Collected Miscellany

David Edelstein had this to say in a review of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and the Punisher:

And neither, needless to say, is a patch on the greatest of our revenge dramas, Hamlet, the story of a first-rate intellectual who finds himself trapped in a third-rate revenge play and can’t quite get in sync with it: Hamlet is an attempt to dramatize the conflict between our primitive urge for vengeance—sometimes adaptive, more often grotesquely self-perpetuating, and poisonous to the social order—and our more evolved “modern” consciousness. Four hundred years later, we’re still trying to equal it. Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 are great fun, but when they’re over there’s nothing to make us question our addiction to violent fantasies of retribution. The whole is a little less than the sum of its volumes.

Shocking no?

I am still mulling over a longer more involved discussion of the issues touched on in the rant below on high and low culture. Mark at the Elegant Variation touched on the post in passing and the Literary Saloon seemed puzzled as to what the issue was all about anyway. Other than that, it really hasn’t engendered much debate. Not surprising as these bloggers generally post about things that interest them rather than rants emailed to them by me. The thing is still bouncing around in my head, however, so expect more posts when I get the chance.
UPDATE: Dan Green at The Reading Experience has an intelligent critique. I will have to re-evaluate my thesis, or at least the terms involved.

But here is something to chew on in the meantime. What role does truth play in literature? When you look to read literature, as opposed to a paperback thriller or escapist reading, are you looking for truth? Is it fair to say that great literature uses un-truth, i.e. fiction, to get at a deeper truth? Does it help you know yourself better? Does it provide insight into some fundamental issue of life?

Or perhaps are you simply seeking a higher level of craftsmanship. Is the difference between literature and pulp (to use TNR’s label) only the quality of writing; the skill involved? In this way can genre by its quality and craft rise above its category into literature?

Maybe readers and bloggers would rather not address this abstraction; maybe my lack of an MFA causes me to find these questions interesting while the better schooled have moved on. If you have a thought or opinion on any of this let me know . . .

I am not sure how this connects to the debate mentioned below but it seem germane. The New Republic is starting a series called “Pulps.” The first is a review of Brad Meltzer’s The Zero Game. An editorial aside, which precedes the actual book review, describes Pulps this way:

[What Is Pulps? The criticism of literature has always been one of the fundamental tasks of The New Republic, but there is a difference between the criticism of literature and the criticism of books. Not all books are literature. Yet it is a fundamental fact of American life that large numbers of Americans read books that are not literature. Even if some of those books do not warrant literary examination, they certainly warrant cultural examination. A nation’s highest and lowest notions of itself may be found in its amusements. Thinking about America’s popular books is a way of thinking about America. In the 1950s and 1960s, critics such as Robert Warshow and Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald taught by example how, and why, intellectual seriousness may be brought to bear upon things that are not intellectually serious; and, in recent decades, with mixed results, the discipline of cultural studies was established on this premise. The aim of this feature of TNR Online will be to toil in the same vineyards, though rather more snappily. Pulps will regularly visit the best-seller list and linger over thrillers, romances, fiction, non-fiction, and even (as The New York Times puts it) “advice, how-to, and miscellaneous” books, as documents of our time, for the purpose of a brief but undoubtedly penetrating exercise in cultural anthropology. After all, influential ideas have a way of turning up in the strangest places. A warning: Pulps will give away the books’ plots. Critics have a way of spoiling all the fun.

Is this a surrender to the triumph of low culture or a way to critique it? Or neither? I am not sure but my gut feeling tells me both. It is a way to talk about pop culture while still maintaining some critical remove; a more intellectual demeanor. Why else the mention of anthropology? This is really outside of left right questions as conservative online magazine like National Review having been mining pop culture for years. Heck, what is Jonah Goldberg if not serious intellectual conservatism communicated through the language of pop culture?

Call me elitist, but I am still not sure this is wise. But of course I will read Pulps religiously . . .

This seems to be popping up everywhere, so here is my version:

“People at fairs change like the leaves of trees; and I daresay you are the only one here to-day who was here all those years ago.”
— The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy

Now you try:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

One of the themes that bounces around any discussion of literature or the arts these days is the high versus low, literature versus genre, pop versus art issue. Is there a clear line? What delineates that line? Does it matter?

In a link everybody and their brother have probably posted, The Literary Divide, Anne Applebaum hits the theme in the Washington Post:

I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, “The Known World,” won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other?

It should come as no surprise that I have a conservative answer to this issue. It seems to me that a big part of this problem is our culture’s rabid egalitarianism with a dash of relativism thrown in.

Without falling into a blind nostalgia about the past, it is safe to say that middle and even lower class citizens looked to high society and art for inspiration. Those with the means and the leisure time attempted to set a standard for taste and class. Sure this didn’t always reflect a true meritocracy and it had its share of problems, but there was a sense of responsibility and a sense of standards. The iconoclasm and egalitarianism of the counter-culture sought to destroy this system. Its inspiration was relativistic and anti-hierarchy. Rules and standards; culture and custom; traditions and mores; these were all oppressive tools the powerful used against the weak. They must be thrown off to achieve freedom.

Soon those at the top embraced this counter culture and sought their inspiration in the low culture. Instead of class and taste, they sought hipness and trendiness. Old money bought libraries and museums, new money bought drugs and sex, avante-garde art galleries, and more recently, dot-coms.

The hierarchies, the natural aristocracy, the standard bearers have been thrown down. We are all pop culture consumers now. Many on the left love to blame the right for the consumerism and lowest common denominator culture but in fact it is the relativism, “multicuturalism” and rabid egalitarianism of the left that has undermined culture. That is not to say that many on the right, I am looking at you libertarians, haven’t ignored the importance of culture. The ideologies of the left, however, have had a much greater impact. Utilitarianism, utopian romanticism, Marxist-Leninist revolution, Freudian gobbledy gook, and cultural relativism (to name a few bogeymen) have all contributed mightily to the unraveling of culture and community. A society where these ideas are pervasive and fully digested will not appreciate art, nor understand it because it runs counter to the squishy safe egalitarian relativism it has been weaned on.

I am sure many in the cultural region of the blogosphere disagree with this rant. If so, I would welcome a debate on what went wrong and why.

Arts & Letters Daily finally gets around to noting this Michael Frayn interview that I posted about on February 11.

Just saying . . .