neo(l)culturnie

I'm watching the UK version of Being Human these days, doing a glom. I tried Buffy but it was too high school, fake high school, I mean. TV's version of high school feels familiar only because it's always the same place TV always visits. Not the school I knew or my kids attend. Thank you God for that.

And Buffy might have been cutting edge a while back but now, eh, old stuff, cliche-city. Kind of like Shakespeare's full of cliches, maybe? Many people seem to love it, so there must be something there.

ANYWAY,  the name of this post is a word my mother used to say. That's how I heard it, and I'm sure it's not spelled that way--couldn't be, since it's Russian. And the L? Was there an L? It meant uncultured, I think, but also vulgar, a galoot's choice. It's what I want these days. My mother considered television a wasteland, except PBS was occasionally all right. I want to like Buffy the vampire and I read/write romance. She wouldn't be caught dead in a ditch with a romance.

Every now and again I hear classical music or read a book that I might have read years ago and I'm brought back to the old world. I didn't fit there and I'm vaguely uncomfortable here because I know I'm ne--culturnie.

I wonder of everyone extant has that to a degree. You establish your own culture based on your past (or entirely rejecting it) and yet the differences - or similarities - to the way you're brought up mean you're sort of self conscious about your choices, or conscious of them, anyway.

You'd think past the teen years, this wouldn't be an issue. You're right, for the most part. I just notice it every now and then. First there was the attempt to appreciate Buffy. Then I heard some Chopin this morning and it seemed overwrought but then I remembered how much I'd once liked it. ....

and yo, I think it's time to call this maundering cliche train to a halt and find some coffee. If I'd stuck with my old culture, my mother's world, it would be tea. Not much difference there.


Comments

  1. Only one L, I'm pretty sure, but I'll double check when I get home and can lay my hands on one of my old textbooks or dictionaries.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No snark. Bad puppy. No. (Review stuff.)