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MIDDLES_AND_MIDDLES

                                         December  2, 2012

Dwight Macdonald,                                   DWIGHT_MAC
"Masscult and Midcult", p. 54:

"_'Pour e'pater les bourgeois'_ was the defiant
slogan of the nineteenth-century avant-gardists
but now the bourgeoisie have developed a passion
for being shocked.  'If possible,' Kerouac
advises young authors, 'write without
'consciousness' in a semi-trance," while a               But what if he did it
prominent advanced composer has written a piece          with "inventive passion"?
for Twelve Radios that is performed by turning
each to a different station, a sculptor has                     JUST_NOT_THE_FACTS
exhibited a dozen large beach pebbles dumped
loosely on a board, a painter has displayed an
all-black canvas only to be topped by another
who showed simply-- a canvas.  At last, one
hears the respectful murmurs.  The Real Thing!
The avant-garde of the heroic period generally
drew the line between experiment and absurdity--
Gertrude Stein was the chief exception.  Efforts    Doing something silly
like the above were limited to the Dadaists, who    because you want to show
used them to satirize the respectable Academic      that everything is silly,
culture of their day.  But the spoofs of Dada       that's okay. but doing it
have now become the serious offerings of what       because you want to show
one might call the lumpen-avant-garde."             that nothing is silly,
                                                    that's a very bad thing.

                                                           PADS_AND_GARRETS
      This is Dwight Macdonald for you, a snooty
      character that hyphenates "avant-garde" and
      knows how to spell bourgeois

      Back in the days before blogger-rants
      we had to make do with stuff like this.


         Why is it that people who want to
         snipe at Cage and Rauschenberg       HONEST_JOHN
         don't mention them by name?  He
         got Kerouac's name right.

                Just for a touch of irony:
                this kind of reflexive dismissal    
                of Cage and Rauschenberg is what    
                I would call the essence of         
                "middlebrow"...                     
                                                    
                                                    
                                                   



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