The Guardian and Noam Chomsky
Link
Monday, 19 March 2012
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Spleen and Modernity: Baudelaire and ‘alternative’ consumption
In his Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire encapsulates the attitude of the practitioner of “spleen” in his ‘The Dog and the Vial’, where the dog rejects the vial of perfume in favour of faeces, to which Baudelaire likens it to ‘the public’ who are worth of only carefully chosen dung for their sensibilities would be exasperated if present with beauty or genial and vital experience of senses; only ‘shit’ will do. Baudelaire’s relationship with his readership, the ‘general public’, therefore marks his the function of spleen: it is evidence of melancholy without real cause, direct and projected onto everything that passes over its gaze, dismantling it in all its pretensions and ridiculing it for all its worth. It seeks to take all authority as merely phenomenal, fleeting and ‘mere opinion’, to which it gives us, and him, a leftover – suffering and despair. Baudelaire’s work is a testament to such cold hearted sentiments and desires:
For I have from each thing extracted its quintessence,
You have given me mud and I have made of it gold.
Link
For I have from each thing extracted its quintessence,
You have given me mud and I have made of it gold.
Link
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Who reads 'The Sun'?
Here is a website that illustrates the readership of ‘The Sun’ and the demographic key below:
As you will be able to see, 90% of ‘The Sun’ readers are in categories CDE or ‘blue collar’ jobs, whilst only 10% are in the ‘knowledge professions’ (AB).
Also, have a look at the difference in age, gender and region.
National Readership Survey (NRS) demographic categories
Social Grade | Social Status | Occupation |
A | upper middle class | higher managerial, administrative or professional |
B | middle class | intermediate managerial, administrative or professional |
C1 | lower middle class | supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional |
C2 | skilled working class | skilled manual workers |
D | working class | semi and unskilled manual workers |
E | those at lowest level of subsistence | state pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers |
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