-- Luke
----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 2:31 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Avoiding Bad Taste
>
> 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
> >
> > ___________________________________
> >
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>