land of first drafts

I have a growing distaste for the "artistic" elite. My specific instances of late are writers, but I'm sure the incidences that I have encountered must have found their way into the other arts in one way or another. They are the Snobs. They tell you how the world is; no ifs ands or buts. They are the ones to tell you that the string of gibberish on the page in front if you is a masterpiece. You simply fail to get it because you are so ignorant of the fact that in 1912 James Joyce had a bath and made passing comment about how wrinkled his skin got in one of his epics. If you had only known that then surely the beat poetry in front of you would unveil its brilliance. They are the people who rant about how popular music is the bane of society, unintelligible dribble that will lead to the mass retardation of the coming generations. You should be listening to bands that no one has every heard of. Then, when the unknown band is popular because it was so unknown, you are to abandon it. If more than twelve people can get it, it isn't cutting edge enough. (Interesting social experiment: I made up a band (differing names for differing company) at an "art" party to try and out do the elites. Someone claimed to have heard them before.)

I had a professor belittle the William Carlos Williamson poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" today in class. In an online polemic, however, he viciously stands up for a book of Bob Dylan's poetry "Tarantula." He defends the work as an amazing discourse of the time it as written, using a style that is a " high-art symphony of allegoric metaphor, fertile with commentary on Civil Rights and twentieth-century politics through the ghosts of Kerouac and Shakespeare via Greek mythology."1 That the same man willing to craft such a sentence over someone else's work can imply that "The Red Wheelbarrow" isn't "real" poetry is astounding. He is, in that instance, the personification of the Snobs. It is as if art is measured by its complexity. If you can read and fathom a works depth without haveing to make far flung connections, that surely isn't worth your time.

Don't get me wrong, dear reader, I like complex materials. But I don't exisit on them and them alone. Vivaldi's Summer is one of my favorite pieces of music, but that doesn't mean that I won't sing along to Heartbreaker when it comes on the classic rock station or that I can't help but listen Soulja Boy every now and again. I read Dante's The Divine Comedy on my own time because I was never in a class that required it. And I enjoyed it. That doesn't mean I don't read the latest comercial fiction or devour a Terry Pratchett novel. The point I'm trying to make is that so many of the Snobs put on the air (and the tu-toned hair, skinny jeans, and ballet flats) of being a decade ahead while living decades in the past.
Anyone that claims to listen only to the trendy music, or only read Kerouac and his ilk, is either lying to you, or are impossibly one deminsional. One way or the other, they aren't the type of person who's opinion can be taken without a deal of salt.


"Majority always rules."

1. http://www.jackmagazine.com/issue7/essaysmspitzer.html