Word: highbrows
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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TAMALA M. EDWARDS indiscriminately reads highbrow opinion journals and lowbrow women's magazines alike. In the past month she has written on subjects ranging from Bill Bradley's campaign for President to Gwyneth Paltrow's hair extensions. This week she looks at some of the issues surrounding Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty, an essay that urges women to empower themselves through modesty and "lost virtue." As part of the book's target audience, Edwards feels strongly ambivalent: "You want to be courted, but you're raised to be independent. The book really pulls you in opposite directions." Edwards...
...playwright, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, catapulted to fame with a different Shakespearean work: the 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an existential reimagining of two characters from Hamlet. Since then his work has been known for its wordplay and highbrow subject matter--such as chaos theory in Arcadia, or the life of poet A.E. Housman in The Invention of Love, now running in London. Many of his plays have been criticized for their emotional inaccessibility, but, says Stoppard a bit testily, "If people think it, then they think it. That...
That being said, it seems pointless to mention that the 163-page collection of totally fabricated celebrity dirt is perhaps a little too darkly funny for some of us. (Don't worry; it will be mentioned anyway.) Stewart's bizarre sense of humor--an almost schizophrenic mating of pseudo-highbrow Lampoon humor with seventh grade locker room jokes--brought him notoriety, though not much air time, on the short-lived "Jon Stewart Show" on MTV. In book form, however, his alternatingly grotesque and hysterical comedic style finds a happy home. These are not jokes that would work in a standup...
This notwithstanding, the program was hardly highbrow. Dishes clattered in the background, buses drove by on Bennett St., and a hum of chatter from passers by limited any serious attempt to appreciate the music...
Judging by the titles of his books--The Death of Satan; Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now; Moby-Dick Or, the Whale--the writing of Andrew H. Delbanco '73 would seem more at home as beach reading than on the shelf of a highbrow literary critic...