Half An Oaf Is Better Than...?

Calvin Trillin is a better man than this blogger. Trillin wrote in the Op-Ed divertissement that follows this introductory gibberish:

...Recently, I attended a modern-dance program. I hasten to say that this was not an attempt to amass evidence for any discussion that might come up about who is and who isn’t an uncultured oaf. The choreographer had gone to my high school in the Midwest, and I make it a policy to attend any cultural event created by someone who went to my high school — a policy, it may not surprise you to know, that still leaves me with plenty of evenings free for other activities.

Trillin will attend any cultural event created by someone who went to his high school. This blogger would not attend any event created by someone who went to his own third-rate high school, with the possible exception of a funeral here or there. As Julius (Groucho) Marx said, "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." That goes for this blogger's high school class that will celebrate its 50th reunion in coming months. If you're going to be an oaf, be the best you can be. If this is (fair & balanced) derision, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Half An Oaf
By Calvin Trillan

Tag Cloud of the following article

american attend certified choreographer consider consult credentials critic culture curious decided discussion distinguished don existence fact follow friend gone imply intellectual isn james literary louisiana loved maybe modern-dance movie oaf people person plot policy possible program recently review school self shows someone subtitled think took trouble true uncultured ve wanted

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There was a discussion at my house recently about whether or not I am an uncultured oaf. This is not the first time the subject has come up.

The form these discussions take isn’t what you might assume. It’s not that somebody — one of my daughters, say, or a friend who has dropped by for a drink, or maybe the U.P.S. deliveryman — accuses me of being an uncultured oaf and I defend myself by talking at length about some movie with subtitles that I’ve recently seen. That’s not the way it happens at all — and I don’t just mean that I’d have a different defense, because I haven’t seen a subtitled movie in a long time and had trouble following the plot of the last one I did see. These discussions are not accusatory; they’re more like dispassionate inquiries. Everyone present seems genuinely curious about whether I can be accurately categorized as an uncultured oaf, and no one is more curious about it than I am.

I think that at this point I should present my credentials. I’m a college graduate. That’s not all: I was an English major. There’s more: I graduated from a distinguished American research university. All of that makes me wonder whether or not there are a lot of other people with ostensibly respectable academic credentials who have reason to suspect that they may be uncultured oafs.

It’s true that I have no advanced degree, a fact my daughters like to remind me of from time to time, as a way to keep me sort of damped down. It’s also true that I grew up in the Midwest, in a milieu (a word I’ve learned since) in which culture did not hang heavily in the air. As was customary in that time and place, my mother took my sister to concerts and road shows of Broadway musicals while my father took me to the Golden Gloves and the N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments. (We all went to the American Royal Livestock Show together.)

Still, this country is way past the days when cultural levels were geographically based. For years, our friend James has been described around our house as the most cultured person we know, and James has lived virtually all of his life in south-central Louisiana, a good two hours from the nearest place showing subtitled movies. He is consulted with particular respect when we have a discussion about whether or not I’m an uncultured oaf.

Not long ago, I read an article about a distinguished literary critic, long deceased, and, as an example of the critic’s remarkable writing ability, the article drew particular attention to this sentence: “This intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous achievement.” I had no idea what that could mean.

On the theory that a certified intellectual might be able to enlighten me, I decided to consult someone I know who is an officer of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There’s no substitute for going right to the top. Here’s what the certified intellectual had to say about the sentence in question: “I suppose it’s meant to imply that culture (whatever that is) has allowed (by encouraging the Romantic ideal) the idea of the self to flourish, indeed triumph, to the extent that we value it more than anything else.” Appreciative of his help, I decided not to trouble him further, although what I wanted to ask him was what I would have wanted to ask the literary critic if he had laid that business about the existence of the self on me while, say, we were waiting together in the subway for a train: “Could you please give me an example?”

Recently, I attended a modern-dance program. I hasten to say that this was not an attempt to amass evidence for any discussion that might come up about who is and who isn’t an uncultured oaf. The choreographer had gone to my high school in the Midwest, and I make it a policy to attend any cultural event created by someone who went to my high school — a policy, it may not surprise you to know, that still leaves me with plenty of evenings free for other activities. I loved the modern-dance program. I loved it so much, in fact, that I began to consider the possibility of attending modern-dance programs choreographed by people who had not gone to my high school. A couple of nights later, James, who was visiting from Louisiana, saw the same program, and he loved it too. Maybe, I allowed myself to think, I am not an uncultured oaf after all.

The only review I saw of the modern-dance program offered testimony to the contrary. It compared the plot to a soap opera. (Actually, I had missed the plot. I don’t mean that I failed to follow it: I hadn’t been aware that there was one.) Also, the reviewer implied, without using these precise words, that the program had been designed to make modern dance palatable to, well, uncultured oafs.

What did that say about me? What, for that matter, did it say about James? Is it possible that I’m such an uncultured oaf that the person I’d always considered the most cultured person I know is also an uncultured oaf? No one is more curious about that than I am — except maybe James. ♥

[Calvin Trillin began his career as a writer for Time magazine, and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963. For fifteen years Trillin wrote a series for The New Yorker called "U.S. Journal" — a 3,000-word article from somewhere in the United States, every three weeks. Since 1984, he has penned a series of longer narrative pieces under the heading "American Chronicles." He later became a columnist for The Nation, writing what USA Today called "simply the funniest regular column in journalism." That column became syndicated from 1986 through 1995. In 1996, he returned to Time magazine as a weekly columnist. To date the column has been collected in five books. A native of Kansas City, MO, Trillin received his BA, from Yale College in 1957. He served in the army, and then joined Time. Most recently, Trillin is the author of Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme.]

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves