Brows

I'm really glad that Calvin Trillin wrote about this phenomenon, although in his case, he can by no stretch of the imagination be accused of the characterization he ponders in the article. I'm not so lucky.

Like Mr. Trillin, my family, too, has suggested that I lack culture (and taste, and knowledge of history). A former roommate regularly rolled her eyes at my tastes in television (and those of my other roommates at the time). Mind you, she was a bitch-- who else says things like, 'I'd never guess how smart you guys are by the crap you watch'? And that was in reference to 'Soul Food,' which was hardly 'Jackass.' Seriously, though: some people think I'm engaging in some sort of false modesty when I say that 'Seinfeld' was too highbrow for me, but I never really got into it. Same with 'Frasier.' I like my sitcoms light. Oh, and I found 'Ion,' the play I saw yesterday, painful to watch. And I don't need to tell you that 'Zoolander' and 'Idiocracy' figure among the movies of which I can never get enough. The closest I come in that category to classy is 'A Fish Called Wanda.' Meanwhile, 'Shakespeare in Love' makes me want to gag.

As for food, I never got into stuff like truffle oil (although I do like arugula). I don't *get* truffle oil. In the instances where it has graced my food, I have failed to appreciate whatever enhancements it surely must have brought. I could take or leave the truffle oil fries at Poste, and fries are one thing I could hardly ever leave.

I've not read probably half of what would make up a standard high school reading list. Not out of principle, just never got around to it. In some cases, those books are on my reading list (The Sound and the Fury) or even my bookshelf (Catch 22). In other cases, if you took away every other book in the world and held a gun to my head, and wanted me to go insane before getting shot, maybe I'd read them (anything by Dostoevsky).

I'm neither engaging in false modesty nor justifying my lack of refinement. For one thing, I'm not interested in the former-- I'm absolute crap at so many things that I hardly find it self-promoting to take credit for the things I'm actually good at. This isn't the way everyone sees it, though, and there's a gender angle to that: a lot of people, whether they realize it or not, interpret any admission of knowledge or skill by a woman as overconfidence, and the damage from that resonates throughout the culture-- look at the backlash against Hilary Clinton. I'm one of those people that didn't vote for her and certainly don't accuse Obama of mistreating her during the primary campaign, but I'm the first to acknowledge that her candidacy brought to the surface much smoldering, insidious misogyny. But I digress.

Nor defining myself as lowbrow. This is not a lowbrow-and-proud-of-it post. This is more of a WTF post: why do we need to categorize things by brow?

Just after the turn of the millennium, the Guardian compiled a list of most influential writers of the century, or something, based on input from living legendary writers. It was really telling that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende wouldn't answer, wouldn't legitimize the question.

Now, I'm certainly not trying to say that taste is relative, no music or book is better than any other, blah, blah, blah. I am trying to say that quality and brow do not necessarily correlate.