Books Under Judgement

One of the worst/best things about this class is I am a lot more conscious about what I'm reading and constantly trying to figure out if it belongs in the lowbrow camp or the highbrow camp. Before this class it was really simple. Any airport store thriller, story my mom would read, or Stephanie Meyer book was lowbrow and anything that I read for a literature class was... well... higher-brow than what my mom would read. Books fell pretty easily into these two categories. I was proud that I considered to be reading highbrow books. But after taking this class I no longer feel confident about my choices and my tendencies to think I'm reading highbrow stuff.

Two of the books in question now that I'm a little more acclimated to the highbrow (Finnegans Wake was like throwing a child into a pool with no water-wings) are the Sherlock Holmes series by Conan Doyle and The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. First under inspection is Sherlock. Well, originally I would have considered Sherlock Holmes highbrow. Not ultra highbrow or anything but decently highbrow. I mean it's from the Victorian era! That just sounds highbrow right?! It does... to the reader unfamiliar with highbrow literature. Simply being old does not make a book highbrow. Therefore I'm really tempted to say it is lowbrow. I mean the genre is detective/mystery and not like Lolita or anything. It was sensational lit. Even Sherlock himself notes that Watson's biographies of the stories tends to be sensational. It is very accessible. However, simply being accessible, which all the Sherlock Holmes stories are, does not damn them to the confines of being lowbrow.

Now that I have some knowledge on what is lowbrow and highbrow I'm at an impasse where to place my current reading venture The Last Temptation of Christ. I feel that some of the subject matter is definitely not lowbrow. However, I can't help but feel that it isn't all that highbrow. It seems like that is what my definition of lowbrow is-- something that isn't highbrow. While highbrow is simply something that is highbrow. These definitions would force me to place many works like The Last Temptation of Christ in a category where they probably don't fully belong. After some reflection perhaps this book is neither.

I conclude that the books we read are on a scale. When it comes to books and stories it is rather inaccurate to generalize. Some books are lowbrow definitely and some are highbrow definitely but many occupy the gray space. We shouldn't feel the need to group them into a category to which they don't fully belong to. Even with the term middlebrow the scale doesn't seem to be complete. New exploration is needed. Perhaps it isn't practical but it seems the right way to treat the stories we love without being embarrassed by them.

POST USEFUL BLOG RANT:
Often I'm amazed at the low standards many of my contemporaries hold on various artistic things. One needs to look no further than music to glean that information. Bands like Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Nickelback, 50 Cent and the like consistently are pushed across radios and earbuds. It's incredible to think that albums like "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Beatles (White Album)" used to top the charts and be considered "popular music". Our standards of lowbrow has dropped to the depths. This is not to say that there aren't quality productions out there. Of course there are. It's just when you listen to them, read them, see them, etc. people think you're way too weird and "artsy" with negative connotation.

This is not to say that people can't enjoy these lowbrow things. Of course they can. I enjoy various lowbrow things as much as the next person. But a life without some balance, some taste of the highbrow or at least higher-brow than Seth Rogen, is a life that ends up being lowbrow.