…carping about a five-year-old article is kind of petty and pointless, but –

– if you have a mental category labeled traditional high culture, and it includes both jazz and “experimental fiction,” then you are failing to understand something very important about what high culture is and how it conventionally works.

The elite tendency to embrace things like jazz and experimental fiction is driven by precisely the same impetus that lies behind the more-recent elite tendency to embrace geek chic, and it lies in direct opposition to maintaining the construct that is traditional high culture.  I have no objection whatsoever to someone being an avant-garde hipster whose avant-garde-hipsterism happens to be 50 years behind the times, that is a fine and noble thing to be, but at some point you really ought to acknowledge that that’s what you actually are.