“The association of eugenics with race, social class and the emerging ideas about ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ cultures was unmistakable. The terms themselves were first used around the turn of the century to describe people of intellectual or aesthetic superiority (highbrow) or inferiority (lowbrow). They were derived from phrenology, a nineteenth-century practice widely used in determining …
What Is A Highbrow?
“Harper’s Magazine examined the three categories at mid-century. ‘What is a highbrow?’ the writer asked, followed by three replies. ‘A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women,’ Edgar Wallace, a writer of crime novels and thrillers once said. Harper’s writer thought that too vague, but that Columbia professor and author …
Like Toothpaste
” . . . in the aftermath of a controversy over The Birth of a Nation in 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the cinema a ‘business pure and simple’ and not an art form to be protected by the First Amendment. The movies, then, could be regulated as a consumer product” (William Romanowski, Pop …
Give It A Rest
Editor, I have a proposal for your newspaper, and for Mr. Ralph Nielsen. In his most recent screed, Ralph said that he declined a public debate with me because he is not a trained speaker, and he prefers the written word. Good enough. This, therefore, is my proposal. The Argonaut should publish 500 words from …
Should Sinners Die?
Editor, I would like to make one small, but important, correction to the story you ran on the protest at the recent “Hate is not a family value” dance. I was quoted as saying that homosexuality is a sin, and that those who sin deserve to die. This is quite true, but a missing point, …
A Substitute Aristocracy in a Democracy
“American popular culture is as old as the colonies, but the appearance of high and popular culture as distinctive categories in American life occurred around the turn of this century [1900] . . . a cultural hierarchy emerged that divided American life into ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as a primary means of social, intellectual and …
Puddles
“Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into ‘appreciating,’ are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his …
Comments on Comments
This last week, after there was a comments pile-up here in the discussion of the Ligonier situation, a reasonable question was raised by David Bahnsen, which was, why have a comments feature at all? Ironically, my wife and I had just been talking about the same thing, and then after the question was raised here, …
Artistic Responsibility?
“In the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist’s duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing: we owe him ‘recognition,’ even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests, or habits. If we don’t give it to him, our name …
Where You Been?
Ed Iverson is one of NSA’s faculty members and serves as the librarian of our Tyndale Library. In addition to these duties, as well as being a gracious Christian gentleman, he also writes a periodic column for the Moscow/Pullman Daily News. But the ongoing reaction to his column by our local lefties resembles a series …