The point of those articles was that someone said that they like a certain thing even though they thought it was terrible and I thought "I wonder what they mean by that."

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progres

No Hipsters. Don't be coming in hear with your hairy faces, your vegan diets, your tiny hands and your sawdust bedding. No, wait. Hamsters. No Hamsters.

7

Wil Self wrote a piece in the Spectator entitled "Why I Hate Hipsters." I hope they commission another piece called simply "Why I Hate". And then one from a hipster entitled "Why I Hate Wil Self." 

I got as far as the bit where he complained about people who play loud music in coffee shops and got lost. I think he is mainly cross about the existence of cappuccino. He uses the words "frothy coffee" and "dickhead" interchangeably. A Daily Telegraph sub-editor asserted that hipsters were now the world's most derided sub-group; which must come as quite a relief for all the pedophiles. 

Some people hate hipsters. They hate them even more than they hate immigrants. One of the things that makes them really really cross is that they drink orange juice out of jam jars, which is to say, one of the coffee shops on Stokes Croft has jam jar shaped glasses. I find that sort of thing quite fun, but I can't imagine getting cross about it. I suppose it's a class thing. When people say that they hate hipsters with their beards and their Oxfam clothes and their orange juice what they mean is that they don't like the way in which all the boarded up shops have been taken over by coffee shops and bakeries and forced the crack dealers and whores out of business.

It's gentrification, innit? According to Wikipedia, I myself am 60% Hipster.

I think that one of the things which make "Hipsters" so derided is their affected sense of ironic detachment. The hipster goes to the Cube and the Arnolfini but only in order to strike a superior pose and complain that they've gone awfully mainstream recently; the hipster gets a ticket for the first night of a new play but doesn't appreciate it because he was so busy appreciating how clever and sophisticated he was for appreciating it. When I get accused of being a hipster (a thing which has hardly ever happened) it's never because I re-read Judge Dredd comic books or have Superman radio episodes on my IPod. It's always because I once heard a concert by a Senegali guitarist.

Oooo you hipster! You only went cos you wanted to feel clever!

The hat possibly doesn't help.

8

I don't think that the person who says that he knows the books he likes are terrible or says that her preferred genre is "trash" has a low opinion of the things which they love. I think that they are simply signaling that they want to suspend criticism. They would rather you stopped thinking, please. They don't want to have, for the seventeenth time, the debate about whether one of the character's was a bit racist and whether there were enough female characters. (He was and there weren't but shut up about it already.) He thinks that if he lies on his back with his tale between his legs, no-one will start a fight with him.

And I was kind of expecting (and so were you) this lecture to end up with me saying "Silly people! Asking me to switch my brain off!  Telling me that I can only see Guardians of the Galaxy is I leave my critical faculties at the door! Saying that some things are immune from criticism! If I can write a long Freudian Essay about King Lear I can damn well write a long Freudian essay about Superman Brought To You By The Makers Of Kellogs Pep (the Super-delicious breakfast cereal.)

But instead I am going to wonder out loud: why does anyone think that this kind of thing is worth saying in the first place?

Isn't it because the hipsters and the critics and the fan fiction writers and the subversives and the social justice vigilantes and the people who should really have grown out of this nonsense years ago are always trying to erect a veil between you and the thing you are watching or reading. Who want to prevent you from, in Lewis's sense, ever receiving any work of art ever again. Who want your primary experience of Guardians of the Galaxy to be that it didn't have any major female characters in it. (Groot knows, the lack of major females characters in Guardians of the Galaxy was as obvious as the fact that Geoff Tracey was a puppet.)

I think that "I like this, but it's rubbish" is trying to safeguard a few tiny drops of actual, primary, artistic experience. In a moment, I'm going to use the word authenticity and everyone will be forced to leave the room.

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "don't look at the strings".

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I want to watch this, not through a veil of hipster pretension, but actually itself"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this uncomplicatedly despite the fact that we live in age of irony"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this."

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "This is good."

I like Clone Wars even though it is terrible; I like Superman on the wireless even though it is terrible; I like 60s Marvel even though it is terrible. 

But truthfully; truthfully truthfully truthfully, I think that Doctor Who and Star Wars and Macbeth and the Ring Cycle are terrible too.

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progress

6

I have a friend who makes a point of reading stories against the grain. If it's a comic book about a hero who catches thieves just like flies then he decides that the thieves are all heroic Jesse James types and the hero is a fascist oppressor. (OK: the idea that bankers and vigilantes are baddies may not be that much of a stretch.) If it's a story about heroic warriors fighting bug eyed monsters in space he recasts the bug-eyed monsters as oppressed colonial victims. I assume he thinks that Doctor Who is a racist: the Daleks are just misunderstood. Or possibly Doctor Who is just impossible to misread; which probably means it's not worth reading in the first place. 

I can see how this game might keep an intelligent brain occupied while it's owner was watching movies about Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers. (Perhaps if you are bright and creative enough to rewrite the film in you shouldn't be watching the Lone Ranger in the first place.) I would guess that it renders (for example) Watchmen practically un-watchable. The text already undercuts itself so radically that it's hard to see what is gained by a clever reader willfully subverting it. "Let's read Watchmen as if Rorschache is the good guy." Well, yes, the text positively encourages you do that.  "Let's read it as if he's the bad guy." Yes, the text positively encourages you to do that as well.

On Lewis's terms, this sort of playful approach is the least "literary" imaginable. It is only interested in using the text as raw material for a game; anything that the actual author put onto the actual page is likely to disappear under the weight of subversion. Turning Star Wars (in your head) into a story in which Luke Skywalker is a religiously inspired terrorist is only one step up from school kids pretending there are dirty bits in Middlemarch. (Which is what they had do before the invention of the internet.) But can it really be that an active reading is worse than a passive one? Couldn't one equally make the case the kids comic annual that says "Look, space ships" and leaves the kid to do the actual imagining is one of the highest and most dynamic forms of literature. (It's also how good pornography works. So I'm told.)

If you are already taking the trouble to imagine that perfectly clean books are dirty ones; or of reading one novel and making up a different one in your head, then why not go the whole way, write your day-dream down on paper, and create completely new stories of your own? I suppose that's how Fanfic got started.

I don't think that a gay teenager, reading Legion of Superheroes and deciding that (I think it was) Bouncing Boy must be gay was consciously engaging in a subversive queer reading. I think that was a natural thing to do when there were no gay characters in comic books. The whole idea of Robin and Bucky was that you got to imagine that you were Captain America's or Batman's Very Special Friend. At one level, fan fiction writers are using popular fiction in the exact way it's always been used; in the exact way it's intended to be used. (Has any one ever read Harry Potter and not pretended that an Owl is about to drop a very important letter through their bedroom window? See also: Power Rings, Jaunting Belts, Light Sabers, Lenses...)

But it seems to be that when fan fiction becomes too much of a thing, the Legion and Harry Potter are basically reduced to a commodity: raw material to be chewed up and spat out and in new form, one where the baddie is the goodie and both of them are having kinky sex with each other. Which is fine. I mean, its fun, and its creative and its interactive and it doesn't do anyone any harm. I think it might be a pretty good working definition of the difference between a fan and a critic. A critic writes an essay about a book. A fan write three more chapters. (And then dresses up as the main character.)

But. There is Doctor Who fan fiction online before the closing credits of this weeks episode have been ruined by the continuity announcer. When Amazing Spider-Man 2 came to an end, I sat in the cinema for eight minutes to see if there was a post-cred. My fan-fic writing friends used those eight minutes to write a short story based on the premise that Aunt May was having an affair with Norman Osborne, and posted it to the internet before I left the cinema. They must literally sit through the actual movie thinking "What if this character were gay? What if I added a sex scene here? Could that background character be reimagined as the protagonist of the movie?" They have their reward. But this critic wonders if they can be said to have ever actually "seen" the movie they are writing about?

there's more

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress

5

Some people would say that the writer who can write a 15 minute script which ends with the hero getting captured in such a way that millions of children literally can't wait to find out if he escapes or not is just as clever -- maybe cleverer -- than the one who can write 4,000 pages about the minutiae of his childhood in such a way that the broadsheet newspapers salivate over it. But I don't think they really believe it. People also say "You have to be just as good an actor to play Widow Twanky as you do to play Hamlet" but I don't think they really believe it either."

I think that what everyone really believes is that there is a sort of league table of genres with Superman at the bottom, Middlemarch is at the top, and Agatha Christie in the billiard room with the lead piping.

Which means we have been making very heavy weather of a very easy question. "I like this even though it is bad" means "I like this despite its low position in the the hierarchy of genres"

Emotionally, I am pretty sure that this is what I believe. Middlemarch is "better" than Superman. One is about a whole community and a whole nation and asks us to redefine our whole definition of psychology and narrative, where the other sold breakfast cereal to American kids. I definitely feel that Middlemarch is better than "some text that some copy writer wrote on the back of a box of Kellogs Pep" although I also accept that advertising copy writing is a hard job and neither me nor Mary Evans could have done it. 

But I am not sure that I could rationally defend these feelings. What does "better" even mean?  I could just as well argue: 

Superman — Poked fun at the Klu Klux Klan when it was dangerous to do so; encouraged literally millions of kids to practice tolerance and clean living

Middlemarch — Approved of by F.R Leavis

Superman — Millions of kids ran home to school to listen to it 

Middlemarch — Literally no-one would read it if someone hadn't decided that an English Literature GCSE was needed to get certain kinds of job. 

Superman - Figure who literally everyone on earth has heard of; genuine 20th century myth. 

Dorothea Brooke - Who she?

6:

Mr C.S. Lewis proved that what defined a "good" book was that the reader had a "good" literary experience. One of the markers that a "good" literary experience was taking place was that once the reader had finished the book, he might go back and read it for a second or third time. The person consuming a romantic story in Woman's Realm (intending to throw it away once he's finished it) is doing a different kind of thing to the person sitting down to read Barnaby Rudge for the fourth time. 

I have never read Barnaby Rudge. I have no idea why that was the example which occurred to me.

I don't know if would be prepared to argue (except in order to annoy my Mother) that Doctor Who is "better" than Coronation Street in some objective way. I don't think that it necessarily has better actors, better writers, better directors or cleverer plots. I suppose I could say that it's cleverer to create an alien planet that people believe in than to create a Manchester kitchen that people believe in but on the other hand we've spent 50 years apologizing for the sheer unbelievableness of many of Doctor Who's planets. And some of his kitchens.

But there is no question that we Doctor Who fans do go back and watch our favourite episodes over and over again; but the the idea of anyone going back and listening to old episodes of the Archers is obviously silly. I think I am correct in saying that soap fans, if they miss a few installments, don't try to "catch up" by watching the parts that they missed: they simply start watching again from this weeks episode and take it for granted that the characters themselves will bring them up to speed on what has been happening while they've been away. A bit like real life. There are DVD collections of Inspector Morse, Grange Hill, and the Banana Splits but none of EastEnders or Coronation Street.

On Lewis's view, a "good" reading is one which "receives" the book — that looks at what is there, and only what is there, which appreciates what the writer is doing and tries to have the emotional reaction that the writer wanted you to have. A "bad" reading is one that "uses" the book: which takes some descriptions of sails billowing in the wind and jolly rogers being run up flagpoles as a jumping off point for a day dream that has nothing very much to do with what the author wrote. It's the difference between the person who listens to the classical concert in silence (because he wants to hear every single note down to the last triangle) and the person who is glad that the brass band has started playing because it gives him the excuse to sing along terribly loudly. On Lewis's terms, virtually all pop music is bad. The whole point of pop music is that you "use" it: you dance to it; you use it create ambiance for your party. If you go to a live concert you scream down the band. 

Well, yes. But a dance band is there to provide music for people to dance to; and it might do that well or badly. It might take just as much skill to get everyone in the disco bopping as to win a standing ovation from the cognoscenti in the Albert Hall. Lewis is right that sitting and listening carefully is different to singing along; but I am not sure where he gets "listening carefully to music is better than dancing to it" or "music that you listen carefully to is better than music that you dance to" from. Morally? Psychologically? Theologically?

continues....