Is good taste politically incorrect? Snobbish? An indication of unjustified feelings of class superiority? Is it, in short, in bad taste to claim to have good taste?
I thought a lot of a liberal arts education was about the cultivation of good taste. Some of it is development of reasoning powers, some of it (a very small amount) conveying information. A lot more is socialization and Foucauldian normalization and ranking. A lot of is socialization, the opportunity to hang out, chase and bed your preferred objects of erotic desire, ingest your favorite intoxicants or stimulants. But at least ideally, isn't the education part of of it about being able to distinguish what's really good and appreciate why? For example, to be able to finally wrap one's head around various editions of Wordsworth's Prelude?
I sneer at Kenny G. I revere Duke Ellington -- I just received The Centennial Edition of the Duke, 24 discs, in the mail, I am going to have an orgy.
No, Justice Scalia, not that sort of an orgy. Though if you have some nice looking, open minded women in mind you can drop by with them, just ask your friends in FBI where you can find me. We met once, actually, not at an orgy, it was the 7th Circuit, but you wouldn't recall, since we all had our clothes on. I was thinking of a musical orgy. We could combine them, I suppose, I could not think of anyone I'd rather fuck to than Johnny Hodges.
Sorry, I wander. The point is, I don't think it is bad to have the equipment to know that the Duke is transcendent and Kenny G negligible. Even if you enjoy Kenny G now and then, which I don't, though I have other low tastes.
No, I wasn't thinking of orgies with right-wingers. Btw, Justice Scalia, I don't really care about the politics of your girlfriends if they don't care about mine; there was a libertarian babe who clerked with me on the 7C who was really hot, I wouldn't have held her right wing views against her at all.
No, the low tastes I was thinking of were things like, um, girl rock and pop from the late 50s and early 60s. Cheap mystery novels. Not John Grisham, that's going too far, Charles McCarry, maybe.
Anyway, taste isn't bad. I mean, good taste isn't bad. Bad taste isn't good, but that's not necessarily bad. I got it bad and that ain't good. Edward Kennedy Ellington, take it away.
jks
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Someone should do a sociological study of the way in
> which the claim to
> "good taste" is made within varying sectors of the
> population.
> (Claimants to Good Taste exist in _all_ sectors, but
> the label of course
> varies: e.g., in some groups the way implicitly to
> claim Good Taste is
> to sneer at good taste; among yet other groups the
> phrase would be
> unknown though the claim, variously labelled, would
> still appear.)
>
> Among intellectuals (defined here as all who
> self-consciously use their
> mind, whether well or badly) it seems to me that for
> at least a century
> (perhaps millenia) a, perhaps _the_, major way of
> exhibiting Good Taste
> does _not_ consist in laying out what one _likes_
> but in making clear
> what one _dislikes_. That is, Good Taste is
> displayed, regularly, by
> displaying one's freedom from its opposite, Bad
> Taste (in some circles,
> equated with vulgarity). One IS what one hates.
>
> This is really widespread -- browsing through my own
> back posts I catch
> myself at all too frequently, and there was
> certainly a great deal of it
> in the conversation of my grad school friends at
> Michigan. And it merges
> with manners & morals. The turning point of James's
> fine novel, _The
> Awkward Age_, is when the heroine admits she has
> read a certain book.
> Someone who was "proper" would not have touched the
> book. I haven't
> checked but I would wager that in any given month on
> this list there are
> a number of posts disavowing acquaintance with this,
> that, or the other
> author, musician, text, CD, TV show (or TV in
> general; disavowal of the
> "boob tube" is never of any risk). . . .Such
> disavowals establish both
> one's own "good taste" and the vulgarity of others.
>
> Among literary scholars this practice operates even
> in distinguishing
> among 'acknowledged' authors. Lives there a lit
> student with taste so
> broad that he/she has not sneered at one of the
> following: Milton, Pope,
> Richardson, Ben Jonson, Wordsworth, Browning, W.C.
> Williams. . . ? (Well
> into my 75th year I suddenly discover that the 1805
> _Prelude_ is
> continuously wonderful -- and the 1850 _Prelude_ has
> a lot to be said
> for it. I am sure that on various occasions in the
> past I must have
> mentioned the poem with curled lip.)
>
> And of course, in political discussion it is always
> safer to sneer (with
> a label, not an argument) at the politics of others
> rather than develop
> a positive position of one's own.
>
> There is some novel, but I can remember neither the
> author nor the book,
> in which a character is mortally offended when he
> (she?) is accused of
> "bad form." One can also notice that the way to
> establish one's "cool"
> seems, from what has been said recently on this
> list, by drawing in
> one's skirts at the "uncool."
>
> Praise is always a risk, unless one's flanks are
> protected by a proper
> list of disavowals. Someone in the last half-year
> referred to the
> "middlebrow" taste for Vivaldi. Fifty years ago one
> could listen to
> Vivaldi in only one place in the U.S.: at 4 a.m. at
> Carnegie Hall, where
> a number of musicians who played for the
> Philharmonic would play Vivaldi
> once a week. No records. No concerts. In the 1930s,
> Wyndham Lewis
> sneered (!), "800 Vivaldi mss. unedited, and they
> dare to speak of
> western civilization." Most of those unedited mss.
> were in Dresden.
> Pound had them microfilmed. The originals were
> destroyed in the bombing
> of Dresden.
>
> What made Pound a great critic was his generosity.
> Despite her sharp
> tongue, it is that quality that also distinguishes
> Marianne Moore in her
> comments on other writers.
>
> Carrol
>
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