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Comment by ConcreteGidget | Hacker News Reader

I've never worked in journalism but how does "You know something sceptical’s afoot when you find Larkin on your bedside table instead of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld " get past an editor?

I think I'm pretty smart but I've only thoroughly read half of the authors mentioned in the post which seems to intentionally render itself unintelligible to anyone who identifies as "working class"

Theres nothing better than getting done at the construction job site, having a few light beers, and arguing about arcane renaissance philosophers.

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> "You know something sceptical’s afoot when you find Larkin on your bedside table instead of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld " get past an editor?

> I think I'm pretty smart but I've only thoroughly read half of the authors mentioned in the post which seems to intentionally render itself unintelligible to anyone who identifies as "working class"

The sentence that you quoted isn't bad at all.

"Working class" doesn't mean "unlettered." And if you see a name that you don't know, you can always look it up. Just as people do when they see an ordinary word whose meaning they don't know.

Oddly enough, I have been reading the English poet Peter Reading recently, who did work as a laborer for two decades (and then survived for a few years afterward on the dole), and yet certainly had read at least Larkin and Montaigne during that time. And then of course there is the former Eastern Bloc where even many workers built up home libraries of some pretty deep authors, because there wasn’t much else to buy with one’s wages than books.

There was a time in the late 19th and 20th centuries when movements for worker emancipation went hand in hand with efforts to make those workers more erudite and give them access to the same reading that the bourgeoisie enjoyed. I regret that we seem to have lost this in the modern era.

It's an opinion piece by a novelist. Why are you so bothered by references to authors you're not familiar with? I just googled the ones I didn't know. And it's a bit patronising to presume that working class people don't read literature.

"The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes"

My point is that the pieces like this are inaccessible for the vast majority of people. Its meaning could easily be conveyed without so many obscure references. If this were in a literary magazine then fine, but this is the Guardian.

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