Eccentric Flower:199906/Highbrow lowbrow and in between

There are times when I reject the lowbrow. And there are times when I reject the highbrow. I can't seem to find much pattern. If it's elitism, it's a very curious kind. It's not even as simple as carving out the middle sigmas of the curve and only keeping that. It's spotty. I can never figure out what I'll reject, and I often can't figure out why I reject it.

I dislike James Joyce, which is a curious thing for someone to say who did three thesis papers on Joyce in high school. I feel that Joyce stories go nowhere and do nothing; they are interesting to analyze for their tone and imagery, but they aren't interesting to read. Books should be either entertaining or enlightening or both; fiction, I feel, should bias heavily toward the former. But most Joyce neither entertains nor enlightens me. It is simply a curiosity. It's like deciphering hieroglyphics (which I'm pretty good at). It is not practical for me to write in them, except as ornamentation. I am certainly not going to spend any length of time reading a manuscript in hieroglyphics; the work of decoding them would make it impossible for me to pay sufficient attention to the thread of the narrative. They're fun as an occasional puzzle. Like cryptograms. Would you want to read a book that was entirely written in enciphered text? No? Well, would you want to read Finnegans Wake?

On the other hand, I have read novels which "didn't go anywhere" and enjoyed them - Life, A User's Manual by Georges Perec comes to mind. I think it may be difficulty of access. I have a problem with Pynchon, because it's so hard to tell what he's doing and where he's going. So what if he's brilliant? He makes his reader jump through too many hoops.

And since Cryptonomicon has been described in Pynchonesque terms by several people, I may reluctantly have to sever my relationship with the amazing Neal Stephenson. I was already somewhat put off by the idea that the book was 900 pages and only the first half of his actual MS.

Tim Powers is probably the closest I get to the intense multi-layered onion of Pynchon's style on a regular basis. It took me a while to figure out all the layers that were taking place in Last Call, but there it didn't distract - there it made the journey more fun. I don't know where the limit is, when it starts being a problem for me.

Tom Robbins is my ideal in terms of meandering digressions and playful words. With Robbins, you know in advance that the plot is not the point, and you can read with joy while he plays. But you also know there is a plot, and that for all his wandering he will get you to a destination eventually. With Pynchon (and Joyce for that matter) I don't have that reassurance. I worry that they'll strand me in the middle of the desert with no gas for my car and then tell me it was all a big absurdist joke.

Needless to say, I loathe absurdists. And nihilists. Cynics are okay.

On the other side of the coin, I shy away from anything that smacks of physical or vulgar humor. Usually it's because I just don't think that stuff is funny - but sometimes, I admit, I'm avoiding it because of the way I perceive the "typical audience" for that humor. With something like Dumb and Dumber, I won't go because I won't think it's funny. With something like Austin Powers, it's because I fear guilt-by-association with the audience.

But I went to the second Austin Powers movie anyway, because Nonelvis talked me into it.

Jette and Diane and a slew of others, including Owen Glieberman of the Owen and Lisa Show, have already said everything that needs to be said about this film. As Jette said, it's the kind of film the phrase "wildly uneven" was invented for. I like the way Owen put it best: When Myers is having fun, when he's got material, the film works; but when he runs out of material, he dips too readily into the toilet. There were sequences which were just painful to watch. Most of them involved the Fat Bastard character. On the other hand, I thought I'd heard every such joke ever known, but I giggled at the rapid-fire montage of penis slang. The first time. Myers also has a tendency to return to the same territory too often.

Meanwhile I am no closer to figuring out why I dislike some things on sight. For example, when I saw the trailer for the South Park movie, I was hit with a sinking feeling ... because the trailer was actually funny, and it occurred to me that I might actually have to see this movie. And I don't want to do that. I don't want Parker and Stone to have any of my money. It will only encourage them to make more movies.

And yet ....

I've only seen the show a couple of times, and it's made me giggle once or twice when I have seen it, so it's not like I have a basis for this feeling. My dislike of those two is visceral, and probably quite unreasonable. I wish I could figure it out!