In a recent conversation with a friend, we were discussing why it is that blogs that seem to lean to the more frivolous and flippant consistently win out over the blogs that possess a certain density or majesty.
Now we must keep in mind that those adjectives – frivolous, flippant and dense, majestic – are subjective to the extreme, shifting from reader to reader, perspective to perspective. The interpretations we bring to a piece change according to the time and place we read something as well as changing from reader to reader.
We must also keep in mind is that this discourse has been drifting as a condensation cloud above our heads for millennia. From Aristotle to T S Elliot to Martin Amis.
There has always been a…let us call it a tension between high and low culture, between the tragic and the comedic, the educational and the time filling. We can find it in contemporary Australia in the heated public debate over our Public Broadcasters and what their past and future roles have been and should be. The ABC’s and SBS’s recent, desperate slitherings for audience ratings have been seen to undermine their positions as bulwarks against the rising tide of mindless commercialisation and the zombie, undereducated demographic. We can find a parallel in Britain with the constant seesawing between BBC and TV1 and the respective cultures they imply.
Personally, I have always surrounded myself with the literary greats – Homer, Dostoevsky, Thompson, Woolf and Wolfe, Steinbeck and Greene. Surrounded myself – yes; consistently read while Seinfeld or the Simpsons are on – no. I have always appreciated the cavernous wells of meaning that can exist in a single Shakespearean sentence, the softly undulating laundry cycle of a Woolf character’s psyche, the chainsaw satire of an Ellis novel and the erudite diamond cutting that is Borges’ writings.
BUT, I have also found myself munching furiously on popcorn to the mindless rev of The Fast and the Furious, found myself laughing hysterically at the Kramer capers of Seinfeld, found myself peeing my pants with the primitive wit, surely turning Wilde in his grave, of The Simpsons.
Recently philosophical discourse, particularly that of the Postmodern strain, has turned its eye and, sometimes dubious, intellect to modern Pop culture and tried to reconcile it with that most elusive word – culture. Single word, no additions, monolithic in meaning and intent.
Is it right to call a person who’s, almost exclusive, education is comprised of tabloid newspaper reports and the pop-psychology of Frasier cultured? (even though it is debatable whether anyone who reads a tabloid would actually watch the hockey accented Frasier bumbling his way through life while sprouting pithy quotes and remarks).
Roland Barthes, a acclaimed postmodernist thinker, proclaimed that “the author is dead”, that the import of literature and culture is no longer to be determined by the New Critics and the Ivory Tower dust peddlers. Culture is determined by its core constituency and creator, the population and collective of minds that live in that culture. Not the critics, but the practitioners. In the new climate and with that aphorism in hand (Death of the author, death to the author) many realised that it was not Shakespeare who was important, but the ageless and ever renewing wave of readers who act as pallbearers to a crowd proclaimed dead genius. It is not the author who possesses genius. Genius and cultural worth only resides in the reading and the interpretation. Individuals do not bestow genius on the audience, it is the audience who “votes” that an individual is genius, whether it be Mozart or Seinfeld. There is no longer any absolute, just an ever shifting consensus.
This development has given us carte blanche to like whatever the hell we feel like liking and calling genius whatever we find to be most deserving of that title. So yes, Homer (the lumbering yellow one) can now be called one of the greatest modern philosophers – as long as he is voted as such.
I often use my house as a suitable analogy. It is a big house that took my father many loving and tedious hours to restore and expand. The front is Australian Federation that dates back from the early nineteen hundreds, the rest is an extension, completed in various stages, of my father’s design and labour.
The living room that is in the older part of house is beautiful. Cold and timbered, ornamental but understated, with an expensive lounge and nothing else really but the diluted light that comes from the East, filtering through the curtains, making the room eerie and delightful all at once.
We never use that room.
We use the rumpus room out the back. Cheaper pinewood walls and junk everywhere, a hand down lounge with some of the colour worn off by many sitting asses and lazy feet, an entertainment cabinet with a library full of DVD’s – The Simpsons and Futurama abound – and a wide screen television hooked up to an X-Box. There is literature there, but mainly of the magazine variety and the conversations revolve around soccer scores and what block buster film has recently been digested. The family loves this room and the light and laughter remain on from the moment the house wakes to the moment it rests its head to sleep.
We love that rumpus room and the never ending reruns of Seinfeld.
But I am always comforted by the softly murmuring, slowly decaying presence of Steinbeck and his grapes of wrath kept in the older, colder part of the house.
Sometimes I open a page and wonder what the hell it was that I was laughing at.