The article on the prevalence mass culture sounded a bit defeatist.
Whenever we judge anything we do so by comparing it to something else, I am not sure if Beethoven would have the same following now if it wasn’t available in a time of rampant pop music. The irony is that high culture is made high by the existence of low culture, without the low coulture the high becomes a new low- so instead of annoying elevator music, one get’s Chopin’s famous waltzes, which will eventually be pooh-poohed for even “better” music which would be considered the new high culture.
In the end “good” culture is relative.
Snoop dog might not be “good” but it is culture nevertheless, good or bad, culture is an amalgam of good and bad, like it or not they serve their purposes when we compare them to one another.
I would just like to say that although initally this article caught my eye…and seemed good. You have made me extreamly made how DARE you even insult “teenagers” expressing themselves. They are not hurting anyone by writing in a note book and it is not killing anyone when they print something in the high school news paper ( ewww! look out!)
Maybe I am just being a silly 20 year old and a little over anxious to tell you how stupid and meaningless your article was to me…but I think maybe not…check yourself….I am sure your poetry is wonderful and that you have never written crap. You know I read a poem recently on underground.com and the ending is quiet fitting of the author.
“before you kick another poem about the state of the world please
look inside and then
be just as critical, be just as critical ”
so I guess my point is before you write another article bascailly summing it up in a sentence …on how stupid kids are for writing poems becasue they have no talent in my eyes…look inside yourself and be just as critical.
This past week I read a review of an anthology of poems against the war in Iraq. I don’t object to a poet or anybody else having a political point of view. John Milton did, William Shakespeare did, and Francis Scott Key certainly did. But, when I read one hundred of the poems on the website http://www.poetsagainstthewar, I could find just three mentions of Saddam Hussein. Not a word about the mass graves of Iraq. Nary a reference to his murderous sons. Surely a sensitive poet could find something poignant in an entire family being gassed to death because they were Kurds or impressive in the spectacle of Iraqis dancing in the streets while they pulled down Hussein’s monumental statues or horrible about what went on in Hussein’s torture chambers. One of the reasons for this empty-headedness about the subject of the Iraq war is that as far as I can tell none of the poets included in Hamill’s anthology actually fought in the war. The direct experience of war is much of what gives authenticity to the verse of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Robert Service, Siegfried Sassoon, Walt Whitman, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, and John Ciardi. It would be interesting to compare poetry written by veterans of the Iraq war to the anti-war poems collected by Hamill, to see whether there is a characteristic poetic difference between the people who opposed the war in verse and the people who fought it. As it is, I suspect that projects like Hamill’s will advance the cause of peace just as much as they advance the art of poetry, which is to say not at all. If this is the best contemporary poets can do, poetry as an art is as defunct as the World Trade Center and there’s nothing left to do but give it a decent burial.
If the side that, in your view, has it right is politely silent, how did you find so many quotations? And aren’t these quotations reflective of a climate of opinion that is dominant in many quarters, notably (in my experience)in American academia? So dominant, in fact, that the viewpoint you deem right is pretty much taken for granted, hardly needing to be articulated–which condition you may be confusing with polite silence. In other areas, of course, including American electoral politics, the situation is rather different.
Being unfamiliar with the format of this page, I neglected to mention that I am responding in my comment beginning “If the side . . .” to an In Focus piece on Science and Religion, not on the piece on poetry addressed by most of the other comments on this page.
Yes, it’s all just One Big Letters page. We might have separate ones some day if there is enough response to separate sections, but the flood of mail we got for the poetry article is a bit unusual.
So many quotations? What so many quotations? Dennett and Dawkins? That’s all of two. And Dennett said in that very piece I quoted that he usually doesn’t argue with religious people, and that he’s only now deciding that policy may be a mistake. Dawkins is unusual in his willingness to point out bluntly that the problem with religion is that it doesn’t happen to be true, and he gets a lot of scorn and derision for it, even from avowed skeptics and secularists.
Are you sure religion doesn’t get a free pass even from a good many people in American academia? Don’t you know any woolly types who think that, well, it’s true for them, anyway…? But even if you’re right about academia, there is as you point out all the rest of the world. As I said in the In Focus, since the religious side has less and less hesitation about assuming it has everything right, I think it’s a big mistake for the non-religious side to sit politely back and let them rave.
Maybe I’ll do a Note and Comment on the subject and you can comment there, where the comments go with the right subject.
Who’s counting? You’re right, I carelessly registered as quotations the references to comments by Bertrand Russell and Carl Sagan, thus doubling the actual number, yielding a pretty substantial total for a short piece. The fact that the quotations and references do, as I suggest, reflect an attitude that seems to me so common in the setting I know best that it doesn’t have to be uttered led to an overall impression that the notion of polite silence might be a bit off. I’m a bit nervous about the “two sides” notion. It reminds me more than I’m comfortable with of W announcing you’re with us or against us. In the political context to which I referred, I’m inclined to think that recognizing that the “other side” includes many sides is more helpful at least from a pragmatic point of view.
It seems to me as if the author of this article might be baiting his audience to find some wholely passionate responses. Indeed, if this is the intent he has suceeded! Keep up the cynical repose good man!
Beliefs that are the result of contemplating the consequences of behavior and the presumptions that drive that beharior have nothing to do with the physiology of stimulus and response that was the subject of Libet’s experiment. It is as misguided to use science as a qualitative language as it would be to enlist music as a medium for quantitative discourse. The chemestry of taste does not communicate the experience.
The article on the prevalence mass culture sounded a bit defeatist.
Whenever we judge anything we do so by comparing it to something else, I am not sure if Beethoven would have the same following now if it wasn’t available in a time of rampant pop music. The irony is that high culture is made high by the existence of low culture, without the low coulture the high becomes a new low- so instead of annoying elevator music, one get’s Chopin’s famous waltzes, which will eventually be pooh-poohed for even “better” music which would be considered the new high culture.
In the end “good” culture is relative.
Snoop dog might not be “good” but it is culture nevertheless, good or bad, culture is an amalgam of good and bad, like it or not they serve their purposes when we compare them to one another.
I would just like to say that although initally this article caught my eye…and seemed good. You have made me extreamly made how DARE you even insult “teenagers” expressing themselves. They are not hurting anyone by writing in a note book and it is not killing anyone when they print something in the high school news paper ( ewww! look out!)
Maybe I am just being a silly 20 year old and a little over anxious to tell you how stupid and meaningless your article was to me…but I think maybe not…check yourself….I am sure your poetry is wonderful and that you have never written crap. You know I read a poem recently on underground.com and the ending is quiet fitting of the author.
“before you kick another poem about the state of the world please
look inside and then
be just as critical, be just as critical ”
so I guess my point is before you write another article bascailly summing it up in a sentence …on how stupid kids are for writing poems becasue they have no talent in my eyes…look inside yourself and be just as critical.
This past week I read a review of an anthology of poems against the war in Iraq. I don’t object to a poet or anybody else having a political point of view. John Milton did, William Shakespeare did, and Francis Scott Key certainly did. But, when I read one hundred of the poems on the website http://www.poetsagainstthewar, I could find just three mentions of Saddam Hussein. Not a word about the mass graves of Iraq. Nary a reference to his murderous sons. Surely a sensitive poet could find something poignant in an entire family being gassed to death because they were Kurds or impressive in the spectacle of Iraqis dancing in the streets while they pulled down Hussein’s monumental statues or horrible about what went on in Hussein’s torture chambers. One of the reasons for this empty-headedness about the subject of the Iraq war is that as far as I can tell none of the poets included in Hamill’s anthology actually fought in the war. The direct experience of war is much of what gives authenticity to the verse of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Robert Service, Siegfried Sassoon, Walt Whitman, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, and John Ciardi. It would be interesting to compare poetry written by veterans of the Iraq war to the anti-war poems collected by Hamill, to see whether there is a characteristic poetic difference between the people who opposed the war in verse and the people who fought it. As it is, I suspect that projects like Hamill’s will advance the cause of peace just as much as they advance the art of poetry, which is to say not at all. If this is the best contemporary poets can do, poetry as an art is as defunct as the World Trade Center and there’s nothing left to do but give it a decent burial.
If the side that, in your view, has it right is politely silent, how did you find so many quotations? And aren’t these quotations reflective of a climate of opinion that is dominant in many quarters, notably (in my experience)in American academia? So dominant, in fact, that the viewpoint you deem right is pretty much taken for granted, hardly needing to be articulated–which condition you may be confusing with polite silence. In other areas, of course, including American electoral politics, the situation is rather different.
Being unfamiliar with the format of this page, I neglected to mention that I am responding in my comment beginning “If the side . . .” to an In Focus piece on Science and Religion, not on the piece on poetry addressed by most of the other comments on this page.
Yes, it’s all just One Big Letters page. We might have separate ones some day if there is enough response to separate sections, but the flood of mail we got for the poetry article is a bit unusual.
So many quotations? What so many quotations? Dennett and Dawkins? That’s all of two. And Dennett said in that very piece I quoted that he usually doesn’t argue with religious people, and that he’s only now deciding that policy may be a mistake. Dawkins is unusual in his willingness to point out bluntly that the problem with religion is that it doesn’t happen to be true, and he gets a lot of scorn and derision for it, even from avowed skeptics and secularists.
Are you sure religion doesn’t get a free pass even from a good many people in American academia? Don’t you know any woolly types who think that, well, it’s true for them, anyway…? But even if you’re right about academia, there is as you point out all the rest of the world. As I said in the In Focus, since the religious side has less and less hesitation about assuming it has everything right, I think it’s a big mistake for the non-religious side to sit politely back and let them rave.
Maybe I’ll do a Note and Comment on the subject and you can comment there, where the comments go with the right subject.
Who’s counting? You’re right, I carelessly registered as quotations the references to comments by Bertrand Russell and Carl Sagan, thus doubling the actual number, yielding a pretty substantial total for a short piece. The fact that the quotations and references do, as I suggest, reflect an attitude that seems to me so common in the setting I know best that it doesn’t have to be uttered led to an overall impression that the notion of polite silence might be a bit off. I’m a bit nervous about the “two sides” notion. It reminds me more than I’m comfortable with of W announcing you’re with us or against us. In the political context to which I referred, I’m inclined to think that recognizing that the “other side” includes many sides is more helpful at least from a pragmatic point of view.
It seems to me as if the author of this article might be baiting his audience to find some wholely passionate responses. Indeed, if this is the intent he has suceeded! Keep up the cynical repose good man!
Re: Jeremy Stangroom’s article on Humanism
Beliefs that are the result of contemplating the consequences of behavior and the presumptions that drive that beharior have nothing to do with the physiology of stimulus and response that was the subject of Libet’s experiment. It is as misguided to use science as a qualitative language as it would be to enlist music as a medium for quantitative discourse. The chemestry of taste does not communicate the experience.