VL-IV Un-Pop culture

[Mark Kohut]

bandwraith wrote: 
Several things occurred to me while re-reading VL so far.
First, the lack of high culture. No Botticelli, Beethoven, or
any of the other high culture references so prominent in
the novels that preceded VL- not even a cartoon or a
kazoo version. "Classic" in this book refers to a car, a tv
show, a movie or some other pop venue, and nothing
more. There is the Marquis de Sade, but I'm not sure how
to classify the Marquis- high, low or something else.

MK: I say de Sade is low, real lowdown and sadistically violent, as we know---and was newly popular in America from the sixties. 

Nabokov, read in some degree by our OBA, has this concept, "poshlost", to define a kind of pop culture 'kitsch' (and more): 

"he defined it as "'self-satisfied inferiority,' moral and spiritual" (Mirsky 1927, p. 158). Vladimir Nabokov made it more widely known in his book on Gogol, where he romanized it as "poshlust" (punningly: "posh + lust"). Poshlust, Nabokov explained, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive" (Nabokov 1944, p. 70). 

>From Count Chocula thru Leatherface through the Marquis de Sade, TRPs pop world of "Vineland" is full of a lust for violence and, arguably, the characters' kitschy culture?