Art school (Chapter 8)

I know I should have something to say about this chapter of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes, but getting my experience with art school into a blog post is going to be unwieldy. If it all sounds confusing, that's because it was, intrinsically so I think, and that's my point. And also, I've discovered that spending Tuesday mornings writing about pop culture wreaks havoc with the rest of the week.  So, here goes:

I went to art school at UGA in the early 1980s.  The professors mostly espoused abstract expressionism, while the students preferred kitsch art (this link won't be for everyone).  Some created art seriously, while others were more about the trappings.  But the point that fits in with Myers' book is that there wasn't much respect for tradition. At that time, I took most people seriously who were actually going to the trouble to produce and show work, of whatever variety. I even enjoyed the eerie installations that included rooms full of melted wax, trash, and a child's record player chanting times tables. I took the folk preachers who built exhibits in their backyards seriously (Howard Finster wasn't the only one). The guy I knew who went barefoot all winter, smoked cigarettes while running, didn't speak for six months, and shaved his head, but only occasionally poured some paint on canvas, I didn't take seriously.

I kept very little of my own work, except for some slides--much of it disintegrated. Conservation is a problem even for curators in modern art museums, because since the sixties many artists consider museums to be "homes for dead art" and refuse to think in terms of permanence.  But I don't think there was any danger of my work going into a museum.

 

I do remember my art school days fondly (outside of classes, I had a lot of strange adventures, but they were mostly innocent because I had strong self-boundaries), and I even think it was valuable in some way (I taught myself a lot), but its most lasting effect was burnout.  I remember sitting on a bus one day during my senior year thinking, "Why do I have to reinvent the whole world to be an artist? People have already done that. I'm supposed to think that no one is authentic but other artists, but I think I'd rather be learning organic chemistry or something. Organic chemistry is hard, but at least it doesn't make you feel dizzy and isolated. I'm tired of everything being ironic and edgy."  So, after a bit of a post-graduation crisis, I picked up a second major in design, got married, got a job, and didn't think about painting again for at least three years.  And when I did paint again, I did portraiture, a type of painting that has a very long tradition and lots of craft behind it.  I'd had it with restlessness as a statement.

Myers quotes Jacques Barzun:

If ones elders are willing to be "permissive" and "flexible" about one's every excess, it soon becomes clear "that there is nothing to push against but the empty air, a feeling which is at first agreeable, then is disconcerting, and ends by causing the anguish of pointlessness--the horror of the absurd."

I was never particularly interested in indulging in every excess, though I was certainly encouraged to.  What bothered me was more whether there was any way to produce art at all without respect for natural form.  As might be expected from someone who later painted portraits, I enjoyed figure drawing better than anything else.  I was much better at capturing a form quickly and loosely on paper than I was at inventing a vision far removed from nature in my head.  But that was supposed to be "derivative."  If I had had some help that respected my interests, it might have become something more, but the philosophy of the school was quite the opposite of my inclinations, and I was too young to know what I needed educationally.  My absurdity was that so few respected what had brought me to art school in the first place--a talent for natural form.  

As Myers defines it, what my college experience lacked was a sense of high culture.  It focused on the new, not the timeless.  It relied on instant accessibility, rather than training.  It celebrated fame (shock value, alternative music) more than ability.  It constantly alluded to something else (usually kitsch, and particularly Southern kitsch). And there was little discontinuity between life and art.  

As I read over this, it sounds quite critical of my college experience, but I think that's because I'm discussing a chapter in a book that emphasizes the difference between high culture and pop culture, and thinking back over that experience in retrospect.  At the time, I hardly knew the difference. Discontinuity between art and life could be fun, lots of fun, but is that why one really goes to college? Was it worth four years of school mostly to develop a strong sense of irony? I understand that it was a studio program and that therefore I was working within the "tradition" of modern art, but I was stuck with the strong discontinuity between modern art and most of previous history. Meanwhile, there was so much more craft I could have learned, if only I'd known it was out there, but previous generations had thrown it out so completely that it was barely mentioned. At least I went to Italy.  

Here's what struck me in this chapter of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes:

I do think that there are still differences between high art and pop culture, but the past fifty years have done a lot to blur the line.  This is partly because much of high art is a statement about pop culture.  Thus art no longer imitates human nature, but culture itself, usually by adding a layer of irony.  I'm not sure art believes there is such a thing as human nature anymore.  Was it Dorothy Sayers who said that we're using up our intellectual capital?  This is what she meant.

Pop culture's emphasis on the eternal now is completely different from the Eastern idea of zen.  I am not highly trained in Eastern art, but I understand its sensibility, and the difference is one between serenity and restlessness.  This is what makes me wonder if Madonna knew what she was talking about when she said she was a Buddhist Jew, but I won't go there.

The chapter ends with this quote:  

The aesthetic of immediate and constant entertainment does not prepare the human consciousness well for recognition of a holy, transcendent, omnipotent, and eternal God, or to responding to His demands of repentance and obedience. 

What I was struggling with last week when I posted was that such quotes feel, at first, like a sort of works righteousness.  I find it much, much easier to live outside the mainstream myself, or even to talk about what I've been doing in terms of day to day life, than to talk about it in expository terms.  This isn't because I can't make the necessary abstractions, but because I fear that I will sound legalistic to other Christians.  I do think that pulling back from pop culture is a good thing, or I wouldn't do it. And I agree with Myers' statement above. But there are all kinds of reasons people have for living the way they do, and I'm not interested in telling you exactly where you should veer off the mainstream. The Bible doesn't say whether or not you can watch a given movie, eat junk food, or listen to a given band. It gives us the big picture of who God is, and the glorious story of how Christ came to redeem us. The details are what God gave us lives, brains and an intellectual tradition for.

In lieu of Chapter 6

A personal commentary on Chapter 6 of Ken Myers's All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is not forthcoming anytime soon. And since both Wednesday and Friday promise all-day outings, I'm not sure Chapter 7 is in the works for this week, either.  In fact, I seem to have overloaded my brain to the extent that I need to take a deep breath and straighten out some of the tangle that's in there already. That happens from time to time.  So I'm cooking instead.

Regarding Chapter 6, I attempted in two different drafts to write something more than a mere synopsis of the chapter, whose subject is how pop culture and the liberal arts are not just different tastes, but different experiences altogether. And both times, even though I clearly stated the difference between quality of thought issues and salvation issues, I ended up feeling as though I were personally critiquing my fellow Christians.  Moral of story:  I suppose it doesn't work for the neighborhood Luddite to preach on the mental advantages of turning off pop culture, no matter how wonderful, or even important, those advantages may be to said Luddite.  

In my state of mental knottedness, however, I did discover a young writer, Matthew B. Crawford, who seems to have a gift for making many of the same points I would like to make if I were half so talented as he at writing insightfully (a big if!).  It probably helps that he isn't trying to make an appeal to Christians, but to young people generally, particularly college students.  That way, there's no question of any implications in his appeals for acceptance by God.  With Myers, it's much harder to separate the two.

Here's a sample of Crawford talking about the importance of liberal education, echoing what Myers (via C.S. Lewis) calls receiving a work, which an requires effort to see beyond one's limited perspective, as opposed to using it:

The humanities might be understood simply as s record of the best that has been thought about the human situation. Acquaintance with this record has the effect of freeing us from the present, with its necessarily partial view, and opening us up to the full range of human possibilities. Further, to enter truly into the great works of the past, or of other cultures, requires an effort to free oneself from the present and its certainties. A cultivated willingness to make that effort is perhaps the cardinal intellectual virtue.

That is an excellent summary of Chapter 6, with the exception that Myers postulates that for Christians, our imprisonment in the psychological familiarity and present-orientation of pop culture may make it harder for us to grow not only intellectually, but spiritually as well.

I found Mr. Crawford via Rick Saenz of Dry Creek Chronicles, who in turn found him on Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons blog.  After reading the linked article, Shop Class as Soulcraft (which will be published as a full-length book in May), I was so enthused that I Googled several other articles by Mr. Matthews, all equally enjoyable. Though he writes on everything from physics textbooks to mood medication on campus, the common thread is always the destructive effect of modern society on the liberal arts.  And that's a subject I could read about all day.  

So, for Chapter 6, I suppose my comments will be limited to:  1) Instead of reading Myers, go ahead and read An Experiment in Criticism, the excellent C.S. Lewis book on which most of the chapter is based, and 2) print out a few articles by Matthew B. Crawford and read them when you have time.  Among the current mass of internet articles, they stand out as well worth our attention.

"I guess you had to be there" (Chapter 5)

I am now getting so far behind with blogging about Kenneth Myers's All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes that I’m a whole chapter behind Cindy’s schedule.  And my unusually busy winter, combined with my slower than average writing, will probably keep me behind schedule for some time.  I'm sure it would help if my posts weren't almost as long as Myers's chapters!  But here, a week late, is my attempt at blogging chapter 5:

Chapter 5 of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes discusses the question, Is there any qualitative difference between high art and pop culture, or is it just a matter of taste? This is a slippery question, partly because of aesthetic relativism, and partly because for the past few decades academics have evaluated all culture in terms of social background and politics.  

Regarding the political analysis, Myers says that surely art does have a social and political dimension, but he refuses to get sidetracked by the academic approach, calling it “the quasi-Marxist assumption that matters of taste and aesthetic judgment are determined by social class.” The political approach would seem to indicate that there is no such thing as a genuine aesthetic judgment, only determinism. It’s really just another aspect of relativism.

Seeing this expressed so simply enabled me to understand something about my own art education. One of my art professors in college told me that the problem with my art was that I had a “Protestant work ethic.” (He wasn’t the only one who made personal comments. They were common.) This is not to say that my drawings and paintings were aesthetically superior and merely unrecognized--not at all!--but looking back, I think the lack of authenticity in my work had a lot more to do with my pop culture habits than they did with my social background.  And when I learned aesthetics from my professors and from seeing first rate art, I didn’t merely move myself into a higher end niche market.  My whole world enlarged.  It was as though I could see new colors that I hadn’t known about before, and perhaps it was literally true.  

Myers says instead of politicizing art, we should evaluate it according to its effects and nature as much as its cause.  The rest of the chapter is about art’s effects and nature.  His ultimate argument is that the experience of high art and pop culture are so qualitatively different that they can’t simply be a matter of taste or social background.

This is a good place to refer to Mark Steyn’s 1997 essay “Twenty Years Ago Today.” (I have finally found in a version that doesn’t require a subscription to The New Criterion. As much as I would love to see The New Criterion flourish financially, I think this essay is so insightful that everyone should be able to read it.  Just remember where it came from.)  In the essay, Steyn is evaluating the progress of American culture since Alan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind twenty years ago, and making the argument that you can’t write off Bloom as an old style elitist (as many have done) for suggesting that college students remove the plugs from their ears so they can hear and think about something other than pop culture.  He’s trying to make the same point as Myers, that pop culture is qualitatively different experience than high culture, not merely a matter of taste:

“Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.”

... It is of historic proportions that a society’s best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.” Confronted by these sentiments, many young readers just shrug: The old man doesn’t get it. Not his fault. He’s just old. In a way, their reaction or lack of it vindicates his final point: “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.” He’s mouthing away but they can’t hear. 

And most of us of Sir Mick Jagger’s age and younger don’t want to hear, either. To be sure, this or that gangsta rapper is a bit much, and Britney’s a sad old slapper, and Madonna’s a clapped-out provocateur, but what’s wrong with a bit of rock and roll? Nothing. Except that, when it’s ubiquitous, it’s stunting. Paul Simon and I once had a longish conversation about this and eventually he conceded that even the best rockers had nevertheless been unable to develop beyond a very basic harmonic language: There isn’t enough there to teach in a “music” course...What an achievement it would be if every high-school could acquire a classical catalogue as rich as that used in Looney Tunes when Elmer Fudd goes hunting Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny. Carl Stalling, who scored those cartoons, often fell back on formula: If someone was in a cave, the orchestra would play “Fingal’s Cave.” But you can’t even do that any more, because no-one gets the joke.

Please, go back and read that again, several times.  Read the article.  Read Alan Bloom’s book.  I care a lot more about that than I do about whether you read the rest of my post.  

But meanwhile here are a few guidelines Myers gives us for understanding the nature of pop culture, along with a few of my own thoughts about them:

Entertainment

It is a myth that only pop culture is entertaining. The truth is that all art is entertaining; but pop culture is only entertaining.  It can’t bear too much repeated exposure (thus its faddishness) or sustained aesthetic analysis (maybe this is part of the reason for focusing on political aspects?).  You can become acquainted with pop culture, but the relationship is always superficial.  (This makes me think of modern versions of friendship and community.)

Nostalgia

Pop culture is nostalgic.  It’s not an original experience; it’s about reliving one.  The person brought up on it doesn’t learn how to appeal to universal values, only to shared experience.  (This is not an absolute, of course, but a generalization according to the logic of pop culture.) 

The reliving experience point makes me think of “The Chris Farley Show,” a skit from the early 1990s on Saturday Night Live in which he played an interviewer who was so nervously inept that he could only say, “Do you remember that scene where...?  That was awesome!” His guests’ understanding of his questions depended entirely on their having acted in or seen the movie themselves, because Farley’s character could impart nothing of universal value.  This was even the case when he tried to describe something of lasting significance, like Jesus clearing the temple.  

Pop culture, like a Chris Farley movie review, is essentially a location joke.  As a case in point, most people’s appreciation of SNL depends heavily on the shared experience of watching the skits. This used to drive me crazy as a teen, because my family didn’t watch the show and so I never had any idea what half the conversations I heard were about.  Later, as a young adult, I did watch the show and so I got to be in on the joke--until the show went into a decline. And of course, I’m appealing to the location joke nature of pop culture myself by posting a video of it! 

This is not to say that it isn’t genuinely fun to follow a trend or be in on a private joke, but that it can’t easily transcend its original setting (though it can be extended a bit by adding layers of irony). Its primary lesson is “You shoulda been there!”  That’s fine between family and close friends.  But it’s not much of a way to conduct a broader social life, much less a cultural dialogue.

Sentimentality

 

Pop culture is also sentimental. One thinks of Precious Moments figurines, of course, but Myers also correctly connects Evangelical culture with sentimentality. He quotes Abraham Kaplan, saying that the object of sentiment may be morally “worthy,” but the feelings called forth spring too quickly and easily to acquire substance and depth. “To the sentimentalist, what matters is the feeling stored within him, not whether it is rooted in reality.” 

The point is somewhat subtle, but worth considering. If a worship service (or for that matter a movie) jerks my emotions around repeatedly, no matter how worthy the sentiment, my natural reaction is to first wonder that’s wrong with myself, then to feel manipulated and detached from the spectacle.  This is not to say that I don’t feel strongly stirred by art, or the gratitude for Christ’s sacrifice, or love for my neighbor, but that my emotions are limited to human scope, duration and proportion. They are effected by everything from how much sleep I’ve gotten to whether I’ve been arguing with someone. A deeper presentation of these underlying truths can outlast my emotions of the moment. C.S. Lewis noted somewhere that his problem with fear-based preaching was that strong human emotion seemed to have a natural duration of about two weeks.  This observation has helped me in times of crisis.  Even great life conversions,  relationships, crises and griefs have to be digested in smaller emotional increments.  So certainly we shouldn’t be surprised that our response to great art isn’t instantaneous.  

Celebrity

Another mark of pop culture is the cult of celebrity.  Ironically, though pop culture may stir strong temporary emotions, it is actually more impersonal than high art.  We might say that its range is less, or that it has a lower emotional resolution.  Therefore the focus  tends to shift from the art itself to the person to created or performs it.  As usual, I can think of a Lewis analogy. Lewis says that poor art focuses not on the work, which takes both the artist and viewer out of himself, but on the ego of the person who creates it.

But pop culture is not escapist! 

Myers ends this chapter by saying that the problem with pop culture is not that it’s too escapist, but that it’s not escapist enough!  As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, it all depends on whether you’re escaping or merely deserting. (Implying that pop culture is deserting.) He said, “Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?  Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?”

And finally...Individualism

Myers points out that it’s hard for Americans to accept that there is a difference in the quality of experience between high art or folk art, and pop culture, because we are pragmatic and tend to want quantifiable, scientifically provable results.  Besides which, we are individualistic to the extent that we don’t like the thought that high art requires patience, training and willingness to submit to a master.  

I have learned through repeated experience, both aesthetic and spiritual, that there is much to be gained from submission to excellence. My art instructors, who were mostly abstract expressionists, told me to question authority.  But even they would still tell me to go check out a book on Milton Avery or Robert Motherwell, or better yet, to go see their works in a museum. Even anti-traditionalists have their traditions. In my late twenties, I submitted myself to some atelier style training under well-known portrait artists.  I can guarantee you that although these artists give specific information about the craft, they don’t demand slavish obedience.  You’ll just get more out of your class if you adopt their style for long enough to see how it works.  Then you can adapt it to your own style. John Holt, the unschooling advocate, called this mastery that is worth obeying natural authority.  It’s very different from authoritarianism, which demands obedience because of an outsized ego.  

Myers also says we should be wary of an individualism that tells us we should discover who we are independent of family and community.  I see his point, certainly. In fact, a family could discover new cultural forms together, as my family has learned about classical music through my daughter’s violin studies. But this does bring up an interesting question--what if your inheritance is pop culture? This is the case with many, if not most, Americans now.  Or to put it in a slightly different way, what if you admire Wendell Berry idea of home, yet you’ve no strong community tradition to go home to?  This seems like a very, very important question.  

Diversion as culture

Chapter 4 of Kenneth Myers's All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is about our cultural restlessness.  When I looked these chapters over, it was obvious that my problem was not going to be coming up with anything to write;  it was going to be whittling my thoughts down.  And since this month I seem to be running in the same gerbil wheel of activity I deplore below, what seems to have happened is that I've cherry-picked the quotes from the book.  They give you the heart of the matter.

Early in the chapter, there's a telling quote from Blaise Pascal:

“Men...are overwhelmed with business...and they are made to understand that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honor, their fortune and that of their good friends be in good condition, and that a single thing wanting will make them unhappy.  Thus they are give cares and business which make them bustle about from break of day--It is, you will exclaim, a strange way to make them happy!  What more could be done to make them miserable?...[If we wanted to make them more miserable, we could relieve them of these cares, because] then they would see themselves; they would reflect on what they are, whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ and divert them too much.  And this is why, after having given them to so much business, we advise them, if they have some time for relaxation, to employ it in amusement, I play, and to always fully occupied.  

How hollow and full of ribaldry is the heart of man!”

In one sense, busyness has been a problem at least since Pascal's time.  Certainly it describes most everyone I know, even myself at times. We keep our kids out of school because we think they’d be overscheduled, and then we immediately fill their calendars up with activities--all good ones, of course.  

But there’s something even more hyper about the culture of today than that of Pascal’s time.  Pop culture not only keeps us shlepping to lessons; it’s a whole culture of ever-evolving diversion.  It thrives on it, celebrates it, makes itself at home in it.  But diversion seems intrinsically related not only to television and music, but to our ailing families, our ailing communities, and even an existential sense of restlessness.  What's the connection? And where does this competitive, disconnected sense of pop culture come from?

The Left claims that it is imposed from above, because capitalism depends on it. Mothering Magazine deplores our society's brazen marketing to children. It’s certainly easy for a parent to get that feeling if you’ve ever witnessed the launching of a new children’s product, often via television or movies.  Ninja Turtles, Teletubbies, Pokemon, plastic bracelets from Nike, does it really matter what it is?  Each time the latest fad hits a new crop of children who have no sales resistance, no awareness of how marketing works.  Then, just when the last kid gets the item in a Happy Meal, it becomes passe. Today's fad is forgotten, or even becomes tomorrow's pop culture joke. It may even be recycled, along with a cool layer of irony.

Cool hunters comb the city streets, looking for new trends to exploit.  But the left really only gets part of the story.  Often teens or artists start their own fads.  Their whole lives are consumed with being competitively hip, and sometimes their style really is interesting.  By the time the fad filters down to the Gap level, the trend setters are on to something new.  But wherever you catch it, it's always evolving, and it takes a lot of energy to keep up.  No wonder teens can’t concentrate in school.

John Taylor Gatto connects our obsession with the fashionable present to the breakdown of communities and a purposeful helplessness inculcated by our age-segregated schools:  He says, “Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that."  He also said: "[School] cuts you off from your own past and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.” 

We might as well add the internet to that, except that at least we can choose to blog about our own past if we like.  Still, the challenge is to get any sort of involved conversation going.  Blog readers don't know your parents, or your family's past.  For that matter, all of Manhattan seems to live in a continuous present.  I'm lucky if I've briefly met another mom's parent. Mostly we talk about what we're doing this week.  

Myers seems to agree with Neil Postman (who figures into the book later on) and others that technological advances have changed the way we think. Artists and philosophers sense this change of consciousness and embrace it. Marshall Berman describes its essence:

“To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction...To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.”

Art has always reflected the culture around it, but after Andy Warhol, high culture became primarily about an ever-increasing pace of change and conceptualization, and its motto, “In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.”  But change in high culture is the subject of chapter 5.  For now, let’s look take a quick look at how the Industrial Revolution changed our basic mindset.  

After finding what he considers to be the heart of the matter, Myers then discusses how the Industrial Revolution and its technological innovations changed our culture and our sense of time and ultimately produced pop culture. You might wonder what the aging Rustbelt has to do with technopop, but the common answer is obvious once you think of it:  Boredom.  Factory work is tedious and unsatisfying in itself. It is divorced from nature and liturgy. It ultimately destroys community life, and fosters a culture of diversion.  And John Taylor Gatto shows clearly how industrial models originated our present school system.

Jacques Barzun said:

“...industrial life requires something that would compensate the toilers for their loss of individuality, of self-will and self-regard, of free movement and dramatic effort.  Something, I say, had to be done to palliate their nervous fatigue, their self-contempt, and their boredom, which is only vital energy unused...and the compensation is the culture of cities, rooted in the newspaper and rising by degrees to spectator sports, organized betting, and panoptical sexuality.”

His words almost sound quaint now, but they’re still true.  Sure, the particulars have changed, and our educators sound alarms that we're "falling behind the times."  But the basic idea is the same:  We feel disconnected, but who's got time to figure it all out?  And does it really matter as long as we're having fun?  

I have developed my my own pet theory over the past several years that a "management" approach school and attraction to pop culture go hand in hand.  The most common outlook towards academics, not only in the dysfunctional public schools (in my neighborhood) that Gatto talks about, but even among classical Christian schools and homeschoolers, is what I call “managed workload.”  The primary lesson is not the subject itself, but the ability to manage one’s time and to master a certain quality of “output.”  One even sees it in Sunday school.  

I find that this approach is for the most part dependent on extrinsic rewards, of which the most common are related to pop culture.  ("Do your homework or no TV!") The management approach ultimately destroys concentration on substantive learning. Sure, there’s something to being able to manage your time well, but there’s even more to being able to say no and being able to answer the question, How do I want to live?  If I don't do what others do, am I willing to be alone sometimes, and poor sometimes? I prefer to foster interest in the subject itself.  This is why I am sympathetic to unschooling, even if I haven’t always got it worked out in practice.  No doubt some people think I'm not being realistic.

As I write this, C.Z. is working on a lesson in Jacobs’ Algebra. She wanted me to come check the first two problems (with several subparts each), because she suspected she was going off in the wrong direction, and her hunch turned out to be a good one.  I said, “You know, you’ll move along faster and do less work in the long run if you read the introduction to the chapters carefully.”  I said this because if she does her work well, I only require her to do the second set out of three in each lesson.  I was an A student.

“I prefer to do an extra set anyway,” she responded. “Otherwise I feel like a dog trying to hold a bunch of tennis balls at once.  I don’t learn anything.”  Now algebra is certainly not C.Z.’s favorite subject, but I admire her frank refusal to cater to efficiency at the expense of understanding.  She may even struggle with the workload at first when she gets to college, but at least she’ll know why she’s there.  And if she really wants to be there, she'll figure it out.

But what disturbs me most about the medium of school or work, with its artificial requirements for efficiency and its fostering of a culture of salient distraction, is that it overrides the student’s intuition and cuts off that part of the human mind that feels God’s presence most keenly.  As Myers says, 

“Modernity has not excluded God from the universe.  It has simply made it more difficult to maintain a consciousness of God’s presence in a culture that increasingly ignores him.” 

Case in point: My pastor preached two Sundays ago on the first sin.  It was a sort of Postmodern update on Lewis’ statement that most people are not reasoned out of our faith; they drift away. Dr. Keller said that the serpent didn’t tempt Eve by holding an Enlightment-style conversation on the probability of God’s existence.  He sneered.  “Did God really say that?”  Temptation is an atmosphere. And it's how rumors get started:  Eve exaggerated by saying that she wasn't even allowed to touch the tree.

And this is the way of pop culture.  It doesn’t reason us our of our faith, but it pokes fun at everything until we become afraid to take anything seriously.  What is truth, anyway? 

Adam Stenbergh recently reviewed David Denby’s book Snark.  Denby thinks that snark (bascially a sarcastic ad hominem attack) is ruining our public discourse. Stenberg answered that snark could be defended as a way of constructively criticizing a society that's already almost completely obscured by spin, but I beg to differ. There’s nothing constructive about snark.  It destroys, but doesn’t build. Or as Myers says, “A steady diet of such astute humor merely takes us to a third level of emptiness.”  (pg. 63)

Ernest vanden Haag took the place of boredom in pop culture in faith seriously: “In pop culture,” he said, “even the second coming would become just another barren thrill...No distraction can cure boredom, just as the company so unceasingly pursued cannot stave off loneliness,  The bored person is lonely for himself, not, as he thinks, for others.” 

Perhaps Hell is partly that level of cynical unawareness that makes us blind to grace and joy, like the Dwarves in the barn at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle.  One thing I do know: When Christians are called to live in the present, that doesn’t mean a continuous present of the sort that can’t entertain itself.  It means a timeless present.  And it fellowship doesn’t mean constant companionship of peers, but the presence of the Love that casts out all fear.

Near the end of the chapter, Myers explains what’s at stake in a culture of diversion:

“Family and community are only one media of meaning, of the source.  High culture is another medium of meaning, one we’ll explore in more detail...The transcendent reality of God Himself, and the experience of fellowship with him in Christ, is the source of meaning.  The question remains whether popular culture cans serve as an able medium of meaning, or whether it is instead a distraction from confronting meaning, as well as meaninglessness.” (pg. 64)

 I hope to be able to blog about chapter 5 soon.  But I'm not sure when I'll get to it.  Ironically, my calendar is too full. 

Why readers read

I finished An Experiment in Criticism today.  As usual, C.S. Lewis ended his book in a state of very quotable elegance.  Here he's talking about why good readers read--because literature enlarges the soul. For one not familiar with Lewis, it might almost sound like he's being snobbish, but please don't take it that way.  I really don't know any other way he could have said what follows and still get his point across:

"Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world.  In it, we should be suffocated...

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.  In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.  But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."  

Enough said.

The pervasiveness of pop culture

At Cindy of Dominion Family's invitation, I am happy to be joining her 2009 blog discussion of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes.  I've never done a blog book discussion before, so I'm looking forward to it, albeit with a certain curiosity as to whether I'll be able to contribute any original thoughts!

Like Cindy, I read this book the first time in about 2002, and it wasn't the first book I'd ever read critiquing pop culture.  Particularly, I'd read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in 1988 (and two other times since), but as Myers quotes Bloom extensively, I'll save Bloom's influence for another post. In 2002 I was a relatively new homeschooler, doing background reading on education, popular culture, and parenting--anything I could think of that might help me to homeschool effectively.  I wanted a large vision, and the reading I did then still serves me well.  I read books like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Richard Mitchell's The Graves of Academe, the Goertzels' Cradles of Eminence, Frank Smith's The Book of Learning and Forgetting, and everything by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto.  I had vaguely unschoolish sympathies in education, but the closest thing I could find to a Christian cultural commentary on early education was Charlotte Mason's series, written in Victorian times.  I wanted to find something that would address the culture of the new millennium, so I was delighted to find this book.  

There's a lot to like here, and upon rereading I have found bits of close reasoning that I didn't pick up on the first time, which I hope to discuss here later.  But as a critique on Christian response to pop culture, which is what the first chapter discusses, I find that the landscape has shifted.  In their response to the pop culture of the late 1980s, Christians concentrated on producing wholesome, bubble-gum pop alternatives to rock n' roll like Amy Grant or Sandi Patti. Mr. Myers critiques this approach effectively, but it was not one that ever appealed to me even at the height of my interest in pop culture, which was also in the 1980s. 

Nowadays Christians that I know are much more likely to consume mainstream media, even edgy varieties (though it's now well-known that the edges evolve at warp speed), viewing them through the lens of "worldview education."  What this means in everyday language is that I often hear intelligent moms who are known for their generosity and service justifying the latest sub-par PG-13 movie release as having "wonderful Christian themes," and hear the phrase "engage the culture" from blog and pulpit to such excess that it has become a sort of location joke in its own right.  As with the subcultural approach, it seems like we Christians are just trying too hard.  I think we need to admit that not every instance of pop culture can be redeemed by a sprinkling of Christian theological analysis.  It might not even bear analyzing by secular criteria.  If you're a Christian who wants to go to a movie, just say so.  And meanwhile, trust that your faith will shine on its own terms.  

But overall, I think direct confrontation is an improvement over the subcultural approach. Christian subculture always had an icky ten-years-behind feeling, and the quality was often embarrassing.  As my art professors used to say snidely, it was derivative, and what's worse, it was derivative at a time when art students were gleefully covering velvet Elvis paintings and Virgin of Guadalupe statues in a protective layer of irony.  Now Christians themselves seem to have adopted this view.  It is better to play the Pomo game along with the artists, or to try to recover some sense of honest culture for ourselves?  I prefer the straightforward approach, but then the question becomes, how simply can we live in our times without setting up rigid rules or isolating ourselves?  Is it even possible to ignore pop culture?  

As a guide, I like Myers' straightforward theme, stated in the introduction, that pop culture is permissible, but not everything that is permissible is constructive.  Pop culture, like junk food, presents "innocent" pleasures, but its principal attributes are obstacles to enjoying better things. Its triviality, while making it seem innocuous, also makes it pervasive. And therefore pop culture sets the pace, agenda, and priorities for social and (yes) spiritual experience.  I know this is true from my experience of trying to downplay pop culture at home.  (For the record, we don't ban pop culture in our home, but we don't cater to it, either.)  As C.S. Lewis says, if you want to test the strength of an invading army, try resisting it.

 

A big reason that many Christians, including myself, consume pop culture at all is to avoid social isolation.  My husband, who is well-known in his office for his humorous attacks on pop culture, nonetheless reads movie reviews so that he'll be conversant at lunch.  (He draws the line at People magazine, though.)  C.Z., who never watched Saturday morning cartoons or collected trading cards, nonetheless could rattle off all the Pokemon characters back in 2002 (or whenever it was that they were popular) so that she could talk to the other children in Sunday school.  As a teen, C.Z. is learning that in order to have a conversation she has to share others' interests--ring tones, movies, or maybe a book like The Lightning Thief or Harry Potter.  Last night on just such a mission, C.Z. started her first Harry Potter book.  Unfortunately she started it on the heels of Joan Aiken's Black Hearts in Battersea.  After eighteen pages, she sighed, "This doesn't even compare to Joan Aiken."  Today she went out and bought another Aiken book.*  

I face temptations of my own.  I discovered over Christmas that pretty much all of my relatives (the ones my generation and younger) are on Facebook.  I briefly considered joining.  After all, I don't see many of my relatives in person much anymore, so it might be a nice way to keep up with them. And you have to be invited to see someone's profile, so it's not like everyone on the net is going to be looking at your child's photos. But when I started hearing about the kinds of things that my relatives were posting, I realized that they weren't the things that caused me to have affection for them.  Mostly I love them in spite of these things, but they are just the sorts of things the medium encourages.  So I think I'll stay Faceless (and Twitter free) for now.  Besides, it would just be one more thing to keep me on the computer. 

All this is to agree with Mark Steyn that pop culture is not popular, it's omnipresent.  It's not like you can easily abstain and "be yourself."  You exist in context, in "community," whatever that means these days.  Even if you don't set out to be current, you can't avoid learning by osmosis. There are smutty ads on the subway cars, tabloids in the checkout line, and booming rock at Gap Kids when you take your six-year-old there to pick up a T-shirt or two.  As a nation, and as Christians, we are spending a remarkable amount of our time and energy on culture which is totally forgettable. Along those lines, I highly recommend Mark Steyn's 2007 article in The New Criterion, "Twenty Years Ago Today."  Unfortunately it requires a subscription to read it online, but it's one of my all-time favorite articles on pop culture.  I'll be discussing it later, along with Allan Bloom.  

Meanwhile, on the triviality front, I often hear people, even (or maybe especially) Christians, justifying the latest upward tick on the disgust meter as trivial by saying, "They're not paying attention to the words anyway," or "The girls aren't meaning to dress provocatively; they just like fashion." Well yes, but that very thoughtlessness is a big part of why I think pop culture is not always constructive.  I'm not fond of legalism, but that's because legalism is opposed to true spiritual understanding.  And so is a culture in which Christians participate in whatever is cool without thinking through why it's worth their time in the first place.  The rest of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes discusses the mechanisms of pop culture in detail, and I'm particularly interested in the discussion of how pop culture intersects with high culture, but for now I'd simply like to encourage Christians that there's nothing wrong with being a little out of the loop. The best of culture and community is timeless.

*My point isn't even that Aiken is the next Dickens or that Rowling is pulp, but C.Z. has read Dickens, and Aiken does a fun and intelligent Dickensian spoof that adds something all its own. And I haven't read Rowling, but C.Z. gave some good reasons for preferring Aiken.  The issue is instead that she was reading Rowling primarily to have something in common with other kids.