True Story

In the summer of 1999, I purchased two books from the local Barnes & Noble.

One, which I had wanted since first reading him in high school, was the Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. I had encountered his work in junior year English class, through his powerful short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and fell in love with him. The Devil's Dictionary remains an indispensable addition to any cynical misanthrope's library. I gleefully chortled and guffawed through the A's, B's, and C's. It's really quite funny, for instance:

AIR, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

And then D:

DULLARD n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life. The Dullards came in with Adam, and being both numerous and sturdy have overrun the habitable world. The secret of their power is their insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a platitude. The Dullards came originally from Boeotia, whence they were driven by stress of starvation, their dullness having blighted the crops. For some centuries they infested Philistia, and many of them are called Philistines to this day. In the turbulent times of the Crusades they withdrew thence and gradually overspread all Europe, occupying most of the high places in politics, art, literature, science and theology. Since a detachment of Dullards came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower and made a favorable report of the country, their increase by birth, immigration, and conversion has been rapid and steady. According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians. The intellectual centre of the race is somewhere about Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly moral.

I finished the book with a sort of hurt only a jilted lover could possess.

The second book, How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, was completely fascinating. One of the last subjects Pinker dealt with was how subsets of a society use art as an exclusionary device.

Most people would lose their taste for a musical recording if they learned it was being sold at supermarket checkout counters or on late-night television, and even the work of relatively prestigious artists, such as Pierre Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, draws derisive reviews when it is shown in a popular ‘blockbuster’ museum show. Modern and postmodern works are intended not to give pleasure but to confirm or confound the theories of a guild of critics and analysts, to e’pater la bourgeoisie, or to baffle the rubes in Peoria.

Oh for fuck's sake!