Horizon

...and of course the question is complicated by the way some art forms & individual works have of becoming high culture in retrospect when they weren't at first. E.g. Shakespeare -- e.g., for that matter, live theater in general.

P.S. Camille Paglia comes from Endicott, New York, an area of mainly rural upstate New York chiefly known for state prisons, the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory, and the State University of New York at Binghamton, which, at least in the years when Paglia would have been growing up around there, didn't cast much of a cultural shadow beyond its own campus. The one really high-quality community cultural institution in that area is (or, anyway, was) a genuinely good opera company maintained by the area's large Italian-American community. So what you get in Paglia is a result of her upbringing: denigration of American culture, praise of Europe (especially Southern Europe) as the source of all high culture, and a constant effort to use big words and take highfalutin positions in order to mask being a mere American from mere Endicott, New York. Understand this about her and all her antidemocratic snobbery makes sense.

Dickens is another example of hack work which has become 'classic' or 'canonical'. Even the concept of the novel is, in high cultural terms and if you forgive the pun, novel having only existed for a few centuries.

Curiously, the work which forms the initial canon of a form (once a form is accepted as art) tends to be from within 50 to 100 years of the form gaining popularity: Austen was writing only 50 or so years after 'Tom Jones' which, IIRC, was the first western novel. If you look at modern forms then you notice that cinema (born 1895) gains critical acceptence in about 1945/50 - and the uncritical 'classics' are from about that time. Oddly, the denigration of cinema as mere popular culture (something you get a lot of when it initially emerged) has gone and it - like novels - get divided into highbrow and lowbrow.

Culture doesn't decline, it evolves. The epic poetry of Homer still exists. There was a chap reciting some epic from memory on the Today programme yesterday, but he was from China so obviously that doesn't count since anyone discussing "the death of culture" is really talking about "the death of *my* (often DWM) culture".

apologies - the epic poem is Krygyzstani and the extract here is as the villian dips prepares to ride out from Beijing to attack the hero:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/rams/story_telling.ram

Understand this about her and all her antidemocratic snobbery makes sense.

Camille Paglia can I'm sure defend herself, but would you like all your ideas to be reduced to the sum of a few childhood neuroses?

'Tom Jones' which, IIRC, was the first western novel

Are you referring to the bit where Squire Allworthy rounds up the posse at Dead Man's Gulch?

Hm. "DWM" I assume means "Dead White Male". Haven't been subjected to that one in a long time, and I live in Berkeley even.

This is a nice, handy survey of evidence for a downward spiral in attention span. It also mentions in passing the well-attested and steady increase in worldwide IQ scores that by now has its own name.

>Understand this about her and all her
>antidemocratic snobbery makes sense.

Camille Paglia can I'm sure defend herself, but would you like all your ideas to be reduced to the sum of a few childhood neuroses?

Naturally I'd be terrified of any such thing.

Dickens as 'hack work'? Oh dear Mags you have a hard-on to bury white culture dontcha. Still, being 'culturally democratic' means never having to make a value judgement- *unless* it's about white culture, of course.
As for the high culture thing and attention spans: Frank James the notorious rural Mississippian train robber brother of Jesse James could recite reams of Shakespeare between jobs- find me a gangsta who does that.

I think memorizing things was probably much more common in James' time, what with very low literacy rates and no calculators and so on.

I don't know if I speak for Mags here, but it might clarify her comment to observe that "hack work" can label the way in which work is performed and presented, without necessarily criticizing its quality.

Dickens did write fiction quickly, sometimes "strictly from hunger," for serialized publication, and the results were snatched up by the public like a new X-Men comic, not like a new work of Great Literature.

And in another fifty years or so, it probably won't make any sense to say what I've just said here, because by then I bet everyone will see the X-Men comics as being canonical Great Literature too.

Yeah I know Mab, I know exactly that he wrote for money and for his supper but me, I regard the term 'hack work' as having a distinct pejorative whiff about it. As it was used in the context of general 'cultural democracy'('Sh*t For All') and peevish 'dead white male' waffle I took it as having *more* than a slight pejorative whiff about it.