“About Last Night” appears to be on the way to breaking its all-time record for single-day traffic, mainly because the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, in addition to having been mentioned in yesterday’s “Hip Clicks” column on the USA Today Web site, was linked early this morning by Political Animal, Kevin Drum’s Washington Monthly blog. In the immortal Time-style words of Wolcott Gibbs, “Where it will all end, knows God!”
In Our Girl’s temporary absence, I’m trying to stay on top of the scores posted by the various bloggers listed in “Sites to See.” Here’s the complete roster to date:
Banana Oil, 70%.
Bookish Gardener, 57%.
Brandywine Books, 67%.
Collected Miscellany, 68%.
Crescat Sententia, 40%.
Elegant Variation, 47%.
A Fool in the Forest, 64.38%.
Futurballa, 47%.
Gnostical Turpitude, 72%.
Mixolydian Mode, 52%.
Maud Newton, 54%.
MoorishGirl, 44%.
Rake’s Progress, 59%.
The Reading Experience, 43%.
The Rest Is Noise, 55%.
Return of the Reluctant, 54%.
Shaken & Stirred, 73%.
Something Old, Nothing New, 45%.
…something slant, 58% “or thereabouts.”
Superfluities, 41%.
James Tata, 49%.
Tingle Alley, “60%ish.”
Sarah Weinman, 58%.
To all those bloggers who’ve posted answers but no score: do your own math if you want to hang with the popular kids!
As for reaction to the TCCI, Ed has converted the results into a USA Today-style graphic, while Gideon Strauss posted this funny response:
I’ve decided not only to test how far my tastes differ from that of Mr. Teachout, but also how much less informed my tastes are. So I will give myself two scores: my TCCI score, and a score for the number of paired items out of a hundred on Teachout’s list for which I had any idea what he is talking about (which I will call the Teachout Cultural Superiority Index or TCSI, so that my TCSI score will measure how close I am to his perfect 100)….
Read the whole thing here.
Gnostical Turpitude actually went to the trouble of writing a longish essay about the TCCI. Among his astute observations:
[T]he questions posed by Teachout reminded me of “Humiliations,” a parlor game that appears in the David Lodge novel Changing Places. In that game, players confess the titles of books they’ve never read, receiving one point for every player who has read the book in question; hence, the winner is the competitor who has never read the books that are most familiar to his opponents.
There’s a certain odd thrill to announcing that I’ve never read anything by Thomas Mann, that I’ve never read either Huck Finn or Moby-Dick, and that I’ve never been to (or read) an Edward Albee play. (As the professor in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe might say, “What do they teach them in the schools these days?!”) I’d imagine that the thrill I’ve just described is similar to the feeling one experiences after winning a round of Humiliations!…
Read the whole thing here.
This seems as good a time as any to confess that I once organized a game of Humiliation (I’m not positive, but I think it’s in the singular) at a garden party of budding young New York intellectuals who were all friendly enough to play honestly. I thought I’d die laughing, or at least throw up. No, I won’t tell you who was playing or what other sordid admissions were made, but I will admit that I stopped the show by acknowledging that I once reviewed a literary biography of an author with whose novels and short stories I was totally unfamiliar. It was a long, long time ago….