So, Mark, where do you place you and me in this?

[koganbot]

dubdobdee over on the poptimists answer record/fanfic thread:

some of the prob with "theory-dependent" crit -- not just music crit either -- is that there's a deferred fandom going on: viz yr "allowed" to be critical of tarantino but you have to treat eg foucault [but basically insrt guru of choice]* as if it's a different level of thinking; there's a very

Comments

[dubdobdee]

i am hallway and you are classroom (and i will regret sayin this when i am sober)

[dubdobdee]

less drunkly (hence not being merely cheeky in order to get a rise

[koganbot]

In the one minute I have before having to go meet some friends:

My complaint about the hallway-classroom split is that it is mutually impoverishing, that it truncates both conversations terribly and makes each dishonest. So if you're hallway and I'm classroom, we're in trouble.

The classroom relies a lot on authority: of a teacher (do it my way or you will get a poor grade) and of the subject matter (we will claim that the subject matter organizes the discussion for us and decides what is relevant and irrelevant. The two "authorities" reinforce each other. There's nothing inherently bad about this. Sometimes challenging authority is just another filibuster, other times it's genuinely questioning what needs to be questioned (are we doing this out of mere habit and deference, or is there good reason for having this discussion in this way?).

[koganbot]

I don't think that Greil Marcus and Debbie Deb are different in kind, so if I haven't discussed them together, that's mere coincidence. I discussed Robert Warshow and Disco Tex together.

[koganbot]

I often don't cite sources to establish credit, either, not because I'm a schnook but because of word limits or because it would kill the flow of the prose, and footnotes often aren't allowed.

While Goldman's Elvis is not a serious biography, it is a very serious book, if only for what it seeks to accomplish: to exclude Elvis Presley, and the culture of the white working-class South, and the people of that culture, and the culture of rock & roll, and the people of that culture, from any serious consideration of American culture. And the bait is being taken: in the New York Times review that will be syndicated all over the United States, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that after reading Goldman's book "one feels revolted by American culture for permitting itself to be exemplified by the career of Elvis Presley

[skyecaptain]

I don't think either of y'all actually split into hallway/classroom very easily yourselves, from what I've read. But it does seem like, milieu-wise (whether you like it or not, usually not) Mark seems to be most agitated with clasroom-thinkers who are pretending they're in the hallway, and Frank seems to be most agitated (or rather, stuck with) hallway-thinkers who are pretending they're in the classroom. Reductively the difference between the crippling (boring) pseudo(?)-academic deference of big-T theory guys while pretending it's in the interest of PHUN and the dabblers who organize themselves into conceptual classroom hierarchies (most of the rockcrit world). In both cases you have a worst of both worlds scenario with no attempt to actually break down or transcend the split itself, just sort of superficially invert the properties while keeping the deeper structures of hallway (no real intellectual engagement) or classroom (deference, reverence, visibly demonstrable "hard work" in the form of jargon, etc.).

[koganbot]

For the benefit of lurkers: the way I divide up "hallway"-"classroom" is (a) in the "hallway" we talk to and about each other (incl. flirting, fighting, gossiping, joking) while (b) in the "classroom" we talk about some third thing, the subject matter. And I was saying that we rock critics (i.e., the good ones) refuse this division, refuse to allot one area of our lives to hallway behavior at the expense of classroom and another area for classroom behavior at the expense of the hallway. I see the crime of hallway thinkers and of classroom thinkers as their doing one at the expense of the other or, even worse, their making not doing one the symbol of doing the other. So being dry, impersonal, and boring can be the symbol for dealing with a subject matter, even if one doesn't actually have anything worth saying about the subject, and being snarky, full of invective, and emotional can be the symbol of living a life, even if one actually avoids being interesting or engaging with the world beyond one's own armpit

[skyecaptain]

Actually, the way you've put this, I think my own formulation is backwards; in your examples above, Reynolds/K-Punk can often bring classroom terminology, a sense of "I've done my homework already, so I don't need to examine this particular problem even if my homework doesn't apply," to do pure hallway bullying and/or dismissal (usually the latter; if they're bullies, they're not very good at actually getting under skin the way true bullies do

[dubdobdee]

my initial claim -- insofar as it has life beyond a drunken and regrettable and self-hating gag -- is that i think frank, by temperament and intent, does skew much more toward teaching and the teacherly than me (he has a goal in mind; an approach to thinking and exploration he would like to impart - and perhaps as much a whole bunch of approaches he would like to DEpart); whereas i, by temperament and approach, skew more towards "doing the show here now, improvising its form out of the material to hand"

rush to change religion

[koganbot]

Not relevant to the discussion, but I just saw this headline:

"Pope urges Angolans to convert; stampede kills 2"