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W H Audit

Highbrow Reality TV
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A mildly arch Oxford homosexual visits a household to assess whether their love is universal enough. He may consign them to darkness and/or death (see link) if they don't make the grade.

The show differs from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in having more moral seriousness and less shopping. For both these reasons, it may struggle to attract sponsorship.

pertinax, Jul 11 2011

http://www.poets.or...ia.php/prmMID/15545 [pertinax, Jul 11 2011]

[link]






       Is it time for the bi-annual sexual-orientation wars already ? I haven't completely tidied up from the last one and the parrot's still at the dry cleaners.
FlyingToaster, Jul 11 2011
  

       Would he stop all your clocks too?
hippo, Jul 11 2011
  

       ah, the link helps... a bit... but I'm not sure how you got from "A jobless guy with a chip on his shoulder sitting under his private cloud watching the commuters trudge by" to whatever the post is supposed to be about.
FlyingToaster, Jul 11 2011
  

       Might find a Pay-per-View income stream.
Sir_Misspeller, Jul 11 2011
  

       Good title.....more info needed on testing process.
xenzag, Jul 11 2011
  

       I think the most appropriate testing process might depend on one's favourite school of literary theory. If one followed Barthes, for example, the auditor would be dead on arrival, and the subjects of the audit would invent their own assessment and ascribe it to him.
pertinax, Jul 11 2011
  

       Personally I'm interested in the way that Auden prefigures post-modernism in his appeal to irony, but seems to combine that with a moral seriousness that actual post-modernists generally seem to lack. In other words, he seems to have lived as a better person than his ideas implied, pace Roy Campbell.
pertinax, Jul 11 2011
  

       Don't mention the Waugh.
8th of 7, Jul 11 2011
  

       I have idea for a W H Audi.... it'll keep.
xenzag, Jul 11 2011
  

       //pace Roy Campbell.// What?
mouseposture, Jul 12 2011
  

       //pace//, pronounced par-care (or par-say for the less classically anal (or par-chay for the hopelessly Vatican II corrupted - as if a bunch of *Italians* would know how to pronounce Latin)) means 'peace', the implication being "I respectfully depart from Roy Campbell's opinion in this instance, but am not trying to start a fight with him". (Or "I know better than the ignorant and mistaken Roy Campbell, but am ever so tactful and gracious in saying so".)
spidermother, Jul 12 2011
  

       Oh, for heaven's sake.
mouseposture, Jul 12 2011
  

       Thank you, [spidermother].
pertinax, Jul 12 2011
  

       //whatever the post is supposed to be about//   

       Well, [FlyingToaster], the linked poem (and to varying degrees, a number of Auden's other poems) convey a view of the world in which what the world needed, on the eve of World War II, was a combination of more love and a stronger sense of irony. I think (though I may be mistaken) that Auden looks down on the commuters, not because they *have* jobs and marriages, but because, in those jobs and marriages, they try to follow rules and aspire to ideals laid down by others. I don't agree with this view, but I think it is the view which Auden took.   

       Now, as for the idea, it arises from a tangle of thoughts about irony and ironism, archness and camp, high and low culture and how they developed during the twentieth century. The idea has no particular thesis to argue, it just juxtaposes some of these things to see how they look together.
pertinax, Jul 12 2011
  

       Roy Campbell, IIRC, was a critic who felt that Auden and his friends were just selfish hypocrites. Some of the evidence supports this view, but not all of it.
pertinax, Jul 12 2011
  

       Highbrow Reality TV is an oxymoron, if not a double oxymoron.   

       Those whose IQ exceeds their shoe size are able to distinguish between reality and TV. This ability renders the idea redundant.
Twizz, Jul 12 2011
  

       //Thank you// *You* are welcome, [pertinax]. <Points nose up in the air in a kind of supercilious sulk, Obelix style>
spidermother, Jul 12 2011
  

       //a double oxymoron//   

       Ah yes, the rare compound dioxymoron.
pertinax, Jul 12 2011
  

       Is that more dangerous than an ordinary moron ?
8th of 7, Jul 12 2011
  
      
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