harry poptimer and the tides of snobbery

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i read this us blogger cz
a. he is grebt at getting to the nub of wonk-pol debate crisply and amusingly (not unlike freakytigger)
b. his spelling is TERRIBLE (not unlike barnetape

his comments threads (on say race issues, or health policy, or iraq) are generally between 5-25 comments long. This time the sub opened the hatch WHILE STILL SUBMERGED...

Comments

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

did you read ALL of those comments??

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

i am afeared to click on anything potter at the moment for fear that years of reading will be spoil'd for me

my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. ok this argt is a total hot-button thing right across culture -- as witness the urgent angry scale of the debate WITHIN a political subculture (smart/young/liberal/blah blah)
ii. "we" are sayin/have sed wayd more interestin stuff abt it than these our pol-cult overlords (as i say i like matt yglesias, but i think HE'S the outlier even on his preffered topics, and fairly -- if amiably -- conventional on pop or film or, as here, novels)
iii. note by "we" i am actually including our more notorious glam-meritocracy feud-foes
iv. there is i intuit a BIG OPEN SPACE to be seized here, which no one is NEAR thinking clearly about, EXCEPT US (sorta) -- i guess several of my projects this year (inc. L*R*B; dalek5; my attempts to break into quasi-academia) batten on exactly this shapeless intution, and so does lollards and FT generally, in its quiet-spoken way 9hurrah for us)
v. it is like being back in the early 60s, as the village voice and the very early rock mags discovered a whole entire unsatisifed readership hungry to be fed, who didn't even know who they were yet
vi. with the caveat that this readership -- as of now -- is very badly burned by what the voice-rockwrite trip turned towards
vii. i am talkin abt W1RE 2.0, this time it's transglobal and collective ("all shall love me and despair")

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i can put that better:

if the conversation is also art, then all art is always also part of a conversation -- was then, will one day be is -- and we are all co-authors of and fine judges of conversations

this is simultaneously a mundanist levelling and an acknowledgment of the dense richness and invention of the "everyday"

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i read quickly through a couple of things in rorty's 'philosophy and social hope' last week before i left the twin cities. i wonder if one of the points he made might not be relevant here.

a. he sketched a model of education-as-socialization-and-individuation, where the socialization is rightly done for the good of all, and done up through the end of high school; the individuation is necessary for the development of a healthy electorate and society, and is done in college.
b. the individuation is mainly done by reading books and talking about them (ha).
c. professors should be able to follow their own projects of individuation so that they can demonstrate them / exemplify them / model them to the students, and as such
d. should be allowed to choose whatever books they want, where one of the uh 'suggestions' - requirements? is that
e. they choose books that are 'classic' enough to be part of common culture so that they will actually have books that they can
f. talk about with grandparents, people who went only to high school, whatever

(i am sure in misremembering i have misrepresented something or other.)

anyway, one thing that struck me about the general shape of the responses in that comment thread was how they hewed so much toward a selfish kind of individuation; how their favored examples did not paint a picture of a very internally individuated group; and how little interest there seemed to be in books that were part of common culture. at best, the common culture on display was heavily dependent on cultural gatekeeping mechanisms / fashionability / the reigning left-geek literary tastes of the past 10 years - and so i'm hesitant to call it 'common culture' even in a restricted sense of 'common'.

i'm not sure how this bears on quality or kind of conversation.