When I first met Amanda in Brit Lit II, she had piercings across her lip, funky streaks in her hair, and clothes that would put Claudia Kishi to shame. Simply put, she was way too cool to ever be my friend. The next year, when Walter started hanging out with her, I told him that I wished I could be her friend. He, of course, laughed. It wasn’t until a few years later when she came back and we both started the grad program did I get to be friends with the cool girl with the awesome eye shadow who had been listening to Manson since she was twelve.
Post-graduation, Amanda started teaching and, for the job, had to remove her beloved piercings and let her hair revert to its natural brunette. She knows who she is, we know who she is, but new people she meets don’t know right away that metal chick she keeps beneath the surface.
It’s easy to forget that your life story isn’t always available at first glance.
In this month’s Vanity Fair, James Wolcott tackles this issue from a slightly different perspective in the article, “What’s a Culture Snob to Do?” Wolcott is not always my favorite person, but he wins back a couple of bonus points on this one.
Or maybe I lose a couple.
In the article, Wolcott takes a look at technology and culture in a way that has nothing to do with things like, say, the future of publishing. No, publishing still exists, but how on earth are we supposed to judge people by what they read if it’s locked up tight in devices such as the Kindle?
Tell me you don’t do that. Every person you see in a Starbucks, on the bus, outside a classroom. Even if you’re not a book reader. What about magazines? If you see me on my front stoop reading Cosmo how is that different than when I’m reading Vanity Fair or The Atlantic or (looking at my coffee table) The Southern Review?
During one of the Twilight reading days, I was sitting on the front stoop, enjoying the sunshine that the vampires couldn’t, when my cool, metalhead neighbor came up the walk. I did my best to hide the spine of the book, but to no avail. My neighbor lit his cigarette, leaned over, and tapped the edge of the book.
“I read those.”
Which I, of course, remembered as soon as he said it. Last summer, after we had both moved in, he sat in that same spot, reading and laughing about it. So we re-bantered our banter about the series and all was well.
But I was absolutely petrified of getting judged wrongly over that reading material.
Wolcott also talks about movie and music collections, discs and collector’s editions that line the walls of snobs’ houses.
Which I also judge.
The first thing I do in someone’s house, someone’s office, whatever is take a quick inventory of their collection. Ubiquitous anthologies according to that person’s genre/area of literature study. The full works of a favorite author. Beyond the books themselves, how are they organized? Cared for? Same goes for movie collections. (Music collections for my friends my age seem to exist on car floors. My parents and their friends, they’ve got the shelf space devoted.)
How do we define ourselves and each other if all of these cultural markers are made void? Right now, simply having a Kindle is a specific marker, like how the iPod used to be, but, if the Internet is right, it will soon be as ever present as the little white ear buds. Don’t give me egalitarian, class-void, education-void answers. We’re a judgey people. Own it.
So tell me, then, what’s the biggest thing for which you judge people? (I judge when people end sentences on a preposition, especially the last sentence in a piece, so absolutely I just made a stiffer final sentence in the name of grammatical accuracy/snobbery.)
