Tag: cultural stuff

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Culture

po-heritage

One of the things that seems odd to me about Ron Silliman’s legendary (post)Avant/SoQ dichotomy is that trying to claim ownership of a country’s cultural heritage, trying to shape a national canon, feels like an essentially conservative impulse. The idea of a national tradition of radical poetics seems self-contradictory, like the Maoist idea of continuous revolution. I don’t think there’s actually a logical contradiction, but there does seem to be some conceptual tension.

I was going to use this observation as the starting point for a whole post about America’s relationship with its cultural heritage, but on balance I think that’s an exercise best left to the reader.

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Culture Other

Bob Denver & Americana

Bob Denver, the star of Gilligan’s Island, has died. Gilligan’s Island is one of those bits of Americana which feel familiar but I actually know entirely via hearsay. It’s one of the most frequently used pop culture references in other US pop culture – they mentioned it on House just last night – but I’ve never actually seen an episode because I don’t think it’s been shown on British TV in my lifetime (ever?).

Similarly, when I went to the US I felt it was very important to eat a Twinkie, to try and find out what it was about this confectionary that made it iconic. Answer – well, it’s certainly different. Bizarrely artificial and liable to send you into diabetic shock. The O. J. Simpson trial was odd, too. The whole thing was covered in detail in the UK news, partially because they tend to follow big US news stories anyway, and partially because the moment he was chased down the freeway on TV, it was a great story. But somehow, the whole point of the thing was missing; the premise of the story was that a Very Famous Man was accused of murdering his wife – but in a country where few people care about American football, he wasn’t actually famous before the trial. He’s famous now, but famous for being accused of murder.

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Culture

more middlebrow

Perhaps the difference between the US and the UK is simply that, over here, being an intellectual has never had any social cachet.

Categories
Culture

middlebrow again

A post at Whimsy Speaks alerted me to some more web chatter on the middle-brow, including a NY Times column on the subject.

What startles me is that so much of the commentary (in, for example, the post and comments at Pandagon), is quite clearly aimed at the idea of a socially aspirational category, not an intellectual one. So Jonathan’s examples of Starbucks and Target, which I just thought were an odd quirk of his, turn out to be quite typical. Martha Stewart is cited. If Starbucks is middle-brow, presumably my home-ground Ethiopian Yirgacheffe is high-brow. A high-brow cup of coffee. Hmmm. What they really mean is presumably that Starbucks is middle class.

And yet Americans still refer to the British as class-obsessed. Martha Stewart seems to me to be a good example. I’ve never seen anyone who is has so openly built a career on stoking people’s social insecurities and then selling them the cure; and I can’t actually think of a comparable British personality. There are hundreds of programmes on TV about improving your home and garden, what to wear, and what to eat, but none of them seem to have that stifled, buttock-clenching aura of gentility. Which isn’t to say that the UK is a snob-free haven, just that the American self-image on matters of class is sometimes a little skewed.

I really shouldn’t be attempting US cultural commentary, of course – I just don’t know the country well enough.

Categories
Culture

Jonathan Mayhew on ‘middlebrow’

Jonathan has been commenting on the middlebrow. But his blog doesn’t allow anonymous comments and I don’t have a blogger account.

I found Starbucks and the designer teapot peculiar examples (not that I know the teapot or teapot shop in question). For me, low/middle/highbrow implies a specifically intellectual judgement. The relationship between your taste in coffee and your taste in literature seems strained to me – it makes it more into a judgement of someone’s social class. Or urbanity. Perhaps the word he’s looking for is ‘sophisticated’ rather than ‘highbrow’.

That’s not the same thing as saying that we are all differently-browed in different areas. I have low-to-middlebrow taste in films, but fairly highbrow taste in literature, and it seems reasonable to make the comparison. My taste in coffee seems a quite different subject.

I also think his description of the middlebrow as ‘addressed to a wider audience that wants to “improve itself”‘ is patronising and misguided. My sense is that the middlebrow audience just enjoys art at a particular level of accessibility and intellectual content. The idea that people watch Pride and Prejudice on the telly because they want to ‘improve themselves’ seems ridiculous to me. Rather, they’ve found the level at which they find art to be enjoyable. Two disclaimers: I don’t think that level is determined by intellectual capacity but by their priorities and tastes. And I don’t think that high-brow art is always better than middle-brow or low-brow art.

[publishers apparently have a category called ‘faux-brow’. Like The Girl in the Pearl Earring, which is romantic fiction, but with a historical, arty theme and a more expensive cover.]