White Problems: Poorly Read Partners
April 7, 2008 by clander
“It’s Not you, it’s Your Books”
by Rachel Donadio
The New York Times, March 30th, 2008
“We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.”
Stuff White People Like examines the issue: Can you date someone who is not well read?
Yes:
Dating someone who is not as well read as you is a good idea since these type of people are more easily manipulated in terms of both actions and future tastes in books. The ability to entirely craft the literary tastes of your partner is highly desirable as it reinforces your own impeccable taste and allows you to play a literary version of Henry Higgins
No:
In social situations there is a good chance that an poorly read person will admit to not having read Nabokov beyond Lolita or that they are unfamiliar with Umberto Eco’s essays on reading. Of course, there is the off-chance that they might commit intellectual and social suicide by asking your friends if they “loved The Da Vinci Code as much I did?” This is extremely embarrassing and reflects poorly on them. Ultimately, their actions are more of a statement about you and your inability to date someone of adequate literary experience.
Final Call:
It is recommended that you date and then subsequently dump someone who is considered “poorly read,” simply for the story. It will show your commitment to the importance of books and reading. But beyond that singular experience it is unacceptable to seriously date anyone who has not read the right books.
Thanks to Jake Adler for sending the article.
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perhaps one should consider first what it means to be well-educated, before being well-read
Well I like Stephen King.
“an poorly read person?” Sorry it should be “A poorly read person.”
Us whiteys love our grammar. While we’re on the subject it’s also not right to say “AN historic” instead of “A historic,” which is probably why you made this mistake.
Look at it this way. Do you live in “an home?” Would you pound a nail with “an hammer?”
Nope. It’s A home, A hammer and A historic.
you’re missing a comma after the word “sorry”, and “us whiteys” should be “we whiteys”. you’re also missing a comma after the word “subject”, and a colon would be a more appropriate punctuation mark than the period ending the sentence “Look at it this way”.
it seems to me that you’re not entirely qualified to be offering punctuation or grammar advice to anyone.
Actually “an historic” is acceptable. The letter “H” has gone in and out of favor in English and also in Latin from which we borrow the term Historia, ultimately derived from Greek. If you look at books even from the first half of the 20th century you will never see “a historic.” White people love to be esoteric even more than we love what you incorrectly refer to as grammar, it’s really a matter of euphonics, therefore “an historic” is really the whiter term as it shows a familiarity with the archaic and lifts one from the vulgar strain of people who write English as they hear it.
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