Some assorted weekend ramblings....
I've stayed away from this because I am, as I said, absolutely incompetent
in the area of critical theory; and the little chunks of Leavis and (why do
I associate him with) L. C. Knights I had to read during the Ph.D. program
left me feeling I was being chastised. Of course, in order to shovel my
way through a dissertation on Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, I had to read
criticism of a more localized rather than grand-genre type. My favorite
remains Prof. Roy Battenhouse of Indiana University, for whose former
students I still feel compassion: this was the man who wrote that something
is wrong with the "moral compass" of Romeo & Juliet because in I.i, set on
a Sunday morning, nobody in Verona is in church.
I read stuff like that and I'm not waving but drowning.
But I got to read A. C. Bradley, Dr. Johnson and Auden too, and the last
especially was a joy. I discovered the 18th century Irish critic Maurice
Morgann on Sir John Falstaff, and absolutely adored him because he thought
like me.
But enough about me, darling, what do you think of my dress?...
>Beavis and Butthead are canon makers. "This song sucks!" "Metallica rock!".
Perhaps you are presuming that the people who watched those two actually
took their musical tastes to heart? Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.... I don't give
my sons false credit for being excessively tasteful but when they were in
their teens they watched B&B religiously, rolled on the floor laughing,
then said stuff like "What a couple of assholes" and got on with
life. Beavis & Butthead were like a warning sign: "Don't be this at home!"
when plenty of their schoolmates were. What always struck me as odd was
that I'm sure half the MTV audience was made up of kids precisely like
Beavis and Butthead, and if they laughed it was because they were too thick
to figure out they were being mocked, or they knew it but didn't care. But
did B&B help "make" rock bands? I'd be surprised to find out yes.
>I caught a snippet of an interview with pomp-rock geniuses The Darkness the
>other day which consisted entirely of questions such as "Poison or Motley
>Crue? (Iron) Maiden or (Judas) Priest? Aerosmith or Kiss?" and their answers
>to them. No problems there over having a lineage, which includes some
>precursors and excludes others. I might add that The Darkness demonstrated
>excellent taste...
Well, in that sense there is a canon attached to everything. And a
subcanon. This sounds like an Anglican cathedral. Maybe we make up our
own canons based on nothing more elevated than "I dig this" or "This is my
story." There was a wonderful rock group called Betty some years back that
I enjoyed listening to...and it wasn't just because I was a guy ogling the
eye candy: these three women reminded me of a rock version of Manhattan
Transfer. I was listening to them in spite of my firm belief that rock
stopped developing with the Rolling Stones, sometime around the New York
Madison Square Garden concert in 1970. So Betty to me was a personalized
anomaly. Did they make a blip on the musical radar outside of
feminists? Were they part of anyone's canon? I mean besides mine.
Similarly(?)--the personal identification thing is something I was warned
against for as long as I was studying literature, but sorry, I can't move
off that square. I have no idea of Thomas Hardy's current reputation, but
Jude The Obscure remains for me one of the great reading experiences of my
life if only because as the self-pitying teenager I was then I identified
with him absolutely. Can reading about someone else's misery bring joy? I
would love to have the opportunity to teach that book to undergraduates if
only to see how they react to it these days.
>Try getting into an afficionadoes' conversation about boxers or Jazz
>musicians some time - nobody's embarrassed about making and defending quite
>outrageously partisan choices; and nobody thinks that their choices are
>purely and finally personal, either - that's why they're worth arguing about
>with other people, are even *enjoyable* to argue about, and why the person
>you're disagreeing with is *necessarily* an idiot.
If you want to see insanely partisan behavior hang out with opera
people. Try not to take your own life or theirs:-). I have been an opera
person since I was 14, and I like to think of my tastes in repertoire and
voices as "catholic" but they probably are as partisan as anyone
else's. But as far as I know I've never tried to persuade other people
that I was right and they were wrong to like Tenor X or Soprano Y. When I
first started attending, there were great argument wars among the partisans
of three sopranos: Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, and Zinka Milanov. These
arguments were unwinnable because they tried to couch themselves in logic
when everything at stake was based on "She turns me on" or "She sucks." It
was what you saw and heard, and how you reacted personally, and it was
codified and turned into a rule: Callas Great, Tebaldi Bad, or the other
way around. I discovered as the years went by that some singers I used to
dislike grew on me--and I think this had much to do with my own maturation
as a listener, that I could hear beauties in voices I'd previously
disliked. I really hate arguing about opera, but when I'm in that
environment I still do it...I hope with some discretion.
>Vi or emacs...?
Know 'em both. More or less like them both. I learned vi in 1984, and
still use it. People who interviewed me for jobs as a technical writer
were somewhat shocked when I said I liked to tweak my HTML code using vi or
emacs as an editor. Some of them may not have known what vi and emacs even
are--I call such people Members of the Frontpage Generation. (PS: I
learned Dreamweaver)
>Rossetti has some definite subtleties, and could rival Iris Murdoch for
>erotic cynicism with religiose overtones. As for Gobblin' Market, I think
>the correct label is "Pulp Fiction".
I don't remember the Murdoch I read well enough to comment, and I've got to
go back and look at "Goblin Market" again--an ur-Tarantino screenplay? Hot
stuff....
Ken
-------------------------
Kenneth
Wolman http://www.kenwolman.com
http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
"Sometimes the veil between human intelligence and animal intelligence
wears very thin--then one experiences the supreme thrill of keeping a cat,
or perhaps allowing oneself to be owned by a cat."--Catherine Manley
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