A Reading List Must Appeal to Students to Be Teachable

In “Weighing the Classics” (July 15) on the California Department of Education’s new recommended reading list, you and some of the interviewees imply that because all of Mortimer Adler’s “great books” are not on the list, then the list is “dumbed down” and its compilers “look like morons.”

But it’s a K-12 list. A high school book needs to be teachable as well as great. Any English teacher (I’m one) will tell you it’s tough to find books that “work” in high school. Yes, we need to consider the difficulty and the adolescent appeal of a work as well as its quality.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s weirdness tends to work; James Fenimore Cooper’s lush descriptions of the forest primeval don’t. Some Shakespeare works, but not much Edmund Spenser. Some Emily Dickinson, not much Walt Whitman. Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes work; Ralph Ellison’s long, tough, great “Invisible Man” is problematic. Yeats was a great poet, but his absence from the list isn’t “inexplicable”; high schoolers aren’t ready for him.

Can we please dispense with the ridiculous myth that once upon a time thousands of classrooms across our nation were full of adolescents reading “Moby Dick” and Dante and “Don Quixote” and Ezra Pound and Euripedes? The list may be “imperfect,” “idiosyncratic” and “haphazard,” but not because four Nobel laureates were left off, or because only one ancient Roman made it on.

ROB THAIS Los Angeles

Poverty, Grandmothers Have No Place on Streets

Sandy Banks’ July 17 column told of a grandmother taken off the streets to a clean, comfortable bed. The grandmother started to cry when she saw that it sported a quilt like the one she had when she was a girl. I cried too.

The state Assembly voted on a budget of $101 billion. If we Californians can cough up that kind of money, we can afford to keep grandmothers off the street.

We don’t want to alleviate poverty in California. We want to abolish poverty.

CARLETON H. RALSTON Los Angeles

A Throwaway QuoteThat Packs a Punch

In “L.A. Cool Is All in Your Frame of Mind” (July 13), you quote Dorothy Parker as saying, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” a comment without rhythm or truth.

In fact, a quick check in any hardback or online quote book might set you straight. Parker wrote: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” a better scan, a truer generalization, and--in the context of an era when men, rather than teenage boys, carried all the social and economic power while women of any age were referred to as girls--a throwaway line packing a punch.

ANNE ELIOT Pasadena

Legal Wrangling Between Freelancers and Big Media

I read “Victory for Freelancers Leaves Librarians at a Loss” (July 10) about how librarians at newspapers are forced to “purge” the contributions of freelancers because of the recent Supreme Court decision in New York Times Co. vs. Tasini et al. and just sighed.

This is so unnecessary. Jonathan Tasini has urged the publishers to come up with a method to fairly compensate freelancers. I’m sure it would hurt their profits to give freelance writers a fair share, but not as much as this wholesale destruction they propose.

Millions of dollars were spent to build those databases, and millions more will have to be spent to dismantle them. If I were the big media companies, I’d want to worry about lawsuits from another direction--from their own shareholders for gross mismanagement of important assets.

I am one of those freelancers, for trade magazines. Most of the magazines I’ve worked for over the last 10 years have blithely assumed that first rights included the right to place individual works on electronic databases and also to sell individual reprints or our articles for commercial exploitation. The most cursory reading of copyright law would tell you that this is simply not so.

Given how hard it is to be a freelancer without health insurance, pension plan and other benefits that regular editorial employees enjoy, how could anyone imagine that this policy of the big media companies was fair or just?

I am finding that the firms publishing my material were often paid more for their share of a reprint sale than they paid me for the first publication of the article. The publishers should put away their virtual torches and simply sit down and make a deal fair to both sides rather than perpetuating their greedy grab-fest.

FRANCIS HAMIT North Hollywood

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