Midcult PBS

It was pledge week on PBS, and last night they were flogging Dowton Abbey. The voiceover pledge-driver described the series in this way: “It really is smart TV, but as The New Yorker says —”

And here is the New Yorker sentence that PBS then paraphrased:

the British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it’s a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne.

I think the announcer may have changed scarfing and swigging to eating and drinking.

Dwight Macdonald would have appreciated Downton Abbey as a perfect example of what he called “Midcult”:

A whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form — let us call it Midcult — has the essential qualities of Masscult — the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity — but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain — to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.

The enemy outside the walls is easy to distinguish. It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming. For it presents itself as part of High Culture. Not that coterie stuff, nothing snobbish inbred so-called intellectuals who are only talking to themselves. Rather the great vital mainstream, wide and clear though perhaps not so deep.

“Masscult and Midcult” (1960)

Funny: in a post earlier this year, I described Downton Abbey as “about as deep as a paper plate.”

Smart but goes down easy; goes down easy but smart: that’s a perfect way to understand Midcult.

Related reading
A handful of Downton Abbey posts

[Macdonald’s essay can be found in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York Review Books, 2011).]

Word of the evening: hobbledehoy

“I have no time for training young hobbledehoys”: Mr. Carson, in tonight’s episode of Downton Abbey.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “A youth at the age between boyhood and manhood, a stripling; esp. a clumsy or awkward youth.” The OED traces hobbledehoy to 1540 and calls it “a colloquial word of unsettled form and uncertain origin.” Here’s a wonderful citation from the Pall Mall Gazette (1891):

There is nowadays an immense public of hobbledehoys — of all ages — and there are even men of culture and critical capacity who take a perverse pleasure in affecting hobbledehoyhood.

Still the case, I’d say.

Why am I watching Downton Abbey? It’s about as deep as a paper plate. But there’s some fine acting.

Downton Abbey, third-season trailer

At kottke.org, a trailer or partial trailer for the forthcoming third season of Downton Abbey.

Elaine and I watched the first two seasons this summer and agree with our daughter Rachel: first season, great; second season, meh. The first season is driven by character; the second, by increasingly improbable melodrama. Or to say it plainly: the show turned into a soap opera. But I’m curious enough to watch the third season: I can’t just abandon these people. Sense of duty and all that.

[Dang: someone else has thought of Petula Clark.]

Word of the evening: flip

Another bit of language from tonight’s Downton Abbey: Mrs. Patmore spoke of how her suitor, Mr. Tufton, was only interested in her for her cooking. He would go on and on, she said, about how he liked his pancakes flipped. No double entendres here: Mrs. Patmore was speaking literally.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces pancake back to approximately 1400. But this use of flip is a fairly new arrival:

trans. orig. and chiefly U.S. To cook by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle, esp. as a job in a fast-food restaurant. Chiefly in to flip burgers.

The OED’s first citation is from the Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1913: “Unknown celebrities . . . The artist with a heart tattooed on his arm, who flips flapjacks in the window of Childs’ restaurant.”

As with last week’s stuff, American English leads the way.

Other Downton Abbey words
Hobbledehoy
Stuff

Downton Abbey stuff

Elaine and I watched Episode 6 of you-know-what last night and noticed three little flurries of stuff:

Lady Edith Crawley: “Oh, just family stuff — an errand for my grandmother.”

Lady Mary Crawley: “Nothing. Women’s stuff.”

Matthew Crawley: “Nonsense, you had stuff to see to.”

Stuff is an old, old noun. But the three young Crawleys are using the word in a new way. The Oxford English Dictionary has it:

Used loosely to denote any collection of things about which one is not able or willing to particularize . . . ; material, matter, business. colloq.

The young Crawleys are a colloquial avant-garde. The OED’s first citation for this use of stuff is from 1922, from an American source, Radio News:

Take a look at S. M. Brown, Chief on the Mauretania, “doing his stuff” in the saloon.

I can’t imagine that the influx of stuff in this episode is just coincidence: it’s one sign among many that the world is changing.

A related post
Word of the evening: hobbledehoy

[Other signs of change in this episode: new techniques in land-management, new roles for women, and jazz.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, January 28, 2013.]

In the first panel of today’s Hi and Lois, Mom has rebuked her firstborn: “Chip! Do you have to add to the noise?” That’s cold. You should never rebuke your son for playing an acoustic guitar. (Electric? Maybe, sometimes.) I suspect that Chip, amid outcroppings of dog, sofa, and children, has escaped into his music to maintain his sanity on the family’s vast arid living-room plain.

Lois must be watching Downton Abbey. She has Edith’s eyes.

 
Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

From a dream

“It’s as if my wiles had vanished into thin air.”

“Exceedingly thin air.”

Whence such dialogue? I must have had Downton Abbey in my sleeping head.

Other dreams, arranged by subject
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire : Baloney recovery : Beach Boys reunion : Citizen Kane : “Columbain coffee” : The Cummerbund Response : “Darn That Dream” : Jack Dempsey : Inara George and Van Dyke Parks : Infinite Jest : Charles Mingus : Skeptiphobia : “Smoked chicken water” : Ulysses : United States of America commercial

Today’s Saturday Stumper

A crossword solver intimidated by the Newsday Saturday Stumper would do well to give today’s puzzle a try. It’s by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, and it’s easy, as Stumpers go, probably the easiest Stumper I’ve seen, with just a couple of tricky spots in lower left corner. At least that’s where I found them.

Shout-outs to these clue-and-answer pairs:

3-D, nine letters, “Italian erupter.” Sorry, MOUNTETNA.

13-D, five letters, “Place for a pilot.” Back in the day. And today, but elsewhere.

18-A, seven letters, “Animal float or wind-up boat.” The rhyme is nice.

21-A, six letters, “Calzone's conic kin.” At this point 21-A is much more familiar to me than the calzone. When did I last see a neon CALZONES?

23-A, four letters, “Novel designation.” The clue redeems the answer.

33-D, nine letters, “Tobacco plant genus (unsurprisingly).” Dammit, I knew this one right away. (I’ll always be an ex-smoker, never a non-smoker.)

39-D, seven letters, “LG introduction of 2011.” Part of the brief lower-left snarl. LG means phones, right?

52-D, four letters, “Notes with a Manitoban museum.” Just so weird.

56-A, seven letters, “Cupid colleague.” Also part of the trouble in the lower left. Misdirection!

58-A, seven letters, “Downton Abbey role.” I was trying to run through character names. Uh, CARRSON? SYBILLL? CALZONE?

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Snoopy, downstairs

Snoopy is planning to play at Wimbledon. Charlie Brown: “Where will you stay if you go to England? You don’t know anyone there.”

[Peanuts, June 11, 1976. Click for a larger view.]

I always like seeing a Peanuts strip that references some once-obvious, now-gone bit of popular culture. The reference in this strip, then and now, is to the television series Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of its time (1971–1975 in the UK, 1973–1977 in the U.S.). I remember Mrs. Bridges and Mr. Hudson (Angela Baddeley and Gordon Jackson) and Rose (Jean Marsh), all from downstairs. No other names have stuck.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Separated at birth?

 
[Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls.]

I hadn’t planned to make two such posts in one day. Elaine and I thought that had to be Harriet Sansom Harris (Frasier Crane’s crafty agent Bebe Glazer on Frasier) playing Susan MacClare, Marchioness of Flintshire, in tonight’s Downton Abbey. But no.

Tonight’s show was a Christmas Special. Some Special. I have come to think of Julian Fellowes’s screenplays as bowling balls. The characters are the pins.

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Steve Buscemi and John Davis Chandler
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Ted Cruz and Joseph McCarthy
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

[Have these women met? And would they see a resemblance?]