Also, I coined EDUPUNK, started UMW Blogs (Gardner had nothing to do with it, nor did DTLT), and I am possibly North America’s premiere, if underrated artist. You should be happy, and feel lucky, to have me in your network.

Hope that turns the tide of this comment thread. Humility is a dangerous drug that doesn’t let go once it’s ugly fangs dig into your ego. Fight, fight, fight against the dying of the heart light :)

Poignant, all.

I’m homesick.

You might not yet be directly contributing to the motleyread reading, but this thread is a significant contribution anyway. Just the kind of thing I hoped would grow green from the reading roots.

Man, I love YouTube with a mighty love….

I’m also very unhappy that we’re midway through February and I haven’t even picked up Dubliners, much less participated in the motleyread. I feel very guilty about this because the invitation I got was just amazingly sweet and wonderful. I had all these good intentions. Nobody’s fault but mine…. Still, I feel down about it all.

I love the folks involved in the motleyread in part because they’re all non-poser intellectuals. So I grok Chris’s response and it resonates with me too. Believe me, in the quasi-sticks where I grew up, there were plenty of people who wanted to call me out for even using the word “symbolism,” let alone applying it to something. Elementary school and junior high left a lot of scars on me for that reason. Then I learned some more about how to let my freak flag fly, I guess, but I remember the jibes pretty vividly.

Then I got to grad school, and academia, and found a lot of what for lack of a better phrase I’d call competitive intellectual preening. Smart people, yes, but devoted to sorting the rest of the world out on the basis of their perceptions of other folks’ intelligence and education. So-and-so is first-rate, so-and-so is second-rate, etc. etc. etc. So you’re not wrong that pomposity exists, expertise can be high-IQ self-love, and posers can ruin a good deep conversation by spreading their peacock feathers or starting a pissing contest. Or doing both at once (yikes, what a mess).

But Chris is also right that for the non-posers the conversation can get very erudite not as an exclusionary tactic, but as a way of using shared experience and knowledge to work through richly complex and resonant stuff (art music writing etc. etc.). And of course you know I include various kinds of popular music in the category of richly complex and resonant stuff, even a song called (ironically) “Pure and Easy.” :) It’s all about the shared exploration, with something for everyone no matter where you start. And the non-expert often asks the best questions–less path dependency, and a greater chance of seeing something unexpected because so much is unexpected.

So OK. Ready for a non sequitur tea in China?

There’s a great Monty Python sketch with a penguin on top of a television set. The two “ladies” in the sketch are talking about the penguin, and one asks the other a question about why the penguin is on the set, to which the other replies that she’s “not Dr. bloody Bronowski” (he did the series “The Ascent of Man,” which I’ve never seen but can bluff about for 30 seconds, after which I talk about “The Shock of the New,” which I have seen). “Who’s he?” the first “lady” asks. “Oh, he knows everything!” the second “lady” replies. “Oh, I wouldn’t like that,” the first “lady” concludes. “That’d take all the mystery out of life.”

It’s a really funny sketch. I’ll play it for you. We can lol. :)

I did not mean to imply #motleyreaders are #elitistsnobs — meant to say it is good medicine.

What confuses me is that you make it sound as if people who talk about books are doing something wrong. Posturing I can understand, but talking about books? And why do you suggest that people who talk about symbolism or pacing must be somehow inauthentic?

It is possible to sincerely love an art and want to talk about it… and if people who have a fair amount of knowledge have conversations that get into things that seem esoteric to those who don’t, why shouldn’t they be able to enjoy that? It’s not as if such things have to be exclusionary. Part of the intent of the Motley Read is precisely to let people express themselves in whatever way they see fit. Those who have a background in the field or who have read extensively or who just have those proclivities will talk about things differently. It happens when people get together with an in every field of endeavor, as far as I can tell, whether art or craft, from programming to books to cooking. It doesn’t follow that those people– that *I* or anyone else who approaches the book that doesn’t happen to be the way *you* do so– are inauthentic, experiencing the book in some lesser and less “real” way.

Whatever your way of writing about _Dubliners_ is, it’s valuable. I don’t really see how it’s all that different from what everyone else is doing who is choosing to write about it! But there are times when anti-elitism (and I do recognize that there are posers) becomes its own kind of elitism, denying people who write or think or express themselves in different ways the legitimacy they deserve.