You know, when I think about the rage against the snobs, I think of a time– I want to say I was 11, maybe 12, so that puts us at like 1993 or 1994– when my father took me around to show me the old black box theaters he used to work in during his New York days, little places running experimental plays, always staying just ahead of bankruptcy. They were mostly closed down or boarded up. And that was 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Times Square will live forever. Don’t forget that.
Anne Jamison wrote a book called Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World. That she can believe both things, simultaneously, that what she likes is taking over the world and that there exists some potent elite power that holds what she likes down– well, if I wanted to find an example that demonstrates the power of ideology, I could do a lot worse.
I think this one is complicated by the fact that Giraldi was being a horrific prick. Jamison’s charge of misogyny wasn’t unwarranted. Her facile view of the role of criticism doesn’t make his piece useful or beyond reproach.
That’s certainly true – he was asking for it
I know you’re only using Times Square as a metonym but it’s a little bit funny to choose it as your stand-in for an enduring edifice; I like Delany’s “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” on this.
Yeah true. I’m thinking more of its Planet Hollywood quality.
One Direction has taken over the world, yet can you deny that they’re universally spat upon? Fanfiction is popular now, but will any work of fanfiction command as much respect from future generations as it does from the current one?
Why does Stephen King express being overshadowed by Henry James although he’s far more famous than the latter? Isn’t it true that James achieved little commercial success in his day, that his works were almost out of print immediately after he died, and that his posthumous reputation is kept alive only by academia? Here’s why.
“And then I say to myself, I bet they do. Some of these guys, the college professors—the guy, say, whose idea of literature really stopped with Henry James, but he’ll get kind of a frozen smile on his face if you talk about Faulkner or Steinbeck—they’re stupid about American fiction and they’ve turned their stupidity into a virtue. They don’t know who Calder Willingham was. They don’t know who Sloan Wilson was. They don’t know who Grace Metalious was. They don’t know who any of these people are, and they’re fucking proud of it.”
Peyton’s Place sold 32 million copies, and it has been completely, utterly forgotten. The New Yorker still publishes pieces on Henry James. There’s no highbrow graveyard, but there is a middlebrow one.
The snobs are the gatekeepers to the golden isles of the classics, Freddie, and they’ve kept it tight shut to the GoT/Trekkie/etc mob. I’m no ally of theirs, but their hostility, their discontent, is perfectly understandable.
One Direction commands the world’s attention today, but Brahms commands a little piece of the world’s attention forever.
“Progressive or subversive, the two published pages of Op. 119 Number 1 Intermezzo explore areas of music that provide a veritable field day of never-ending musical intrigue, analytic fascination, and theoretical speculation. Brahms’ short piece has kept music analysts and academic book publishers gainfully employed with an abundance of never-ending scholarly articles. ”
http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/12/johannes-brahms-progressive-or.html
Never-ending scholarly articles! That’s the crown they’ll never take.
The snobs are the gatekeepers to the golden isles of the classics, Freddie, and they’ve kept it tight shut to the GoT/Trekkie/etc mob
That is simply not true. It’s factually false. There are academic conferences just about Game of Thrones and Batman. There are people who identify their work as “Whedon studies.” There are hundreds upon hundreds of people who now identify video games as their sole scholarly interests. Journals fall all over themselves to publish articles about fanfiction, comic books, and sci-fi. What you’re saying is a very typical sentiment, but it’s terribly out of date.
http://parabasis.typepad.com/blog/2012/05/the-fandom-issue-marvelous.html
That the the Lorenz curve in prestige and attention that different journals receive in their respective fields is steeper than that for income or wealth is a fact I’m sure you’re familiar with, perhaps a fact you’re–naturally, as someone in academia–obsessed with. There’s scholarly work on everything, I’ve read a few journal articles on Ayn Rand in my halcyon ProjectMuse browsing days in a no-name journal from someone in an obscure institution, but you won’t find Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writing about The Fountainhead.
When Judith Butler or her equivalent merely alludes to Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or its ilk in one of her published writings or even on her Facebook wall in a serious and not cutesy “look I’m hip and normal and youth” way, I’ll mail you a handwritten apology.
I get the impression that Stephen King is aware that he’s just a dimestore novelist. He’s always struck me as having a great deal of humility. But I’ve been reading his books since I was a kid, so I might be a little biased.
Just as an aside though, when King is good, my God he can be good, particularly in his short stories. “The Jaunt” has stuck with me since I read it 20-odd years ago.
I think that King is indisputably a great writer and will be read a century from now, if Henry James or William Faulkner are read a century from now.
That isn’t to say he hasn’t written a lot of junk.
Those old black boxes may have been boarded up, but New York still has hundreds of tiny little theater companies all over the place. I know of one on a floor in a building that used to be a Con Edison relay station. Another one in the basement of a courthouse. Another that is an Episcopal church on Sundays and a theater during the rest of the week. Lots of places hanging on, doing the Lord’s work.
The days of the Lower Manhattan avant-garde, though, are probably gone forever.