Stale Air and Dearest Freshness

By Eugene McCarraher

Four decades ago, Dwight Macdonald rued the impending triumph of “Midcult,” an “agreeable ooze” of denatured high culture produced for the college-educated. Curtis White’s The Middle Mind surpasses Macdonald’s work. Where Macdonald thought Midcult a merely insipid affair, White contends that the Middle [RETURN TO ARTICLE]

  • Reader Comments

     Page 1 of 1 pages

    born-again modernism, but the book might have some references for us?

    United States Posted by charles on Nov 10, 2003 at 3:37 PM

    born-again modernism, but the book might have some references for us?

    United States Posted by juliana on Nov 10, 2003 at 3:38 PM

    A good example of this is the New York Timees radio station, WQXR.
    Once the home of classical music, it has been dumbed down into a classical top-40’s venue. A policy of gently stroking the minds of a college grad audience without waking them up seems to be the formula.

    United States Posted by Walter G on Nov 13, 2003 at 10:51 PM

    Sometimes I really think it’s impossible to write cultural criticism from within academia.  You get so many bad samples.  There’s a particular kind of stupidity that prevails not just among “the college-educated” or the “bobos” but among faculty and other producers of cultural criticism themselves: it isn’t particular to academia—so you can’t write a *thesis* about how it’s particular to academia, the academic impulse to write theses about observations or frustrations notwithstanding—but it’s certainly at home there.  It sounds like this book encompasses one of these manias developed by a person who isn’t at home, for various reasons, within his own coterie, and has found a generally appealing way to say why that should be important to us all.  I mean, who isn’t sick of upper-class liberal banality?  But it’s the fact that it’s *banal* that is significant, not the particulars, except in the discussion of attitudes towards American imperialism, which sounds like it is probably well-taken.  Banality has always, and always will, come in a multitude of shapes and forms.  The only way to attack it is at the root, often with the language and methods of a field highly denatured and untimely in this age of biodeterminism and deconstruction: namely psychology.  If you’re going to write a book about any kind of “mind,” that seems like a good place to start.

    But hey, I’ve proven my implicit theory about doctrines and their limitations: now *I* want to write a book about some segment of American culture, a book the world would be much better without.  Huzzah.

    United States Posted by tamar on Nov 19, 2003 at 9:32 PM
     Page 1 of 1 pages

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