Age

[Denis Salter]

Dear All:

One of the many things that I like and dislike about top ten
lists and so on is their instability.  Imagine what kind
of top ten Canadian plays would have been listed in, say,
each decade from 1920 on.  What kind of communities would
be making those evaluations--and why?
Instability is a good way of exposing naturalised values.

What I also like is how our own ten top lists, whether
known to us or not, change over a lifetime.  If anyone
of us, for sound naturalised or non-naturalised reasons,
had made up a ten tops list for each decade, how much would
the lists change? Any why?

I've recently been rereading novels and seeing films that I
first read and saw twenty years + ago. My reading 'formations',
for myriad reasons, have changed -- and in some cases to an
extraordinary degree. Of course I am delighted
by that, though it is also a little vertiginous.

One of the smartest pop culture books around is David Foot's
*Boom, Bust, and Echo."  [How much, I wonder, has he, as an
'academic' (problematic term) made from that book?  Is its
popularity in the charts a function of its readability for
one and all?]  This book brilliantly, I think, de-naturalises
assumptions (mine anyway) and made me SEE THINGS I SHOULD
HAVE SEEN A LONG TIME AGO. It would be striking to use his
demographic models as a way of determining the top ten of
any cultural 'artifacts.'  If demography 'drives' the economy,
it certainly, at the same time, 'drives' the form and function
of those who create the ten tops lists.  We can't even begin
to get to the root of this question until we know everything
there is to know about the reading formations that validate
the choices made.

Denis.


Denis Salter
Department of English
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T6
(514) 487 7309
E-Mail  CYWS at MUSICA.MCGILL.CA