Comments on: Bach and before, Ives and after

By: Y

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:06:12 +0000

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

Life on “The Game”

By: Anon

Anon — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:35:07 +0000

Interesting how we have Bach, Bartok, Brahms, Sibelius, and…Parsifal. Was Wagner a dirty word in the US in 1949?

By: fish

fish — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:21:01 +0000

Is this the place for the Beevis and Butthead marathon?

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:02:27 +0000

And if it wasn’t for the lumpenproletariat and the peasants, we’d all starve to death naked. (Right now, never mind the historical past.)

The lowbrows could muddle through without the middlebrows much better than vice versa.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:56:40 +0000

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

By: alex

alex — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:39:17 +0000

This is all very amusing, but as I like to say from time to time, if it wasn’t for the bourgeoisie, most of us here today would never have been born, and a lot of us who had been would be somebody’s serf… Middlebrow, schmiddlebrow, at least know where the money comes from.

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:30:30 +0000

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.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:46:55 +0000

Students should expected to read The Faery Queen from end to end, and they should be expected to to like it. Real, competent poetry, without the kinds of vulgar distractions and little verbal twists Shakespeare had to put in to keep people from falling to sleep.

By: Myles SG

Myles SG — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:44:28 +0000

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.

By: Myles SG

Myles SG — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:43:07 +0000

“I’m well aware that Myles is only taking the piss, but I have to draw the line when it comes to Beethoven. I don’t care if the people worshipping him are vulgar or not, but that worship is well deserved, since Beethoven ranks only slightly below god and has the the added advantage of actually having existed at a certain point in time.”

I was personally under the impression that God was the Hallelujah chorus in Messiah. Fine, the Ode to Joy too. But my listening as of today skews heavily toward F Couperin, Rameau, Charpentier, and the like, with some Mozart and Franck thrown in. Faure and Debussey-Ravel are great too.

By: Myles SG

Myles SG — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:40:09 +0000

“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.

By: novakant

novakant — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:05:42 +0000

I’m well aware that Myles is only taking the piss, but I have to draw the line when it comes to Beethoven. I don’t care if the people worshipping him are vulgar or not, but that worship is well deserved, since Beethoven ranks only slightly below god and has the the added advantage of actually having existed at a certain point in time.

By: John Meredith

John Meredith — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:31:22 +0000

“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.

By: Bunbury

Bunbury — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:57:50 +0000

My daughter’s school teaches Lucretius as part of the science curriculum before the division into specialisms. Is that acceptable?

In 1940 GH Hardy wrote:

As W. J. Turner has said so truly, it is only the ‘highbrows’ (in the most unpleasant sense) who do not admire the ‘real swells’.

Since I cannot tell from the above discussion whether a brow level is supposed to be a measure of worth, a proxy for a class system, a measure of one-upmanship, a degree of illumination, a tribal affiliation or something else, I’m not really sure where he wishes to stand.

By: ajay

ajay — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:20:50 +0000

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.