A Kind of Poet

A Kind Poet T.H. ADAMOWSKI Donald Clarke. Allor n.rllrYlHHT Macmillan 1997· 324· Sinatra Scribner's Lahr. Sinatra: The Artist and the Man Random House 1997. 162. Art Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazza, eds. The Frank Sinatra Reader Oxford Press 1995. paper Frank Sinatra. The '-lIl"'I-',q:.~t:If I could tog,eth1er the kind of band I Frank Sinatra would be the Lester Me and IJUI.GtU.·Q,we our own sound. Miles Davis in ","".rio::o,nI"D even, ot intellectual affection for a o-(\'lf;:>1"nrrIPnt.::: and their cultural nannies continue to humanities intellectuals now embrace culture so scandal to those in the press who have not heard thatwatchwordslike 'masscult' and 'midcult' havebeenwarehoused and that it is not to own a television but to watch more than BBC and PBS programs. In the discursive models and cultuUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1999 688 T.R. ADAMOWSKI ral studies, there are few pop manifestations that have not found a place, including soap operas, movies, rap, hip-hop, and the cultural implications of those 'reinventions ' of themselves periodically undertaken by performers like Madonna and the 'artist formerly known as "Prince.'" Beyond the new media of film, co, radio, and television, such 'debased'literary genres as science fiction, techno-thrillers, mystery, and even western fiction are now routinely taught in literature departments. Indeed, detective fiction has been popular with intellectuals for so long that in some quarters any suggestion that it is a 'popular' genre may even be taken as an insult. For many intellectuals, these have long been domains of unalloyed pleasure, often indulged surreptitiously, often acquired in childhood and adolescence (butsometimes later). However, to resist the cultural residues ofCalvinism is difficult oncampuses where, even for departments concerned with art, the prevailing role models are disciplines priding themselves on explanatory 'rigour.' Thus debased sources of pleasure must undergo intellectualization , so that to read, watch, and listen to them may be seen by the Others (and felt by the self) as ways of going to work. Earlier in the century, the ride for much of pop culture was rougher. For decades, the uncultivated Many heard from the stiff lips of the cultivated Few the hectoring tone directed at Huckleberry Finn by Miss Watson. Chiens de garde of culture, from the Frankfurt School and Partisan Review, warned against kitsch. Between the oracular lines of Heidegger, mass culture represented one of the cultural forms of the anonymous das Man. For Sartre (one of the more tolerant ofthe mid-century Few), even top forty radio betrayed the special form of alienation he called 'seriality.' Of course, there were always certain exceptions. Because movies provided a pleasure that did not suffer by comparison to some older form not directed to the Many, this distinctly modern medium received an early visa permitting entry into Culture for some of its practitioners. In Words, for example, Sartre describes the pleasure he experienced at the cinema when, before his child's eyes, a 'wall' seemed, as he put it, to go into 'delirium': 'I had learned in the equalitarian discomfort of the neighborhood houses that this new art was mine, just as it was everyone else's. We had the same mental age; I was seven and knew how to read; it was twelve and did not know how to talk' (Sartre, 122). As for jazz - nearly a mass art in the 19305 and early 19405 - its sources in African-American culture earned it a seal of approval that would be validated when, eventually, the Many lost interest in the music. Finally, however, under the impact of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, cultural barriers began falling everywhere, especially in popular music. Although the substance of such music had changed (even from the entry-level rock of a decade earlier), little had changed in its merit or its trash-to-good ratio, unless one accepts estimates of that era that 'the Beatles are as good as Bach' or later claims of aging admirers that Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature. Also changed was the sheer size ofthe pop audie~ce and its astounding economic influence, dwarfing any A KIND OF POET...