I often hear people defending their “guilty pleasure” habit of subscribing to awful blogs or reading tabloids or watching bad TV with phrases like “It’s good sometimes” or “It’s not that bad” or “I have to follow what’s happening.”

There’s only so much time in the day, and only so many days in our lives. There’s enough great work out there that you don’t need to waste any time with anything that isn’t great.

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Marco.org:

Agreed! (Mostly! Obviously Marco isn’t against reading what you have to read for your day job. Or your good job, even. I read, say, TechCrunch and other not-Shakespeare-but-zeitgeisty blogs because I’m writing a story about tech culture and have a legit reason to want to accurately represent that culture. But:) The worst habit, often accidentally encouraged by awesome tools like Tumblr and Twitter, is to add and add and add, and never delete. Even bad TV is more defensible than bad RSS feeds, because you must actually like the show enough to make some effort to watch it. It doesn’t just pile up for you automatically, unless you watch all your TV on Hulu.

So do yourself a favor and unsubscribe from something today. (Even if it’s me. I won’t notice!)

Then go read “Infinite Jest” or watch “The Seventh Seal” or one of those other things that seems awful until you go do it and then it’s very satisfying, moment-to-moment.

(via nickdouglas)

I hate this attitude.  It’s this attitude that leads to signifiers of importance grafted onto art in order to make it palatable to people who think that culture should be medicinal; this attitude that leads people to think that importance lies always somewhere outside and not in what you do and what you like; this attitude that lets us dismiss difficult or weird or bad or stupid or cheesy or campy art because it’s not making it easy for you, not throwing its seriousness in your face so you can feel good about spending you precious goddamn time with it.  Art or culture or entertainment or whatever you want to call it is about pleasure and connection as much as it is about transcendence, and the mere fact that something you think is “bad” is able to hold your attention is at least as interesting as anything “great.”

Instead of dropping your guilty pleasures, think more about why you like them.  Don’t settle for easy answers, and don’t assume it’s because there’s something wrong with you, as this quote does.  I would much rather have someone say something intelligent about why they like gossip blogs or Bridezillas (say!), something that admits the validity of pleasure as a prerequisite to analysis, than to hear someone talk about how they read this really important book and how profound it is.  It’s the guilty, not the pleasure, that’s the problem here.

(via barthel)

I’m on the all-pleasure, no-guilt front myself. For me, this doesn’t really mean that “high” culture does not offer pleasure — for instance, I found Infinite Jest to be joyous and compelling, not like work at all — but it doesn’t mean that “low” culture is not also just as complex and just as rewarding. I was going to say more, but I’ve gotta go, Gossip Girl is almost on.

We will be, laments Parker in her obligatory chapter on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, so “awash in vaginaism,” that we are nothing beyond “vaginas on the plain seeking out other vaginas with which to hold hands and gaze unlongingly into the silky night of a manless moon.

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Constant Comment | The American Prospect

I don’t really agree with Kathleen Parker at all, but that is a good line.