star-Farers, and of the Sundering of the Earth.

More, she also had the gift of the foretelling, for some of the dreams she had were not of the past, but of the future, and she detailed the things to come, the Darkening, the False Reprieve, the disaster of the Diaspora into the Land of Water and Fire, the collapse of the Gate beneath the paw of the South Watching Thing, the years of misery and the death of man, beyond which is a time from which no dreams return, although there is said to be a screaming in the aether, dimly heard through the doors of time, the time-echo of some event after the destruction of all human life. All these things are set out in the Great Book, and for this reason Naäni is also called The Predictress.

Mirdath and Xenochthon had fifty sons and daughters, and all the folk of High Aerie claim descent from them, some truly, and some not.

The Martian Manhunter as Victor Triumph–cool and collected, the leadership role.

Supergirl as Amelia Windrose– athletic sort of all-America girl

(despite that Miss Windrose is British, so go figure).

My second choice is Roxy Rocket, who has the right wardrobe. 

Harley Quinn as Vanity Fair– Look at that smile!

She has the right kind of attitude. Ignore the blonde hair and whole psycho hose beast thing, and she’s almost a perfect fit.

My second choice for Vanity is Giganta, who has the right personality. Giganta is a very nice person once you get to know her. At least she’s a redhead.

The Demon Etrigan as Colin Mac FirBolg–I wish I had a shot of him grinning, and you’d see the resemblance.

The Question as Quentin Nemo

AND THE BADDIES!

Gorilla Grodd as Headmaster Boggin—he has the right tone of jocular menace particularly when he smiles.

Victor Fries as Doctor Fell — except that Mr. Freeze has feelings for his wife.

Poison Ivy as Miss Daw—she has something of the classy, aloof detachment of the siren.

Bizarro as Grendel Glum—seriously disturbed. Think of scenes where he talks about loving Lois Lane.   

Granny Goodness as Mrs. Wren—for that maternal look, my little ducks, my goslings, my sweet cakes.

    * TIMELESS: Great Books should be works that are as much of concern to us today as at the time they were written, even if that was centuries ago. They are thus essentially timeless — always contemporary, and not confined to interests that change from time to time or from place to place.
    * INFINITE: The second criterion was their infinite re-readability. Few books are worth reading more than once. A great book is inexhaustibly re-readable. It cannot be fully understood on one, two, or three readings. More is to be found on all subsequent readings. One re-reads a great book with greater pleasure and more insight on each rereading.
    * RELEVANT: The third criterion was the relevance of the work to a very large number of great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last twenty-five centuries. The authors of these books take part in the great conversation, reading the works of many of their predecessors, and answering them. In other words, the great books are the books in which the great conversation occurs about the great ideas. It is the set of great ideas that determines the choice of the great books.

Also worth quoting in full is Alder’s comment on what was excluded from criteria of judgment:

We did not base our selections on an author’s nationality, religion, politics, or field of study; nor on an author’s race or gender [sic–he means ‘sex’]. Great books were not chosen to make up quotas of any kind; there was no “affirmative action” in the process.

In the second place, we did not consider the influence exerted by an author or a book on later developments in literature or society. That factor alone did not suffice to merit inclusion. Scholars may point out the extraordinary influence exerted by an author or a book, but if the three criteria stated above were not met, that author or book was not to be chosen. Many of the great books have exerted great influence upon later generations, but that by itself was not the reason for their inclusion. [Adler’s footnote: This negative consideration applies, in my judgment, to Voltaire and his “Candide”. It also applies to the German philosopher Leibniz and his works. Just think of the influence exerted by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin!”]

In the third place, a consideration not operative in the selection process was the truth of an author’s opinions or views, or the truth to be found in a particular work. This point is generally misunderstood; many persons think that we regard the great books as a repository of mankind’s success in its ever-continuing pursuit of the truth. “That is simply not the case”. There is much more error in the great books than there is truth. By anyone’s criteria of what is true or false, the great books will be found to contain some truths, but many more mistakes and errors.

But, in that previous discussion of the Great Books, the most adroit contribution was made by the honorable and ever- insightful Steve Wilson over at ‘My Elves Are Different.’

The foremost reason is so that one will develop the proper tastes, so that one’s palate, so to speak, is trained to accept the good and reject the bad. A gourmet can eat the occasional chili dog slathered with Cheez-Whiz or can of Spam (remember the original meaning of that word, folks?), but in general he has a finer appreciation of food.

The second is that great books are great, by and large, because they contain all that a good book contains, but more of it, more richly developed.

I was reading Jack Kirby’s MACHINE MAN at the same time I was reading John Milton’s PARADISE LOST. It was really nifty when the fighting robot used his magnetic jet-shoes to repel the enemy attack: all Kirby’s fight scenes are well blocked out, and exciting to the eye. But the war in heaven described by John Milton was sublime: it was beyond comparison. Superlatives fail. Had I a tongue of brass, I could not describe the fury of battle he describes: such as, to set forth great things by small, if, nature’s concord broke, among the constellations war were sprung, two planets, rushing from aspect malign of fiercest opposition, in mid-sky should combat, and their jarring spheres confound. Had I been raised on a diet of MACHINE MAN, I would not see that Milton was doing what Kirby did, only better. Had I not read Homer and Virgil, I would not have seen what Milton was trying to do, or how he was both honoring and surpassing his predecessors.

The third is that such books improve the soul. I made a manful attempt to read MOBY DICK just because it was a great book, not because I had any particular interest in the work itself. I found it boring, and put it down, defeated. Of all things, it was a role-playing game that revived my interest in it: I wanted to play a character based on Ahab in an online game, and so I casually looked into this long, boring work for some choice quotes. I found out that the book was not just good, it was great. The whole of it is spiced with a wicked humor I did not notice at first, a pagan irony both in the theme and in the execution. The very scenes dismissed as boring, the longish sections on whaling minutia, contain some of the funniest and moving little bits in the book, or in all literature. But beneath his outward Big Fish story, Melville is actually talking about deep matters, the kind that make you stop and think: thoughts one can wrestle.

When I think about the quality of leadership, of obsession, of self-will, I think of Ahab, poor maimed Ahab, his brows clamped with madness as if by the Iron Crown of Lombardy. When I think about pity, I think of poor Pip, who lost his wits at sea. When I think of loyalty misplaced, or the tension between what the laws of man and the laws of God demand, I think of Starbuck. When I think of inborn nobility unimproved by civilization, I think of Queequeg of Rokovoko. It is not down on any map; true places never are. And I wonder and I ponder. To pass life by without having wrestled with such thoughts is a loss, and a loss all the more sad because one will never know what one has lost.

If it were not for the deep respect I have for such books, the very thing Paul Raven dismisses as “elitism” I should never have made an attempt at that book. Had I not be educated at a school that taught me the difference between a great book and a merely good one, I should not have had the background, the palate, needed to savor this fine work. And what is funny is MOBY DICK is not even the most famous of famous books.  

The fourth reason is that to know and to read the great books makes one a member of the family of all those who have eaten from the same dish. You can look each other eye to eye: no matter what separates you, you are brothers. The great minds throughout all history are men who have read the works from the same canon. Kant is in a conversation with Hume who is raising objections against Descartes, who is arguing with Aquinas, who is quoting Aristotle, who is refuting an error in Plato: and if Marx had only read his Aristotle and been persuaded, he would not have made the same error Plato made. What time traveler would not invite all these great minds, whether you agree or disagree with them, to a feast and symposium to dine and to discuss the most interesting matters under the heavens or above them? Well, friends, all it takes to join the feast is the patience to open a book the world says is boring.

The conversation has been going on for centuries. It might take a little work at first to get up to speed, and there may be threads in the discussion you find distasteful or boring or even evil: but once you are in the conversation, you are in.

The fifth reason is that reading great books increases the pleasure one gets from merely good books. Seeing the heroism of longsuffering Ulysses allows me to appreciate the similar patient suffering of the characters in a Dashiell Hammett whodunit, or, more to the point, of a character in a Keith Laumer book, who studiously followed the style and motif of Dashiell Hammett. (Read the first chapter of DINOSAUR BEACH, if you don’t believe me: this is what Hammett would write if Hammett wrote SF.) 

An example: I read Mr. Pullman’s THE GOLDEN COMPASS, and found it perfectly delightful (the sequel less so, the third book in the series not at all, I’m afraid). My pleasure in reading was increased when I recognized the Homeric metaphors used by the author to describe the combat of the armored polar bears. No matter how much I enjoy reading fantasy, had I merely ever read Tolkien and Eddison and Dunsany, and not read Homer, I would simply have missed one of the little pleasures the author gracefully placed in his book for his readers. I would have eaten the ice cream and missed the cherry on top. You are not doing Mr. Pullman any favors by missing the goodies he puts in his work.

My point here is that if something good reminded you of something great you’ve read, you have an opportunity to like it better, the same way, for example, you might appreciate a song because it reminds you of your first date with your wife. You get misty eyed when they are playing “our song”—well, the same thing happens when you come across one of “our heroes”, the eternal hero you have seen before in other guises in other stories by other authors.  But you have to read the greats to have them in your memory to call upon, the same way you have to go out on dates to fall in love.

The sixth reason is that it takes humility to be an elitist, whereas being a populist is the soul of arrogance. An elitist, someone who likes great books because they are great, not because he likes them, is as humble as a mountaineer standing before a titanic, mysterious, unclimbed peak. To climb that mountain is work, at least at first, we all agree. But once you have achieved the summit, and all the world is under your heel, how far you can see! What things those content with lower perspectives will not view! The humility of a mountaineer is this: he does not think of himself as he climbs, he thinks of the rock under this fingers and toes. He did not make the mountain, he is not the one who piled it up. That is the work of former years, previous generations, so to speak.

The populist, on the other hand, looks in the mirror, and seeing only his own little self dressed in his own little circles’ little fashion, preens and says he is as large as the mountain. Who can actually prove he is taller than me? (says the populist) “By my measuring rod I have invented for myself this day, I say I am taller! My taste is just as good as his. He likes the Venus de Milo, and I like Charlie’s Angels It’s the same. He reads HAMLET, I read GREEN EGGS AND HAM. To each his own!”

There is nothing wrong with reading Dr. Seuss. I dare say I have read his works far, far more often than I have read the Bard of Avon. And I would read him in a box, and I would read him with a fox. I would read Seuss here and there, and I would read him anywhere. And I never did finish Henry the IV Part III (or was it Henry the III part IV?). But, honestly, to equate the two is an act of mental sabotage against your own ability to make judgments. It is the pride of Lucifer to look at earthly things, fair as they are, and hold them supreme above heavenly things: worse still, it is the absurdity of the White Queen of the Looking Glass world, who believes six impossible things before breakfast.  

The seventh reason is that it is merely sloth to tell a lazy, flabby person it is good to be lazy and flabby. This is true both or physical flabbiness and for intellectual flabbiness. See here: we cannot all be athletes, and we cannot all be scholars, but we can respect athletes for their physical beauty and prowess, and we can honor scholars for their learning. Anything less places us in that particular hell described in “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut: “The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.”

The main part of that laziness is parochialism. If you don’t read great books, you think everyone thinks like you and your circle. You have not stepped in your imagination into the boots of a gentleman of the Sixteenth Century, or the spurs of a Knight of the Sixth. You have not read the luxurious DIVINE COMEDY or the sparse and puritanical PILGRIM’S PROGRESS, or traveled with Aeneas to the Underworld or sailed with bold Odysseus beyond the sunset. Reading science fiction written by your contemporaries is not the same: no matter how imaginative, these fine gentlemen who write speculative fiction are of your world and share many or your biases. To look with other eyes, you need to enter another world: the world of a previous century, each one different from the next. These are the worlds your fathers and their fathers made, and that we have inherited. Have you no duty, none at all, to understand what has been put into your hands? They thought about the same joys and sorrows we think about, but they thought about them not in the same way. Do you want to see through their eyes? Read their works.

The reason why people talk as if it is shameful not to have read great books is simple: to be ignorant of the good things in life is nothing to boast about. To be willfully ignorant is even less worthy of public display.

Now, having said that, have I read all these wonderful books Paul Raven mentions? No, I fear not. Instead of reading TALE OF TWO CITIES, I read THE DEATH GIVER by Maxwell Grant, where The Shadow has to stop a scientific madman from using chlorine gas to commit a series of grisly blackmail-murders on behalf of the Secret Seven. I found out that the weed of crime bears bitter fruit: crime does not pay! But what would I have found out if I had read Charles Dickens instead? I might have known why it was the best of times and the worst of times, or what makes a man take another’s place even before the guillotine. I might have found out what made such sacrifice a far, far better thing to do. Perhaps it would have been a far, far better thing to read.

It is an embarrassing gap in my reading. I am man enough to admit the flaw; I cannot join Mr. Raven in the idea that it is mean or wrong-headed to have standards, or that it is somehow cruel to have high standards. I can admire things I cannot appreciate.

Some works are sublime, meant to last forever, to be read and reread until the work becomes a treasured part of one’s soul; some are pulp, meant to thrill the reader. Now, there is nothing really wrong with pulps, for the same reason there is nothing really wrong with a comely peasant lass who picks her teeth and laughs with her mouth open—but it would have been blasphemy for Paris to award the apple of Eris to her, not when the embodiments of wisdom, love and majesty were standing naked before his eyes.