Bach and before, Ives and after

can’t read — larger, larger! (please)

I thought “bach and before” was odd, but then I realized this was before Glenn Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations LP.

What’s “The Game”? Charades?

apparently the authors felt no compunction in talking about the “three basic categories” in spite of the fact that they then go on to detail four.
granted, the three are presumably high/middle/low, but from the chart there is no evidence that the upper/lower subcategory of the middle-brow is any less “basic” of a split than any of the others.

indeed, by content i would say that the upper-middle has much more in common with the high than it does with the lower-middle. looks to me like the three “basic” categories, if judged by the average distances between nodes, would be 1) high+upper-middle; 2) lower-middle; and 3) low.

but i think this really just shows that they had not thought much about basicness, or about the naturalness of the categories. middle is just assumed to be the natural triplet alongside low and high. and in a separate move, middle is also just assumed to be the largest demographic, and so the most amenable to subdivision (after all, the middle class is the most numerous here in postwar america, innit?)

I like the honest-to-goodness albums, but I never would have thought of “Have a Holy Jolly Christmas” as highbrow.

I just barely remember that stuff from 10 year old magazines lying around the house (there was also U and non-U, and Dwight McDonald’s midcult and some other cult) , but Jesus that seems dated and silly now.

Lowbrow has worn pretty well.

Some of this stuff comes from the New York Intellectuals (their own term), who also now seem dated and silly, even without considering that they gave birth to John Podhoretz and Bill Kristol. How many of them doesn any one read any more?

I like to drink 90 cent gallons of red wine. Does that make me a highbrow?

How many gallons at a sitting.

This all relates to the elite-liberal / populist-winger dispute, which is not imaginary. But nowadays, per this chart, it’s really a dispute between the upper middle class and the highbrow.

Minnesota’s Farmer Labor Party, the US’s most successful leftwing party, received support from Charles Ward of Browne and Bigelow, who originated the soft-porn calendars once seen in gas stations as well as the “Dogs Playing Poker” poster. They also were supported by Captain Billy Fawcett of “Cap’n Billy’s Whizbang”, publisher of Cavalier, Daring Detective, Dynamic Detective, Screen Secrets, Secrets, Triple-X Western, True, Woman’s Day, and other lowbrow and middlebrow publications, above all Mechanix Illustrated. (Fawcett Gold Medal pulp fiction came later.)

But the goddamn New York Intllectuals ruined everything.

#1 – sarah s – after you click for the larger version, move your cursor to the lower right and let it rest for a second – a box will appear with arrow in the corners. Click on that and you’ll zoom in.

Nice.

This reminds me of Charlotte Haze in Lolita, who combined social-climbing and plebian defensiveness in one confused mess. A nation of Hazes trying to be as classy as possible, uncertain as to their actual location but hating / fearing everyone above or below them on the ladder.

The two things that jumped out at me the most were “decanter and ashtray from laboratory supply company” which made me want to check out the industrial catalogs sitting behind me for such objects to repurpose; and “pulps and comic books” as low-brow reading material. I wonder what the writers and editors of 1949 would think about the way that pulps and comics have been recuperated into highbrow culture? At my local comic book store, I frequently hear news from the vast array of artists, aesthetes and tastemakers who are also patrons.

Despite its shortcomings, Fussell’s Class at least gets it right with the “X” class, for whom, even in that dim remembering, when man was wolf to man, it was okay to like comics AND Bach. And decent salads. And Westerns.

The music selection is rather parochial. I would have thought people were still listening to big bands then, and that the avant garde might have been listening to be-bop. Hank Williams sold a lot of records too.

Avocado in salads in ’49 seems comparatively hip; I don’t think I had it until we moved to California in ’61, but I was only ten then and might not have been eating salad yet.

There’s an odd but typical confusion of class and cultural stratification at work. Who on earth could afford the high-brow furniture? A typically indigent young high-brow couple would furnish their hovel with cast-offs and used items, while the worldly wealthy might be more likely to pamper themselves with luxurious comfort.

And craps? How about poker instead?

I appreciate that Go is highbrow, but from the look of the board it doesn’t seem like you actually need to know how to play.

Is the implication of the last column that both low- and high-brows are only reproduced colaterally?

Something in this poster reminded me of Niko Pirosmani paintings. For some reason.

I too would like to know what “The Game” is. It was obviously common enough in 1949 that everyone who read Life would go “oh, right, the Game, yeah, definitely upper-middle-class” but is now obscure enough that it doesn’t even appear on wikipedia. The cartoon isn’t exactly helpful. Charades?

It’s also interesting to see that the chart tends to confuse not only markers of class and income but also markers of class and taste, and, for that matter, markers of class and ethnicity. All those working-class Italians in New York were drinking red wine rather than beer, I should imagine.

So how did this brow thing work? Did the tastes define the categories (if you liked beer, you were forever lowbrow)? Or did the categories define the tastes (once enough highbrow people started drinking beer, it became a highbrow signifier)? If the latter, where did the brow categories come from in the first place? Were fashions in intellectual tastes like fashions in clothing, where the fashionable people have to keep changing their tastes because wannabe fashionistas are perpetually trying to emulate them? Was there an industry diligently marketing tastes to intellectuals? Was there an intellectual equivalent of the Color Marketing Group, planning the intellectual tastes for future seasons?

the chart tends to confuse… , markers of class and ethnicity.

I sort of suspect that at this point if you were too “ethnic”, then you were no-brow as far as Life Magazine was concerned.

If you’re too ethnic, chances are you’re a unibrow.

I too would like to know what “The Game” is.

The Game

(Either that, or it’s the gangsta rapper mentioned above. Or possibly Lizardbreath is right…)

Anyone notice a slight tendency for the top and bottom categories to converge? Both, say, forgo mixed drinks. Les extremes se touche…

@derek: Or Shakespeare.

But I would argue that beer isn’t highbrow now, it’s universal. (In fact, you could probably do a whole sub-chart based on varieties of beer, under the now-correct assumption that most people of all brow types now drink *some* kind of beer, but I’m not enough of a beer connoisseur.)

Aside from beer, the rest of the lowbrow stuff (assuming you agree that it was correctly identified) really hasn’t worn all that well IMO — westerns and comic books have both shrunk in importance and coleslaw has not exactly taken over the salad scene, and those are the relative successes.

38: Huh. Thanks. … there was also a version in Britain called “Nebuchadnezzar” which involved acting a skit for each letter of the target; so if you had to act LENIN you’d do a skit for, say, Livia, and then one for Edison, and then Nelson, then Ivan the Terrible, then Napoleon, and then do The Whole World for “Lenin”. People had more spare time in those days I guess. The name is of course because that would be the worst possible one to get.
The strategy would be to keep the name as ambiguous as possible; so you might have an obvious one for J, say, and then do the story of Abraham and Isaac (leaving the audience unsure whether that was meant as an A or an I) and so on.
I’ve only heard about it in Dorothy Sayers…

42: also, Shakespeare.

The name is of course because that would be the worst possible one to get.

I reckon a famous speaker of a language with click consonants might be worse.

@Shakespeare corrections: Probably worth noting that Shakespeare didn’t climb the brow ladder over time- it may have been evacuated from the lower brow tiers, although I doubt that as well because of it’s function as totem of acceptable art. You might argue that plays were considered socially inferior to poetry, but the plays were being performed at court…

alas, it turns out I’m upper middle. My absolute favourite thing on the chart, though, is the illustration of coleslaw, which has all the pathos of an Edward Gorey menaced object.

Hmm, life magazine doesn’t really know anything about sculpture.

All my useful objects are from chemical supply company. I am a security guard at a chemical supply company.

A basic familiarity with Aeschylus and Euripides, not to mention Sophocles, would render one less inclined to make confidently superlative claims about Shakespeare’s literary greatness and genius in tragic and epic literature. He was a great poet and bard, but he was not much greater than Homer or Sophocles. And that’s why jubilant upper-middle class celebration of Shakespeare sometimes carries the unseemly stench of back-grubbing social-climbing.

Myles SG, you’re a funny man.

Anyone who makes the effort to read Greek is an upper-middle try-hard at best.

The divorce case in that issue is a window into a distant and pretty bizarre past.

It left me deeply baffled and very slightly nauseated. It’s on page 91, for those who wish to look—and one really ought to, as the text alone is insufficient. (I’ve also extracted it to a web page here.) There must be some sort of ironic cultural context here that I’m not getting.

Here’s the text:

Barbara Jean Floyd, 18, “Miss New Orleans of 1948”, gave her home-town reporters a field day last week by inviting them to one of the liveliest tussles ever put on public view in that city. The tiff has its origin two months ago in Columbia, where Barbara, stranded on a South American tour, married George Cauthen, 28, a pilot for an airline. Several weeks later, telling George an ex-suitor in Detroit had attempted suicide and needed her help, she flew to Miami. Shortly thereafter, she was in New Orleans denying that she had been married.

When Cauthen arrived in pursuit two weeks ago, Barbara demanded a divorce. “Boy,” George told reporters, “have I been taken.” It was at this point that Barbara summoned up her indignation and the press, and proceeded to hit, scratch and bite George. He responded by pushing her to the floor, giving her a few husbandly whacks and saying she could have her divorce. “I was lucky,” he admits, “to get off with only three weeks of her.”

Photo captions:

DURING A LULL George helps Barbara to her feet. He said he’d call it quits, but she followed him to his room, dared him to “come out and fight”.

THE FIGHT OVER, Barbara Jean indicates spot where she got spanked. “It didn’t hurt a bit,” she said triumphantly, “because I had my girdle on.”

“It is true that appreciation of Shakespeare is a middle-brow aspirational taste similar to that of many symphony audience members and the like. Or fans of high profile literary authors such as Toni Morrison, Salmon Rushdie, or, God forbid, David Foster Wallace. But, DFW aside, being an object of middebrow asiprational taste doesn’t necessarily imply mediocrity.”

Fair enough. And I did exaggerate to make my point that a lot of Shakespeare-worship isn’t based so much on merit as on social aspiration. I liked the movie Richard III (1995) very much. It was strictly Shakespeare in script. But what bothers me greatly is when Shakespeare is elevated to the detriment and ignorance of a great number of other bards of the English language who had influences not quite but nearly as profound and laudable. Like the grand, Latinic tradition of Milton and Pope. Or the evocative, gossamer beauty of T.S. Eliot and Yeats.

Understanding the supreme importance of the Bard is all well and good, but not so when we let his unique brand of spry, witty Elizabethean brawn eclipse all other worthy streams of English culture.

It is a sad day when there are men familiar with every Shakespearean play, but cannot recall even the first few lines of the Waste Land, much less recite any from Paradise Lost. I personally don’t see why we disallow people to go through English class not learning Shakespeare, but yet are perfectly as ease with them not knowing anything from the seminal poem of the last century. Most curricula now include at least some cursory Sophocles, but I have yet to meet anyone who demands the inclusion of the Oresteia.

And while I am here with the iconoclasm, let’s put down Beethoven too. I was a rather good Beethoven amateur pianist, as far as they come, but I personally thought the Beethoven-worship, like the Shakespeare worship, sometimes veered toward vulgar excess.

Or take art. What is the matter with da Vinci? The crowds that throng toward the Louvre cannot, in most of the cases, even get a decent look at the painting, yet they all crow about its beauty after the most cursory look (if it can be called that) at the genuine article, separated by bullet-and-bomb-proof glass.

Two points: when I lived in Arkansas in the early 1980s, in addition to playing the home version of Jeopardy(TM), we also played a deep version of Charades, in which you not only had to charade the answer but the category. “Famous Bodies of Water in Hollywood,” for example, included Joan Rivers and Veronica Lake. No surprise that Jane Eyre couldn’t keep up.

As for highbrow/lowbrow and Mad Magazine, the other article you can’t find online is “How To Be Cultured.” When they ask you if you saw Eddie Fischer on the Philco Hour last night, the response is “Television . . . who watches television?” Practice that sneer and try it on your friends.

I don’t understand the ‘unwashed salad bowl’ thing at all.

Myles SG is best known for playing the role of an upper-class Wodehousian twit in Yglesias’ comments. And possibly in real life.

Or the evocative, gossamer beauty of T.S. Eliot

I have to agree: ‘Yes, I’d eat you! / In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, / Juicy little, right little, missionary stew’ has such a — may I say? — lilt to it.

“I liked the movie Richard III (1995) very much.”

Indeed.

“Like the grand, Latinic tradition of Milton”

Who, of course, was well-known for disdaining Shakespeare.

“and Pope.”

Oh dear

“It is a sad day when there are men familiar with every Shakespearean play, but cannot recall even the first few lines of the Waste Land, much less recite any from Paradise Lost.”

Every Shakespeare play? Even Timon of Athens? I’ll bet that anyone who is on familiar terms with Timon can rattle off the old ‘Let us go then, you and I/when the evening is spread out against the Starnbergersee…’

“…but I have yet to meet anyone who demands the inclusion of the Oresteia.”

I, for my part, will not sleep soundly at night until I have met someone who insists on De Rerum Natura, as part of earth science.

Praise the void! I have not technically met you, Michael, but I think I can now sleep peacefully. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Myles SG is best known for playing the role of an upper-class Wodehousian twit in Yglesias’ comments. And possibly in real life.

I’ll say one thing for Bertie Wooster, he wore his learning (such as it was) lightly – aside from the occasional mention of his Scripture Knowledge prize, of course. Myles’ comments stink of the lamp.

“Myles’ comments stink of the lamp.”

Or the ‘stench of back-grubbing social-climbing’. ‘Back grubbing’ is a bit odd, isn’t it? Back grubs, if I remember rightly, include the larvae of the rose chafer, my favourite indiginous beetle. I don’t think they are strongly associated with class anxiety.

“I’ll say one thing for Bertie Wooster, he wore his learning (such as it was) lightly – aside from the occasional mention of his Scripture Knowledge prize, of course. Myles’ comments stink of the lamp.”

All unfortunately incisive and true. But then, I am unlike Wooster not upper-class, so I too am not civilized by the fine and artful nonchalance the aristocracy toward book-learning.

Truthfully, I take no issue with school curricula skipping the classics. I personally cannot imagine enough people taking up Latin and epic poems and so on more willingly than they are currently to take on Shakespeare. It’s not like we need to discourage people further from study of literature by force of sheer humbug.

But at the same time, a lot of what we do currently is humbug nonetheless. For most the unending Shakespeare forced-feeding (one suspects Sparknotes was invented to relieve this very difficulty) in high school is quite bad enough. I personally can’t see how they would be discouraged by a balance of more early-modern authors and poets, who have the advantage of being at least readable, and a bit less Shakespeare. If they are interested they can pursue Shakespeare in college.

My favorite English class reading was by Joyce, followed by Conrad. My favorite Shakespeare play from English class was Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of his lighter plays. My least enjoyable English-class reading, ever, is a prize shared by Macbeth and Crime and Punishment, although I suspect Crime and Punishment has the edge here. I hear some have Dickens instead of Dostoevsky in that place, but I would not know.

I am sure a lot of other English students share the same configuration of love-hate.

In fact, if we MUST force people to read Shakespeare, we can shift the balance at least to some sonnets instead of an all-historical-tragedy lineup.

I cannot believe that a high school kid would dislike Macbeth, but only because my memory of it is inextricably bound up with Lou Freakin’ Reed. Dostoevsky really missed the MTV boat.

So now we have the [whatever it is that the bourgeois does that isn’t labor] theory of value. and even biological existence.

Is this the place for the Beevis and Butthead marathon?

“The Game” was essentially charades. Here’s another Life article about it:

Life on “The Game”