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1 January 2005: Sometime yesterday, I sneered at Harold Bloom as an academic in a post to the Shakespeare Fellowship where I argue about who wrote the plays of Shakespeare, and someone responded that he wasn't an academic--because of, I gather, his unacademic way of writing. That blipped me into my taxonomical mode. Hence, I soon had a Taxonomy of Culture-Workers done.
There are six kinds:
(1) Total Academics: those who have gotten advanced degrees and deal with received subjects in long-standard ways. For example, a professor of English applying the critical method of T.S. Eliot to the works of Walt Whitman. Or using the poetic techniques of Eliot to compose poems about the death of his mother.
(2) Incomplete Academics: those who have gotten advanced degrees and deal with received subjects in relatively unstandard ways, or deal with fresh subjects in standard ways. I consider Bloom such an academic, for he deals only with the Canon, but his treatment is not completely standard.
(3) Superior Academics: those who somehow have gotten advanced degrees but deal with fresh subjects in original ways. Mike Basinski and John M. Bennett are two such; both have ph.d.'s but compose poems about all kinds of subjects in highly original ways. (I think it very difficult for creative people to succeed in schools, for they are biologically ill-equipped to conform, in my view. But I think colleges started becoming much more lax about regimenting their charges in the sixties, and the West has become so incredibly affluent since WW II that people can take twenty years to get through college and grad school without starving. Faking conformity is easier for older students, too. I myself managed to get a B.A. by the time I was forty, and almost went on to a master's.
(4) Infra-Academics: those without advanced degrees who deal with received subjects in long-standard ways. I can't think of any offhand, but they're all over the place.
(5) Valuable Non-Academics: those without advanced degrees who deal with received subjects in relatively unstandard ways, or deal with fresh subjects in standard ways.
(6) Superior Non-Academics: those without advanced degrees who deal with fresh subjects in highly original ways. Me. (By "original," I don't mean unprecendentedly unique, but simply differently from almost everyone else.)
As should be obvious, these are first thoughts. I'm sure I'll eventually refine them substantially.
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