Lingering Tastemasters

A people’s culture comprises what they do, including what they do with their minds. T. S. Eliot noted that British culture included not only attention to the plays of Shakespeare, but also the preparation of boiled cabbage cut into sections. Tom Wolfe has lately numbered among American rituals the Destruction Derby, and among Southern California folk-artifacts the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. Meanwhile The Cantos of Ezra Pound (to take a random example) has gone into its sixth hardcover printing, a most difficult book, steadily bought; and a corrected text of Finnegans Wake had a large first printing in paperback.

In Gary, steelworkers experiment with Hawaiian cooking. In Charlottesville, the place to run across a professor of Russian is the town’s liveliest cultural node, a camera shop. In Santa Barbara, as the season turns, the classified ad page offers Scuba equipment in exchange for a hunting rifle.

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About the Author

Hugh Kenner

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A people’s culture comprises what they do, including what they do with their minds. T. S. Eliot noted that British culture included not only attention to the plays of Shakespeare, but also the preparation of boiled cabbage cut into sections. Tom Wolfe has lately numbered among American rituals the Destruction Derby, and among Southern California folk-artifacts the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. Meanwhile The Cantos of Ezra Pound (to take a random example) has gone into its sixth hardcover printing, a most difficult book, steadily bought; and a corrected text of Finnegans Wake had a large first printing in paperback.

In Gary, steelworkers experiment with Hawaiian cooking. In Charlottesville, the place to run across a professor of Russian is the town’s liveliest cultural node, a camera shop. In Santa Barbara, as the season turns, the classified ad page offers Scuba equipment in exchange for a hunting rifle.