GG: The Snob Factor and yet, he watched TV, right?

["C. Dunne" <cdunne@u.washington.edu>]

OK, this is a warning to those who like serious discussions regarding
strictly musical matters, those upright biographers who can weed
out the truly important from the low-brow and banal, those aesthetic
interpreters who would, for instance, if writing an poem, filter out the
Anglo-Saxon in preference of the Latinate (why say "shit" if you can say
"excrement?" Why say "kill" if you can say "extinguish"?):  Don't read
this.

Since, *I* find great joy and poetry results from an interesting mixture 
of both registers of life -- high and low -- I am wondering to what extent
Gould found pleasure in both realms.  Oh, I know, he was publicly a
cultural snob, and gave Andy Kazdin hell about his wife reading
Cosmopolitan, but acc. to the introduction to Friedrich's book, one of his
"collections" (besides black marker pens, sheet music, cufflinks) was a
stash of videotaped Mary Tyler Moore shows.  Huh?  

I suppose Gould could make an argument that the Mary Tyler Moore show is
actually quite intelligent, that it is high-brow entertainment in the
disguise  of low-brow entertainment.  After all, he did a
similar spin job on his tastes for Streisand and Petula Clark.  

So is this like a grad. student who admits to watching Melrose Place, 
then performs a semiotic/postmodern/cultural (whatever) analysis on it as
a kind of defense mechanism?  "No, really, I am not one of the
spoon-fed masses..." 

OK, so the question is... how much TV did Gould watch? What shows did he
admit to watching? Does anyone know? 
        
Colleen

> At 4:38 PM 5/8/97, Leon A. Le Leu wrote:
> >It is such a change from wondering about what haemorrhoid ointment Gould
> >might have used while sitting on his non-ergonomic chair; what biscuit he
> >might have consumed with what strange beverage; 
> 

_______________________________________________________________________________
Beauty is only
          the first touch of terror
                    we can still bear

			Raine Maria Rilke, "The First Elegy," trans.. by
				David Young
_______________________________________________________________________________