Keep or Throw Away?

Ted Gioia's The Honest Broker is one of the few Substack's that I subscribe to. Maybe I should find a few more to get a better sense of the vibe before I initiate my thing. He recently published a piece decrying the death of mid-twentieth century American culture. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with this reading old book thing, but the disappearance of once popular and prominent writers from the cultural consciousness is part of what I'm trying to understand. What gets lost when we forget about works from the past? Should it be discarded or is there some inherent value in a book written decades ago that can tell us something about living today? I'm not sure that really gets at what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm not sure why I'm trying so hard to really define the primary thrust of this idea, but it feels really important to have a clear idea of what I'm trying to do or want to do or think I should do. 

Gioia is mostly addressing the erasure of once significant and well respected works of art from our current cultural experience. They are in there, embedded in the output of the now, but they are invisible, forgotten, no longer an active part of driving popular culture or deeply influencing contemporary artists. Gioia's comments on the embeddedness of our culture in the works of the past is part of my project. I'm more interested in poking around in the parts of the culture that never really took off. If they never really got a foothold in the popular conscience, are they even part of the culture? I guess any work, no matter how minor, is part of the culture. I guess my big question is whether the major works are really all that much better than the minor works. What do the minor works say that got drowned out by the hits that captured a broader audience?

The hits are hit for a reason. The only deep cut from an album that I can think of that was just as good as a hit single is Black from Pearl Jam's Ten. People like to flaunt their elevated task by highlighting deep cuts that they think are better than the hits. Predicting hits in any creative endeavour is a mystic art with a very low success rate. Experts can't reliably pick what will be a hit and what will flop. Hits emerge from some kind of collective act that makes something popular. Then that popularity wanes, and something that was popular is forgotten. Being forgotten doesn't necessarily make that thing bad or of low quality. I'm not really looking to arbitrate whether an old book is a masterpiece that should be recognized for its genius. I'm just trying to see if something produced years ago that sits on the shelf forgotten and ignored offers a meaningful experience to today's reader. How has the accumulation of culture altered the value and meaning in an object produced for a different person in a different time. The Book Club edition of Beneath the Storm's Eye wasn't produced for an almost 50 year old man sitting by his pool in Florida 58 years after it was published. How big should our cultural memory be? How much of the history that informs our culture needs to be remembered? Do we really lose anything when a book that never caught an audience physically exists but does not actively participate in the culture? What should we remember and what should we forget?