A Whitman Sampler
The only downside of TiVo is that when a commercial is genuinely interesting, you still miss it. It was at gnosticpi and bigstokes80's that I finally saw the Levi's commercial featuring Will ("Grampa Walton") Geer's voiceover reading of "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" by Walt Whitman. And apparently, there's another one featuring a wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman his own self reading "America." Leaving aside the weird appropriation of Communist imagery to sell blue jeans (in your face, Uncle Karl!), there's the even weirder use of Walt Whitman to sell blue jeans. Or is it weird, so much as forgotten? (And how much of the "Old, Weird America" is just forgotten, but truer and straighter than what we dare to remember?) After all, the great democratic poet fits the great democratic garment like ... well, like blue jeans.
I encountered Whitman in high school English class, which is probably the wrong time to encounter Whitman, Dead Poets Society notwithstanding. There is nothing less cynical, less self-preserving, less guarded, than Whitman. Or maybe, it's just the wrong time to read Whitman if you're leading-edge Generation X, holding ironic distance as a shield before you. Perhaps the Millennials are as thrilled and energized (en masse, of course, or should I say "well in order") by great barbaric yawps and bodies electric as we were embarrassed and disdainful. Maybe that's what Wieden + Kennedy (the mad ad men behind this campaign: and what do you think that meeting sounded like? "Blue jeans ad? I know; let's macedoine some socialist-realism and some cinema verite and set it to Walt Whitman.") think, anyway.
Be that as it may, I suspect that I haven't played entirely fair with Whitman since then, for all that I've grown out of being a high-schooler, if not a leading-edge Gen-Xer. (You know who else could use a little love from the masscult? Vachel Lindsay. But I've said enough.)
So what else about Whitman? Well, he and Bram Stoker were BFFs. No kidding. Fervent pen-pals since 1876, Stoker met Whitman in America in 1884. In its trusting way, Wikipedia says that Dracula is meant to be Stoker's "ultimate male principle," meaning "Walt Whitman," and a still more excitable Web page goes into loving detail on the Dracula-Whitman parallels, such as they are. I'd be more likely to buy (though I haven't had time to read the original journal article) David Thiele's argument:[T]he character Quincey Morris in Dracula is a version of Whitman's "friendly and flowing savage," who stands "in stark contrast to his English and European counterparts," and that "in A Glimpse of America Stoker can be seen to have adopted Whitman's belief that America was both closer to nature and more highly evolved than the rest of the world, including Britain," generating in Dracula a "continuum" with "the degenerate decadence of Dracula's world at one end, the mostly modernized and civilized but still somewhat constricted, arrogant, and decadent culture of the English in the middle, and the highly evolved, primal virtue of Quincey Morris's Whitmanic America at the other end."
"Have you your pistols? Your sharp-edged axes?" You'll need 'em to kill vampires. In your blue jeans, O pioneers.
I encountered Whitman in high school English class, which is probably the wrong time to encounter Whitman, Dead Poets Society notwithstanding. There is nothing less cynical, less self-preserving, less guarded, than Whitman. Or maybe, it's just the wrong time to read Whitman if you're leading-edge Generation X, holding ironic distance as a shield before you. Perhaps the Millennials are as thrilled and energized (en masse, of course, or should I say "well in order") by great barbaric yawps and bodies electric as we were embarrassed and disdainful. Maybe that's what Wieden + Kennedy (the mad ad men behind this campaign: and what do you think that meeting sounded like? "Blue jeans ad? I know; let's macedoine some socialist-realism and some cinema verite and set it to Walt Whitman.") think, anyway.
Be that as it may, I suspect that I haven't played entirely fair with Whitman since then, for all that I've grown out of being a high-schooler, if not a leading-edge Gen-Xer. (You know who else could use a little love from the masscult? Vachel Lindsay. But I've said enough.)
So what else about Whitman? Well, he and Bram Stoker were BFFs. No kidding. Fervent pen-pals since 1876, Stoker met Whitman in America in 1884. In its trusting way, Wikipedia says that Dracula is meant to be Stoker's "ultimate male principle," meaning "Walt Whitman," and a still more excitable Web page goes into loving detail on the Dracula-Whitman parallels, such as they are. I'd be more likely to buy (though I haven't had time to read the original journal article) David Thiele's argument:[T]he character Quincey Morris in Dracula is a version of Whitman's "friendly and flowing savage," who stands "in stark contrast to his English and European counterparts," and that "in A Glimpse of America Stoker can be seen to have adopted Whitman's belief that America was both closer to nature and more highly evolved than the rest of the world, including Britain," generating in Dracula a "continuum" with "the degenerate decadence of Dracula's world at one end, the mostly modernized and civilized but still somewhat constricted, arrogant, and decadent culture of the English in the middle, and the highly evolved, primal virtue of Quincey Morris's Whitmanic America at the other end."
"Have you your pistols? Your sharp-edged axes?" You'll need 'em to kill vampires. In your blue jeans, O pioneers.