#high-brow

A high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.

Humor.

Okay, so having done a lot of research about Stephen King for my dissertation, I’ve rediscovered something that makes me feel the need to rant. Namely, the idea that literature is only ‘good’ if the majority of the population either can’t understand it, or don’t even try to read it. Of course, many of the authors these elitist critics name as high-brow are very good authors [Eg. Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace] but I don’t see the point in valuing a text just because it went over the head of most readers. 

Like, surely a book should be accessible to people? 

 And yet, there are lots of critics out there [I’m looking at you Mr. Harold Bloom] who consider authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling to be responsible for dumbing down readers. Because, apparently, if a book is popular and people enjoy it, it is because it is easy to read and contains nothing of significant value. Bloom, and critics like him, are essentially calling the majority of readers morons. Weird, considering authors such as Dickens and Shakespeare actually wrote for the masses, and who wants to try and argue that neither of those deserve to be on the list of most influential writers ever? Why should readers be considered stupid because they want to read something enjoyable? Why should authors be considered terrible or forgettable because they write something popular? I’m not saying that these so-called ‘high-brow’ books are not good, and I’m sure there’s a load of people out there who are huge fans of authors like Pynchon and Tartt [myself included] but why can’t we be allowed to enjoy whatever we want to read without being judged?

Beginning in the late fifties, The New Yorker ran a series of short Talk items about captivating graffiti slogans. Most of these accounts were brief, including simply the location and a description of the graffiti in question. The magazine chronicled an early example of literary graffiti that would take on greater artistic significance. In 1957, a keen-eyed New Yorker contributor published a small item about someone who had recently visited an “espresso joint” in Greenwich Village. The visitor took note of a phrase that was written, in elegant calligraphy, on the wall beside his chair: “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Years later, the playwright Edward Albee, who was often asked about the title of his 1962 play, told The Paris Review how he’d been inspired by a line of graffiti that he had seen scrawled on the wall of a Greenwich Village establishment during the mid-fifties. Perhaps this was the very same scribbling the magazine had noted in its pages nearly five years before the play’s début.

Click-through to continue reading a history of polite graffiti in The New Yorker: