Literary Criticism

A couple of brief reflections,  
one prosaic, one poetic.    
(Both pathetic!)    
    
(adapted from a couple of social media comments)  
 
I grew up in a deprived seaside area, a town where all the county councils dumped their human refuse, so to speak, meaning in effect that we had a lot of mercenaries, untreated psychiatric patients, and even sexual offenders wandering around. The sort of place where you’d sit in McDonald’s and the mothers in the next booth would point at a man walking past and say “he’s a paedo”, or “he deals drugs.”    
     
I was a voracious reader as a child and looking back I realise now how much just reading books was treated with suspicion and disdain. Even a public librarian, while I was checking out a Jules Verne novel, held it up and asked: “are you really going to read this?”

Later in my life, a job centre advisor said that he’d seen me on a bench reading a book, and remarked that “we can’t have you reading books all day when you should be looking for work.” Bear in mind that he only saw me doing so once.    
     
Even my older brother walked in on me reading in the front room once and started picking at me for being too “sad” to do anything else with my day.    
     
I have dozens of stories like that in the back of my headspace, probably. The experience was rotten as a kid, but funny now. This is why I hate most literary critics and see them as gatekeepers, though, because they create social attitudes to books like the ones I grew up with.      
     
And then piss and moan about falling literacy rates.    
     
A Critical Guide to Critics    
     
a quatrain    
     
We need to break their finger-bones because
they won’t give up the great books otherwise.
They’ll keep them and charge you a fee for learning    
when all that you need is a card, both free and freeing.