HAROLD BLOOM's invigorating 1994 book, The Western Canon, has been vilified by people whose agendas are other than literary and who see nothing more in Bloom's thesis than a glorification of dead white male writers. No doubt these same people will applaud The Dictionary of Global Culture, edited by two African American Harvard professors, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jnr, and just published by Knopf.
The aim of the book is to offer "the global citizen's guide to world culture, emphasising the achievement of the non Western world," which seems lopsided and prejudicial from the outset - even if the editors insist they also want "to celebrate the very real achievements of. . . Western cultures".
So what are these western cultural achievements? Well (to take a random selection), Homer, Pindar, Shakespeare, Amy Lowell, Philip Roth, A.D. Hope and Banjo Paterson are deemed worthy of inclusion, but just as randomly, among the writers uncelebrated - indeed, unmentioned - are Catullus, Horace, Pascal, Coleridge, Melville, Stevens, Pound, Frost, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney.
You might think that in a dictionary which places much emphasis on people born and reared under the yoke of colonial subjugation, the last named would have merited inclusion, but there seems little consistency about these matters. Indeed, assessing the 770 page tome in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode observes that "the Korean American novelist Ronyoung Kim, oppressed by Americans, and the Japanese Canadian Joy Kogawa, who wrote a novel about oppression by Canadians, are sure of their places, but John Steinbeck, who wrote of the oppression of white people, isn't." (Similarly, Bo Diddley is included, but not Elvis Presley).
And while Professor Kermode acknowledges that its editors have described their selection as haphazard, nonetheless the dictionary's "omissions and choices are systematic enough to make it clear that the editors are treating things as they are as if they were what they wish they were, and hope they may soon be".
As to why they're doing this, perhaps the last word should go to Harold Bloom when, in The Western Canon, he declares that "students of literature have become amateur political scientists, uninformed sociologists, incompetent anthropologists, mediocre philosophers and over determined cultural historians ... We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice."
DEAD white males don't dominate the Top 100 Books of the Century announced this week by Waterstones and Channel 4's Book Choice, but living white American, British and Irish males do. Of the hundred books chosen from a reader's poll, seventy eight fit into that category, while a mere thirteen are by women.
Is this an indication of sexism and racism? I don't know, but I'm disinclined to read too much significance into such lists - after all, when Empire magazine recently published its poll of the hundred best movies, the vast majority of the choices came from the past decade, which said more about Empire's readership than about movies. And as Waterstones don't supply an age, sex, race or class breakdown of its 25,000 voters, it's impossible to know where the list is coming from.
Still, being chauvinistic, I'm intrigued to see Ulysses at fourth place (though I wonder how many voters piously included it as a book they feel they should have read), Roddy Doyle scoring twice (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha at 75 and The Van at 96) and Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling in 84th position.
I've long stopped hoping to see poetry represented on such lists, though T.S. Eliot comes close here in 101st place - just squeezed out by, oh dear, Nicholas Evans's The Horse Whisperer. As for the Number One, I regret to say I've never been able to wade through Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Actually, I don't regret it at all. Life is short.
IF Gaye Shortland's new novel, Turtles All the Way Down published this month by Poolbeg) is one tenth as exciting as the life she describes in the publicity bumph I received with the book, readers are in for a raunchy time.
Born and reared in Bantry, Co Cork, Ms Shortland begins her self portrait by describing the "erotic experience" of being kissed, at the age of eight, by a Spanish sailor, and then, while lecturing in Leeds, living with an Italian woman who "had lesbian sex on her agenda - it wasn't on mine, but she was a Taurus and I'm a Pisces and easily dominated".
But she's only getting into her stride. Teaching English in Muslim Nigeria, she becomes fascinated by nomadic men and "I immediately began to chase them". Indeed, "I thereafter spent as much time as I could going north to Niger and into the desert to chase nomads".
The chase was successful and she ended up with a daughter, whose father "was a very beautiful, illiterate and destitute nomad with thick black plaits down to his very beautiful butt... I had amazing fun with him and all his very beautiful relatives (the men, that is)." One thing leads to another and eventually "I have an affair with one of his seventeen year old relatives - well, wouldn't you?"
The next three or four years "are all for love", though eventually she decides to get married to another nomad and they have a son. They all move to Cork, but the nomad finds it hard to adapt to life there and leaves "with my blessing".
After that it's over to Barcelona for a spell and finally back to Cork again where "I fall in love with a cute as hell 26 year old German political student" who has "blond hair, blue eyes and a low sex drive". Then, and possibly because of his low sex drive (there is "no future" in the relationship), she begins to write. Well, it's always good to have an alternative career.