EAllusion wrote:Daniel Peterson wrote:Well, if it'll make you feel any better, I regard most opera as just an older form of the musical. There's nothing particularly deep or difficult, in my view, about the story line of I Pagliacci or Cavalleria Rusticana (nor, for that matter, of Così fan tutte or La bohème or Turandot).
I don't think so either. I think people who stick who automatically view opera as high and broadway musicals as low, especially in terms of intellectual sophistication needed for appreciation, are not unlike people who will only respect comic books if they get to call them graphic novels. It's pretenious douchebaggery. Nonetheless, they have a patina of high culture about them and sound intellectually sophisticated to a certain crowd as a result.
Notice, though, EAllusion, that he said "most opera." Do you want to place bets on which operas he regards as "deep" and "difficult"? I'll put money on Der Ring des Nibelungen, and perhaps Don Giovanni. It's not so much that these are any "deeper" or more "difficult" in any way that DCP could meaningfully explain; it's just that they fit neatly into his rather predictable aesthetic. (I'm sure you've noticed that he's also enamored of T.S. Eliot, who is to nerdy adolescent males precisely what Sylvia Plath is to nerdy adolescent females.)
You definitely have a habit of name dropping stodgy, intellectual-sounding things in questionable situations often enough that it makes it look like your trying to impress upon your audience that you are intellectually serious. One can almost seeing you hold a giant, dusty old copy of Shakespeare's collected works in your lap as you type. As an intelligent person, I trust you know that others who are mature, intelligent, and reasonably educated aren't going to be impressed by such things (Yale! Oxford!), but, trust me, that's the tone it sets. Hey, it's no fun to have real personality quirks like this poked at, but you dish out enough that I'm not worried about it. Plus, I think you rather like this kind of conversation.
The thing is that he seems like he is stuck back in 1962, and that he's still relying on old High Culture guides to tell him what he ought to like (that and the fact that his tastes run towards the Uber-Serious, Brooding Male Adolescent). So, I think your "stodgy" descriptor is dead-on. Most of the "mature, intelligent, and reasonably educated" are also interested in being half-way up-to-speed, culturally speaking, and DCP doesn't seem to have gotten beyond, say, The Beatles. It's not as if he's telling us about how he's trying to decide between a Mars Volta album vs. the new Bat for Lashes, or how much he hated the ending of John Wray's latest novel, or that he thought In Bruges was well-crafted. I pointed much of this out to him once and his response was to adopt a Ward Cleaver avatar, which he's still using to this day. I also think you're right to not worry about poking him. He won't adopt things that genuinely worry/hurt him, such as my suggestion that he change the phrase over his avatar to, "Paid LDS Apologist."
One other thing: I don't know where he's getting this "class and status anxiety" thing. Didn't he come from relatively "low-born" stock? Is this a "takes one to know one" kind of a thing?
