Atdtda22: [42.2ii] Slow and stupified, 611-613

[Paul Nightingale]

[611.14-15] "... a regular daily broadcast of the ongoing drama The Slow and
the Stupefied, currently a great rage among the gas-head community."

One can infer a reference to soap operas as they emerged subsequently on
radio. Soaps, as now, were always central to debates about culture, in
particular the construction of something called mass culture.

And so to:

Radio soaps had plenty of detractors throughout the 1930s and 1940s,
including a group of Westchester, New York, housewives who started a series
of "I'm Not Listening" campaigns aimed at the genre. Soap operas were
singled out because they dominated daytime radio programming and because
their target audience, women, was thought to be a highly "suggestible"
population. Critics claimed soap operas represented the worst of the
broadcast industry's "assembly-line" culture, and that they possessed little
educational uplift value. But defenders of soap operas claimed that they
offered a comforting distraction from the lonely drudgery of housework. Some
defenders even went so far as to argue that soap operas had some redeeming
social and cultural value--teaching women how to cope with family problems
and/or providing them with an emotional scapegoat for the problems they
could not solve.

[...]

>From the mid-1930s until the mid-1950s about 50 percent of American women
were active listeners--attentively listening, writing letters to sponsors,
sending in box-tops for premium giveaways, and buying the products
advertised. A smaller group of club women actively opposed soap
operas--organizing meetings to discuss the genre, and, in at least one case,
organizing a full-fledged boycott. Doctors, psychologists, radio columnists,
sociologists, and audience intellectuals, who were mostly, though not
exclusively, male, wrote countless articles, studies, surveys, and
editorials--most of which condemned the genre.

[...]

>From the late 1930s until the late 1940s, soap operas occupied the center of
a debate over what was the proper form of entertainment for the American
housewife, as well as over the commercial nature of radio production. On the
one hand, these critics offered a useful critique of the commodity nature of
mass culture; on the other, they betrayed a fear of the consuming power of
women--and their influence over the form and content of daytime programming.

From: Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism,
1935-1947, University of California Press, 2004, 111, 112, 113.

See also: Adorno & Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass
Deception" in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 1979 [1944]

And so to "the topic of Gasophilia" [613.17]:

[613.23-24] "To the cognizant nose in particular, the olfactory sector--or
smell, as it is known, can be a medium for the most exquisite poetry."