i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls
Time to take this post entirely too seriously:
I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.
When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.
I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on Project Gutenberg sifting through forgotten old fiction and lemme tell ya. a lot of that stuff sucks ass.
THIS IS SO INCREDIBLY TRUE FOR CLASSICAL MUSIC AS WELL
People can be real big assholes about contemporary classical music, because they're holding it up to the absolute cream of the crop from the past 400 years. That's a lot of time to pick from! There's a reason you've heard Mozart's Requiem but not his Symphony No. 1... because we don't perform the stuff that isn't good. I've gone to (and performed in) plenty of modern pieces that are not seeing the light of heaven, but there's something incredibly special about being one of the first people to experience (or perform!!!) something that's hot off the presses and GREAT. I'll be 95 years old and telling whatever young musicians I'm working with that I was at the very first Met performance of Fire Shut Up In Your Bones, for instance.
And it's also very comforting when something from one of the "great composers" you know from history is kind of dogshit. Yeah, we all have clunkers, buddy. It's okay.
