We Get Letters

One of the many benefits of conducting one’s education publicly, as we try to do here at the Jade Sphinx, is that our broad range of subjects brings us a broad range of letters.  (Oh, very well … emails; but it doesn’t sound quite the same, does it?)

Without further ado, let’s dip into our mailbag in-box, and see what we have there.

You write about children’s literature a great deal.  Do you think that’s a fit subject for adult criticism?

Short answer: yes.  In fact, I’m rather surprised at the question.  There are many children’s books – the works of Andersen, Grahame, Milne and Barrie come to mind – that rank among the most important novels in the language.  More important – a truly interesting children’s book can be read on multiple levels.  I believe that children are amused by the animal shenanigans to be found in Wind in the Willows, while adults will pause at the more subtle philosophical asides and implications. And if my home were sinking into a concrete quagmire, I would salvage a great many classic children’s books from my library before I grabbed many contemporary novels.

And keeping on a contemporary note, some of the most interesting things on bookshelves today are found in children’s books.  Look at the rich imaginative world of William Joyce, for example.

Do you really hate all rock music, or is that an affectation?  And if you do, how do you avoid it?

I am nothing but a catalog of affectations.  But, seriously, yes, I have hated most all popular music from the rock era onwards.  It’s not simply that all of it is bad – though it is; or that it is very bad for you – though it is that, too; rather, it is simply because we have lost so much by embracing so little.  The palette from which rock (and funk, pop, bubblegum, rap … and all the other playground words we use to describe it) paints with sound is a very limited one, indeed.  We now find ourselves in a musical landscape which has very little room for romantic love, or simple idealism, or even, it seems, common decency.  It is no surprise that mores and society have both degraded since the advent of rock.  If a personal library is the measure of a man, then popular music is the measure of a people, and what our music says about us flatters no one.  When contemplating contemporary music, it is inexplicable to me that we do not all simply retreat from it in shame.

As for hiding from it … it is a continual battle.

I found your lamenting a lack of humor in The Iliad and The Homesman to be more than a little quirky.  Do you really think that humor can be found in most anything?

This reminds me of another reader who asked how an aesthete could have a sense of humor.  I think the only possible reply is that an aesthete must have one.

True story: my husband and I were leaving Cambodia on our way to Thailand.  We were at the airport, going through customs.  The customs agent processing my husband’s passport looked at him, looked at the document, stamped it, and nodded him on.  My customs agent looked at me, looked at my passport, looked at me, looked at my passport…. Finally stamping it and holding it out to me.  But – before I could take it, he snatched it away and held up and tiny, printed sign that read, TEN DOLLARS COFFEE MONEY.  I cocked an eyebrow at him and countered, “how much do you want for tea?”

What encounter with art changed you profoundly?

Too many to list here.  Perhaps the most formative was a one-man show by John Gay about Oscar Wilde called Diversions and Delights.  It starred Vincent Price and I went multiple times in my early teenage years.  I’ve never been the same.

When the Apollo Belvedere came to New York as part of the touring Vatican show – again in my teenage years – I stood before it for hours, transfixed.  Here, I thought, was something utterly and completely perfect in every way. 

After reading your piece on the New American Philistine, I suggest you leave your mother’s basement and walk around the real-world for a bit.

Many thanks for the breath of fresh air.  Or something.

Brickbats aside, America isn’t the Land of the Philistine, it’s the Promised Land of the Philistine.  We don’t want to hear it, and pretend that all aesthetic opinions are created equal, and that democratization of taste allows the cream to rise to the top.  But none of that, however, is quite true.  Signs of our cultural decay are all around us, and plain to see.  We are gorging ourselves on junk, and it is killing us. 

Do you have questions?  Send them in for a future column!

Undershaw House

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Steel True, Blade Straight

If I had told you that the home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), where he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905) still stood, what would you expect?  A museum?  A shrine?  And if I added that it was here that he entertained the creators of such literary masterpieces as Peter Pan and Dracula?  That Virginia Woolf was a guest?  Wouldn’t you expect people waiting to see it?

Wrong.  How about converting it into some tacky apartments, instead?  Proving that America does not have a monopoly on Philistinism, we learn the following from The Folio Newsletter:

Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's home in Hindhead, Surrey, is the subject of a legal bid by campaigners aiming to prevent it from being converted into flats. The house, which overlooks the South Downs, was built by Conan Doyle in 1897 for his wife Louisa, who suffered from ill health. After her death a decade later, he sold it. The house is virtually untouched from the period and retains such features as the family coat of arms, which appears on the impressive stained glass windows. Undershaw also remains significant to fans of Conan Doyle as the place where he wrote many of his most famous works. With continued uncertainty about its future, however, it is in a state of neglect and has been boarded up because of recent acts of vandalism.

The Undershaw Preservation Trust claims to have identified a buyer for the property who wants to restore it to its former glory as a single family home, but has so far failed to convince the local council to stop developers from pushing forward with plans to convert the property despite its status as a listed building.

Again and again we see this callous disregard for our shared cultural heritage.  Doyle himself drafted the first designs of the house, which rests on a three-acre lot, and passed his plans onto architect Joseph Henry Ball to complete. Doyle had installed an electric plant (rare in those days) and a railway in the grounds for the use of his children.                         

But what galls me more than the desire to convert this historic site into apartments is that the house has already been vandalized.  The urge to vandalize beautiful things (and this includes the scourge of graffiti, surely one of Satan’s means of assuring us he’s ever-present) is a tragic part of the human makeup that never seems to go away.

But this sad story also brings up larger questions.  When Neil Caffrey of Fossway Ltd bought the building for development, he could not have been ignorant of its historical significance. Does he simply not care?  Or does money trump history, art and the public good? (Rest assured your correspondent has a healthy respect for money.) 

And what of the vandals?  It occurs to me that vandals never desecrate ugly things, only objects of beauty or significance.  This is part of our overall cultural decay: the further we retreat from beauty, from our shared cultural history, and from the achievements of those who have come before, the more we grow to hate and distrust those things.  Be warned, it’s a short step from acts of vandalism to lives of barbarism.

Readers interested in doing something to protect Undershaw can find more information here: http://www.saveundershaw.com/.

The New American Philistine

Recently I received an email which read, in part, “you are often railing against the philistines, but you have yet to really define who they are.  Just so I fully understand your points of view, who are these philistines that you see every day, and how can I recognize them?”

Good questions all.  You correspondent must confess that defining the contemporary philistine is a formidable task: the picture must, thanks to the rapidity of change, shift too fast and too regularly for a concrete definition to take hold.  However, like the good judge and pornography, I know it when I see it and so, in that spirit, following are some of the defining traits of the new American philistine.

None of these characteristics, separately or in-and-of-themselves, are enough to label one a philistine, but one or more are a sure sign of cultural and intellectual decay.

Multiple tattoos, for instance, or, anyone with tattoos that are visible when fully dressed.  Why this repulsive, tribal holdover has reemerged is a mystery of terrifying potency; at times, it almost seems as if modern man wishes to run around in grass skirts and nose bones, which leads us to the next signifier.

Multiple piercings – if an individual is pierced in the eyebrow, nose, tongue, perineum, lip or has more ear holes than a rotary phone, then a charge of philistinism is warranted.  In fact, I had recently seen a woman with so many piercings in her lip that watching her drink was like looking at a fountain.

If underwear is at all visible when fully clothed, then that person is a philistine (and rather unhygienic, to boot).  Similarly, if trousers are worn so low on the body that running becomes impossible, you are witnessing witless philistinism.  Such individuals invariably have photographs of themselves with: a baseball cap turned sideways or backwards, thumb-index-and-pinky-finger extended, tongue pointed at camera, or, a gun.

If you are near someone listening to an iPod, MP3 player or similar device through earphones and you can hear the music, you are near a philistine.  If you can hear the music through their earphones more than two feet away, it is quite possible that the wearer is not only a philistine, but functionally brain dead.  The same is true of car stereos audible outside of the actual car itself.  Which leads us to another indication…

If the subject is interested in rock (be it ‘classic,’ glitter, glam, pop, bubblegum, hard or whatever), funk, rapp, hip hop, reggae, gangsta, disco, gospel or soul, then you are dealing with a philistine.  This, I’m afraid, is beyond debate.

If the person in question owns fewer than 25 books (not including, of course, children’s books and/or comics and ‘graphic novels’), then they are a philistine.  Similarly, a taste for Dan Brown, Harold Robbins, or Harry Potter is highly suspect.

A philistine thinks movies made pre-1980 are ‘old,’ refuses to watch anything in black-and-white or with subtitles, and equates box office success with quality. 

If the television is on whenever the subject is at home, they are a philistine.  If they have a predilection for Mad Men, they are a philistine with pretentions.

If artistic tastes run towards graffiti, ‘tagging’ or other forms of public vandalism, then you’re dealing with a philistine.

If tastes turn towards ‘art’ that incorporates any of the of the following – feces, urine, decapitated cows, lard, blood or detritus – then that individual has surpassed philistinism and entered barbarism.  If you have paid a considerable amount of money for a signed urinal, ‘street art,’ a soup can label or a bucket of broken glass, you are not just a philistine, but a sucker, as well.

The philistine decorates their home with ‘collectibles’ issued by the Franklin Mint.  Often, there is at least one picture of a napping puppy, throw pillows with ‘cute’ phrases stitched into them or potpourri.  If you, gentle reader, find yourself in such an atmosphere, run for the nearest exit.

These are the signifiers that immediately come to mind.  I now open the floor to my readers – how do you define the new American philistine?