The Folk At The High Table

1 Jul

This last couple of posts I’ve been writing about pulp, or rather, what pulp actually means. It has a reputation for being garbage banged out faster than is proper on a typewriter because you’re getting paid by the word and for a very large part that may be true (no smoke, right?) but let’s look at the smaller part. The part that isn’t garbage.

Those covers I talked about in the last post, that’s not junk. For me, that’s art of the highest order. I get more joy out of that than I ever would looking at a painting by Turner who, despite my girlfriend thinking he was a God among men, I find just about as dull as art can get. With Turner you get an observation of a landscape. With McGinnis you get life in the fast lane, full of colour and a story only half told.

That might be simplifying Turner somewhat, but it’s also simplifying McGinnis. Touché.

In more ways than you have ever probably considered, pulp is pop music for the eyes. Those folk who pour salt on it as being low culture may well be correct, but who is to say low culture is less than high culture? “Experts”, that’s who.

Let’s be clear here. I have tried Dickens and find his work like wading through a sea of marshmallows that have been left on the dashboard and we may defend the man by saying it doesn’t translate as well as it could all these years later, but Conan Doyle does and so does H.G. Wells.

You can suck as many lollipops as you like, but you still won’t suck as much as Shakespeare. Sure, he had a good line or two that will last until the end of time but he’s not half as good as everybody thinks he is. For my money, Under Milk Wood is better than anything Old Bill ever wrote.

The point being that when it comes to culture–and let’s frame it around books and writing–I’ll go out on a limb and say that a publisher would probably find much joy in having a Booker Prize Winner on their books. But if you dig in, I don’t think any Booker Prize Winners will be paying the salaries of all those people that work at the publishing company. That’s a job for the likes of Stephen King and Barbara Cartland to take care of.

(I know nothing about Cartland aside from her infamy, so I looked her up. She wrote 723 novels but I never hear of her being spoken of in hushed or reverent tones... but she must have put more than a few meals on industry people’s tables over the years. Kudos.)

Those Booker guys? Most of the time, they are nothing but one-hit wonders and to prove it, I’ll ask you this: who won the Booker in 2023? I’ll put seriously good money on the table that you haven’t got a clue. It was actually Paul Lynch for a book called Prophet Song, but I’ve never read it nor have I heard of him since. In fact, pick any year you like and answer the same question. All you need to do to get my view on it is cut and paste a name and a title.

Dan Brown on the other hand? He only sold 250 million copies globally but if you ask somebody who says they’re a ‘reader’, they’ll probably tell you he can’t write for shit. Just like they say Kiss can’t play their instruments and comics aren’t a valid form of reading. Actually, this September, Dan Brown releases a new book in the Robert Langdon series–sit back and watch it skyrocket. Stick that in your pipe people at the high table.

And hey... while we’re on the subject of being wrong about everything, did you know that Walt Disney–despite being quite an artist in his own right–never drew Mickey Mouse? That honour goes to Ub Iwerks who I also guarantee you have never heard of.

Hang on... I’ve lost my train of thought. Let me catch up with myself...

Right. The point.

Low culture feeds people. High culture feeds egos. One puts dinner on the table. The other makes sure the table is made from reclaimed oak and positioned just so under a skylight.

How about some more salt in the eye for high culture? Low culture always wins. It always has and always will. People want stories that move, that punch them in the back of the head, stories that grab them by the collar and don’t let go. They want songs with choruses, movies with explosions, books that make you stay up way past when you said you would. They want joy, thrills, romance, sex, drama, melodrama, good guys, bad guys, and maybe even the occasional surprise decapitation. That's pulp. That’s low culture. That’s the blood and guts of real cultural influence.

High culture may set the tone for gallery openings and university syllabi (I had to look that up and I have to say, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth rather like people who use the word datum for the singular of data when everybody under the sun knows exactly what you’re talking about), but low culture is what actually makes the world spin until it gets dizzy. It sells out arenas, fills supermarket shelves, spawns empires out of sitcoms and soft rock ballads. It’s the culture that shows up when you fucking need it, does the job, and doesn’t need a 3,000-word essay in The New Yorker to justify its existence.

You want influence? Who shaped more minds—Plato or Stan Lee? Who brought more people to tears—Mozart or Whitney Houston? Who taught more people about good and evil—John Milton or George Lucas? Don’t stop me now, I’m on a roll…

We could argue about it all day long, but you can’t stack high culture’s influence high enough to ever change my mind, but, if you are a high culture expert and fancy your chances of changing my mind, please, write me an essay/post/whatever and I’ll publish it here in its entirety.

So next time someone tries to tell you pulp doesn’t matter because it’s junk, or comics aren’t literature, or pop songs aren’t poetry, remember this:

Low culture is high culture that people actually like.