This week’s question comes from reader XIO666:
“What’s your favorite piece of pre-20th century pop culture? I’ll go with Micromegas by Voltaire, a short novel where two intelligent beings from much larger planets visit Earth and are quite amused to find such miniature inhabitants believing the universe was made for them. One of these beings ultimately agrees to write a book for us Earthlings describing the meaning of life, however, it turns out that the book contains only blank pages. Micromegas is the precursor to all science fiction and one of the first serious examples of speculation on intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. It is also one of the earliest examples of what we would recognize as today as existentialist philosophy and also trolling.”
Gwen Ihnat
Every winter, at some point I return to the 800-plus pages of Anna Karenina. I even forced it on my book club, who protested its length, but I tried to win them over with the fact that it’s basically just a giant Russian soap opera. The title character’s famously doomed relationship with Vronsky becomes her undoing, but I love all the other relationships that swirl around her: Anna’s unfaithful brother Stiva, whose latest scandal opens the novel, or the tender love story of Levin and Kitty, who are like an inverse of Anna and Vronsky. It’s not a short undertaking, but it’s intoxicatingly easy to get sucked into Tolstoy’s gossipy format, which turns poetic at times, like when Levin is ruminating on his love for his land, or the train scenes that mirror each other by opening and closing the book. I’ve never even seen a movie version of it, because I love it so much I doubt any screen adaptation could live up to what I’ve crafted in my head. If you’ve never tackled Anna Karenina, I highly recommend it—maybe in January, curled up in your favorite chair with some vodka.
Danette Chavez
Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons are some of the best-known violin concertos, popping up on classical music stations all over the world and inspiring countless derivations (including the Diamond Music popularized by a series of De Beers commercials, which I once incorrectly assumed was actually Vivaldi’s work). More than any other work of classical music, they inspired me to pick up the violin. The Baroque arrangements made me aware of everything a violin—really, any string instrument—could do: mourn the loss of life in winter, exult in the spring, embrace the fall, and languidly enjoy the summer. I was never more than an adequate violinist, but when I played “L’inverno” for the first time in my high school orchestra, it very much felt like I had accomplished my dream.
Alex McLevy
From where I’m sitting at my desk, I can see more than a few of my favorite pre-20th-century texts sitting on my bookshelf: Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s Three Discourses, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Max Stirner’s The Ego And Its Own. (I swear I’m not being pretentious—eight years of a Ph.D in politics will do this to you.) Having spent a not-inconsiderable part of my adult life with my head buried in pre-Enlightenment-era writings, I used to be able to whip out a top-10 list of such works at a moment’s notice. I’m pretty sure it’s still lying around here somewhere, but it’s been a few years now since I was immersed in that world, and with the benefit of some time apart, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on what truly moves me the most from before the 1900s, and truth be told, it’s not a book at all. It’s a painting: Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. The image, at first glance, appears to be a classically renaissance artwork: The German-born artist knew his Dutch masters, and he surrounds his two ambassadors (one in secular clothing, the other clerical) with a plethora of symbols of humankind’s scientific advancements and erudition. Globes, a sundial, music instruments, textiles, and more line the walls and tables. But take a closer look—at first, there seems to be a strange line cutting across the floor between them. This is one of the most famous uses of anamorphosis in all of art history, a distorted perspective requiring the viewer to stand at just the right point of view to be able to see what’s been depicted. In this case, if you manage to look from high on the right side (or low on the left), you’ll see it: a human skull. Cutting across this work of art is a warped projection of death itself, erupting into normal reality to remind you that no matter the advancements of the species, death comes for us all. It gives me chills even now, and this was painted in 1533, for god’s sake. Holbein was a badass.
William Hughes
What’s that? A chance to talk about Johannes Trithemius, a.k.a. my favorite nerd in all of history? Don’t mind if I do! Born in 15th-century Germany, and raised by a stepfather who didn’t care for book learnin’, Trithemius had to do all his early reading on the quiet—which might explain why he became one of the founding fathers of modern cryptographic techniques. His most influential work was the three-volume Steganographia, my favorite book that I’ll never, ever read, and the text that lends its name to present-day steganography (i.e., hiding information within other text, or, as it’s now known, “designing escape-room puzzles”). Ostensibly a book of black magic about convincing spirits to convey secret messages for you, Steganographia is actually a textbook on early cryptography—something that only became clear when the cypher key to translate its first two volumes was published in 1606. (People are still working on the third.) Besides being serious business, vis-à-vis international politics and war, cryptography is also a deliriously dorky affair, and it’s clear that Trithemius must have been having an enormous amount of fun designing these incredibly obscure puzzles for his geeky descendants to one day decipher.
Katie Rife
The first motion-picture projector was invented in the late 1880s, and cinema’s first decade produced some fascinating experiments: the world’s first cat video, for example, or the first onscreen kiss. Both of those came through the workshop of Thomas Edison, however, and while Edison wasn’t really as bad as the Nikola Tesla fans of the world make him out to be, the Edison Co.’s willingness to electrocute animals to prove the superiority of its DC current is a big turnoff for me. So it’s a good and lucky thing that we have Alice Guy-Blaché, the world’s first female film director, to celebrate instead. Back when I was in film school, they were still teaching college kids that The Great Train Robbery (1903) was the world’s first narrative film. But in the decade-plus since, Guy-Blaché’s 1896 film La Fée Aux Choux has become rightly recognized as achieving that particular milestone a solid seven years before Edison cameraman Edwin S. Porter made his film. The plot of La Fée Aux Choux is simple: Based on a French fairy tale explaining where babies come from, a fairy pulls two real babies and one doll out of a cabbage patch. That’s about it, at least in the 1896 version. (Guy-Blaché remade the film with new footage in 1900 and 1902.) But for as simple as it is, this is one of the first films to have a plot based on a script, and not just document a real-world phenomenon. The fact that it was made by a visionary woman who’s recently been pulled from obscurity to take her rightful place in film history takes it from merely interesting to downright inspirational.
Erik Adams
In the most “high-school drama kid browsing the T-shirt wall at Hot Topic” answer this side of “Edgar Allan Poe’s pretty cool,” I’m going to go with Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. The dull, contemporary impulse is to plumb Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and through the looking glass for their most twisted elements (the same goes for L. Frank Baum’s Alice-inspired Oz novels)—a necessary reaction to their Disneyfication, but also one that narrows the range of the material’s imagination. Not to say that there’s nothing macabre about the tale of the walrus and the carpenter, or nothing sinister about a decapitation-happy monarch. But if that’s all you’re focusing on, you’re missing the ingenuity of Carroll’s language, or the boldly illogical manner in which his narratives proceed—that “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” conundrum that makes the books so ripe for adaptation, yet so easily garbled in their translation from page to screen. Better to get lost in the riddles and paradoxes and the vastness of this fantasy world, and the merest of visual hints provided by illustrations of a Mad Hatter who can’t move—let alone dance the Futterwacken.
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Not enough people these days read the author Ivan Turgenev. In the circle of great later-19th century writers that included Henry James and Gustav Flaubert it was Turgenev that the writers themselves considered the very best. On his deathbed Turgenev had pleaded with his friend Tolstoy to return to writing literature.
He’s a master of the pen. Eloquent and incredibly thoughtful-one of the best writers of all time (Russia has no shortage of them).
Yeah, apparently the AV Club is going all-out to try and make me seem like an intellectual lightweight today, ‘cause mine’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Elementary, my dear Scotty
That’s a good answer because some (not all!) of these responses treat “pop culture” as “creative work I have heard of,” which seems to miss the mark for me. The casual use of “pre-20th century pop culture” kind of begs the question. Of course there were more and less popular works of art in the past, but reflecting a hazily defined modern category back into the past raises a lot more questions for me than it does any immediate answers. What work is “pop” doing there? Does it actually mean anything or is it just a meaningless prefix now applied to all artistic culture as a habitual reflex. If I said my favorite work of 20th century pop culture was Ligeti’s Piano Etudes (it’s not, but they’re great), that would seem odd, since most people don’t consider Ligeti pop culture (the AVClub does not generally write commentary on his work) – and yet another of his pieces, Lux Aeterna, was heard by many more people within Ligeti’s own lifetime than all of Vivaldi’s concerti put together were in his, since Kubrick appropriated it for a movie.
I think you’ve hit on something important here. In the past, what was “popular” often wasn’t really up to those who were the end-consumers. Religious art, for example, can be breathtakingly gorgeous and can certainly still speak to modern audiences, but the people being exposed to it when it was produced weren’t seeking it out in books and museums, it was foisted upon them whether they liked it or not. And it usually wasn’t created in the spirit of “art for art’s sake”, it was essentially religious propaganda, commissioned and paid for by wealthy patrons seeking to maintain their worldview’s grasp over the minds of others.
And it usually wasn’t created in the spirit of “art for art’s sake”, it was essentially religious propaganda, commissioned and paid for by wealthy patrons seeking to maintain their worldview’s grasp over the minds of others.I mean, I’ve got some news for you about a thing called “capitalism” …But what I was really thinking about was – ok, let’s take music. Before sound reproduction, you had two ways of experiencing a secular piece of notated music. Either you could go to a professional concert – which was an option not open to most people for both financial and geographic reasons (no matter how “popular” an opera was in Vienna, that didn’t help you if you were in Glasgow), or you could witness (or partake in) a private performance in your home or a friend’s home. This latter repertoire is restricted to the ensembles you’re able to assemble or to what you can arrange for a reduced number. (Liszt’s piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies weren’t just the showman appropriating for his own use some of the greatest music ever written, they also made it more possible for people in general to experience that music.) Sheet music could sell very well for the period, suggesting that quite a lot of people were competent enough musicians to entertain themselves and their families, but access to the musical training needed was not going to be evenly divided up across the social spectrum. The idea that at one time every home had a piano only applies to certain kinds of homes, after all. And finally, speaking from personal experience, the way you relate to music when you’re actually playing it for yourself (or others) is completely different from the way you relate to music you’re hearing on a recording. All of which is why in my opinion saying something like “well, [classical composer X] was like the pop music of his time” obscures more than it reveals.Edit to add: I should have said something about difficulty in additional to convenience of repertoire. A lot of sheet music purchases, I’m sure, were aspirational, because they still are. I have my grandmother’s collection of Chopin scores, and I can tell from the condition of the spines what her level was as a pianist. I own a lot of sheet music I can’t really execute, but I can give myself – or a sympathetic listener if I were to inflict this on one – a kind of “through a dark glass” impression of what the piece would sound like if a virtuoso were to do their thing. But that’s very different than actually hearing one do it.
I’ve got some news for you about a thing called “capitalism” …I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at here. Of course capitalism has a major impact on pop culture today but I’d be hard-pressed to identify what particular worldview is being foisted on people by, say, the MCU. Film critics may find it fruitful to do deep-dives into the underlying philosophy of Iron Man but the average moviegoer just thinks its fun, I’d reckon. That’s a world away from “the only acceptable images are those which depict Church-sanctioned ideology” I’d argue but as with most things art-related, YMMV.
Regardless, my main point was people in 2019 have a choice about what culture they consume. If you want to reject every single work of art thrown at you by giant corporations that still leaves you with more stuff than you could possibly consume in your lifetime to choose from and that was most decidedly not the case until fairly recently.
I’d be hard-pressed to identify what particular worldview is being foisted on people by, say, the MCU.Well, it’s hard to see the frame when you’re inside it; I’m as much a product of my environment as anyone else, and I probably take all kinds of wacky things for granted as a result. But for the sake of argument: mainstream superheroes are inherently conservative (small c intentional); they protect, they preserve, they can even improve, but they do not foment revolution. No heroic character in the MCU looks at society and says “fuck it, we could be doing so much better and I could make it happen” – the received logic of nearly a hundred years of superhero comics evolution tells us that guy is going to wind up a villain even if he didn’t mean to. In an early appearance Superman decided the best way to help a bunch of juvenile hoodlums would be to destroy their neighborhood, because then the government would have to build better housing for them. I mean, it’s probably good that Superman didn’t keep acting like that, and the logic involved is childishly simple (oh, wait, these stories were for kids!), but it very quickly became inconceivable for a superhero to have such revolutionary ideas.In general I think you’re underestimating the intentionality of modern capitalist-produced art by like 5% and overestimating the intentionality of previous generations of religious art by, I dunno, I big percentage. Like, the effect is the same, but I don’t think the people who hired Bach to write weekly masses Leipzig were rubbing their hands together because they’d guaranteed a few more years of improved social control through artistic propaganda.Your last paragraph I agree with and it’s a significant change (though I wonder how much of an effect it really has).
I will gladly concede my arguments probably don’t apply to pre-20th century music and acknowledge you clearly know more than I on that subject. But I disagree with your broad-strokes assessment of superheroes (Deadpool immediately leaps to mind as a counterpoint) and will again note, even if your conclusions are true, the average movie-goer almost assuredly isn’t picking up on that stuff and is just enjoying some popcorn movie fun when watching. No matter what the message of The Avengers is intended to be (and I’m not honestly convinced there is one) it was the spectacle, the comedy, and the character beats that put butts in seats, not threats of eternal damnation if you failed to attend and certainly not some collective belief about how the universe works (or should work) shared by all the gazillions of people who enjoyed it worldwide.
Besides which, corporations are about profit above all else, so plenty of competing worldviews are represented in the art they release for the simple reason you make the most money by covering the most markets. And even if non-corporate-but-still-capitalist art is a very small share of the marketplace, it is definitely a thing which exists. Taken together, that means capitalist art runs the gamut across any spectrum you choose to look at — political, philosophical, religious, what-have-you. Gimme a belief held by humans somewhere and I can point you to a work of art which expresses it, I’d reckon, whose artist would like be paid for his work, thank you very much. That is very obviously not true for the art adorning cathedral and church walls which, no matter the year and no matter the sect, has a pretty limited set of acceptable messages: “God is real! Jesus is real! The Bible is true! Humans are flawed and full of sin! Do what we say!” (And note from my tense I am arguing this is still true today, btw, it’s just that churches are no longer the primary source of visual art most people experience.)
But is a typical churchgoer in 1730 (or 1330) thinking “darn it if the only artistic messaging I get access to is reinforcing the power of the church?” or is he just thinking whatever he thinks about the art and music from inside the frame he occupies? I don’t disagree with you about the diversity of viewpoints, or that the average MCU-viewer is just taking the popcorn at face value (and that’s fine, I’m not trying to slap people into awareness or anything). I just think the difference is smaller than you think. I can’t say about Deadpool – I only saw the first movie and I’ve never read a Deadpool comic, so I’m not sure what he signifies in this conversation. But grabbing your other comment about Tony Stark, my point is that movie-Stark is stuck inside a particular mindset. In the background, he uses the arc reactor tech to make “clean” energy more possible (which is great, but it also seems like a transformation in the most low-key way; nobody needs to change their behavior, somewhere off in the distance maybe an oil company is mad, but not in a way that you or I could ever make an oil company mad because the tech is fictional). His ideas about making the world better are about protecting it. It never occurs to him to use his power (in our out of the suit) to transform it in a profound way. I’m not saying that’s bad, or that’s what I want from my superhero entertainment, I’m just saying it’s only one possibility. Early Superman shows us another possible development that was left aside.Stepping away from superheroes … we have a lot of fiction about cops. And I’m sure that somewhere in the totality of American-made entertainment, we have fiction that says “look, cops are fundamentally bad. Police forces are fundamentally forces of social control that terrorize the most vulnerable communities and don’t do a good job of stopping crime. Organized police are a relatively new innovation and one we should discard.” Because that’s a real viewpoint some people have. But it’s not reflected in any entertainment I’m aware of from any major outlet, where the gamut runs from “most cops are infallible heroes” to “some cops suck but other cops are fallible heroes”. Maybe someone said it in an episode of The Wire and I just don’t recall.
But is a typical churchgoer in 1730 (or 1330) thinking “darn it if the only artistic messaging I get access to is reinforcing the power of the church?” or is he just thinking whatever he thinks about the art and music from inside the frame he occupies?
I would say no, he isn’t consciously thinking that but I would argue he has virtually no other worldviews informed by art to choose from, and that’s simply not true in 2019. He was much more trapped inside a framework than modern pop culture consumers are.
My basic point about Deadpool was just that he is a) as much or more a criminal as a hero, and b) often merely a force of anarchy. Even when he does end up doing the “right” thing, it’s usually for less-than-altruistic reasons and/or was an unintended consequence of doing what he woulda done anyway. He’s very consciously set up as a comment on the standard tropes of the genre he inhabits, however, so he probably doesn’t really help my case, now that I’ve thought about it a little harder.
I rtually no other worldviews informed by art to choose from, and that’s simply not true in 2019. He was much more trapped inside a framework than modern pop culture consumers are.Incidentally, artists even in the middle ages were more playful or pushing of their own specific viewpoint (albeit always within the milieu of religiousity) than many understand in 2019.There are certainly examples of pretty dramatic centralization also. Gregorian chats, e.g., were not the only type of monastic music, and the Vatican was able to drive out a lot of localized monastic music over the course of a couple of centuries. Although rival musics existed in the further reaches too. But what leaps to mind for me is that the Vatican also tried to homogenize a set of legitimate tunes that were Vatican-approved for use in churches. Composers responded by slowing down the Vatican tunes and dropping them into the bass, such that they were virtually unrecognizable. They then would top this with a brand new tune, often borrowed or quoting of popular secular music of the time in much the same way hip hop does now, using the secular tune that at least some people in the congregation woudl recognize to comment on the themes found in the legitimated now-bass-line source material. In this way, composers were able to philosophize and criticize about the church, the Bible, etc, in a way that is not accessible to modern ears, because we don’t know the body of musical literature in the same way that they and their audience did.My aunt is an organist in turns out, and she continues in this tradition. After the Ohio/Michigan game, she always works the winning fight song into the music for the following Sunday morning. She says a healthy subset of the congregation notices, even if she slows it down quite a bit or makes it into an obligato part. So I don’t think it’s out of the realm of posibility that a Medieval congregation might recognize, e.g., drinking songs or what have you in a similar way.
Oh, come on. Ever since the 1970s with movies like “The Warriors”, and “A Clockwork Orange”, the idea that the police are essentially a gang not very different from the other gangs they oppose has been presented in fiction over and over again.
Is “God is real” actually the “message” of all that art or just the cultural milieu in which the art was created? You seem to be confusing the surrounding culture with the art it produced.
I would absolutely argue the art of churches was very consciously intended as, first and foremost, religious propaganda . Certainly plenty of non-religious art existed in Europe during Christianity’s stranglehold over the culture but it sure as shit wasn’t on display in churches. Churches were (and again, are, imho) places devoted to a very narrow idea and every aspect of them — from the art on display, to the architecture itself, to the music heard inside — reflects and reinforces that and all but demands you acknowledge the received Truth it’s conveying. I guess I don’t think see how that’s a controversial position.
I mean, that’s a comically narrow and naive view of even the art available only churches (which is a weird thing to focus on since there was art outside of churches too all over the place). Certainly, religious art was about theology, but it was also about, say, self-aggrandizement (rich dudes liked to show off how much they spent on the church art so the point of the painting was more about how amazing the Baron of Wherever was), or personal desires (there was a cardinal who was particularly fond of sexy naked ladies so he had a bunch of paintings of conveniently unclothed “saints”). Also, you’re ignoring the numerous paintings depicting pagan subjects (e.g. the School of Athens), portraiture (e.g. Holbein), and paintings of daily life (e.g. Bruegel). Like, there were artists who specialized in painting bouquets of flowers. What secret religious message was the Girl with the Pearl Earring conveying?
I very clearly said, “certainly plenty of non-religious art existed in Europe during Christianity’s stranglehold over the culture but it sure as shit wasn’t on display in churches” so suggesting I am seemingly unaware non-religious art existed is pretty goofy. (And putting forth The School of Athens as an example of art without religious significance doesn’t exactly hold up to more than surface-level scrutiny.) If you think more than the tiniest minority of people alive in the 1500s ever saw a Bruegel, I’m not sure what to tell you. The audience for painters like Bruegel or those who painted portraits on commission was the very wealthy who, just as they do today, constituted a very tiny minority. I made this point in my very first post: until very recently, there were no art books and museums catering to the masses, so for the vast majority of Europeans (because remember, unlike today, most people were not living in large urban centers) the only place they were likely to encounter anything but folk art was on the walls of their church and you’ve yet to provide any reason I should amend my position that what hung there was specifically chosen for its religious propaganda value. If you have evidence churches in the Middle Ages were being adorned with specifically non-religious art I’d definitely be very interested in reading about that and changing my tune accordingly. I don’t claim to be an expert by any stretch, but still don’t understand what’s even remotely controversial about noting the art adorning churches was chosen almost exclusively for its religious propaganda value.
Medieval churches in Europe have plenty of purely decorative ornamentation. And as noted, there’s usually a fair amount of artwork devoted to the patrons.
The art devoted to the patrons I don’t think qualifies. I think it was intended to link those patrons to the sanctity of the church in the eyes of the congregation and thereby imbue them with authority essentially handed down from on high. I think it fairly falls under the heading of “rich patrons pushing their religious worldview” but sure, YMMV.
The ornamentation is a very fair point. Some of it certainly does come out of specific religious iconography but clearly not all of it, so thanks for bringing it up.
Public art was all over urban centers and was frequently irreligious (e.g. those equestrian statues littered across the landscape and fountains depicting dolphins), suggesting that the idea of art as irreligious was neither alien or unusual. And how exactly do the geometric shapes of the wildly popular rose windows in cathedrals provide direct propaganda for religion? Or making columns that look like trees and flowers? People liked the stuff because it were beautiful. Churches are littered with art that’s transparently there because it was stylish and cool. Like, there are churches with trompe l’oeil domes. Why? Because people liked that kind of thing and it was fashionable for a while. Religious art serves many purposes. Propaganda (God exists!). Expressions of grief (here is a painting of my loved one in heaven because I’m sad they’re dead). Expressions of pride (look how much money I spent on this amazing chapel!). Nationalism (only our patron saint has this nice of a cathedral!). Etc. Assuming it all held the same social role is foolishness. A religious society will produce religious art. That doesn’t mean that it’s all serving a single purpose or role within the society.
{Sigh}
If you want to have a conversation, fine. If you want to “refute” me by restating things I’ve already said (such as acknowledging the very existence of non-religious art even though you keep suggesting I someone don’t) or otherwise ignoring the thrust of my argument — which was that in the past, people did not have the same freedom to choose what art they were exposed to as we do in the modern age —then this will be my last reply to you.
For example: “Public art was all over urban centers . . .” is a point I have already acknowledged. But a very small percentage of people lived in urban centers until the very recent past so if your argument rests on that point, it’s not really refuting mine.
“And how exactly do the geometric shapes of the wildly popular rose windows in cathedrals provide direct propaganda for religion?”
Someone else already noted that plenty of the decorative flourishes in the architecture of churches were purely ornamental and I conceded the point. I will gladly do so again here, on the assumption you didn’t see me do it earlier. That said, the propaganda aspect isn’t the window itself, it’s the way it illuminates and is incorporated into the design of the church that is. Haven’t you ever been to a Gothic cathedral? Yes, that style of window pre-dates Christianity and yes, part of their appeal is simply their beauty, but just going inside one makes it plain they also serve a “higher” purpose. The Gothic style of cathedrals is quite literally a consciously designed monument to God’s glory and the Church’s dominance over the culture. Again, this is not a controversial claim on my part. The use of trompe l’oeil in domes may not serve any specific religious purpose but the dome itself definitely does — it was meant to invoke the vault of the heavens and, by extension, suggest the Church itself rose into God’s realm. (<—also not controversial — and it had similar religious significance to the non-Christians who had employed them earlier.) It boils down to this, I think: you would have me believe that Christianity is just one of many things incorporated into art because it just happened to be popular at the time — like shoulder pads in ‘80s clothes or something. I reject that and instead believe the religious themes were the starting points and the art was forced to flow from there because the people who created it (or at least financed it) intended it to further their worldview and reinforce the dominance it/they had over the common folk. Today, normal, everyday people are exposed to lots of different worldviews in the art available for their consumption but that was decidedly not the case for the bulk of human history, and when Christianity dominated Europe, churches were far and away the most likely place an average person would encounter it. I mean, there are plenty of ways to construct a beautiful ceiling or illuminate a building’s interior which don’t have any religious connotations. There’s a reason why cathedrals and alehouses don’t look or feel the same, after all.
I would add only that corporations are more about growth than profit, at least now.
And also add that in general, what percentage of a people adhering to a faith actually believe in it? How many people, raised Catholic in England, when faced with Henry VIII saying that he was now head of the Church, said to themselves “eh, close enough”.
I’d also note that “fuck it, we could be doing so much better and I could make it happen” is exactly what Tony Stark believes. Of course, he’s about as conservative as onscreen superheroes come, so I’m not sure where that leaves your argument.
Funny how the guy wearing the flag resists him while the former Soviet spy frowns on them .
To pick one thing, the MCU (like Star Wars) supports the worldview that violence is an acceptable, necessary, and in fact enjoyable aspect of the social order. It also supports an absolutist view of morality, even if it presents the Good Guys as fallible. It wouldn’t make sense to have a superhero movie where the heroes ad villains simply refuse to fight each other, which suggests that the violence itself – not the resolution of conflict – is the core fantasy. Also, isn’t part of the appeal of mass produced entertainment that you involve people in a cultural conversation, which drives them to continue participating rather than miss out, even if they notice a decline in their enjoyment of it? That’s not exactly the same as religion, but it’s not so different.
“. . .the MCU . . . supports an absolutist view of morality.”
One of the central conflicts running through the MCU films has been about the differing moral worldviews of its heroes — specifically Steve Rogers and Tony Stark but there are plenty of other examples, too — so I’m gonna have to disagree here.
As for your first point, you answered it yourself in your second paragraph. There’d be no movie without “acceptable [and] necessary” violence. That’s not a product of a worldview so much as the demands of genre storytelling, imho. Plenty of stories can be told with no reference to violence but there’s not much point in choosing a superhero as your protagonist if that’s your goal. If that explanation isn’t satisfactory, that’s your prerogative, but I would suggest your point would be stronger without the inclusion of
“enjoyable” at the end. Yes, lots of superheroes obviously enjoy the violent aspects of what they do (and some clearly revel in it) but just off the top of my head, I’d put forth Captain America and Doctor Strange to counter that it’s always true. Neither of those guys strike me as people who enjoy the fight — they do absolutely believe it’s necessary, though.
See, that’s the point – when you say that an entire genre relies on the acceptability of violence, you’re taking about a genre that explicitly promotes the value of violence in maintaining the moral or social order. Religious storytelling works the same way – you presume a certain value set and build the story in such a way that it doesn’t work without those values. Even if Captain America doesn’t like fighting, he inflicts violence with a great deal of verve. We aren’t supposed to be horrified when he kicks somebody, we’re supposed to cheer for him. Then we’re supposed to be proub of him when he asserts (contrary to the story around him) that he doesn’t enjoy violence. The notion that it’s “necessary” is part of that same value system. Also, the heroes in the MCU have a certain degree of interpersonal conflict, but there’s no interpretation of those movies where the Chitauri or Thanos or Hydra or Zimo or Robert Redford holds the moral high ground. The arguments between the characters is ultimately meaningless in the face of constant threats of absolute destruction (which, critically, can only be averted through violence). They aren’t military recruitment videos or anything, but we’re taking about whether the movies promote a value system. They do. They reinforce the idea that violence is necessary in the face of existential evil. That’s a natural outgrowth of the era when a lot of these heroes originated (around World War 2), but that doesn’t make it accidental.
when you say that an entire genre relies on the acceptability of violence, you’re taking about a genre that explicitly promotes the value of violence in maintaining the moral or social order
This feels like a chicken-or-egg argument to me and I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer. Violence is something which exists in the real world of human experience so it’s only natural we would write stories about it, as we’ve done since time immemorial. The more stories written, the more sub-types of those stories will emerge. At some point, these age-old stories of heroes and violence began featuring superheroes. Now, nearly a century later, superhero stories are their own genre and if your intent is to make a summer blockbuster movie out of the conventions of that genre, I’m hard-pressed to see how you do it without having the superheroes punch stuff. As Tarantino has noted, and I agree, violence onscreen is exciting and fun to watch but that in and of itself isn’t an endorsement of real-life violence. Furthermore, I’d be hard-pressed to personally argue there is never a time for violence — despite never having resorted to it myself — because yeah, I think the good that comes from, say, stopping someone from raping or overthrowing oppressors outweighs the immorality (presumably?) inherent in the violent acts used to achieve that. (I mean, is violence inherently immoral? Better philosophers than I’ll ever be have wrestled with that one, after all. It’s certainly by no means unnatural, as any National Geographic show makes plain.)
there’s no interpretation of those movies where the Chitauri or Thanos or Hydra or Zimo or Robert Redford holds the moral high ground
I dunno — I agree Hydra and Zemo are portrayed as unambiguously in the wrong, but just Google “Thanos was right” and you’ll see there are folks who have interpreted Infinity War in exactly the way you say can’t be done. But all kidding aside, I do see your point that no matter where on the moral spectrum any particular hero falls, they all solve problems in essentially the same way.
Well – would Ghandi’s tactics have worked against the Third Reich?
They would not have. World War 2 was necessary, due to a miserable failure of human civilization to prevent it. However, we treat it as a triumph rather than a failure due to a belief that necessity justifies violence on a large or small scale. And again, we return to action movies, which reiterate this cultural narrative about the moral justification of violence. And again to things like the MCU and Star Wars, which target them at younger audiences. Since the MCU, for example, is fiction, it doesn’t require the same moral compromises as an actual war. Those moral compromises are part of a narrative framework deliberately constructed by the filmmakers. It would be obtuse for me to argue that human history allows room for pacifism. (I also don’t happen to believe that the necessity of violence supercedes the immorality of it.) But again, the conversation here is about how entertainment reinforces cultural values, not about the validity of those cultural values.
I think that at times, by far in the minority, pacifism is morally indefensible. We tend to take these rare points as justification for violence aplenty, or at least to look for trouble where there is none. I wonder if one could devise a Marvel movie where the violence is not the centerpiece. The best two scenes of The Dark Knight are just people having a conversation, teetering on and veering into violence, but are by no means action scenes; so, maybe one could. Thanks for the good conversation.
The difference is that Marvel/Disney don’t really care about the message the films communicate or the worldview they embody. They just care that people go see them (which in turn means that they don’t want them to be say anything so controversial that it would inspire widespread boycotts, or anything that gets them banned in China).So it’s the preferences of consumers that ultimately shape the content of the films, not any specific views of the corporations making them. (Since I’m just watching it, the example that comes to mind is The Boys, a superhero show where the villains are megacorporations and a unaccountable 0.01% elite that exploits regular people, manipulates governments and engages in creepy surveillance… brought to us by Amazon.)
This turns into a circular conversation quickly if we assume that “what people want” is completely separate from “what people are sold.” They aren’t always the same thing, of course, but social values are an active process, and art (particularly commercial art that half the population sees) plays an important role in shaping our expectations. Now it’s certainly true that the corporations making these movies can be amoral in a way that religions (ostensibly) can’t, but corporations don’t simply will movies into existence. They hire artists, and those artists hew to the conventions of the form, which reinforces those conventions as the “usual” way art is made.There isn’t a deliberate plot to indoctrinate Americans into a culture of violence. It just happens. But our commercial art actively appeals to our militaristic impulses, and it’s especially glaring when that art is tremendously popular and targeted at children. That doesn’t make it invalid or valueless as art, but the nature of this conversation is to point out that “pure entertainment” like the MCU actively participates in social engineering.
But that’s pretty much just the definition of what a culture is: a set of ideas or customs shared within a community that find expression in cultural artifacts and behaviors that in turn serve to reaffirm those ideas and customs.So to say that we live within a culture and that movies are a part of that culture shouldn’t really be worth stating.
The relevant distinction here is motivation: Between art that is created for the purpose of promoting some particular idea, and art that just picks it up unconsciously from the general cultural milieu or other factors. (Of course, it’s not quite that simple in practice, since intentions can be complex, particularly when you have to consider some combination of patron, artist, publisher and censor, each with their own goals and motivations.)
I get what you’re saying, but in that case “religious art” doesn’t really exist in the sense that we’ve been discussing it – at least not during the Medieval or Renaissance Periods, when European culture was highly religious and European art was also highly religious. You could say “Raphael’s paintings of Jesus and Mary don’t promote Christianity, they just use the dominant cultural references of the era to demonstrate his technique.” That’s certainly valid, but as you point out it introduces a lot of unanswerable questions about what the artist intended and where the artist was situated inside of their culture (this is the core of postmodernism, more or less). The Avengers movies are about an American soldier and an American billionaire saving the world through violence, but that doesn’t mean the filmmakers were explicitly promoting a worldview of American exceptionalism – that worldview could filter into the art from the culture at large. And (I’ve been obtuse on this point, I admit) those movies are fun to watch without thinking about their place in the culture. They aren’t didactic works, but a lot of paintings that depict saints or Bible stories aren’t didactic either. Still, I think this approach treats culture as a passive thing – we exist within a culture, and that culture is reflected in our artwork – rather than something we actively construct. Sixty-five years ago, we had westerns and war movies to reinforce our belief that Americans are tenacious geniuses who will fight (and fight and fight) against all odds. Those stories aren’t popular anymore, but we have superheroes to do the same thing. That’s how culture is constructed. (Also, as a quick aside, I’ll point out that the most recent mainline Star Wars movie took a few moments to consider the moral exhaustion of fighting a war continuously for three generations. It didn’t do anything with the idea, but it was refreshing to at least have some acknowledgment that the Star Wars universe is kind of an existential hellscape.)
Before sound reproduction, you had two ways of experiencing a secular piece of notated music. Either you could go to a professional concert –
which was an option not open to most people for both financial and
geographic reasons (no matter how “popular” an opera was in Vienna, that
didn’t help you if you were in Glasgow)Well, they had opera in Glasgow too, at least after the Royal Colosseum and Opera House (later Theatre Royal) opened in 1867.The opera was probably out of reach for most people, but they had music halls, they went to dances, there was music in pubs, taverns and saloons. Most of those things seem to fall between your two options. I don’t know how much of this music was notated, and the performers may often have been semi-professionals, but it seems to me a much better parallel to today’s popular music than formal concerts or performances.
I agree. The introduction of cheap printing created a sensation among both the middle and working classes in 19th century England. There was a huge backlash among the upper class social critics who thought book reading would create a lazy, unproductive population. Many novels now considered to be part of literature were derided as a woeful waste of time.
Plus, writing novels was one of the few avenues for women to make money, thus making reading them seem “common” or frivolous. Yes, Jane Eyre was nothing but a distraction to young girls who should have been concentrating on marriage, dammit!
For me anyway, “popular culture” is art and/or entertainment designed for mechanical reproduction and large scale distribution. That’s not an apt description for most of the works cited above.
“ some (not all!) of these responses treat “pop culture” as “creative work I have heard of,”Assuming they’re talking about books they haven’t read is pretty dickish.
Where do you get that I’m assuming they’re talking about books they haven’t read? I’m talking about whether it makes sense to describe Vivaldi or Tolstoy as pre-20th century “pop culture”; what makes them “pop” as opposed to “not pop”? What does that distinction signify in the 17th or 19th century and does it even make sense to use it as a distinction vs. some other specific terminology?Also, William Hughes literally picked a book he has never read.
I mean, by a really obvious reading of the part I quoted.
If you were talking about Hughes’ pick, that does make sense. Anyway, whatever.
What does that distinction signify in the 17th or 19th century and does it even make sense to use it as a distinction vs. some other specific terminology?It doesn’t have to have been “pop culture” then to be “pop culture” now.
Ain’t nothing wrong with Sherlock Holmes.
Unless you’re Mormon possibly. He really hated those guys.
I guess we all have our quirks!
I remember slogging my way through the long section of A Study in Scarlett that was set in Utah. It is really bad.
Once while I was reading through the complete works for the first time on my way to a friend’s party when I arrived I told them what I was reading when I got there. Then added “he really hated Mormons” and kinda laughed. To which my friend’s cousin whom I just met replied “oh I’m Mormon”. So that wasn’t the best first impression. To add:I don’t know ANY Mormons and that’s not really a thing around me nor are any of my friends religious in anyway.
Yeah – force your way through for completest purposes if you want, but you are not missing much if you do not.
These days Mormonism has gotten some degree of respect just for being around a while — people have been Mormons for generations. Conan Doyle was living in a time where it was more obviously something like Scientology is today — a clearly predatory scam designed to get the leaders sex and money.
The whole hating the queer community thing isn’t exactly respectable these days.
Are you seriously comparing a religion/cult (which people can and do leave all the time when they grow up and can question what they’ve been told by their parents) to a biological state which people have no control over?
I think you read that wrong dude. I’m gay, I don’t appreciate the Mormons or many religious views on how I go about existence.
No shame there. That’s a good read. Doyle also wrote some terrific horror fiction that’s well worth checking out.
If you want to go a bit more obscure, but stick to Doyle, there’s always his “Professor Challenger” stories (most famous by The Lost World, but there’s more). See, instead of a detective who knows everything, you have a scientist who knows everything. Completely different!
Nothing wrong with that choice, and it was most definitely pop culture. Imagine so many people waiting for serialized short stories to be published and getting to talk about them to each other.
No Princess of Mars, either. Shameful, really.
The art, poetry, and literature of the Romantic Movement, especially Coleridge, Keats, Blake (poetry) and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tedema and John William Waterhouse (art). Their neoclassicism is dreamy and gorgeous, and led directly into my other favorite movement, Art Nouveau or arts and crafts (and the Vienna Secession in Austria) that eventually led to Art Deco and Modernism. I love the progression; from a decadent and languid movement focused the classics to a return to nature and more practical applications of form and artistic expression to almost pure form itself, stripped of any pretension. It is one of the most interesting progressions of artistic expression in Western civilization.
I wasn’t sure if art counted or not, but I was a fan of the Baroque period, when Caravaggio was king.
The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1600
You can still see his influence in film and comics. A classic example of how you can be a great artist and still be a terrible human being.
While we’re on the subject of paintings and things, Hudson River School.
These are gorgeous
The Fighting Temeraire. My favorite for a long time before it showed in James Bond
My favorite painting of Caravaggio is Love Conquers All, an extremely unsubtle in-your-face allegory of a naked angel shoving aside symbols of science, religion and others with his foot. Saw it in Berlin and was amazed. Never knew Caravaggio had this side to him.
Yea, there’s a mischievousness to that one, that can be either alluring or (for my parents) appalling. But it gets a reaction
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is mine. Hundreds of years later and it’s still hilarious. All the scenes involving the Mechanicals in particular are among the funniest ever written. I’m not sure this is Shakespeare’s greatest play but it’s certainly my favorite. Lord what fools these mortals be, indeed.
Nothing but low and little??!??Original girl throw down!
The Nutcracker Suite. One of my favourite Christmas rituals is sitting in a dark room with the Christmas tree all lit up, listening to the Nutcracker and looking out at the stars.
I’m so happy to see I’m not the only one who does this with the addition of a bottle of wine and one or more cats sprawled out across my lap. My go to recording is the Eugene Ormandy / Philadelphia Orchestra because I think the piece flows best as a suite and I love that big Philadelphia sound (not to mention that recordings from this era sound fucking amazing).That said, the full length recording by Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra is hard to beat as well.There’s also a nifty version by Duke Ellington that is great for decorating the tree or cooking Christmas dinner.
I love that Duke Ellington version! The original Nutcracker is one of my favorite pieces of music that I have never played (I am a classical musician).
BAM has the Hard Nut ballet version that is choreographed to the Duke Ellington version. I keep trying to go, but the timing hasn’t worked out for me. I am hoping this is the year I make it there.
The Kirov is the one I keep and play every year, starting around Halloween. It’s about perfect.
Gonna have to say anything by Mark Twain.
His travel writing is so, so funny.
The things he wrote about his times growing up are also fantastic. The sections of Life on the Mississippi about learning to be a riverboat pilot are great, vivid writing.
Strongly agree.
YES. A Tramp Abroad is one of my favorite books.
I see your Alice stories, and I’ll raise you The Brothers Grimm.I was into the Hansel and Gretels, Rumplestiltskins, and other weirdly dark children’s stories they put out.
The Brothers Grimm and Asbjørnsen & Moe left more of an impression on my childhood than any modern author. I love all those collections of folk tales & fairy stories.
Max and Moritz, too
H.G. Wells! The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds are both 1890s publications.
The Invisible Man was fantastic, but my go to for Wells will always be The Time Machine…
Bram Stoker wrote fun pulp fiction. I found Dracula to be far more entertaining than Frankenstein.I think it’s partly due to English prose getting far less ornate on balance by the end of the 19th Century, especially in popular fiction.
It’s a ripping good adventure yarn and nowhere near a preachy as Frankenstein.
But he and Verne had no luck on their play dates!
Moby Dick. Only book I’ve read repeatedly and discovered something new every time. Ahab is the prototypical tragic villain, much of the action verges on magical realism decades early. Melville had the balls to make a quarter of his novel a textbook about whales and sneak in a ton of homoeroticism. A man flays a whale penis and wears it as armor to root around in the belly of the beast! I have never read a book stranger than this one where the author wasn’t clearly reaching for the bizarre. An adventure story, philosophy tome and dialogue between God and Man all in one. The finest work of American literature, in my opinion and that of many others.
I listened to Moby Dick on audiobook this week. I read it as a teenager and didn’t really appreciate it. Loved it. The reading was pretty good and free on Youtube:
This book’s description of clam chowder might be the most evocative description of any thing in any novel ever.
I guess I should re-read Moby Dick. The only thing that I vividly remember from reading it in 9th grade is a long description of the whale’s penis. I have a vague recollection that the description takes up all or nearly all of the chapter.
Clam chowder, whale penis, the color white! I love the fact that Melville devoted an entire chapter to pretty much anything that interested him.
the group of shirtless men working with the spermateci, trying on the whale penis like a cassock . . .so much fascinating stuff
I have a vague recollection that the description takes up all or nearly all of the chapter. That chapter would be “The Cassock” in which the organ in question is skinned to make a poncho. Talk about BDE.
I first read it in my early 40’s and it really resonated. Ishmael starts off the book basically experiencing a mid-life crisis and resolves to go whaling just for the fuck of it.
It’s a terrible, terrible book to foist on teenagers. The plot is very simple, which makes it downright baffling to search for a narrative, which is how basically every teenager approaches reading a novel. It reinforces the idea that older literature is unapproachable and dull, which people carry through their lives. Billy Budd is almost as good as a piece of writing, and it’s a fraction the length. Hopefully they’ve started teaching that one in high schools. Anyway, there’s nothing like Moby Dick. Literally nothing. As a stylist Melville might be unmatched in the English language, and his obsession with finding – basically – the meaning of American identity is equal parts absurd and inspiring.
It’s a terrible, terrible book to foist on teenagers. The plot is very
simple, which makes it downright baffling to search for a narrative,
which is how basically every teenager approaches reading a novel. It
reinforces the idea that older literature is unapproachable and dull,
which people carry through their lives. I read Moby-Dick as a teenager, and loved it. I was (and remain) a big fan of Jorge Luis Borges, and Melville’s book appealed to me in the same way, just on a much larger scale. There’s that blend of scholarship, mythology and fiction to explore philosophical ideas that I find almost intoxicating. Plus it’s just so well written!However, this was late in my teenage years (I must have been 19, and may actually have turned 20 while I was reading it), I read it by choice, and I was above-averagely fond of reading in the first place.
i like the sermon in the whaling chapel.
http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/try-pots-clam-chowder-moby-dick/
I read somewhere that it sounded like a death fight in Melville’s room while he was writing MD. Stomping across the floor, shouting, chairs thrown around.
i was supposed to read it in my advanced high school english calss but i couldn’t get through it. i went to my teacher & told him so, he was okay about it. for some reason, i didn’t even go through the cliff’s notes to understand it for the test & failed. years later, i went to see a one-man theatrical presentation at the new bedford whaling museum – the guy played everyone, even the whale! it was pretty good. many years later, i decided i really should read it so listened to a recorded version & then wrote to my english teacher to tell him i was finally ready for the test! i gotta say it was a slog. i would advise anyone trying to get through it to just read the “story” chapters & skip the “whale facts” chapters. fun fact, the whaling museum holds (or used to hold) an event beginning on dec. 31 of every year where people volunteer to read the whole thing outloud. (everyone signs up for 30 minutes, i think.)
I was surprised a couple years ago upon picking up Moby Dick for the first time how seriously good it is.
I really enjoy Melville’s short stories. Benito Cereno is a pretty solid story and still holds up.
Have you read the emoji version? Personally, among Melville’s works I prefer Bartleby. I could tell you why, but I prefer not to.
Oh man, much respect and more power to you. I’ve had to read Moby Dick three times for my undergrad and postgrad work, and each time I’ve hated it more. Basically the only parts I like are the homoerotic parts, which delight me every time (“the squeeze the sperm” passage appeared on my GRE subject exam and I nearly got in trouble for laughing in the test facility).
I am making a point of reading Clickhole’s version of the book. I am taking my sweet time. The writing is so gorgeous I don’t wanna rush it.
Holy smokes, me too. It sounds ridiculous to start such a reknowned classic from Clickhole, I suspect you’re joking, but it was a very funny article. And I starthed randomly reading, and it sort of drew me in. It’s towards the beginning, before the sea journey, Ishmael is at an inn and tavern where everyone’s drunk. He’s hugely apprehensive about sharing a bed (as men did in the 19th c. US) with Queequeg, the fearsome Pacific Islander. But it all goes well.. it was just a fascinating bit with a lot of keen psychological insight, possibly tinged by homoerotic tension. It comes off as tremendously modern for something written in the 1850s. Moby-Dick seemed to have a resurgence of interest in the 1920s too for that reason.. its “psychological” aspects. When they were mad about Freud in those days.
No, I’m not joking. I am actually reading the entirety of Moby Dick via Clickhole’s page: ‘’The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World’’ Will let you all know when I’m done.
The cetology chapters are probably my favorite part of “Moby Dick.” But I should really read it again.
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
If I could cast one Shakespeare adaptation, I would like there to be a movie version of Twelfth Night with Ellen Page as Viola
I can see that being pretty good, but I’m content just watching it on stage every few years with people I’ve never heard of. Hollywood always seems to feel some need to put some sort of spin or twist on the plays, but I like them for what the are.
Maybe Ellen Page as Viola and Shannon Woodward as her twin brother
I’m rather shocked at how Eurocentric this was, given the leanings of the AVClub on broader views.
Most of the pop culture they cover even today is “western” broadly speaking.
Fair, but it’s not like modern American society lacks access to old “pop culture” from at least Japan, China, India, or Iran. I’m just surprised there’s no Rumi or Genji or something here.
Does it still count if it’s a piece of pre-20th Century pop culture, but your only exposure to it is from English translations made AFTER the 20th Century?
Yes.
Genji is renknowned as the first novel, but not necessarily the best. The Four Great Classical Novels might have better odds. I suspect that poetry tends to suffer in translation since so much of it is about how one says something rather than the meaning being conveyed.
Well, I love The Baghavad Gita and Tao Te Ching, but I don’t consider them “pop culture” and I am reading English translations. I like Rabindranath Tagore, but I don’t have any firsthand experience of Eastern pop culture and if I did, it would be through someone else’s translation.
Half the listed items on this Q&A would have been translated too, though.I get the concern about the definition of “pop culture”. I’m not sure it is defined, and I don’t know if it makes sense pre-Industrial Revolution. All that said, there are a lot of analogous works of note from outside Europe and the US (also strangely underrepresented) and I’m surprised none were noted.
I don’t know about other places, but I can comment on Serbia. At the beginning of the 1800s, Serbia was still under Ottoman rule. Perhaps 5-10% of all people were literate. If you knew how to write and read and published at least one book you could pretty much guarantee your place in Serbian history, at least in your home town. Culture was limited through folk songs people learned by heart and even that would have been lost to history had the founder of our alphabet Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic not taken his time to write them down. There is not the sliver of doubt that Serbia was playing catch-up with the west and that it had a long way to go. Only in the latter half of the 1800s did something close to a vibrant and self-sustaining literary scene emerge. I can’t imagine it would be much different elsewhete in the world. The fact is that in the 1800s, western Eupore and the US were far ahead of the rest of the world, economically, culturally and militarily. Only relatively recently did the rest of the world achieve something close to parity. Pop culture means any work of art to be consumed by the masses. For example, Greek plays would certainly qualify despite being written 2500 years ago.
You have an amusing belief in the history of European literacy. Illiteracy was rampant in Europe for centuries as well. Shakespeare and Marlowe were performed for illiterates. And China, Japan, India, and Iran certainly had cultures to rival the western ones.
Oh there’s no absence of pop media out of East Asia at least. I’m thinking the entirety of Ukiyo-e. And a lot of the classics are pretty swashbuckling, in the manner of Dumas… like Journey to the West or The Tale of Genji.I don’t know if you can really count mythology/religious stories among pop culture, but I feel like the Shahnemah at least would rank too.
I’m not as shocked, considering how influential European art has been for, really everyone- but I agree it would be interesting to see other parts of the world represented. There was a South African folktale called Abiyoyo that was near and dear to my heart because it was one of the few bedtime stories my father read to me…but I have no idea how old it is. Here’s the Reading Rainbow version:
I’m not weighing in on what “should” be. Certainly there are arguments (divisive ones) that western art, literature, and culture should be promoted. Not even just from bigots. See, e.g. Harold Bloom. What I’m saying is the ethos of THIS PARTICULAR SITE is constantly obsessed with representation and diversity. (I’m okay with this, but acknowledging it’s a strong POV.) and so these responses felt boring or inconsistent.
One possibility is that they aren’t actually obsessed with representation and diversity but like to act as if they care about it more than they actually do.
I watch a lot of Asian TV, mostly Korean, and its surprising how ‘Eurocentric’ their own cultural references can get. I’ve heard random references to Sartre, Goethe, Richard Feynman, Thornton Wilder, Eudora Welty.
Agreed. I see that in India too. Cultural hegemony is a hell of a thing. Still don’t know why the AVClub had such beige responses to this question tho.
Generally, when people are looking at pre-20th century art, there’s a cultural element that draws people to it. People might read Moby Dick because they hear it’s a good book but there’s also a culture in America about Moby Dick that makes someone feel like they should read Moby Dick. The writers at the AV Club are not immune to this; of the pieces listed, one is a Russian novel (which has its reputation as being some of the best literature), a common Baroque musical piece that is often used as shorthand for the seasons, and then Alice in Wonderland. These are all have connections to broader western culture that make them pretty accessible to people within the culture. It’s gonna be harder to convince people, even people who try to be open-minded, to be moved or interested in older art from another culture.
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, I read it during the second year of my English degree when we were doing a lot of stuff that I hated (I especially found Medieval Mystery Plays a real slog to get through, though I know some are fond of them) and then we were given this to study and I absolutely adored it and it suddenly made the course enjoyable.
Ha! This question is delightful! Let’s see:
When I was a kid, my mom worked in a bookstore for a time, and she used to bring home classic literature that was in the form of “comics”, so it would be easier for me and my brother to read. There were versions of Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Robin Hood, but my total favorite was The Three Musketeers. Naturally this got me into the real book, and other works by Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo is even better), but more importantly, it got me into fencing, which was the most fun sport I ever learned (besides Bumper Car Basketball, of course).And like many, I’m a big fan of Shakespeare, with my favorite play of his being MacBeth. I understand the irony of that, since saying the very word is considered bad luck in theater. But what can I say? Double double, toil and trouble, motherfuckas! Anyway, my official answer will be Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which I have a personal attachment to because it was my first big drama production. I kind of fell in love with the tale and I’d like to see Hollywood try an adapt this. I’ll take an epic by way of Ridley Scott, or an animation by way of Disney (it is based off a Norwegian fairy tale, after all). Besides, Peer Gynt is pre-20th Century pop culture with it’s own soundtrack just like we do today- It gave us Edvard Greig’s “In the Hall of the Moutain King”
I had dozens of Great Illustrated Classics when I was a kid. Those were great for fetting me into reading the classics. I should probably go read the unabridged, unillustrated versions at some point.
The first version of The Hobbit that I ever read was an illustrated version that I got in a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. They had Tom Sawyer and a few others, too.
It’s crazy to imagine McDonalds or any food chain encouraging children’s reading with giveaways like that anymore.
Isn’t it? It’s just cheap plastic bullshit now.
Chick-fil-a gives out books in all their kids meals. You can turn them in for ice cream though
The less-often-heard choral version is even better.
So good! Darth Maul and Qui-Gon could fight to this
This is great. Thanks!!!
i love “count of monte cristo.” i wrote a theatrical script version but it’s never been staged. probably too long.
Although I can think of quite a few great possibilities, I’m going to go with the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. They are better works to choose from (Shakespeare being the blindingly obvious one, and I’m especially partial to Bach’s Concerto for two violins in D minor and a particular Mozart rondo), but I find myself humming tunes from H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado at least once a day (and often more), and there’s no other work or set of works for which I can say that.
(It probably helps that many of their tunes found their way into 20th-century works I grew up with, like Looney Tunes.)
As someone who discovered Gilbert and Sullivan far too late I’m still astonished at how rich and witty their work is. While ideologically dated much of the execution is still surprisingly entertaining.
Watching Topsy Turvy as a theater geek was heaven, particularly the giving notes scene after the rehearsal.
Alex McLevy – thanks for making me aware of The Ambassadors – it is awesome.Have you heard of Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning books? (If you got your degree at U of C, she may have taught you). It’s SF set about 400 years in the future, and is SERIOUSLY concerned with extending political and other philosophy from your period. I really think you’ll enjoy it.
Frankenstein. The book is great in creepy, enthralling, and thought-provoking ways; the cultural footprint is even bigger than Frankenstein’s monster.
The neglect of the protoganist for the monster, and the monster’s sadistic revenge haunted me afterwards in a way that the movie did not…
It was very much ahead of its time making the protagonist the real monster.I’ve heard a convincing case that the book should be read as a cautionary tale about being responsible with science and technology.
It’s about being a responsible parent. If Victory could have taken his head out of his ass and appreciated his creation for who he was instead of how he looked it would have been a much shorter book with a happy ending.
It’s so good. Tragic and horrifying all at once.
It’s interesting that the most commonly remembered image of Frankenstein first encountering his living monster is the James Whale version full of crackling Jacob’s Ladders. The scene in the book, where a startled Frankenstein awakens to find the monster at the foot of his bed intensely staring down at him is actually more horrifying with its weird parental/sexual undercurrents.
which makes the bed scene a pretty appropriate way for the two to start out, given the importance/tragedy of companionship for both Victor and the Creature through the rest of the book
When I first read it a couple years ago, what really struck me was the parallels between the creature’s situation and Elizabeth and Justine. Both of these young women were taken in by the Frankensteins, but as Elizabeth was a relation she was considered an “equal” in ways Justine, as merely the child of a servant, never reached. Both were in love with Victor, both died because of him, but Justine is turned into the Bride (and rejects the creature) as a kind of dark mirror of what’s going to happen to Victor and Elizabeth.
It’s tempting to go with Shakespeare (“Hamlet” can be studied forever, rewardingly, and the fun of “Richard III” is always there to re-discover), but I’ll go with “Don Quixote.” Read it twice in the last 17 years, and especially on the second time the fact that it’s a comedic work really came out. Like, it’s actually a pretty ‘fun’ read. Go with the translation that I think is still in print of the red cover with the knight’s helmet. That translation also has foot notes which have to be read for the full experience, which raises some interesting points about the nature of humor. For example, in reading the footnotes I realized that a lot of the humor in “Don Quixote” is based on characters getting things wrong (something that a 21st Century American reader would never possibly know about 16th/17th Century Spain). Re: humor based on people getting things wrong, think of John Belushi’s oft-quoted line in “Animal House”: “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor!?” You’d have a hard time explaining why that’s funny to someone 400 years from now, i.e., “So his statement wasn’t correct?” “No. It was the Japanese that bombed Pearl Harbor, not the Germans, even though they were both our enemies in World War II.” “Oh, okay… so it’s funny that he said it was the Germans when it was actually the Japanese?” “Yes, he got it wrong. That’s why it’s funny.”
Enlightening note about Don Quixote. I might assert, though, that the humor of misunderstanding in the Animal House case is not just in “getting it wrong”, but the fact that the guy “getting it wrong” was standing up in a crisis and leading the group, even while revealing his essential lunk-headedness with his error — capped by the following line “Forget it, he’s on a roll”. I’ll assume that the Don Quixote stuff is similar — things “gotten wrong” by the ostensibly learned and/or influential.
I’ve tried getting into Don Quixote a couple of times, but I just find it so sad. The humor is completely lost on me.
i’ve written a script for children’s theatre loosely based on it called “frog quixote!”
performed by puppets or stuffed animals, i hope!
that would be cool! but alas, it is to be performed by middle-schoolers & up.
I would still watch that!
There’s a wonderful adaptation of DQ for children through Oxford Press. My kids thought it hilarious and they re-read it every 6 months or so. It’s probably best aimed at middle school, but it was accessible enough for my modestly precocious 8-year-old.
I thought about Shakespeare, too. But I would pick a really pulpy Shakespeare, like Titus Andronicus. Something that really showcased that the Bard could be really lowbrow if he wanted to.
I think “Titus Andronicus” is great. Yes, some of the stuff in there is surprisingly nasty (one name: Lavinia). But if that’s what you’re looking for it doesn’t disappoint. I cautiously recommend the 1999 movie version… I say cautiously because lots of Shakespeare fans are annoyed by those differently-set movies of his work. I personally liked that one though.
I think Taymor’s Titus is really great, and it worked well in conjunction with the original text when I taught it. I like to kick off my Shakespeare classes with Titus Andronicus because we can talk about how Shakespeare was a popular playwright and wrote things that appealed to the masses. It helps them to see that the more pulpy elements (feeding someone their own son baked into a pie) can exist alongside sophisticated metaphors and imagery (Tamora as tiger). I like the frame around Taymor’s Titus with the young boy. The class always really digs into the purpose and meaning of that, and we talk about how that adaptation stays faithful in some ways and strategically diverges in others. I like that we can get into all this stuff with a play that most students won’t know. They’re less precious about the work they don’t know, whereas if you start with Romeo and Juliet (which I don’t like and rarely teach) or Macbeth (which is jolly good fun), they might have already formed attachments and opinions. I like Coriolanus for the same reason—tons of contemporary relevance with low student familiarity.
I loved that version!
I like Macbeth, for the crazed world view, witches, and much more modern at the time writing (“you” instead of “thee” or “thou”) that shows that Will understood that he couldn’t sound old-fashioned if he wanted to compete in the theater scene.
That’s a great point! (Adding it to my file on Macbeth to steal and use at a later date).I try when I teach Shakespeare to give students a sense that Shakespeare was a real person living in a real time that was in many ways ordinary. I love to give them readings from Shakespeare’s Restless World, which I think is great at taking ordinary objects and discussing how they connect to a broader social context.
I’m having a hell of a time figuring out why it’s funny NOW, actually, but that’s always been my problem with that Belushi moron.
No one picked The Iliad and The Odyssey? What?
I like how this made me really start thinking about the pre-20th century marker and was glad to realize I actually had more than a couple of choices.I’m going with Alexandre Dumas, both pere and fils. Romantic era based fiction is potboiling fun.
Three things – literature (and the funniest book ever written), ‘Three Men in a Boat’ by Jerome K. Jerome; music, anything by JS Bach; and art, the waterlilies rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
To say nothing of the dog…
I love Baroque music in general. Vivaldi is a favorite of mine as well.
I read Three Men because I had read the peerless Connie Willis masterpiece To Say Nothing Of The Dog. Both highly recommended! I just love Harris, who reluctantly is persuaded to not sing comic songs on the ruins of the enemy whose house he’s planning to burn down.
I, and Ms. Willis and many of us older fans, were introduced to it through Robert Heinlein’s ‘Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.’
I met that book through Ms. Willis as well!
Blade!
The Comical Tragedye of Eric Brooks, Walker of the Daye
So many contenders- King Lear (Most Cosmic), Ubu Roi (Most Punk), Moby Dick (Whaliest). But if pop culture suggests an element of pure pleasure, it’s gotta to be The Pirates of Penzance. All the absurdity of Lewis Carroll, plus infectious tunes and the greatest set of English lyrics pre-Sondheim. It’s a perfect piece of pop culture.
Somerset Maugham is one of my favorite authors. I reread The Razor’s Edge every year or two and each time it’s thrilling. There’s a movie version starring Bill Murray (and one starring Tyrone Powers, but please ignore that) that is excellent and, while it departs from the novel quite liberally, it captures the spirit. It’s possibly Bill Murray’s second best movie after Groundhog Day. The Razor’s Edge isn’t eligible for this category, but Somerset Maugham’s first novel, Liza of Lambeth is. It’s not as good as his later novels or many of his short stories, but it’s still wonderful. It was so popular that the first pressing sold out almost immediately and allowed Maugham to quit his job as a doctor and become a full time writer which lead to Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale and my beloved The Razor’s Edge, all of which are worth reading.
I was debating what mine would be and Maughm is exactly right. It’s just good fun. One of his most hilarious stories is The Three Fat Women of Antibes.-“May I have some bread?” she asked.The grossest indecency would not have fallen on the ears of those three women with such a shock. Not one of them had eaten bread for ten years.
I would say Shakespeare because of that recent Atlantic article that challenged Shakespeare’s authorship but the funny thing is that I tried reading Othello but its too hard to read.
I love the Four Seasons and used it in my college essay and also think maybe Alice in Wonderland is the best book I know of, so I have two things in common with these guys
I’d like to hear Peter Greenaway’s answer to this question.I found Voltaire’s Candide to be hilarious and somehow fresher than the later-written Huck Finn. Perhaps that was due to being written in French and translated into English later.
Voltaire’s endless well of bitter, secretly fiesty dry humor is timeless. And as someone who occasionally assigns Candide, often lost on students.
Tend to that garden, Candide!
Yup! Katie Rife’s favorite piece of pre-20th century pop culture is totally Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1896 film La Fée Aux Choux! Rife understood the question and gave a genuine, earnest response — she just loves watching that minute-long silent movie, it’s so good.
Well, I tell you what, it was fun to read about it even her secret true answer is A Christmas Carol or whatever.
You fuckers have taken most of the good ones, so I’mma go way back and choose Sun-Tzu’s The Art Of War, the bedside table staple of every weird gym bro/borderline-scary military enthusiast everywhere. Silly stereotypes aside, it teaches basic life lessons like how information does matter, and that an educated guess will beat out a ‘gut decision’ any day of the week. Choosing your battles, the importance of timing, and a crapload of other life lessons are covered, and the version I had as a teenager was a quick read that I’d thumb through right before bed. If you see it in a bookstore (the paperback usually isn’t any more than a couple bucks), pick it up and give it a look if you haven’t already. You might be surprised what you learn from it.
I was working in a bookstore the year “Wall Street” came out. We had so many customers ask for “that book he talks about in the movie ‘Wall Street’” …which was, of course, “The Art of War.”
Yeah, I was almost embarrassed to mention it what with the weird douchey connections it has to pop culture and certain types of people. But I still love it.
The Art of War chapter on what sort of person to turn as a spy within the enemy camp reads like a personality profile of Donald Trump.
Wouldn’t be surprised if Charles Manson had read it, as well, what with how many mind control techniques those two seem to have in common.
The Iliad.
Not sure where to draw the line between pop culture and high culture.For that which will never be accused of being the latter, I vote Sir Walter Scott, An Occurrence at Owl Creek, and ragtime.
I think if we’re talking pre-2oth century and it stood the test of time, it’s pop culture.
I think Ambrose Bierce would be pissed if he was lumped with high culture, although he was a great writer. He was a master of savage, economical prose, and he wrote like Goya painted.
Ambrose Bierce, the name rings a bell. He wrote one of the greatest howlers of all time: Write it right. Nothing underscores the futility of linguistic perscriptivism more than this list of ‘words and phrases to avoid’ published around 1910. About 70 percent of those have become absolutely indispensible parts of modern English. For example, Bierce warns us never to say ‘lunch’ and instead always use the word ‘luncheon’ (which I may note has acquired it’s own specialized meaning.)
On the other hand, The Devil’s Dictionary is all about digging into the supposedly settled meanings of words and revealing what is actually behind the facade. Write it Right is mostly a cudgel, but The Devil’s Dictionary is a scalpel. Or, sometimes dynamite.
Yes to Owl Creek! I like the works of Ambrose Bierce. The French adaptation that was aired on the Twilight Zone is fantastic.
The Illiad.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas. I really dig that it’s a slow, patient revenge tale that takes decades for Dantes to enact. It’s made all the better when I read The Black Count and realized that Dumas’ working through some unresolved revenge fantasies related to how post-Napoleonic racism ruined his father’s name.Also Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. It’s dark and broody because he was trying to impress a girlETA: can I be ungrayed on this site?
Dracula . by local boy Bram Stoker for me .(1897 ,so it counts) Also reading the Kim Newman Anno Dracula books afterwards is a lot of fun,I’ve also a soft spot for Robinson Crusoe which I read as an abridged children’s version as a kid , and later a few times as an adult with the original version .There’s some stuff that straight up rankles modern sensibilities (mainly the slave/ slave ownership parts , especially in the early parts that fact that he sells the fellow escaped slave boy , and the kid’s actually HAPPY about it!, although I remember there’s sort of a brief , ‘oh I’ll free him after a few years’ conversation tacked on).But if you can get over that its a fun read.In fairness to ‘Crusoe though its one of the first modern novels written.
Given how most people’s first exposure to Dracula is via endless reimaginings and parodies on film and television, it’s amazing how the original novel still holds up as a tense, thrilling, and creatively constructed story.
There’s still scenes and set pieces no one’s ever filmed – to my knowledge.
Famous Imposters by Stoker is fun reading. It’s a series of profiles of famous imposters and hoaxes, including a nutty legend that Queen Elizabeth I was actually a man, who had originally been a boy switched wih the real Elizabeth when she died unexpectedly as a little girl and had her body hidden in a castle wall.
Crusoe is great though some of the pacing is just bizarre.
I LOVE Dracula and have probably read it thirty times since college (once a year for Halloween at least!) and never get tired of the layers in the story.Here’s my endless babbling on the subject:
http://goddessoftransitory.blogspot.com/2013/10/contemplating-moon-dracula-character.html
Robinson Crusoe is even in its full version a cracking read, almost the perfect book for fifth graders. I don’t think there is a single dull moment in the whole book. It really approaches survivalism from a naturalistic standpoint. Robinson Crusoe’s focus organically grows from just the focus on salvaging whatever he can from the ship to gradually taking control of his environment.
“Hey Kids …Like Minecraft? You’ll Love Robinson Crusoe! (just skip the slavery bits)“
In the Hall of the Mountain King is more metal than most metal.
For me it’s got to be The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Long, rambling, metafictional – hell it’s volume 3 before he’s even born. But in there he gets circumcised by a falling window and Sterne includes quite a few bawdy jokes for an 18th-century clergyman. I’d even recommend the quasi-adaptation film starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
Hell YEAH. I came here for this one, late to the party though I am. This is my desert island novel (you have to have Melvyn New’s footnotes, though. The Penguin edition is fine, but the Florida edition is authoritative). The book is hilarious, sad, smart, and a bit of a ripoff of both Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. It was also a sensation in its time, considered junk by Samuel Johnson (“nothing odd will last”) but experimental and hugely influential to the postmodernists in the twentieth century.
“Leaves of Grass” for me. Whitman was like “fuck y’all’s traditions, imma be ME.”
I read ‘Leaves of Grass’ and hear a lot of The ‘Bhagavad Gita’ in it. Around the time of LoG being written the first English translation of the Gita was being enthusiastically passed around by the likes of Thoreau and Emerson. most notable is the recurring use of “I” in the text.From the Gita: “I am the ritual and the sacrifice; I am true medicine and the mantram. I am the offering and the fire which consumes it, and the one to whom it is offered”From Leave of Grass: “I will sleep no more but arise, You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.”
Pirates of Penzance I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Elagabulus
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous
Pinafore too,
My answers are so obvious as to be mundane. First and foremost, Shakespeare. I’ll take any and all, though Richard III is my firm favorite. As long as I can remember, I have loved villains who are evil, know they’re evil and glory in it, though I never found my platonic ideal until years later when I first saw Richard III. I don’t care if it’s the obvious answer, for me it’s the correct one.My second place is Beethoven’s first piano concerto. I love all his piano concertos, but the first is my favorite. I think the largo movement is the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard in my life.
Most of human history happened before the 20th century, and the big names I love (Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Swift, Sophocles, for example) are too obvious… so here’s a very partial list of “B-sides” in no particular order:1. The Unfortunate Traveler by Thomas Nashe2. The short stories of Ambrose Bierce3. Goya’s paintings—not his official portraits—though there’s some sly subversion there—but his personal, odd and grotesque work. The 20th century has no monopoly on the weird and monstrous.4. Rodin’s sculpture—again, the private, rough-hewn, erotic work over the smoothly finished masterpieces.5. “Jubilate Agno” by Christopher Smart6. Metamorphoses by Apuleius7. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by William Blake
I have a long-standing fascination with the Heian period of Japan (794 to 1185). The Tale of Genji is the best known work of this period, but my favorite of the written works that have survived are the diaries of court women. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon was hugely popular among the noble ladies and got endlessly passed around, so it definitely counts as pop culture. I love the lists she put into it: Elegant Things, Hateful Things, Things That Make The Heart Beat Faster, etc. Sometimes she would just list things like birds or trees or festivals. It’s something that you can just open at random and read.
As far as Japanese pop culture, you can’t go wrong with late 19th Century woodblock prints. They were intended to be cheap art on a par with today’s posters, but they are now iconic — Hokusai’s Great Wave is the best known, but views of Fuji and others are easily recognizable today. The composition, stylization, craftsmanship and drama still jumps out at you today. They were extremely influential on the Post Impressionists in Europe, who struggled to match them in their own art, and they obviously live on when you look at modern Japanese animation and illustrated pop art.
I love the whole Japonism craze from back then cause finding out that all your favourite painters from back then loved to hang out in Asia shops and discuss their favourite manga like a bunch of nerds is just so #relatable. The more things change the more they stay the same!
The works of Jane Austen, no question. Virtually no other author has aged better. Her commentary is sharp, as is her acerbic wit. Yet, there’s always hope amidst Austen’s cutting passages.
The 1897 Henry James novel “What Maisie Knew” is bizarre and difficult and satiric and often very funny. James set himself the task of writing the novel rigorously from the perspective of a 6-7 year old girl while she watches her degenerate upper class parents destroy their family. James is often seen as an effete milquetoast writer but in this novel he’s savage and pointed and mocking in his tacit condemnation of the British upper class.
I have a soft spot for the adaptation of What Maisie Knew that came out a few years ago with Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan. It only dramatizes part of the novel, but I think it’s nicely done.
Rabelais classic book Gargantua and Pantagruel. Very funny, very vulgar, and for the time- very transgressive.
That’s a great answer.
Came here for this and … (Oh baby)… The illustrations of Gustav Dore. Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost … Dante … Below is Jacob Wrestling with an Angel, and Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Aw, hell, yeah! When Notre Dame was burning I had the inappropriate thought that it was too bad Pantagruel (or Gulliver) wasn’t around to put it out. (Definitely a case of “too soon” on my part.) Rabelais is also erudite, the erudition coming more to the fore in the “Third Book” and “Fourth Book.”
If you miss your blockbuster movies while time-travelling back to the 9th century, Read Gustav Flaubert’s 1862 novel ‘Salammbo’. Its sweeping and grotesque and amoral (not unlike ‘Game of Thrones’). A gladiator slave leads an uprising against Carthage. One ‘scene’ (it needs to be described in cinematic terms) involved desperate Carthaginians throwing their own babies into the fiery iron jaws of the god Moloch as an offering to save them from the coming army.
Opera is certainly an art form that’s seen as high brow now, but was “pop” in a contemporary setting. So I will go with Bizet’s Carmen. Passion, melodrama and some cracking tunes.
The Aquarium piece from Saint-Saen’s Le Carnival Des Animaux. As beautiful and ethereal a piece of music as I’ve heard; no wonder it has influenced countless musical creations afterward…..
Does mythology count? Because, there are some cool stories there, especially in Native American mythology. Though, I have been a little more interested in Norse mythology lately, thanks to Thor’s rise in popularity over the decade for obvious reasons.
For me, the greatest novel set during the American Civil War: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
Good choice.
Someone rightfully commented that European works were too heavily represented here, so I want to add Monkey: Folk Novel of China translated by Arthur Waley. Start with an asshole stone monkey who likes to fight everybody and a few hundred pages later you get Buddhism. It is truly batshit crazy in places.
I haven’t been exposed to much pre-20th century Asian art. It sounds like I should though-probably tons of great stuff to be found there.
If we’re talking about something actually classified as popular culture, as opposed to “high” art, that would have to be the sci fi illustrations of Albert Robida.
I was able to browse Le Vingtième Siècle at Houghton Library. It’s a great work.
Going off the popular art cue, the advertising posters of Alphonse Mucha:
I’m a theatre professor and have that poster hanging in my office. I love Mucha!!
Yeah, he’s great. I was fortunate to see an exhibition in Zurich a few years back, including a bunch of his originals and sketches. Really inspirational stuff.I found it fascinating how even in his clean, decorative designs he incorporates irregularities and imperfections that mark them as handmade or “organic”. (In the piece above, for example, notice that the frame is not perfectly straight, and that the supports for the arced “window” are different on each side.)
I’ve been to the Mucha Museum in Prague twice. It is a cool little museum and I love his theatre posters. Especially the stuff he did for Sarah Bernhardt.
King Lear, I suppose.
The first movement of Bruckner’s 9th Symphony feels like home in a way no other piece of music has for me. And I realize Shakespeare is a “basic” answer, but honestly Titus Andronicus has one of the most badass villain speeches I’ve ever seen with Aaron’s speech before he dies. Lucius: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?Aaron: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Sea of Ice” (1824). I love both the Romantic and Symbolist movements and Friedrich’s world occupies a haunting twilight zone between them. We tend to forget that salons and galleries were the movie theaters of their day as much as live theater was and crowds viewing this piece for the first time gasped outloud.Part of that reaction may have been the horror of the depiction of the arctic wreck of a real ship at a time when the North Pole was as alien and terrifyingly remote as the moon. I think the real power of the painting though is its allegorical/psychological power and how Friedrich was opening up a new, disturbing way of conceiving of and viewing art. It’s no surprise the painter was rediscovered and appreciated by both the Symbolists and Surrealists.I’d like to add a couple of fringe works. First, the batshit crazy occultist/hallucinatory novel “Etidorpha” (1895) by John Uri Lord. The book is nearly unreadable but is notable for its bizarre proto-surrealist imagery and elaborately nightmarish hollow Earth world building. H.P. Lovecraft was greatly impressed by the book and it has been suggested that the frequent use of underground settings in his work can be traced back to “Etidorph’s” influence.I’d also like to add the paintings of murderer/madman Richard Dadd (1870-1886), who spent the last 42 years of his life in assorted asylums (including the infamous Bedlam) obsessively painting exquisitely detailed depictions of the fairy world decades before the obviously fake Cottingley Fairy photos created a sensation in Edwardian Era England.
I knew there was a reason I asked this question! The book sounds amazing! I have to check it out. The first painting, too.
It’s funny how much that ice/rocks formation in “The sea of ice” resembles California’s Vasquez Rocks (often used in SF movies/tv to represent an alien planet)
I normally hate period pieces but I watched The Favourite last night and it rules.
Snoods!
I’ll go with Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera Pagliacci (Clowns). Opera was pop culture pre-20th century. And Pagliacci pretty much originated the trope of the evil clown. La comedia e finita indeed.
I’m partial to the water molecule. Still pretty popular, I hear
Katie probably knows this already, but there’s a new primary school picture book about Guy-Blache.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde still holds up. That and Tom Sawyer are probably my choices.
One hint at Edgar Allen Poe, but no love for Dumas, Twain, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, or Dickens? That is a lot of popular pop culture to miss…I’d have a hard time choosing, but Dumas, Twain, and Conan Doyle would have to be the top three.
Oh my gosh, so many great answers, but I am surprised not to see any Oscar Wilde on this list or in the comment section. I will forever love The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it has top spot for sheer entertainment value, but really any of his writing, from the super comedic The Importance of Being Earnest, to the deeply introspective letter he wrote from prison, De Profundis.
Impressionists and Fanny Hill
Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are the same book. Discuss.
War of the Worlds. Or maybe Macbeth or Julius Caesar.
Alex, I think your timeline is off. The Ambassadors was painted in 1533. The Dutch Masters (Vermeer, Rembrandt, etc) weren’t born yet.
Fuck, you’re right. I was thinking of the Flemish Primitives, a.k.a. the Early Dutch artists. Good catch.
“Not a whit. We defy augury. There’s a special
providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come.
If it be
not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will
come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows,
what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.” Hamlet
It was The Three Musketeers for a long time, since I read it at a very young age. But nowadays I’d say it’s Jane Austen’s Emma. I love the humour, the fact that she basically invented romcoms in P&P and polished the formula here, the large ensemble of well-developed characters, the humour, how alike we are in our banality to the people of that time, how precisely she portrays the dynamics between the classes, the subtlety of Emma basically having nothing better to devote her intelligence and talents to than manipulating the people around her for what she thinks is their own good. But I could choose any of her books. It is always fascinating to me how little humanity changes no matter how much culture, science and technology do. The fact that I can read about teen/late teen girls meeting for shopping a few centuries ago, writing diaries, getting mocked for liking what they like as in Northanger Abbey because gothic novels are silly and not real literature. And I like that, while sharp, Austen’s observations are almost always humurous and mostly warm. She doesn’t come off as a cynic or bitter person, it’s just like she’s laughing at everything, herself included. I always feel like I’m a part of the joke, of the “how ridiculous we all are” vibe that all her novels have to different degrees. I guess that can seem a superficial attitude to some, but I love it.
Clair de Lune. The piece that inspired me to take up piano. Four years later, taking up an instrument is the greatest decision I’ve made in my life and has saved me from many of my issues with depression.Here’s a video of it being played to an elephant:
Back in the mid 1970’s my school offered music class 3 days a week. The whole class would schlep down the hall to the music room, where the teacher would pound out tunes on a piano while we sang along. “Drill Ye Terriers Drill” was a favorite of mine, a song published nearly a century earlier. It’s about Irish railroad workers. As a kid I thought rhyming “tay” with “day” was cheating. If you want to know where the socialist influence in folk music comes from, check out the verse where the man blown a mile high gets “docked for the time you were up in the sky!” I’m surprised they let us sing Commie stuff like this in public schools.
Wow, I read all of the comments, and I am blown away by the smarts and culture and interesting discussions started. It’s a very happy cool thing.
A Christmas Carol. I reread it every couple of years and it always reveals something especially relevant and new. The fact that it is still being retold in every media so many times says a lot about how insightful it is. I really recommend the original though.
The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon is one of the most gossipy and hilarious pieces of pre-modern pop culture out there. Pair it with Murasaki Shikibu’s poems and letters to understand their simmering literary feud back in the Heian court.
Much Ado About Nothing.
Mine only misses the 20th century by a little over a decade but I love “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. I think Twain does a marvelous job mocking romanticism while still making Arthur and the knights have some wonderful qualities and it is just a fun story. My runner up would be Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” because hearing the hot gos on Reinassance artists from one of their own was just about the most fun I had in college.
The works of H. Rider Haggard. King Solomon’s Mines and She have influenced so much of the pop culture that came after.
Coin flip between Hugo’s Les Miserables and Dickens’s Great Expectations, both wonderful reading and rereading….
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Journey to the West. Chinese novel based on real story but with demons. Now the basis for at least 8 films and 4 tv series and 2 comic series.
I’m really into medieval French tapestries.
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 “Choral”: IVa. Presto. When we are gone and the aliens are picking over our bones, let them find it and know we really did try.
Saturn Eating His Son By Goya, c. 1819-1823Also Claire de Lune is nice
Last year I read ‘The Manuscript Found in Saragossa’ (1810’s approximately; the author died in 1815* and the translation that I read seems to be based on a draft that was being revised**) by Count Jan Potocki, and absolutely loved it in spite of the ending, which is very disappointing in a very 1800’s way. Still, I enjoyed everything up until that point so much that I can’t really complain. The book concerns a Walloon soldier travelling in Spain, who gets stranded in a small mountain village, who ends up alternately shooting the shit with a variety of local weirdos who tell him their life’s stories, while occasionally investigating the series of bizarre events which start happening to him just about the same time that he sets foot in the valley. The novel largely consists of stories within stories, in the manner of the Arabian Nights, and started off as a Gothic horror piece (apparently Potocki’s original plan), before spinning out into a kaleidoscope of whatever genre Potocki felt like writing at any given time. Seriously, I recommend people check it out.Also a nice bonus; ‘The Manuscript…’ is much less racist than I expected given its era. This is especially true since I started reading it shortly after reading William Beckford’s novella ‘Vathek’, which I also loved, but holy Jesus was that book racist! ‘Vathek’ is so racist that H.P. Lovecraft praised it for its realistic depiction of Arabs. Yikes.On the subject of Gothics, the book that got me into the genre was Matthew Gregory Lewis’ lunatic masterpiece ‘The Monk: A Romance’, which contains all the sleaze, melodrama, and violence that I could possibly hope for from a Gothic romance. Lascivious monks! Secret ladies disguised as monks! Black magic! Pregnant nuns! Sadistic nuns! The Spanish Inquisition! Bandits! Murder! Accidental incest! Accidental ghostnapping! Read it now!On the visual arts side, people in the comments section already mentioned Gustave Doré, and he is indeed one of my all-time favorites; I’d also like to throw in Hieronymus Bosch as one of my faves, especially (and I know that this is a cliché) “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, which I would love to get a poster of for my bedroom wall, but I’m certain my wife would shoot that down, probably with good reason. On Wednesday, my wife and I saw an exhibit on the Pre-Raphaelites at the Seattle Art Museum, which was really excellent.——————————————————————-
*Supposedly he shot himself with a silver bullet because he thought that he was turning into a werewolf.**From what I understand, earlier portions of the book were revised by the author, but the ending was based on an earlier draft; this results in a minor character who had been written out of the earlier parts of the book suddenly being mentioned towards the end.
Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet, so here goes anyway:Its physics is dated, its astronomy completely dead — we all know there’s no such things as Martians and modern lasers don’t work anything like the Martians’ fabled heat ray. But over a century after its first publication H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” still has the power to grab you by the throat and scare the living daylights out of you. Now THAT is how to write great science fiction.
The Satyricon.The characters are like something out of a 2000 year old Lou Reed album. Truly there is nothing new under the sun.
Paradise Lost
“while Edison wasn’t really as bad as the Nikola Tesla fans of the world make him out to be”Feel like backing that up at all? Cause all I’ve heard has made edison seem worse and worse with each passing story. There’s nothing really good about hounding rivals and getting rich off taking credit for other people’s work.