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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Holy shit. I just watched Car Wash last year. Or rather, tried to watch it. I never did get through it. My god what an absolutely insensible and insufferable movie.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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There should be a running list of things that should be read/viewed as part of the work of becoming a polymath. Perhaps with justifications. A canon of culture, if you please.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This occurred to me when I found you had to look up who W G Grace was. It is almost but not quite tantamount to me asking who Babe Ruth was. There is a corpus of knowledge you need to have before embarking on the task of becoming a polymath.
But there is a complication: Americans (and possibly Canadians) have a unique 'set of canons' arising from a coefficient between their insularity and their cultural dominance. They suffer from what one of their vice-presidents nearly called
| Not knowing what you don't know because you already assumed you knew it. |
But Ishmael exhibits a different complication. Political beliefs. At his age, he should already have watched Carwash. I won't know until I get a chance to watch it at my age but, while it was riotously funny at the time, I may very well find it 'insensible and insufferable' now. But I doubt it, I have worked on my political beliefs harder than he has.
I do have a complication in this regard. I have developed such a rooted dislike of anything that is being crammed down my gullet in the name of woke that I can never return to what ordinary members of the intelligentsia are prepared to have crammed down their gullets quite happily.
| And may be part of the canon. | |
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | There is a corpus of knowledge you need to have before embarking on the task of becoming a polymath |
Knowledge of early big-name cricket players is baseline knowledge? I'm going to plead cultural relativism on this one.
| I have developed such a rooted dislike of anything that is being crammed down my gullet in the name of woke that I can never return to what ordinary members of the intelligentsia are prepared to have crammed down their gullets quite happily. |
The 75th anniversary edition of 1984 now allegedly includes trigger warnings in its new Introduction, the wokester prof decrying the lack of black characters and Orwell's assertion that the young women of the party were the most fervent/bad.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Knowledge of early big-name cricket players is baseline knowledge? I'm going to plead cultural relativism on this one. |
That is exactly what I'm referring to. Cricket is not obscure, it is a world sport (of sorts). W G Grace is not an early big-name cricketer (you have to learn the terminology as well), he is seminal in the rise of (a) professionalism in sport and (b) celebrity culture in general.
You have to learn what's important as opposed to what you personally find interesting. Fortunately the rise of cable TV means you don't have to spend forever reading up about everything, a one-hour documentary gives you everything you'll need to know about anything.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Wiley don't get opera, ballet, or chamber music.
I thought I was a bit better on action films until I rashly suggested that Aquaman deserved to be in the canon. I was soon put right about that.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I also don't get this obsession with wokeness. It's a bit like pointing out the implausibility of all leads and villains in action, police procedurals, detective films etc being experts in martial arts or undertaking super-dangerous pursuit sequences.
"It doesn't reflect my real lived experience."
"Er..... no, it doesn't"
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Wiley don't get opera, ballet, or chamber music. |
I'm with you on those choice morsels of high culture--and plenty of others too. You don't have to listen to the wretched stuff, just acquire a bluffer's guide on the basics.
It's surprising, once you do, how easy it is to become 'conversant' and then even 'an expert' because you are concentrating on the sociology of it all whereas the cognoscenti are all wrapped up in, say, comparing performances. Stuff nobody else gives a monkeys about. (Though you should--without actually listening to the performances--because you learn a lot from what the high falutas are high faluting about.)
I don't share your fondness for action movies (unless they're in the canon, like Bullit or French Connection) and I still haven't heard of Aquaman, though I know enough to know he is (or isn't) part of a completely separate canon, Superheroes.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Beyoncé kicked off the first of her six concerts at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium tonight as part of her Cowboy Carter world tour. ITV London News. |
Why does this fill me with astonishment? I understand Beyoncé has zillions of fans in Britain. I understand they can never get in to her concerts. I understand they would think nothing of a trip to London to see her. But even so... it's not right. A tour is a tour. Six nights at the same place is a residency.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Like everyone else with a British education, I have a rooted dislike of the English literary canon when it comes to reading matter after leaving school. I don't mind watching Bronte costume dramas if they are nice and zippy and everyone is overacting like mad but curling up with a Penguin Classics Lorna Doone for a coupla months is best left to Eng Lit students.
Unless it's a three hour adaptation on Radio 4, I don't mind that after a hard day at the computer. But the plot! I've read enough Mills & Boon to understand that romantic fiction rarely runs smooth but I don't recall any lovesick swain or swainess hanging around for years on the offchance their opposite number will still be yearning for you after a momentary encounter in childhood. Never mind both of you!
And having a sister who had read about snowshoes because you had given her Hakluyt's seventeenth century Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation after a trip to London to confer with Judge Jeffries, and she telling you about them so you would be the only person capable of traversing Exmoor in a snowstorm to save your intended from marrying the bloke who killed your father is a plot device rarely used in Mills & Boon.
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