[lit-ideas] Re: My Dinner with Andre

  • From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:04:56 -0500

Mike: When I try to find something on TV only to have my desire for entertainment turned into suicidal despair, I think of that series and wonder why in God's name with all the incredible literature out there we as a species prefer shit? Where's my gun?



Google (Bush's NEA head) Dana Gioia's commencement address at Stanford University. He talks about this very same thing, arguing that Americans have not become stupider (comparative absolute term, eh?) but that American popular culture has become vastly stupider.

In the '50s and '60s, Gioia, child of a Mexican immigrant in CA, was exposed to baseball players and football players on TV, natch, but also could watch Jascha Heifetz and Robert Frost, thereby receiving enough of a smattering of high culture to stimulate his lifelong interest in it. Today TV's just an onslaught of doofus-fest, perhaps because the idea of "high culture" has itself been discredited by doofus-loving canon-hating theory.
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