I’ve been lurking for quite some time now, and I have enjoyed it thoroughly, but it is now time for me to come out of the shadows. I finally have a question worth asking and I wanted to present it to a crowd that has the best chance of answering it.
You see, the other day I was in the kitchen when the Little Modeler was watching “Little Einsteins” on the Disney channel and they were playing classical music. That got me wondering what works of art would be considered ‘classic’ say 100 years from now. What about 200 years from now? Do you think Bill thought a story about two love struck teenagers would be standard reading hundreds of years later? How about someone like Sam Clemens? Do you think he ever imagined that a story about frogs would be read by young students two centuries later? Even someone like good ol’ Vince? Do you think he thought that by painting a nightscape he would be immortalized?
So who or what do you think will be considered classic in the future? Does Tom Clancy stand a chance? What about television? Barney might end up like his counterparts but what about something as simple as Sesame Street? Will future kids be required to watch particular movies? And what do you think will be on the required reading lists of the future? How about required listening? Required watching? If you were in charge, what would be on your lists?
I agree, television isn’t classic. Now. But we’re talking 100 years from now. It may be in a different form, but the basic concept of transmitting real-time or pre-recorded visual and audio signals to be displayed in a different location will probably be around for a very, very long time.
And I can’t say if I like goats exactly, but they make good cheese.
I’m guessing that the Lord of the Rings movies will weather the course of time very well. 100 years from now, it will probably be time to start work on the holodeck version.
Sadly, this will be at the expense of the popularity of the books…
For literature, I don’t think any “bestsellers” will make it – Tom Clancy is already dated, and not necessarily in a charming or edifying way. I’m running through a mental list of more literary writers of popular fiction – Ruth Rendell, e.g., whose latest I took out of the library last night – and I’m not even sure how many of them will continue to be read. (My beef with a lot of these authors – her, PD James, Elizabeth George, etc. – is that they reach a certain level of popularity/renown and all of a sudden they’re “above” being edited, which I don’t think necessarily works to their advantage.)
I think Atwood, Byatt, John Irving, Ishiguro, etc., will continue to be read, though not necessarily everything by each of them. (Of course, not all Charles Dickens or Scott Fitzgerald is regarded as equally worthwhile, so there’s no problem there.)
Frank Sinatra
Miles Davis
Duke Ellington
The Beatles
The Rolling Stones
Jimi Hendrix
Bob Dylan
Elvis Presley (tho it pains me to say it; Chuck Berry is far far better)
Aretha Franklin
Tom Clancy is a bestseller hack. I wish he was forgotten already.
I can see some of Stephen King’s books being read - esp the Shining
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catch-22
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee - short, powerful, beautifully crafted
Lucille Ball? George Burns? I’m not crazy for either one, but I’m not inclined to agree. TV is so prone to recycling plots, jokes and premises that there may always be a pipeline to the past in that regard.
I keep thinking of nominees, but I wonder if I think they’ll be ‘future classics’ or if I just like them. I don’t know what will be popular in 100 years, but I think groups of people will still listen to Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. And I think that anybody with an interest in late-20th Century American life will probably have to look at The Simpsons. The Godfather will still be classic cinema, but I expect Scarface will be more popular.
More effective than making a comment in a thread is to report it to a Moderator, who will happily fix it. (For those for whom this comment now makes no sense: when someone forgets to close a tag, by goofing up the * for instance to end italics, the system sometimes just continues to italicize everything forever and ever after. It’s not a regular thing, it’s just frustrated hamsters, I guess. )
Oh, damn! Stupid chronometer on this time machine! I am so sorry, this is 1995, damn thing is telling me I am still in 2067. Apologies; that’s what you get buying cheap crap from Fusion Unlimited.
The things that stand the test of time are often very accessible, even low-class, to their contemporary audiences. Shakespeare, Dickens, Verdi, Twain, none of them were considered highfalutin. I’d guess that if modern audiences don’t find a work accessible (like so much literary fiction) then future audiences won’t either.
So, I think there’s a chance that Stephen King is writing the classics of the future. He’s got quite a lot in common with Dickens, really.
I’ve been saying this for years.
Here’s another – although people say that there’sd nothing as dated as old science fiction, Jules Verne is still in print, errors and all, over a hundred years later. H.G. wells, too.
Not all their stuff, mind, and I’ve often lamented that most of Verne’s best stuff is rarely seen – but I still have pretty recent copies of most of his stuff. So I predict that some science fiction will survive, too. Unfortunately, a lot of really good, potentially timeless stuff won’;t, because the vagaries of the industry haven’t pushed them to the fore. But good stuff that’sd been in print for a long time will probably stay. I think a lot of Heinlein will be kicking around for a long time – most of it’s still in print. Likewise asimov’s Foundation and Robot stories. I’ll bet 2001 by Clarke will be, too. It’s not his best work, by a long shot, but it’s been in print since it was written because of the movie tie-in (Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage seems to have the same fate).
Can anyone doubt that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings will be with us for quite a while? Or T.H. White’s Once and Future King, or Lewis’ Narnia stories and The Screwtape Letters?