I've been thinking about brow height lately. The terms are odd ones--highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow. (Really, shouldn't this last describe a person whose eyebrows meet in the middle?) They're also used oddly. For one thing, the whole business smacks of phrenology, the pseudoscience of determining personal qualities from the shape of the subject's head (or, as Inspector Clouseau once put it, the practice of studying "ze bimps on ze head.") Head shape and head size don't have a thing to do with intelligence, so why does our critical vocabulary continue to suggest that they do? People used to make specious generalizations about intelligence based on the size of a woman's bust, too, but I can't imagine dismissing a work of fiction by claiming it was too big-breasted.

Another weird thing is that critics rarely seem to complain that works are too highbrow or too lowbrow, but seem much more willing to use "middlebrow" as a pejorative term. This tendency seems to fly in the face of Aristotle's Golden Mean, for one thing, and it pretty much flips the bird to Buddha's concept of the Middle Path at the same time. If I were convinced that highbrow meant "good" and lowbrow meant "bad," I suppose I'd at least be able to see middlebrow as "mediocre," but I can't really see how the middle position is the one most deserving of scorn.

Part of my issue with the browbeaters is my natural tendency toward irreverence. When an artist orders me to pay him critical obeisance, my first instinct is to spit on his shoes while I'm bent over. The ones before whom I willingly bow tend to be the ones who don't take themselves too seriously. In Lectures on Shakespeare, W.H. Auden said it far better than I can:

In the early sonnets [Shakespeare] talks about his works outlasting time. But increasingly he suggests, as Theseus does in A Midsummer Night's Dream, that "The best in this kind are but shadows" (V.i.214), that art is rather a bore. He spends his life at it, but he doesn't think it's very important. His characters behave like men of action, but they talk so like Shakespeare himself, so subtly and sensitively, that if they were real, they would not be able to act, they'd be exhausted. I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude towards his work. There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously. When art takes itself too seriously, it tries to do more than it can... But in order to continue to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.

And there's nothing quite like the pleasure of porridge that's juuuuust right, is there?


12:03 PM

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Barry Took died a week or so back. He was not a household name, but he's significant to me and to many others because of a task he undertook (pardon the pun) in the late Sixties, namely the construction of a BBC-TV comedy series. By assembling the talents of three brash young comedians from Do Not Adjust Your Set, another two from At Last the 1948 Show, and a crazed American artist/animator, he set in motion what would eventually become Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Python's humor has been, to put it mildly, a big influence on me. My brother is really the one to blame, because back in 1975 it was he who told me about the Bridge of Death sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail after he'd seen it while spending a weekend with a friend. I found the idea amusing enough to seek out the film on my own, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. For an impressionable twelve-year-old, it was a smorgasbord, a display of comedy of every sort, piled high and steaming fresh: the twisted (Chico) Marxian logic of the witch trial, the grand guignol slapstick of the Black Knight's dismemberment, the visual surrealism of the animated medieval illuminations, the relentless silliness of the Knights Who Say "Ni!", and even a dirty word or two to keep me paying attention. It was the perfect humor for a nerd just entering puberty, when nerdhood blossoms bold and brightly, and laughter is in short supply.

Needless to say, I wasn't alone. My friends were Python fans, and I even took one of my first dates to see a late show of Holy Grail near the end of sixth grade, and got my first kiss out of the deal, too. When I got to Chapel Hill High School, though, I saw just how big a touchstone Python really was for the nerds of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School System. When I and the other members of the Drama Club (always a popular haven for nerds) gathered for our yearbook photo during my sophomore year, we waited a good twenty minutes for the photographer to arrive. When he finally opened the door and walked in, he discovered a good three dozen of us milling around aimlessly--but Peter Rogers immediately brought us all to attention by intoning "And there was much rejoicing!"

Instantly, and much to the photographer's bewilderment, three dozen voices were raised in a faint and totally unrehearsed "Yaaaaay."

And so I thank Mr. Took, who gave me something to share with others. So many of the people I hold dear came into my life because of those years in the Drama Club, and so many of those years were peppered with shared giggles over jokes from a group that never would have existed without him. If Python did nothing else, it got me kissed.
8:08 PM

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