tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post111553062901219407..comments2024-02-23T03:28:33.435-05:00Comments on Culture Industry: TasteMark Scrogginshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1115659489161966942005-05-09T13:24:00.000-04:002005-05-09T13:24:00.000-04:00I'd like to pick up on two things you say here, Ma...I'd like to pick up on two things you say here, Mark, in addition to my long post in response (about "Pleasure and Gratification") over at Say Something Wonderful. <BR/><BR/>First, although I like Casey Mohammad's proviso that taste is never entirely personal--that it emerges from the confluence of education, class, social norms, etc., and individual idiosyncracy--I'm very suspicious of his concluding point: "just because it tastes good doesn't mean you should eat it." Why ever not? What evidence is there that "eating" the wrong poetry ever did anything bad to anyone? Mighty Casey strikes out on that point, unless he--or you, or anyone else--can point me to a case or two. (Supersize me, guys.) Why is it so hard to stop shaking that bossy Puritan finger, let alone that bossy Puritan groove thing? The better analogy is music, where, as Duke Ellington says, "If it sounds good, it IS good." Period.<BR/><BR/>Second point, about introspection. I agree that there isn't often much to be gained by dwelling on the personal sources of our tastes, except perhaps when you're writing the lead for an entertaining essay. I do think, though, that it's often very helpful to track down that training-in-taste that Casey speaks of. Think of how the old textbook "Sound and Sense" tried to school generations of students to tell "Bad Poetry from Good" and "Good Poetry from Great," or the various projects of rejection and recovery that critics (and poets) have engaged in for the last century or so. Such tracking, though, seems to me most useful only if it's done in the Freudian manner, to free us from repression, rather than to cultivate a new, putative "freedom" from cultural norms, which generally entails tugging on one of those scratchy black "Shprockets" turtlenecks and forgetting how to dance. <BR/><BR/>EMSE. M. Selingerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com