Accessibility �ber Alles, noch einmal He is a l…
Accessibility �ber Alles, noch einmal
He is a loser with a low IQ who likes guns and fantasises about being someone famous or talented. No, not William Hague, but Barry George, convicted today for the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando (or �Jan Dildo� as she was affectionately known). Reading his story, I was wondering, what is the outlet for a poor deluded man who doesn�t have stupidity as an excuse? Professor of English at Oxford perhaps? Check out John Carey�s populist opinions in this review.
I could spend hours unpacking the self-contradictory assumptions Carey reveals here. For instance, he says that mass cultural literacy disproves cultural relativism (i.e., that the great books of Western literature have no intrinsic value). Yet the growth of literacy coincided with such ideas and were propagated by those who benefited from mass literacy programmes. It is why now otherwise intelligent people claim, for example, that a Nick Hornby novel is no better or no worse than one by, say, Kafka. It�s just a matter of opinion. After all, what could be more democratic than that? Professor Carey (incidentally someone who dislikes Kafka) is actually an unwitting relativist because he can see only the utilitarian aspect of literature. If it sells, makes people happy, then it must be good. The quality of radical, disruptive questioning in, say, Kafka, is condemned as elitist.
With this in mind, see Curtis White�s long and scorching essay Kid Adorno. He uses Nick Hornby�s review of Radiohead�s �experimental� Kid A record to bring attention to the general �reassertion of a familiar, grim and very repressive aesthetic� at large in the culture. That is, that �art should be a fair exchange of money for pleasure�.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Something deeply wrong
- Accessibility �ber Alles Three articles in thre…
- Zadie on Kafka again
- Conquest of vision
- Kafka and Smog The secondary literature on Kaf…
