University Challenge, it’s fair to say, is knitted into British culture in all sorts of odd and interesting ways. The only other parallels I can think of for cultural influence and longevity are shows like Blue Peter and Dr Who. The headline for this post, for example, is instantly recognizable to pretty much anyone over here. It’s actually host Jeremy Paxman’s opening line in the show. I’m not quite sure what makes it so durable: there are no big money prizes and no film or book deals tacked on after a win. Nothing, in fact, apart from a rather odd trophy and a few all expenses paid trips to, ahem, Manchester (where filming takes place).
University Challenge is, in fact, a celebration of sheer braininess. It pits two British Universities in teams of four against each other and asks them increasingly difficult (and more rapidly delivered) questions. Oxford and Cambridge — rather than entering corporately, as entire universities — enter only as Colleges (up to five each). People have complained about this, calling it unfair, but I have a strong feeling that the system dilutes Oxbridge sufficiently to allow other universities a chance at the win. Reduce Oxbridge to their corporate identities, and I have no doubt that four Rhodes Scholars would face off against four Gates Scholars almost every year, and be pretty much unstoppable. The greater British public would soon grow tired of their most venerable game show coming to resemble the Boat Race.
The power of a single (small) Oxford college is highlighted by this year’s winner, Corpus Christi, or more particularly, Corpus Christi’s gifted captain, Classics DPhil student Gail Trimble. Corpus Christi (student population 400) knocked off the University of Manchester (student population 40,000). The strangest part of the whole deal is that Trimble’s superb performance (she scored 2/3 of her team’s points throughout this year’s series) has uncorked a bottle of national soul-searching.
Dubbed ‘the Brainiest Person in Britain’ and suddenly exposed to a mass of media attention, she has been fiercely attacked and defended throughout the British press and across Britblogistan. She’s even been invited to do an arty photo shoot for a lads’ magazine (the answer was a polite and slightly arch ‘no’):
“Would you believe it, my brother received a Facebook message from Nuts yesterday morning saying ‘can we have your sister’s e-mail address, we want her to do a tasteful shoot’,” Miss Trimble told BBC Breakfast.
“So of course he sent them an answer saying, ‘seriously mate, would you give your sister’s contact details to Nuts?”‘
Thereafter, she was interviewed on half a dozen chat shows, profiled throughout the country’s still large and diverse print media and discussed in hushed tones around water coolers across the nation. Her name was increasingly twinned with that of Jade Goody, a reality telly star who seems to oscillate from adulation to revulsion. She’s loved at the moment, because she’s dying of cervical cancer, but she was once reviled for not knowing that East Anglia was part of Britain (she called it, somewhat pathetically, ‘East Angular’, and thought it a foreign country). Yet she made money, and became ‘famous for being famous’. Why do we love Jade Goody and vilify a University Challenge brainbox? ran one despairing headline.
Some of it is undoubtedly gender inflected, something Trimble has observed herself:
Some reaction has been less pleasant, with hostile comments posted on blogs early on in the series. She has been ridiculed on social networking sites for being too intellectual, and one newspaper this week asked: “Why do so many hate this girl simply for being clever?”
Miss Trimble – bespectacled, with long brown hair and a beaming, dimpled smile – said she had been taken aback by the hostility, after experiencing no such problems at school or university.
“Suddenly there’s this thing that involves being in the public eye, and I find all this reaction to me, and I’m sure this wouldn’t be the case if I wasn’t a woman.
“It is nice when people are saying nice things about my appearance, and not nasty things, but it’s sad that they feel it necessary to say things about my appearance at all.”
Some of it, however, is class inflected, the closest Britain comes to the culture wars. Buried in the angst is a dislike of snobbery and an argument over what constitutes ‘really useful knowledge’. Gail Trimble is privately educated, the daughter of two scientists and — crucially — unashamed of her cleverness, revealed attractively in this longer interview. In an attempt to bring her down, The Sun made a point of asking her five questions drawn from popular culture, none of which she knew. Infuriatingly for the denizens of the Sun (and to the even greater irritation of those who read The Sun), she did not seem to care. The idea that there may be hierarchies of knowledge is just a bit too freaky for some, and the venom of those casually dismissed (‘all the bits of Britain not for export’, says one Canadian friend over here) was on serious display:
“Not for some time have I been so angry at a complete stranger as I was with this Trimble character. Each answer was met with a smug grin or a cocky smirk. My normally placid girlfriend ended half-poetically seething: ‘Not a friend did she own at school’, before physically turning her back on the screen so she didn’t have to bear this odious little smug specimen.”
Speaking to the Observer yesterday, Trimble said: “I’ve been aware of the attention and the things that are being said. It makes me realise how people see you as a person and how you come across on TV, as opposed to how you have always imagined yourself to be in real life. I don’t know quite know how some people can get an impression of who you are having only been on a couple of half-hour TV programmes.
Intellect, gender and class conspired to combine into a toxic and hateful stew symbolic of these divided Isles, where — as one blogger observed — aspiration has been ditched in favour of spite:
This seems symbolic of the anti-aspirational attitudes found everywhere today. OK, Ms Trimble comes from a supportive middle class home and has had educational advantages. We should be saying, ’Let’s try to give more people those benefits’ but instead the attitude is, ‘Let’s bring her down!’ It’s a far cry from the Mechanics’ Institutes and Workers’ Educational Societies of old. Eheu!
That last sentence is particularly telling, and offers a hint that the politics of envy often associated with certain elements on the political left is, I think, relatively new. Ruskin College and places like it were built in order to give the disadvantaged the same things that Gail Trimble has enjoyed. Much of the early history of the Labour movement (in its broadest sense, and so taking in similar efforts in Australia) was about hope and progress, not a limiting insistence that all must have prizes or that all knowledge is equally valid.
There is another and darker message, too. Often in political philosophy — think, for example, of John Rawls in the development of his difference principle — intellectual brilliance is seen as a form of unearned merit, the consequence of lucky genetics (IQ is largely heritable) and a solid upbringing. The more I see of the treatment meted out to the very clever, however, the more I’m coming to doubt this. If intelligence is a form of unearned merit at birth, then it is rapidly earned as life progresses.
And Gail Trimble has paid her ‘merit tax’ in full this week.
[Two disclosures: I knew two of the Sun's posers (cinema buff, so sue me), and I've just been made captain of Brasenose's University Challenge team for the next season. Perhaps I can plead Australian ignorance ... because until this week, I had no idea what this show means to some people].
UPDATE: There’s an excellent and very thoughtful response to this post over at Fizzog’s blog. Highly recommended.
88 Comments
Just another form of jealousy really. Scourge of the modern world and the concrete foundations of socialism in all its forms.
Which one is she here?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxA0a5G6ccg
Three cheers for Gail! We celebrate sporting heroes; why should we not admire someone who has a great knowledge of the classics? It’s no more meaningful than being able to throw a discus a certain distance. I remember being resentful at school that physical prowess was feted but intellectual prowess was something to be mocked. I really don’t see what the difference is.
Incidentally, that Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy site is great.
NB: I couldn’t have answered any of The Sun’s posers. I had read the story about the 13 year old father, but like Gail, I hadn’t remembered the kid’s name.
“If a footballer celebrates he’s admired; if an academic celebrates she’s being smug.”
Way back in the nosebleed cheap seats of my brain there is a thought process trying to tell me that there is some line to be drawn between here, and Ladette to Lady. I’m just not sure how to draw that line.
Or how to spell Ladette; Laddette?
Nerds of the world, unite! Seriously, in my high school years, I don’t know what I would have done without friends who equally didn’t give a rats’ about footballers or popular music or movie stars. Very reassuring to see that we weren’t just some freakish aberrations!
I don’t get it. Why is this all the left’s fault?
And what evidence is there that the vitriol and abuse have come exclusively from the left, and based on leftist class envy as the post states?
Great post. However I think you went astray towards the end:
And much of it still is.
Do you think those idiots who mock this girl purely for her intelligence are more likely to be soft left or hard right in their political leanings? My experience of anti-intellectual morons suggests the latter…
Our society is almost wilfully anti-intellectual at times. It’s virtually the opposite of a meritocracy – or rather, we’ve selected “merits” such as sporting prowess and rat business/political cunning as the ones to reward, rather than ‘academic’ intellectual prowess.
It starts young too. I’m sure I’m not the only one reading your article who was singled out by both students and teachers from as early in my academic life as the first few years of primary school.
Anyway, exciting to be captaining the team – is this watchable in Australia somehow?
Congratulations on the captaincy, I hope you do well.
I’d suck at this kind of thing – rapid recall of facts is not my forte. I’m infamous for asking things like “Who was that guy in that film? You know, with the hat?”
@8 Adoor Bhasi
What a remarkable woman.
As they say in the classics (or not, I’m sure she could tell me), “Sod the proles”.
I’m not so sure either that this is a struggle between left and right. It strikes me rather as a struggle between two competing right-wing views: A version that benefits from privileged access to education but at least values it, and a version that rejects any sort of “book-learning” as unnecessary.
Anyone calling themselves left-wing who supports the idea that knowledge is irrelevant, or that all types of knowledge are of equal value, deserves the “pseudo-left” label.
I agree with what SL seems to be saying, that a real left-wing attitude towards someone with a privileged education is to insist that quality education is available to all, NOT to denigrate education or those who’ve already got it.
But my real problem with this post? More than 25 years after this was published and you don’t realise the cultural significance of University Challenge? For shame!
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/785204/the_young_ones_university_challenge/
Rah Rah Rah! We’re Going to Smash The Oiks!
Best. Episode. Ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi_(Young_Ones_episode)
D’oh! That wikipedia link is at
http://tinyurl.com/cq6z5p
I’d say one is equally likely to find anti-intellectuals among the Right as among the Left. They just express it and justify it differently.
On the Left side, there is an anti-elitist strain. This is based on a notion that hierarchies are prima facie bad. If you start to say some people are better than others, then you create a class system. Therefore, better that all the tall poppies should be cut short so that we can all be equal. There is, nonetheless, also a strong Left wing intellectual tradition – I can think of many intellectual Marxists, the Fabians, etc, etc
There’s a kind of “chav” inverse-snobbery too, however (as you know, I hate terms like “chav” and “bogan”, so I’ll use them in inverted commas). The only real person is a person who works with his or her hands or has some kind of practical use, and intellectual pursuits are useless. Such behaviour is not confined to the Left. I can equally well imagine a lower-class conservative reader of The Sun sneering at Gail.
And then there’s the kind of sexist Right winger who might think Gail would be better off devoted to kaffe, kuchen und kinder than intellectual pursuits.
When I was at primary school and correctly answered a teacher’s question twice in a row, I remember that she said in front of the whole class, “You’re a little know-it-all, aren’t you?” She affirmed the attitude of my classmates towards me. People are threatened by open displays of intelligence. I don’t know why they don’t feel the same way about a musical performance or a sporting performance.
Nietzsche once wrote that there two concepts of equality. In one you raise people up to the higher standard, in the other you bring everyone down to the same level. I’ve been reading Johnny Rotten’s (aka Lydon) punk. memoir and he says it straight as usual. The working class ostracizes any member who becomes a success. The lead singer of AC/DC did an interview recently where he was naive enough to buy a house in Gordie Town before he realized they didn’t wanna know him anymore.
Indeed. Nietzche’s suspicions of socialism were rooted in his knowledge that the downward motion would prevail. Oscar Wilde probably expressed fin de siècle British Socialist sensibility when he described a street sweeper’s existence as intolerable because so making dignity impossible. That kind of work, he wrote, should be done by a machine. Indeed now it is. The broad socialist movement from British Labour to the Bolsheviks were about higher standards not lower ones. Hey in Moscow NYE they played Swan Lake (every single fucking year!!).
One can’t blame the Left for the anti-elitist stew of the proudly ignorant that our culture has become. Elements of the Right, the mass media, the deprioritisation of education, the final scrambling of old world cultural hierarchies and the Stupid Cult of Rebellion have all played their parts, but the “limiting insistence that all must have prizes or that all knowledge is equally valid” is doing its bit.
Great post.
I blame capitalism. End of.
On the Left side, there is an anti-elitist strain.
Yeah but it’s skewed. You try to assert the superiority of a Dead White Male like Shakespeare and you’ll get cried down, called a fascist, a conservative, a philistine. Beethoven is judged ‘over-rated’ and Pop Culture is ‘of the people’.
But then try and pin down a concept or a phenomena (usually having something to do with a French philosopher) and you’ll be told it’s more complex than that, you don’t understand and (my fave) that word doesn’t mean that.
The Right have it’s own skewed policy on Populism/Elitism.
Elitist: Social services for the Wealthy, systematic and increasing opacity of the ‘democratic’ process, lots of meetings in camera behind razor wire between 20 dudes in suits deciding just how the ‘fee’ market is going to look for the next century.
Populism: Newspapers full of tripe and positively Berean propaganda masquerading as ‘considered opinion’ , a howling cry to the heart of the most base elements of the human animal to justify torture, unjust war, surveillance and very useful for besmirching any critic as a ‘traitor’;.
I don’t think street sweeping or factory work or garbage collection or any work that is socially useful is intrinsically degrading or lacking in dignity. On the contrary. Check out the life work of one recently deceased master, Studs Terkel, on this.
Ironic that Wilde ended his life failing to recover from a treadmill. But he was always a bit of a drama queen.
There are jobs that are inherently degrading. I’ve done some. But read The Soul of Man Under Socialism his description of the 19th century street sweeper isn’t that of a happy chappy.
Oscar was a Comedy Queen. He only wrote two tragedies this one and his life.
“When I was at primary school and correctly answered a teacher’s question twice in a row, I remember that she said in front of the whole class, “You’re a little know-it-all, aren’t you?””
WTF? How the hell are teachers like this allowed to continue to teach???
So capitalist exploitation of labour is degrading, you say? Surely not?
Stinking after a shift ain’t really a measure of degrading work, sorry.
Wilde was masochistic, too. I’d categorise that aspect as the flip side of his comedic output.. Some of his poems are masochism and drama queenery personified. And his plays are only superficially categorised as comedies imho.
Sorry, just had to rescue multiple people on several posts from both the spammer and the moderation queue. It was very bad on the BlogWars thread and appears to have remained tetchy ever since. Irritating but can’t be helped, I’m afraid — there are various net-nasties out there we can really do without.
FXH — the skipper is always second from the right (when watching), and in any case you should be able to find her simply because in a couple of the shows she answered pretty much every question.
Interestingly, I’d seen the Young Ones ‘episode’ of University Challenge as a kid, and knew it was important, but seriously thought it more likely to be an object of satire, not affection or anger. Some of the exploding irritation this week bespeaks affection betrayed, rather that any sense that it’s just a game show. That said, I may have to revise my view of game shows — Slumdog Millionaire works in part because of the game show, not in spite of it.
I can also see the point that gilmae is making, but like him I’m not sure how to draw the line (lots of wriggly lines, perhaps?). As I’ve said elsewhere, most traditionally left-leaning economic ideas are simply tosh, and I’m very grateful to Bob Hawke for jettisoning most of them. However, the traditional left-wing idea (at least in Britain, and probably elsewhere) that poor and working-class people should aspire to high achievement (of whatever sort) has become rather attenuated of late, and I think that’s a shame.
Some of this has been due to silly policies — Oxbridge is notably less diverse now than it was in the 50s and 60s, simply due to the abolition of the grammar schools. Labour got rid of the grammars because it didn’t like what happened to the children who went to secondary moderns, in the process reducing state education in Britain to something only slightly better than a secondary modern. To her very great shame, Margaret Thatcher allowed this process to continue.
Other carry overs include ‘non-competitive’ sports days (‘now we’ve ground down the academics, let’s screw up the sporty kids as well’) and a willful celebration of things that really aren’t worth much (various people here have read my view of intellectuals who intellectualise Big Brother).
I do think Adrien is right to ping some of the identity politics stuff, too — you see it in all those African American studies classes where things like ‘white science’ are decried, yet there’s a simultaneous attempt to claim the invention of that science for blacks. The whole business is very silly and destructive. Ironically it took a classicist (Mary Lefkowitz) to debunk this turgid nonsense.
As I mentioned in the post, the gender issue is also relevant. Thing is, if the people attacking Gail Trimble had a politics (‘women should not focus on careers but on motherhood’), it would be much easier to fight them off. Thing is, these attackers seem to be politics free — it’s clear from reading various things on blogs that they accept that women can be clever and have successful careers. They just mustn’t do so with excessive joyousness, or something. It’s very strange indeed.
Capitalist? For thousands of years the economic mode was of an aristocratic kleptocracy with 85% of the population leading shit lives. In those days they didn’t bother to have street sweepers half the time.
And, l’oh, one hundred years after The Soul of Man Under Socialism machines do sweep the streets. Capitalism didn’t invent toil, nor did it make a pain in the arse.
Well I’m sorry but that’s the sort of statement only someone who’s never had that kind of job can make.
Example s’il vous plait?
Funny, happy endings, a light treatment of serious issues. But no, they’re actually tragedies.
Maybe it’s all a bit of a media beat-up, SL, and you’re reading too much into it.
I can’t see that many people would be negatively excited about this or wish this young woman harm or feel malice or envy towards her. Really. The only sources you’ve cited are The Sun and one blog. I’ve no doubt the former would be prepared to play around with this in a mischievously misogynist, class-antagonistic way. Surely the media”s the main culprit here?
Congrats, btw. You must be feeling chuffed.
Use your google, Posey, and you’ll find mountains of stuff out there, and still growing. I’ve only picked bits out here and there to suit my purpose, rather than attempted to build a brief of evidence (for which I have neither the time nor the inclination).
Yes, well, I’ll see how many rounds we get through. I have a head full of interesting facts (‘the barrister’s bullshit quiz show routine’), but I doubt in the extreme that I can have them all at my fingertips like that.
Adrien, I know you sneer at Marxism but it is actually a critique of class society, and yes slavery and feudalism and some say the Asiatic mode of production all preceded capitalism and all exploited and exploit human labour.
I have done stinking work. Worse than anything you’ve done I’d wager, being a woman. We always get the worst, dirtiest jobs.
Examples? The Ballad of Reading Gaol. And De Profundis.
Suffering has meaning. And we are meaning-seeking creatures. I see his plays rather as a deep treatment of light issues. As would he.
I’m inclined to think Marxism is a secular religion. I don’t sneer at Marx. And I like a lot of Marxian work like, say, that of Eric Hobsbawm or Pierre Bourdieu. But Marx himself wouldn’t have tolerate this attribution of all ills to capitalism. First lesson of Marx: He thought Capitalism a big improvement.
I have done stinking work. Worse than anything you’ve done I’d wager, being a woman. We always get the worst, dirtiest jobs.
For example?
De Profundis isn’t a poem and both of those bits were written in jail. A true drama queen would’ve produced a whining dirge.
While Australia has descended nowhere near the simian levels of Britain’s middle – and lower – orders, the stench of philistinism, ignorance, and self-righteous coarseness continues apace. Check out this yuppie who Media Tart Lumby has sent into the trenches to further infect the polity. The dopey bint would be as useful as tits on a bull at the University Challenge.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/dont-patronise-ladies-who-raunch-20090223-8fr2.html
On the gender side : just think how the male nerd has been embraced and rehabilitated in popular culture – Flight of the effing Concords etc, not so his female alter. It’s her lack of obvious humility that is so galling. A woman may be intelligent as long as she apologizes for it frequently and doesn’t engage in brazen and flagrant acts that exhibit that intelligence. Simpering becomes a bit of a survival skill. Lack of social skills is practically a hanging offence for women still, as evidenced by the comments of the classmate. Of course she didn’t have very many friends – there were probably relatively few people with whom she could have a productive conversation. “The last time of I was shitfaced” was undoubtedly rather low on her list of preferred topics for discussion.
Posey
You blame “capitalism’, eh? And yet capitalism produced Gail Trimble.
Adrien
But read The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Clearly you are one swig of chardonnay away from posting how all human beings are equal in “dignity”. Thus I have no choice but to take that revolver out of mothballs!
Adrien, as you know I have said more than once, Marxism is not a “secular” religion. It is the bloody fourth Abrahamic religion!
It’s the ‘being successful with excessive joyousness’ thing, su — you’re right. And the social skills issue is a big part of it. In a sense it’s useful that Britain is having this rather impressive blow-up now, although unfortunately there is a real person on the receiving end of much of the crap.
Adrien@26. Yeah, I’ve read the Communist Manifesto. You sound like Graham Greene’s Catholic Mayor in Monsieur Quixote.
For example? You’ve never been a woman fucked by the boss, or being forced to watch the boss masturbate, or be put in solitary confinement in the workplace, or have a job that involves gunpowder exploding under plastic less than an arm’s length from your downturned face or have a man as old as your father wait outside the toilet to tell you off for having spent too much time there during the work shift. Have you? I have.
Su, I agree – gender is a big factor in how this woman has been treated. I doubt there would be any outcry about her at all if she were a man. Male nerds are more socially acceptable than female nerds. An intelligent woman who doesn’t apologise for her intelligence somehow seems to cop it much more badly, from both many other women and from many men.
David @ 19 – a stupid vindictive teacher who enjoyed humiliating and punishing people. There’s always one.
Catholic priest, the Mayor was the commie.
Anyway, I’m out of here.
Too upsetting.
Except that it involves a series of observations and attempts to develop a rational theory to explain them and predict future behaviour. It might be (partially) wrong, but a religion it is not, irrespective of how some of its (supposed) adherents behave.
I find this an interesting part of this discussion – we all (rightly) condemn those who somehow think it is a negative for this girl to know a great deal on a number of subjects. But people who know a great deal about contemporary popular culture, or who exhibit great social skill are also exhibiting a form of intelligence too.
If I have any criticism of Ms Trimble, it is that she has either made, or accepted the making by others on her behalf of, a value judgment about what is “worth” knowing – demonstrated by her apparent total lack of knowledge about current events of cultural significant (before anyone starts up: significant to the great majority of people). Without getting into the “is art subjective/objective” fight, Slumdog Millionaire has significance to a great many more people than many great works from previous eras. So ignorance of it is in a sense equivalent of ignorance of Dickens or Homer, notwithstanding that on a long enough timeline it is highly unlikely to stand shoulder to shoulder with the works of those gentlemen.
Let me rephrase: there is significance and merit in a desire to understand and know about things which are happening right now and which are important to millions, if not billions, of people around the world. Similarly, having excellent social skills should not be written off as an unimporant skill. I think some intelligent people tend to look down their noses on the highly social, but I have nothing but admiration for those who can navigate complex social environments with ease.
Whenever people try to tell me that we would all be better off with no government intervention in our private, commercial and employment relationships, I ask them to consider how things would be if there were no nasty laws interfering with how businesses interact with their employees. After listening to the usual load of bullsh#t about how empowered and informed employees can get another job if they dislike the conditions in the one they have, I point out that this variant has already been tested extensively in the UK following the abolition of feudalism and slavery and in the US following the abolition of slavery. Result? Appallingly bad work conditions and systematic exploitation.
There’s a sort of charming, but dangerous, naivety to people who have so much faith in the free market that they think it will somehow overcome human malevolence. There will always be unequal bargaining positions, and it will always be legitimate to consider as a society whether we would prefer to rebalance the scales somewhat.
I’ve already dealt with the serious intellectual woolliness involved in mistaking working class taste with working class politics here and here (two of my discussions of just why we should not take Big Brother seriously, nor any of the various attempts to valorize it by so-called ‘intellectuals’).
It is quite possible (as Hayek observed in Constitution of Liberty) to take working-class politics very seriously without purporting to take working-class ‘culture’ remotely seriously, particularly in these deracinated times.
And if you think law can fix the problem that Posey outlines, then you have faith that can move mountains (something even Muhammad admitted he lacked). You cannot make people like one another by law. Attempts to do so do not work very well. Or at all.
And that’s even before we start getting into a gender version of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
Fascinating. I am familiar with University Challenge – we used to see it in NZ ages ago and even had a local version for a while. (Congrats on your captaincy SL – that’s a real compliment.) I do think it’s a gender thing – what’s a young woman doing showing off like this when she should be getting on with being a good student/sexy young thing/mother (depending on your view of women/s roles). And the different valuing of different kinds of knowledge: spot on. She sounds like a mature young woman and I hope this all blows over and she can get on with being clever in an environment where’s she’s appreciated. LE. I had a similar experience in primary school. I remember the year I wasn’t top of the class the nun who taught me was quite nasty about it – she gave me a little talk about pride, assuming that I cared.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I am talking about the outright intellectual arrogance of assuming that things which are both popular and contemporary are irrelevant trivia worthy only of Hello! magazine. I have infinitely more respect for someone who can have a conversation about ancient Greece, the French Revolution, yesterday’s football match and interesting Hollywood movies set to be released next year than I do for someone who only knows about the former two.
It’s not about ‘making’ people like each other. It’s about giving the disempowered a way to hit the bastards back.
Funnily enough, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens were the soap operas of their day. But then again, some popular stuff doesn’t survive, and gets lost in the sands of time. It’s hard to judge at the time what is worthwhile – something that continues to speak to people long after the particular moment has passed is more likely to survive, I think. That’s what I love about Shakespeare – there are moments where you just think “Yes, that’s still how it is,” or “That’s such an interesting way of expressing it”.
I’m perfectly willing to accept that different people have different expertise, and I wouldn’t consider someone with an expert knowledge of the classics as any more or less worthwhile than someone with an expert knowledge of football. Or an expert knowledge of car engines, sub-atomic particles or whatever. I see knowledge in and of itself as a virtue. And I’m pretty much interested in most things.
Well I don’t see the point in knowing about football and hollywood movies unless you have a genuine interest in them. You’re assuming that people wilfuly avoid popular topics when it is more likely that they just don’t like them. What’s wrong with knowing a lot about the classics and a lot about atonal music but not much else? What is wrong with being a physics wiz who loves the bongos but finds the humanities to be a waste of time (and space)? Nowt. It is the ability to concentrate a lot of intellectual resources within a limited field that really pushes knowledge forward. I went to school with a couple of girls who were probably genuine geniuses. They weren’t intellectually arrogant at all, they just had a passion for certain fields and craved friends with whom they could talk about those passions. “The you’re so up yourself” crap is just envy and impotent fury at people (girls especially) who not only don’t participate in the vicious social rituals that sort out the pecking order in a school but genuinely don’t care that such a hierarchy exists.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
And, as should be clear, I do buy the idea of hierarchies of knowledge, and that some knowledge — while not necessarily useless (it may facilitate the social rituals Su mentions) — is quite possibly meaningless.
Amazing how it all gets back to the same dialogue about ‘value’ that people were having under the stoa in Athens roughly 2,500 years ago
Couldn’t agree more. The world is too big to waste on the dumb and ordinary.
JG – Clearly you are one swig of chardonnay away from posting how all human beings are equal in “dignity”.
.
Um no. Since the Enlightenment we find it agreeable to maintain the pleasant and useful fiction that all are alike in dignity. Reality television puts paid to this.
But we should all have the basic opportunity to obtain dignity.
Still I don’t think dignity is something 80% even know they have or lack.
And I like red wine.
I like wine of all flavours. Red, white, sparkling, dessert. Just in case anyone ever wants to buy me a drink.
Posey –
Greaso. I suggest you read something he wrote after he was weaned. Haven’t read Monsieur Quixote but I’m a lot more Henry Wotton than any priest.
Do you mean raped?
That sounds like ‘a crime’ to me. Do you know what the police is?
Which was? I’m sorry but this sounds like a lot of victim indulgence to me.
Uh well I have had jobs where they hassled you about breaktimes, sure. Why is the ‘old as your father’ thing relevant?
But whilst we’re comparing ourselves to literary characters I’d try, if I were you to be less Justine and more Juliette. Or grow some balls. Yeah?
See when people try and force you to do things you don’t want phrases like Fuck Off come to mind. And if the boss jerks off in front of you then remember that scissors are the natural enemy of the penis.
It’s called being ‘strong’.
Paul – Except that it involves a series of observations and attempts to develop a rational theory to explain them and predict future behaviour. It might be (partially) wrong, but a religion it is not, irrespective of how some of its (supposed) adherents behave.
Paul this is why I use Marxism as distinct from Marxian. Most Marxists I know treat everything with a simplistic dogma that comes of reading some pamphlet written by someone who read a pamphlet written by someone who read The Communist Manifesto and tried Capital Vol 1 and fell asleep.
Marxists treat Marx as “The Man Who Knows” which is ridiculous. No-one knows, or can explain everything. And Marx thought Capital was a failure.
Su –
There are people who do just that. I myself have this tenuous relationship with pop culture I dip in and out as it interests me (at the minute – not).
But I’ve known some very tiresome people who have this reverse narrow mindedness. People who hate Tarkovsky’s first movie because it’s intelligible and detest the Beatles simply because they were successful.
Adrien, 48 was sailing a bit close to the wind. Just sayin’.
Adrien, sometimes it’s bloody hard being strong when you’re a chick and your boss or potential boss is a much older guy. One of my friends was told by her boss that she was “very f*ckable”. When she complained about it, he started giving her shite work and telling everyone at the workplace she was mentally ill. She ended up leaving that workplace. It was a really traumatic experience for her, and I reckon it took a year for her to get over it, because she had loved the job until all this stuff blew up.
When she told me what this guy said, I have to say that my first reaction was, “Why didn’t you deck the bastard?” I think I would have done so in her situation; but then I have this impulsive bad temper (as discussed, yes, it’s my Celtic side). To be honest, I still occasionally wonder what would happen if I saw this guy in the street – would I be able to restrain myself from punching him in the nose?
But when something like that happens, I understand too that often you’re just in shock, and can’t believe what someone has just said or done to you. You might initially try to laugh it off because you’ve been brought up not to rock the boat, or you want to keep your job, or because you simply don’t know what the right response is. This girl was young – and maybe if something like that had happened to me when I was that young, I wouldn’t have been confident enough to deck the guy. So it’s not as easy as it seems.
Adrien, you crack me up.
I called the police once. Bad move but I really needed to move house post haste to get away from a crazed boyfriend who said if I even thought about leaving he’d kill me.
The accommodating cop stalked me for months afterwards fronting at my workplace in full uniform begging for a date. Oh the embarrassment. And of course the ex still knew where I worked, a public library as it happened, and would also front up and create appalling scenes at the reference desk. Fun times.
When reading Regency accounts of girls’ education, I always got the impression that being caught reading Austen was rather like being found with a copy of Cleo by your grandmother (when your Nanna isn’t the cool type).
However, the gender thing works both ways – as I was telling a (male) friend about to come to Australia (Melbourne) to start a job “Learn about Aussie rules football. It’s okay for X (a female mutual acquaintance doing a similar job) not to know anything about it. She’s a girl. It’s okay for a girl to be clueless about footy. You are a man. You have to know all the AFL teams by the end of your first week here.”
Lizzie, that’s terrible. Sheezus.
Posey@25 talked about, as a female “We always get the worst, dirtiest jobs.”
Ummm, until recently, women weren’t serving in frontline armed forces.
Killing people has got to be the stinkingest most filthy degrading job there is.
SL@44 said “Amazing how it all gets back to the same dialogue about ‘value’ that people were having under the stoa in Athens roughly 2,500 years ago”
Yep. Yep. Yep. (And BRING BACK OSTRACISM – only bar them from public office rather than exile them. BTW: Have you read Aristophanes’ “The Congresswomen”?) I argue that a study of the classics, looking at the arc of a society over a millenium or more is incrediably useful, and predisposes to progressive politics because you’ve covered almost every argument that matters when those discussions weren’t tainted with trivia (See “Do the classics create people with progressive politics”, part one and part two).
Let’s see: how meritorious is it to be able to rattle off sports/celebrity stuff? About as useful as knowing how many times the Blues or Greens won the chariot races in Byzantium in a given year.
Knowing the effect of the chariot races and how Emperors manipulated the masses by distracting them with trivial spectacle rather than look at imperial mismanagement? Still priceless.
And you never know, if the oiks starting noticing the “thinking man’s crumpet”, they might be tempted to life their game! (OK, the first poems they’ll be able to quote will be from Catullus and Ovid, and not cutesy ones about sparrows hopping down the road to Hades at that, – but it would be a start!)
@ Adrien: Well if you have the interest then that is fine. I love quite a few kids cartoons, I just don’t see why Trimble should bone up on pop culture references purely to put others at their ease.
Yes but I think the tendency to be a poseur is inversely proportional to intelligence (since it about inflating one’s actual abilities) and it is the assumption that anyone who doesn’t express an interest in popular culture must automatically be a poseur that is objectionable. Someone like Trimble may just be a natural specialist, delighted to immerse herself in what she loves and lacking time and/or inclination to go outside of that field .
Paul @ 39 and LE @ 52 – thanks.
Adrien, I can’t respond to your flip comments @38 for emotionally protective reasons, and I shouldn’t have made the ones that prompted your hurtful response. Since what did prompt mine was your comment that I obviously had no experience of what “stinking” jobs felt like, I do apologise for my response which was partially based on something I could not possibly know: what (literally or figuratively) stinking, or degrading, (the real issue here, I think) work experiences you might’ve also endured.
Random 2c worth throwaways:
– when I came back over from a couple of years in London to Oz, I was struck by how prominent anti-intellectual sentiments were (are) here, compared to the UK.
- I believe back in one of the Howard years elections I read stats showing that among university educated Australians the vote was overwhelmingly not for the man of children overboard et al.
- The habit of equating a sharp memory and fast processing mind with real genius is annoying: I’m happy to acknowledge this person as a genius when she’s made a genius level original contribution to a field of intellectual or artistic endeavour.
- As a lefty, a moderate contrarian one I’d like to think, but a social progressive, I agree that I want to see more upward aspiration rather than dumbing down. On the other hand I think a heavily embedded class system stifles such aspiration. Oxbridge plays a role in both, so there is both a baby and some dirty bathwater to deal with. Not saying the answers are straightforward…
- The problem with bedding down roles in life early is that there are a range of reasons people with talent may not find that out until later. The potential medical genius who goes to the violent non-grammar school because when the tests are being conducted their parents are dealing with crack and beating each other up each night, etc. I speak as a high school dropout who now gets HDs- It took a long friggin time to get the skills, in adulthood, to study properly.
- Knowing about footy may be overkill on the essentials list, but social intelligence is part of the ability to communicate.
and finally;
- people who refer to themselves in the 2nd or 3rd person have a poor grasp on the English language…
“how people see you as a person and how you come across on TV, as opposed to how you have always imagined yourself to be in real life. I don’t know quite know how some people can get an impression of who you are “.
Sorry for going on. I clearly lack self-editing intelligence =)
Perhaps I’ll get a gig with The Monthly…
Social intelligence is not the same thing as social skills. It sounds to me like Gail Trimble has excellent social intelligence – she immediately picked up that her treatment was conditional upon being a woman. Social skills are highly gendered sets of behaviours that for women include, intellectual modesty, not creating a fuss when some drunken ass gets grab-arsey, smiling and nodding when the men are talking, proffering tentative opinions rather than making bold assertions, hair flipping, laughing at appalling sexist jokes rather than glassing the joker etc.
I believe back in one of the Howard years elections I read stats showing that among university educated Australians the vote was overwhelmingly not for the man of children overboard et al.
I do find this interesting – that typically, university-educated people tend in large numbers to favour the political left.
I’m not sure that the reasons for it are so obvious as people would like us to think, though. Some right-wingers generally tend to attribute it to the ‘long march of the left’ through the institutions that began in the 1960s. Some lefties are happy to make the obvious link between better education and their favourite policies.
Then again, a few decades ago, most university staff and teachers would have been conservatives (I believe Kingsley Amis’s book ‘Lucky Jim’ offers some interesting examples of university-establishment Tories just prior to the massive social changes that took place in the 1960s). So perhaps those who are educated at uni can be just as changeable and susceptible to different ideologies as the rest of us.
Also, the high numbers of university-educated lefties isn’t itself evidence that left-wingers have a better understanding of an issue than right-wingers. A person with a PhD in arts and an ability to talk fluently in three different languages probably has no more educational authority than the rest of us to discuss the application of Hayeks thought on our current economy. Likewise, a university-educated economist may not really be able to offer any incisive comments on the respective law and order policies of government and opposition.
Hmm, this reflection more inspired by Armagny’s comments than the post…!
Two groups can play the ‘long march through the institutions’ game. F. A. Hayek wrote ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’ in 1949, and it makes much the same argument as Gramsci did, but from a classical liberal perspective.
It’s the reason why Antony Fisher — the flying ace who founded the Institute for Economic Affairs — founded the IEA rather than going into politics (as he’d planned to do). He visited Hayek and the latter told him that ‘winning over the professional second hand dealers in ideas’ was more important than politics: ‘First you much reach the intellectuals, the teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow’.
It’s for this reason that left-leaning scholars have always been better at taking a place at the universities, but have never really got the hang of running a think-tank — the latter seem to be a right-leaning phenomenon. The USA is the exception, but then even left-leaning think-tanks in the US are broadly pro-market.
For those interested (it’s probably online somewhere), Hayek’s essay appeared in 16 The University of Chicago Law Review (1949).
Thank you for the intriguing and thoughtful post. I’ve tried to add to this a little, in my own way, at http://fizzogblog.typepad.com/fizzogblog/2009/02/beckham-versus-trimble-whats-at-stake.html
Care work Dave. Men in the military are also used to cleaning up sh*t but they’re better paid and not expected to be ‘grateful’ just to be given the opportunity.
Coincidentally, there’s a movie on Foxtel tonight called Starter For 10. It’s about a hot mechanic who tries to buy a super-duper new starter motor for just $10, and stars Zac Efron with Angela Punch McGregor as the love interest.
Tony T. Well I never, I’m glad to see you’re still on the ‘sphere, 4 years after we first had a chinwag at a grogblg in a Turkish on Sydney Road.
I don’t think the left has a stranglehold on intellectual thought by any means. I think in the heart of the Howard years the anti intellectual focus was stronger than perhaps it is under the likes of Turnbull who, though I don’t quite want as PM, I have infinitely more respect for.
Because those years were defined by high levels of securitisation (relax lawyers, I’m not referring to Guy Hands’ work with Allen and Overy to create fiscal products from David Bowie’s back catalogue), especially though not exclusively on the right, the social left, including the likes of Turnbull and Petro and other true liberals I might add, there was no high ground suitable for serious intellectual debate that would directly shape or change the government.
So in a way the ‘left-right’ component is shaped by the ‘present definition’ of both. I concede that plenty of smart, analytical and well-educated people have economic views well to the right of my own. I think that’s very uncommon in respect of refugee bashing or people who really believed there were WMDs.
By making the Howard dig I make my post partisan, but I’d like to finish on my observation that I think we are a country that, putting aside right or left, enjoys dumbing down a debate, and this is sad.
In my own first love, foreign policy, I don’t think either party shows any ability to deal with higher level analysis. Even Rudd has disappointed me a bit on that one…
Thanks for the link to my blog, and for the comment!
I’m afraid spaking for myself I do think there’s something wrong with assuming an actively disinterested position with respect to whole swathes of knowledge/reality. My experience suggests that even amongst people who are very bright in some areas, this can often be a cover for a relative lack of innate ability in other areas.
E.g. the maths/physics genius who is ‘disinterested’ in the humanities may simply not enjoy the sensation of being ‘average’ at the humanities rather than being at home in a discipline where few can challenge his/her knowledge, and may egotistically ascribe less value to the humanities as a result. I have limited respect for this – speaking for myself, with no pretentions to being a genius at anything, I do have areas where I am relatively sharp and areas where I am not so good. Despite this I love nothing better than trying to understand something entirely new and challenging, even if I show no real aptitude for it. I certainly don’t take the line that (for instance) “I am better with words than maths and so I have no interest in maths and in my view maths is basically pointless”. Instead I think, I am better with words than maths so I have particular admiration for those who can navigate numbers with ease.
The danger comes from adding a value judgment about the worth of particular knowledge into all of this. Football (Australian football), for example, is about a great deal more than persons of below average IQ kicking a ball through some goalposts – it embodies physics, physiology, history, human group dynamics, tactics, psychology, politics, business, media manipulation and more. Yet many ‘intellectuals’ would arrogantly write it off as ‘working class’ or otherwise a commoner’s pursuit. I am footy mad, and I commonly find people react with incredulity – “YOU like football? YOU watch every game every season???” It was reassuring when I was a judge’s associate to learn that many of the best legal minds in the country are also utterly obsessed with AFL and cricket.
Are you sure they didn’t inadvertently alienate others by making no effort to take an interest in their interests or relate to them on a level that they were comfortable with? It’s possible…
I gradually found out at school that others had no issue with intelligence (and, more rarely, even admired it) if some small effort was made to put them at ease and give them some common ground to work with. I.e., basic social skills, which can be learned as well as innate.
Oh, and I have found boys to be much more victimised for being intelligent than girls – boys are the ones who are expected to be macho, competitive, and judges on sporting prowess and success with women rather than brains.
It would be natural to ascribe a lower value to that knowledge if one lacked a clear understanding of, and aptitude for, the intricacies and purposes of the social rituals in question.
To me, some of this comes back to the notion of a ‘life unlived’ for me – I cannot fathom anyone who is so wrapped up in their obscure specialty that they let the wonders and horrors of life in the early 21st century go by largely unnoticed. I also find it disheartening when highly intelligent people are utterly disconnected from contemporary society – of all the people who should be taking an active role in contributing to ‘mainstream’ dialogue, they are high on the list. But they are going to have to take their mind off ancient latin and think of base, common issues if they are to do so.
Perhaps if Ms Trimble had answered a few of those trivial trivia questions correctly a few Sun readers would have gained a bit of admiration for her intelligence and had their preconceptions shaken a little…
Wouldn’t a girl, faced with the above list of outrages to personal dignity, who could safely but effectively put the offender in his place also be exhibiting social skills?
Why is there an assumption that being able to navigate social situations automatically means becoming inert and helpless in the face of all affronts to the person? What definition of social interaction are you working from which involves 1940s style subjugation of women? In my social circles a girl who exhibited the ‘skills’ you list would not be regarded as a social success, but rather as a pathetic climber or someone with serious cultural or self-image/self-esteem problems.
I’m sorry, but I don’t necessarily buy the strong gender-based analysis of all of this. Society doesn’t exactly hold up highly intelligent but slightly nerdy men as the epitome of the species either.
I was being tongue in cheek, obviously this is not all that people mean by “social skills” but yes, behaviour that conforms to gender norms is subsumed under the heading of social skills. Laurie Rudman and others have been researching this since about 1998 and have shown that women who are highly ambitious, competent and confident (gender non conforming) are seen as having poor social skills.
If you really think that women are no longer pressured to laugh off sexist behavior then you aren’t paying much attention at those footy games and you have never caught an episode of the Footy Show.
I don’t think gender is the only factor either, I have been reading the comments about Rawls and the class war stuff. I just thought I’d stick my oar in on the matter of gender.
Paul, I know it’s de rigueur especially in Victoria to be obsessed or at least have a strong opinion about football. But, really, it’s all a bit sad, mate, not to mention bloody coercive. I’ve lost count of the arriviste high flyer desperados nearly arrived in Melbourne who adopt Collingwood as their team to prove their egalitarian credentials. Hilarious, ‘specially when I know – for a fact – they (understandably, to me) hate footie and cricket, the whole vulgar, smelly kit and caboodle.
I think it behoves truly cultured people to reject, steadfastly, all efforts to suck them down into a vortex of popular culture – and footie and cricket go to the top of the list here – and say “NO” to flunkeyish lickspittlist pressures to be gregarious and give a toss about things that are of zero interest to them. There’s no reason to be ashamed of ignorance about things that interest you not in the slightest. I’d much rather be in the company of someone who has immersed themselves in the arcana of some specialised erudition than have some shallow, encyclopedic wannabe-wanker vivaciously chatter on endlessly about a 1000 clever nothings.
Adrien, 48 was sailing a bit close to the wind. Just sayin’.
.
Yeah I regretted the post. Apologies.
Look, I love sport and — at least in my youth — was pretty good at it. I’m still a pretty decent cricketer and general athlete. I’ve also done well academically. I worked out quickly that — at school at least — this was the equivalent of landing on ‘free parking’ in monopoly. I was forgiven all the academic stuff because I was big and strong and handy with a hockey stick. Other kids weren’t, and I’ve not forgotten that.
Maybe things have changed, but IIRC, genus bright boy spent a fair bit of time getting beaten up at school. Genus bright girl got bitched at and undermined. She usually turned up at the Senior Formal without a beau.
Because forming relationships is valorized for women in a way that they aren’t for men, this bore very hard on girls. You don’t see it these days, but I can remember girls who were every bit as bright as me ‘playing dumb’ once they hit about 14 so that they could retain male attention. It was about the only time I appreciated the distinctly Christian tone of the school’s sex education — it allowed a girl to knock back constant demands for sex with genuine moral opprobrium — ‘you’re not worth it’. It’s something worth bearing in mind.
And much as I love my cricket, there is still a hierarchy of knowledge; people are still confusing working-class culture with working-class politics. Lots of things working class people like are, not to put too fine a point on it, tripe. That doesn’t mean that working-class complaints about immigration — say — or working conditions, should be dismissed because other people on all sides of politics find them discomforting.
Lots of things working class people like are, not to put too fine a point on it, tripe.
You mean like, fashion, evolutionary psychology, Freud, Jung, Maslow, Dawkins and that Selfish Gene nonsense(any intelligent person could see that was tripe), the anti-psychiatry school of Laing and Szasz, the idea that financial leaders constitute the “best and brightest”, that economics is a science, New Age tripe, Deepak Chopra, Gary Zukav, Anthony Robbins, that ADHD is a myth, the paleolithic diet, genetic determinism, the classical canon of literature, that CEOs should be paid enormous sums for what they do, ….
I’ve heard enough casual conversations across all levels of society to realise that tripe is a fact of the human condition. Educated middle class people spend so much time on their careers that they simply cannot be well informed to avoid having stupid opinions. I very consciously attack my own thinking, I try to remain aloof from commenting on things I am ignorant about, I have found tripe everywhere and most worryingly continually find it in my own thinking.
You attacked Posey for making a sweeping generalisation. Consider your own statements.
John, pull your head in. End of.
As I’ve already pointed out, I’ve spent the weekend putting out legal brushfires started by leftist idiots. I am not in the mood to be needled right now. You may have forgotten that some of us around here work full-time. Posey remembered. Might be a good idea if you do too. You’re in moderation until you remember whose property this is.
After all of that, the Oxford team has been stripped of its title because one of the male team members was working as an accountant.
There’s a fascinating discussion of this on one of the BBC forums. Worth a look.
“adopt Collingwood as their team to prove their egalitarian credentials.”
Like adopting Lady Ga Ga to prove your celibacy credentials.
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about – I love footy because I grew up in a footy town, started watching it and really enjoyed it, and gradually became obsessed. Absolutely nothing to do with what anyone thinks of me (the opposite – I routinely spurn social engagements to watch footy at home alone). Yet you have some view that semi-intelligent people who follow it must be doing so as some kind of elaborate Mrs Doubtfire style charade to prove they are part of the great unwashed. I think that’s sad, frankly.
Well, I completely disagree. I will judge everything on its merits, rather than avoiding that which is popular simply by virtue of its popularity. I certainly won’t like something simply because it’s popular, but to reject it for that reason is silly. As SL has noted, you would presumably have rejected Shakespeare as base popular nonsense in his day.
Yeah, but physical prowess and agression are valorized for men in a way that they aren’t for women, so getting beaten up is IMHO every bit as bad for a boy at school as getting ostracised is for a girl. It’s just the different sub-groups using their nastiest methods to attack the outsider.
And lots of things they like are not tripe.
Look, I am by most definitions a cultural elitist snob. I would like to remove the vote from anyone who has ever watched and enjoyed So You Think You Can Dance or an Adam Sandler movie so that their views do not influence my life. But I am absolutely not arrogant enough to assume that anything that the punters like is beneath me in some way, which some of you are getting dangerously close to suggesting here.
I like dance- but then again I have a 4 hour per week car crash tv allowance. Still, I don’t suppose my vote has much impact anyway…
…you would presumably have rejected Shakespeare as base popular nonsense in his day.
A lot of people did.
In the 18th century after Shakespeare had been rendered passé by Jonson and then revived during the Reformation as popular theatre there came an early version of the Canon that listed 10 great writers.
Shakespeare was number 10!
The list of names was accompanied by reasons for their presence. Shakespeare’s entry contained the begrudging note that he had a way with the popular tongue. His genius wasn’t truly declared until the Romantics.
The history of film criticism is replete with anecdotes of films widely panned by critics and the smart set that were nevertheless popular. And were subsequently recognized as such.
In the 50s for example the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema was regarded by the rest of the cinephile intelligentsia as ‘rightist’ because its pantheon of directors was topped by Alfred Hitchcock and Harold Hawkes. Not many realize this these days but in the 50s Hitchcock was regarded somewhat the same way Spielberg was before Schindler’s List – as a skilled action movie maker. The very suggestion that he was a great artist would’ve earned one contempt if it’d been mad in the fashionable bits of Paris, London or New York.
Cahiers changed that and ironically took their Hollywood/Neo-Realist pastiche and became Arthouse darlings when they started making movies.
Intellectuals and their taste in art is over-rated. See Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon for example. At the end he makes his personal suggestion for the new Canon (which is no longer so ‘Western’). Lots of people no-one’s ever heard of but no Tom Wolfe, no Hunter Thompson, no Beat writers.
Paul, yet another illogical leap!
I don’t say I resist some things deemed popular culture because they are popular, per se. That would be very dumb and supercilious and I’m not either of those things.
I say that people should feel comfortable saying to themselves first and above all: I’m not interested in that; there are other things that interest me that perhaps many others, even most, don’t share. But that’s all right. I don’t need to feel ashamed, or inadequate, or pressured, or guilty or anything bad. It’s simply a non-issue (ideally).
Let others do what they will, enjoy and get pleasure from those things, whatever they are, and let me do the same, and please, do not expect me to spend all my precious, personal leisure time on admiring, praising, discussing or watching something I’d simply rather not.
Posey, I’d have to agree. I don’t enjoy car-racing, for example. I don’t mind that people do enjoy it – good luck to them – but I’d never (a) have any interest in it or (b) pretend any interest in it. It’s a big yawn as far as I’m concerned.
On the other hand, I like some aspects of popular culture very much. For example, I am an avid reader/watcher of sci-fi books/movies. I don’t feel like I have to go and read The Brothers Karamazov instead just to make myself appear learned.
“To thine own self be true” – that Bard often hit the nail on the head.
LE, my secret vice for years was bios & autobios of movie stars/actors. There are some choice ones. The very best imo (which I’ve read) are those of Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis, Carrie Fisher, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, and a very special mention to Sarah Miles’s three volume exquisite, to die for memoirs.
As Adrien and I have done this one up hill and down dale, I shall just spectate for now.
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