![]() He was easy to quarrel with and, by most accounts, easy to forgive. ![]() He was also, almost serenely, pure of heart. Macdonald was vociferous, opinionated, and, when he was drunk, nasty and combative, though this was true of many of his peers as well-it was an alcoholic milieu. He was therefore nicely endowed to flourish in a provincial culture-the intellectual niche world of New York City from the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-sixties-where trading attacks and high-minded insults with former or future friends was regarded as simply one of the ways that work got done. Macdonald not only enjoyed provoking he liked to be provoked. #Highbrow person crossword professionalMacdonald was a man who had a congenital distrust of authority, but whose talent and charm made this into an appealing trait of temperament rather than a personal or professional liability. The roots of this mentality go back to the nineteen-thirties, and one of its liveliest cultivators and exponents was the journalist Dwight Macdonald. They thought of their cultural preferences in exactly the same way that they thought of their political principles: as positions that, if everyone adopted them, would make for a better world. I wonder how many people actually can compartmentalize that way in any case, people like my dad did not. They can be democrats out in the town square and snobs at home. One way to explain them would be to say that they subscribed to a particular liberal idea: that there is often a discrepancy between public values and private tastes, but as long as these things are kept in separate compartments people have no obligation to justify their personal likes on political grounds. I met a lot of people like that growing up, people who managed to combine unequivocal support for principles like equal rights and freedom of speech with flagrant cultural élitism. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Metropolitan Opera were the joint deities of his world. ![]() I knew such a person very well: my father. The liberal highbrow, the person who favored an immediate ban on nuclear weapons and refused to have a television in the house, was a wonderful mid-twentieth-century type. #Highbrow person crossword archivePhotograph by Walker Evans / Walker Evans Archive / The Metropolitan Museum of Art The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884.Macdonald around the time he joined Partisan Review, in the nineteen-thirties. Levine, "Prologue", Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1990: 3 highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres-opera and classical" (Tak Wing Chan, Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010: 60). The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discriminatory or overly selective (Lawrence W. "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition and literature-i.e., literary fiction and poetry to films in the arthouse line and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. The word draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, and was originally simply a physical descriptor. ![]() Highbrow Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, " highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. ![]()
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