e-mail me at billdeg@umich.edu

12/09/2008

what haven't you read?

This week's AV Club has a nice piece called "Art We've Resisted," in which staffers talk about the music, tv, or film they've never made time to consume. "Resisted" is a telling and appopriate choice of words. When you consume pop culture in Big Gulps (the 48-oz. variety), you're essentially making a choice not to see the buzzworthy film or listen to the record that pitchfork gave a 10.0.

Me? I've never seen Titanic, Top Gun, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I've never listened to a Radiohead studio album from beginning to end. I've never read Thomas Pynchon, except for the Crying of Lot 49, which I read for a class (this would have been circa 1995, Postmodernism taught by Prof. Culik).

At my former institution, we once played the "what book haven't you read?" at an English Department party. The highbrow version of the AV Club article, I suppose.

How about you? What haven't you read? What haven't you consumed?

2 comments:

Lance said...

I've never seen a single episode of Lost or 24. And I've never read anything by David Foster Wallace. (This last one, though, has not been an act of resistance so much as one of not getting around to it yet.)

DrMaybe said...

Ditto Lost and 24. Additionally, the last "Reality" show I watched was "The Real World" on MTV, when Puck was still on. Actual people do plenty of inane, crazy things naturally. There's no need to offer a monetary prize for that.