'Commonplace Insights'

The Center for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio was founded in 1970, the year I entered BG as a freshman. Today it’s the only institution in the country to have a Department of Popular Culture. As an English major I hung around with professors who thought the idea of studying pop culture was meant as an elaborate joke to pacify those unruly kids. We were above all that. Let them read Mickey Spillane; leave Chaucer, Dante and Conrad to the grownups. Imagine their surprise in 2024 . . .

I’m no longer an unreconstructed snob when it comes to pop culture. I’ve seen every movie Clint Eastwood ever made, as director and actor, just as I‘ve read all of Raymond Chandler. No apologies. But I tend to classify such things as forms of recreation, time off, harmless hobbies. I enjoy them but don’t take them all that seriously. And, yes, films can be works of art worthy of adult attention. (“Have you seen Klimov’s Come and See? “Oh, yes. Have you seen von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others?”)

 I know a man in his forties, married, three children, who every day plays video games and seems to have seen every Marvel movie ever made. And he takes them seriously. He once showed me a Youtube clip from a super-hero movie to illustrate his understanding of quantum mechanics. I felt embarrassed for him. His conversation is proportionally impoverished. A strict and steady diet of pop culture is the intellectual/spiritual counterpart of a vitamin deficiency. Students will consume that stuff anyway. Why give it academic legitimacy when they haven’t yet read Chaucer, Dante or Conrad?

In the Winter 1979-1980 issue of The Hudson Review, Guy Davenport reviewed Maureen Howard’s memoir Facts of Life, a book I haven’t read. Already the rot was well underway. He’s sympathetic but critical:

“The typical humanist  intellectual of today is a cultural schizophrenic. The half of his mind that makes him an intellectual is stocked with Tolstoy, Joyce, Henry James; the other half comprises -- uncritically, resignedly, or militantly -- radio music, television drama, slick photojournalism, and the architecture of the Golden Arches. Maureen Howard, from whom I take all these examples, is acutely aware of such a bifurcation in herself, and seeing her in this context helps me to understand the strangely uneven quality of her fine memoir Facts of Life. Part of her mind has obviously been nurtured by advanced learning and rigorous mental discipline, and part of it by that great miasma of sensation, illusion, brazen manipulation, and honest half-truth which, if it ever receives a name, may provide a label for our period of history. Similarly -- and I think consequently -- she is capable of lucid and profound literary criticism . . . . but in the autobiographical mode I find her prone to commonplace insights that ultimately have no place in such an impressive context.”

Keep in mind that Davenport (1927-2005) never owned a television or drove an automobile and was probably the most learned man I have ever known.

[Wurmbrand: Sorry, but the name Brian Bond is not one I recognize.]