July 08, 2004

Random Thoughts on the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index

Like many bloggers, I've been oddly intrigued by the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, which appeared over the weekend on Terry Teachout's blog, About Last Night. (Teachout, for those of you who don't know, is a consistently interesting critic with an entertaining blog. Click here for his explanation of the quiz.) The index is a list of questions, presenting readers with a choice between two different options. (Cats or dogs? Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?) For each question, Teachout selected the first of the two choices, so the reader's score is the percentage of the time that he agreed with Teachout's preference.

I've been hesitant about discussing the TCCI, for a couple of reasons. First, I have a general dislike for weblog memes. (My eyes start to roll as soon as I see someone posting the latest silly meme or quiz result on their site; similarly, I lose a lot of respect for anyone who uses the terms "blogosphere" or "blogroll" in a non-ironic manner.) Second, even though I tend to think of myself as a well-read and reasonably cultured person, I had to pass on exactly half of Teachout's questions, since I'm generally ignorant of some of the spheres of culture that play a prominent role in the quiz (like musicals, dance, pop music, visual art, and old movies).

Having said that, however, I do have some random thoughts to offer:


  • For reasons that should be obvious from the paragraph above, the questions posed by Teachout reminded me of "Humiliations," a parlor game that appears in the David Lodge novel Changing Places. In that game, players confess the titles of books they've never read, receiving one point for every player who has read the book in question; hence, the winner is the competitor who has never read the books that are most familiar to his opponents.

    There's a certain odd thrill to announcing that I've never read anything by Thomas Mann, that I've never read either Huck Finn or Moby-Dick, and that I've never been to (or read) an Edward Albee play. (As the professor in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe might say, "What do they teach them in the schools these days?!") I'd imagine that the thrill I've just described is similar to the feeling one experiences after winning a round of Humiliations!

  • I can't help but wonder: am I really that much more ignorant than other takers of the quiz, or am I just less willing to make a snap judgment based on my vague impressions? (If someone held a gun to my head, I'd pick Diana Krall over Norah Jones, for example, even though my knowledge of each woman's music is rather scant; I suspect that my snap judgments coincide with Teachout's judgments roughly as often as my more considered judgments do.) In fact, I suspect that this quiz plays to one of the less attractive characteristics of a lot of bloggers: their tendency to make sweeping judgments on questions they know nothing about. (I can think of a couple bloggers who've used the quiz as a way to make themselves sound far more cultured than they really are...)

  • I still find the quiz oddly intriguing (a lighthearted exercise that touches on more serious issues), in part because of my long-standing interest in the question of binary personality types. Back when I was in high school, I can remember being intrigued by the idea that if you took a limited (but large) number of binary questions, presented them to lots of people, and compiled the results, you'd end up with some interesting patterns. (I was a weird kid!) That is, if you start by dividing the world into cat and dog people, Coke and Pepsi drinkers, and Democrats and Republicans (to name three unsophisticated categories that aren't really binary), and then proceed to other binary questions, you'd eventually start to come up with some fun patterns.

    Then, early in my senior year of high school, I was amused to see that Cullen Murphy (who has since become one of my favorite writers) had written a column on this very theme for The Atlantic Monthly. That column, called "The Power of Two," is no longer available online, but Murphy took the basic idea I'd toyed with and wrote an entertaining article about it. To begin with, the article gave a more interesting spin to some of the binary distinctions I'd thought of:


    ...the classification of people as either dogs or cats in terms of character is one of the most basic divisions there is. Everyone would agree, I think, that T.S. Eliot, Nancy Reagan, Garrick Utley, and Diana Rigg are cats. Walter Matthau, Ted Williams, and Julia Child are dogs. George F. Will is a cat pretending to be a dog. (Like many intellectuals cats, Will furthers this subterfuge by maintaining a very public canine interest in baseball.) In contrast, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a dog pretending to be a cat.

    Not surprisingly, the article also came up with a much more amusing and sophisticated list of dichotomies, borrowing several of them from literature. Ogden Nash once divided the world into "gossipers" and "gossipees"; Archilochus (via Isaiah Berlin) split people into foxes (who know many little things) and hedgehogs (who know one big thing). Murphy borrowed both of these binaries for his article (introducing me to the concept of hedgehogs and foxes in the process.)

    Murphy concluded that these "dyads" might, by one view, be "the building blocks of personality"--we could learn a lot about a person's character by finding out whether he could be categorized as a cat or a dog person or by finding out if he "never tired of" or "was nauseated by" Pachelbel's Canon. As he concluded,


    The practical applications of a system like this are not hard to imagine. Western society has for decades been looking for something to supplant the failed god of psychoanalysis; surely the dyad project could assume at least part of this role. Also, consider how personal advertisements could be revolutionized. The standard but not all that revealing SWMs and DJFs and BGMs could now be complemented by a whole palette of accessory qualities.

    Murphy's article is an amusing and light-hearted piece, but I think it touches on some interesting questions--and has interesting implications for the TCCI. Does the index have predictive power? (That is, given that my literary tastes are fairly similar to Teachout's, would my tastes in dance be similar if I felt like broadening my horizons?) Will the personal ads in The New York Review soon sport such sentences as "53% on the TCCI, 75% on TCCI music"? Even now, ten years after Murphy published his article, I still find the question of binary personality types really intriguing--assuming, that is, that you don't take it too seriously. (I firmly believe that people can be divided into frustrated copy editors and people bored by copy-editing, and that this division says a lot about personality, for example. But I think that quizzes like Teachout's are more fun as a starting point for the discussion of artistic taste than they are as a supposedly firm predictor of a person's preferences.) Teachout's quiz, I'd argue, is an entertaining variation on the same theme.

I don't, I'm afraid, have a grand conclusion to this post--as I noted above, this entry is just a compilation of some "random thoughts" inspired by Teachout's blog. If you're dying to know my answers to the quiz, then go to the extended version of this entry.

By my count, I have a TCCI of 36%. Given that I passed on half the questions, however, I actually agreed with Teachout's preference 72% of the time that I expressed an opinion.

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? [Pass: I don't know much about either man]
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? [Great Gatsby: I've never liked Hemingway]
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? [Pass: I don't have a clear sense of either man's music]
4. Cats or dogs? [Cats, definitely]
5. Matisse or Picasso? [Pass]
6. Yeats or Eliot? [Yeats]
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? [Pass: never seen Keaton]
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? [O'Connor]
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? [Pass: I haven't yet watched my DVD of To Have and Have Not]
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? [Pass: all I know about Pollock is that he liked flags]
11. The Who or the Stones? [Pass: generally ignorant of popular music]
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? [Larkin]
13. Trollope or Dickens? [Trollope]
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? [Pass: generally ignorant of jazz]
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? [Dostoyevsky]
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? [Pass: never read either]
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? [Pass: no clear sense of either]
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? [Hamburgers]
19. Letterman or Leno? [Pass, though I'd lean toward Letterman]
20. Wilco or Cat Power? [Pass: never heard of Cat Power]
21. Verdi or Wagner? [Verdi]
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? [Pass]
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? [Pass: never heard of Bill Monroe]
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? [Kingsley]
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? [Pass: unfamiliar with Mitchum, don't know much about Brando beyond the really obvious]
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? [Pass]
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? [Pass]
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? [Tchaikovsky]
29. Red wine or white? [Red]
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? [Pass: unfamiliar with Coward, though I've liked the very little I've read]
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? [Pass: never seen either]
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? [Prokofiev]
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? [Pass]
34. Constable or Turner? [Pass]
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? [Pass: never seen Rio Bravo, can't remember the Searchers]
36. Comedy or tragedy? [Tragedy, maybe]
37. Fall or spring? [Fall]
38. Manet or Monet? [Pass]
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? [Simpsons, though I don't know the Sopranos well]
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? [Pass]
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? [Conrad]
42. Sunset or sunrise? [Uh... Sunrise, I guess]
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? [Pass]
44. Mac or PC? [Mac]
45. New York or Los Angeles? [New York]
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? [Pass: unfamiliar with Horizon]
47. Stax or Motown? [Pass]
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? [Van Gogh]
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? [Pass]
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? [Magazine: I prefer a good magazine to a good blog, but read more bad blogs than bad magazines ]
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? [Pass: never seen Gielgud]
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? [Pass: ???]
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? [Pass: never seen either]
54. Ghost World or Election? [Election]
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? [Pass]
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? [Daffy]
57. Modernism or postmodernism? [Modernism]
58. Batman or Spider-Man? [Uh... Spider-Man]
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? [Pass: ignorant of both]
60. Johnson or Boswell? [Johnson]
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? [Austen, though I've read very little Woolf]
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? [Pass: not sure I've seen either]
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? [Pass]
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? [Pass: never seen either]
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? [Figaro, I think]
66. Blue or green? [Uh... Blue]
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? [Midsummer Night's Dream]
68. Ballet or opera? [Opera]
69. Film or live theater? [Film]
70. Acoustic or electric? [Pass]
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? [North by Northwest]
72. Sargent or Whistler? [Sargent]
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? [Naipaul]
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? [Pass]
75. Sushi, yes or no? [Yes]
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? [Ross]
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? [Pass]
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? [Pass]
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? [Pass]
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? [Wright]
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? [Pass]
82. Watercolor or pastel? [Pass]
83. Bus or subway? [Subway]
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? [Stravinsky]
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? [Smooth]
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? [Cather, though I've read very little Dreiser]
87. Schubert or Mozart? [Mozart]
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? [Fifties]
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? [Pass]
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? [Pass: never read anything by Mann]
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? [Pass: not completely sure I've heard of either, actually]
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? [Dickinson]
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? [Lincoln]
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? [Pass]
95. Italian or French cooking? [Italian]
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? [Pass]
97. Anchovies, yes or no? [No]
98. Short novels or long ones? [Long]
99. Swing or bebop? [Pass]
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? [Pass]

[I've added a little commentary]

Posted by Ed at July 8, 2004 04:52 PM
Comments

I've been contemplating posting on the TCCI, but hesitant for more or less the same reasons that you have been. I think it's interesting to see which questions of the TCCI people pass on. For instance, you avoid passing judgment on any visual art question (except Van Gogh or Gauguin), when I'm sure you aren't ignorant of all of them. Does this mean you just have no strong opinions about art? Or that you feel that one should somehow be more "expert" to deliver such opinions?

In looking over the TCCI, I've also noticed that in cases where I'm fairly familiar with one of the entries, but not the other, my inclination is to say the one I'm more familiar with, when properly I should pass. Resisting the urge to do so, or to answer those where I have only a little familiarity with both options:

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? [Pass]
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? [Great Gatsby]
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? [Pass]
4. Cats or dogs? [Dogs]
5. Matisse or Picasso? [Picasso. But not an easy choice.]
6. Yeats or Eliot? [Yeats. But again, not easy.]
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? [Pass]
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? [O'Connor]
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? [Pass -- I've only seen Casablanca, but I did like it a lot]
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? [de Kooning]
11. The Who or the Stones? [The Who. Obviously. The people who have said the Stones are just wrong.]
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? [Pass.]
13. Trollope or Dickens? [Pass -- never read Trollope]
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? [Pass]
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? [Pass -- never read Tolstoy (there's some Humiliation for you)]
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? [Pass]
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? [Pass]
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? [Hamburgers]
19. Letterman or Leno? [Letterman]
20. Wilco or Cat Power? [Pass -- never listened to Cat Power, only know Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco]
21. Verdi or Wagner? [Verdi]
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? [Grace Kelly]
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? [Bill Monroe]
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? [Pass -- never read them]
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? [Pass]
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? [Pass]
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? [Vermeer]
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? [Chopin]
29. Red wine or white? [Red]
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? [Wilde]
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? [Pass]
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? [Shostakovich. But it's a difficult choice.]
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? [Pass]
34. Constable or Turner? [Turner]
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? [Pass]
36. Comedy or tragedy? [Tragedy]
37. Fall or spring? [Fall]
38. Manet or Monet? [Manet]
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? [Pass -- never watched the Sopranos, and only a little Simpsons. I'm terribly un-TV-cultured.]
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? [Pass]
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? [James]
42. Sunset or sunrise? [Sunset]
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? [Pass]
44. Mac or PC? [Mac. Though a PC running Linux with KDE 3 is good too.]
45. New York or Los Angeles? [New York]
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? [Pass]
47. Stax or Motown? [Pass]
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? [Van Gogh]
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? [Pass]
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? [Blog]
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? [Pass]
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? [Pass]
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? [Pass]
54. Ghost World or Election? [Pass]
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? [Minimalism]
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? [Daffy]
57. Modernism or postmodernism? [Modernism]
58. Batman or Spider-Man? [Batman was generally my favorite as a child, so I'll stick with that. But it's a tough decision.]
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? [Pass]
60. Johnson or Boswell? [Pass]
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? [Pass -- never read any Austen]
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? [Pass]
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? [Pass]
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? [Pass]
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? [Pass -- don't know Figaro]
66. Blue or green? [Green. But only if it's a dark, foresty green.]
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? [Midsummer Night's Dream]
68. Ballet or opera? [Ballet]
69. Film or live theater? [Film]
70. Acoustic or electric? [Electric]
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? [Vertigo -- but my answer to this might always be whichever I've seen most recently]
72. Sargent or Whistler? [Whistler]
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? [Pass -- don't like Kundera much based on reading one book, but I've only read about 40 pages of Naipaul]
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? [Pass]
75. Sushi, yes or no? [Yes]
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? [Pass]
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? [Pass]
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? [Pass]
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? [Pass]
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? [Mies]
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? [Pass]
82. Watercolor or pastel? [Watercolor]
83. Bus or subway? [Subway]
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? [Stravinsky -- though I'm a fan of both]
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? [Smooth]
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? [Pass]
87. Schubert or Mozart? [Schubert]
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? [Fifties]
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? [Pass]
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? [Mann, but it's a tough call]
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? [Pass]
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? [Dickinson]
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? [Lincoln]
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? [Pass]
95. Italian or French cooking? [Italian]
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? [Harpsichord]
97. Anchovies, yes or no? [No]
98. Short novels or long ones? [Short -- another tough call, but my taste has been tending toward short lately.]
99. Swing or bebop? [Pass]
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? [The Last Judgment]

My quick, probably inaccurate, count gives me a TCCI of 37, and 46 passes, i.e. on those that I answer, I agree with Teachout 69% of the time.

My passes reveal my general lack of knowledge of film. I also passed on a lot of literature questions, in many of which I'm familiar with one but not both of the subjects. Thus the passes might not be so revealing, as I surely know more about literature than film.

I think a perhaps more enlightening way of learning about people's tastes would be to see a list of ten or so similar dualities they would choose, but I wouldn't want to propose a meme....

Posted by: Matt at July 8, 2004 10:50 PM

I'm kind of amused by my reaction to your comment: one of my first thoughts looking down your answers was "Good God, Matt! You've never read any Austen!?!" (I'm reminded of an amusing scene from The Madness of King George in which Pitt the Younger reacts with shock and dismay when he learns that the man he's talking to has never read King Lear...) That's kind of an amusing response, considering that I've just admitted that I've never read a novel by Twain or Melville! It's also a nice illustration of what makes Lodge's Humiliations game so entertaining.

I also think it's interesting to see which questions people have passed on. (I'm curious about whether the questions one passes on correlate at all with age, and about whether there's any relationship between a person's TCCI and his/her number of passes.) There's some arbitrariness in my passes, after all: I've never read a full novel by either Naipaul or Kundera, for example, but I quit reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being because I found it unbearable, and quit reading In a Free State because I had to spend more time on my second-year seminar paper. I'm not sure that this case (in which I had an opinion, but not much knowledge) is terribly different from cases in which I passed.

As to the art questions I've passed on: I definitely don't think that a consumer of art needs to be an "expert" to express judgment. I just didn't happen to have a strong opinion on most of these questions, for a variety of reasons. I kind of like the Vermeer and Rembrandt paintings I've seen, but neither inspired a reaction strong enough for me to choose between the two, for example. On the other hand, I could name a few paintings by both Constable and Turner, and I know that they both did landscapes, but I don't know either man well enough to have a strong opinion on his work. My reactions to both painters are quite neutral, though I did link to a neat little article on Turner a few months back (http://www.reason.com/0402/artifact.shtml).

Posted by: Ed at July 9, 2004 12:10 AM

Re not having read certain "classics."

Well, you're probably right to avoid T. Mann. I have a very positive feeling about having read "The Magic Mountain," but I think it was a kind of sensory deprivation high. "Buddenbrooks" I couldn't finish. But "Death in Venice" is worth reading, and, besides, it's short--long for a short story, of course, but short. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Moby-Dick" ARE big books, and the latter makes up for its New York opening with a lot of fairly boring stuff. It probably wouldn't kill you to see a play by Edward Albee--if you can get into the analog world long enough to do so.

But, generally speaking, I can see the pleasures of "not having read." I myself have not read "War and Peace." In fact, I haven't read it several times. I'm saving it. When the Angel of Death puts his clammy hand on my shoulder, I plan to point out that I can't go with him until I've read "War and Peace." Surely Huck Finn will be just as persuasive.

Posted by: Jessie Sackler at July 10, 2004 10:51 PM
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