Mike the Musicologist pinged me while I was at dinner, and we had a pleasant conversation about a couple of items in this week’s TMQ watch.
Unfortunately, this conversation took place through text messages, which means that we had limited space to discuss our views. (MtM: “What?! There’s thoughts that can’t be contained in a tweet?! My world is shattered.”)
(There may have been some sarcasm there.)
(Also, I am starting to think that MtM is the Random Eddie to my TJIC. Except with fewer burritos, because he doesn’t come up here often enough.)
Anyway, point 1: MtM questions the “ever since” in “there’s no good New York style deli in Austin, ever since Katz’s closed”. I say: I never had a bad meal at Katz’s. MtM says: he did, where “bad” = “did not stay down”. I say: Yeah, I can understand your position. Meals that do not stay down generally put me off a restaurant for life. Also, it is probably fair to say “New York style”: Katz’s probably wasn’t a true NY deli, but more like a close approximation for Austin. (I say “probably” because I haven’t been to NYC in 20 years, and didn’t eat in any delis while I was there.)
Point the second: MtM argues that Easterbrook, in his “Golden Age of News” item, confuses “access” (or arguably “quantity”) with “quality”. Just because we have more access to news, is that a good thing, when “news” consists of “who won this year’s glorified karaoke competition”?
I think this is a fair point to bring up, but at the same time it raises some slippery questions. Was the New York Times of 1933 a higher quality newspaper than the NYT of 1958? Was the NYT of 1958 a better paper than the NYT of 2003? How do you judge the quality of a newspaper in an objective fashion?
I wouldn’t be so quick to say “Well, the people of 1933/1958 were much less obsessed with trivia like sports and entertainment than the people of today.” Are you sure of that? There was certainly a market for Confidential magazine, to take one example. How much difference do you think there is between the old Confidential and TMZ? Even if you want to go back to the 1930s, try reading Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday: one of the big things I took away from both books is that the people of the 1920s and 1930s were just as obsessed with the things we consider “trivial” today as we are now. The difference is, other than contemporary observers like Fredrick Lewis Allen who were writing things down as they happened, most folks have forgotten the trivia.
I’m rambling a bit here. I bring this up because I think it might provoke a worthwhile discussion, and MtM doesn’t really like posting in my comments section. So have at it, folks.
