VL-IV Un-Pop culture

[Joe Allonby]

One of the thing that I love about OBA and has brought me back time
and time again is the playing of low culture vs high culture and the
erasure of the vague line between.

C'mon! Star Trek and Popeye allusions in M&D?

Today's low culture is next century's high culture.

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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?
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