Anti-Climacus

For as pretentious as I can sometimes be about matters of culture and taste, I am forever thankful for two things:

First, the format in which I encounter something is largely irrelevant to me. I care a little on the margins: movies generally look better in wide-screen format; translations of foreign language literature are better if they are not in 19th/20th century British English;* and perhaps a few others that I can't remember at the moment. But music, which I love, I will listen to in any form: I am indifferent between cds, cassettes, LPs, and mp3s. If the music is good, it will be worth listening to.

Second, I am not a completist. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that even artists acknowledged to be of high quality, who also have produced a relatively small body of work, have stronger and weaker works. Nobody's favorite Austen novel is Northanger Abbey. The Idiot, however good it may be, is not Crime and Punishment. The larger the body of work, the more of it is likely to be sub-par: I love Auden, but he wrote maybe a dozen really memorable poems, and a few dozen more good poems. Beyond that, you're better off going to read someone else. The same applies in music: the excellent Pavement reissues that feature 20 or more bonus tracks confirm, mostly, that the good songs made it onto the album. I like the Rolling Stones from 1968-1972, and would love to hear more of the tapes from Exile on Main Street, but what I've heard is of interest to me for reasons other than quality. I know people who would stick with TV shows, or authors, or bands long after it became clear they were never going to produce work on the level they once did, but that's never struck me as the best use of one's time.


* The copy of Zola's The Debacle which I own and am currently stuck at 100 pages through is liberally salted with specifically English slang, and is so noticeable as to be distracting.