Newly minted Pulitzer laureate Anne Applebaum has an interesting take on the rise and fall of the middlebrow:
I’ve recently been to two literary award ceremonies — this week’s was just an announcement — and both times I’ve lost. Maybe losers bring their own bitter, twisted emotions to their recollections of such events, but I still don’t think it’s wrong to describe the “literary” contingent at both events as, well, bitter and twisted. On both evenings, prize committee chairmen got up to praise the novel or historical work they’d selected, invariably adding a phrase or two about how, in “today’s world” such works are “ever more necessary.” Anyone talking about criticism described the lonely life of a critic; anyone talking about poetry became downright defensive. Most of the winners, in fact, were very brief. It was as if the gap between the nice things being said about them inside the room and the hostility of the world outside was too unbearable to discuss.
I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, “The Known World,” won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other?…
This happens to be one of the major themes of A Terry Teachout Reader, which The Elegant Variation (with whom I’m having lunch today) tells me is now on sale in a major New York bookstore, Coliseum. That’s my first Manhattan sighting.
Not to plug myself excessively, especially since Maud has made it unnecessary by posting an item about the Teachout Reader toward which I point you with immodest pleasure. She’s a friend (and says so), so you’re welcome to take her praise with a stalactite or two of salt, but I still hope you like it as much as she did.