Guilty Pleasures - A Quickie

"That whole guilty pleasure thing is full of fucking shit.” Dave Grohl

A fuller version of the quotation above…

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it. That’s what’s wrong with our generation: that residual punk rock guilt, like, “You’re not supposed to like that. That’s not fucking cool.” Don’t fucking think it’s not cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” It is cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic”! Why the fuck not? Fuck you! That’s who I am, goddamn it! That whole guilty pleasure thing is full of fucking shit.”

Dave Grohl

Two ideas collided to inspire this post.

Cultural Snobbery

Yesterday, on Facebook, this article by Alexei Sayle from 2104 was doing the rounds - described as a demolition of Strictly Come Dancing.

I don’t watch Strictly, myself, but there is something intensely irritating to me about people who like to spoil other people’s pleasure in something.

This is what I wrote.

I really hate this kind of thing

Why shit on something so many people enjoy? I really don't understand that. It's not my thing but so what? No one's making me watch it, and when I have, I've not hated it. I daresay I could even get to enjoy it. I love to see people learning new skills, for instance. There's nowt wrong with that.

There's something oddly puritanical and just plain snobbish about this attitude
It's related to the idea of guilty pleasure. There is no such thing. Pleasure is pleasure. If you feel ashamed of something you enjoy it's because you are letting someone else into your head, to judge you, instead of telling them to fuck off

Love what you love!

Me, on Facebook

I think this is an especially bad attitude for those of us who are creative. Not because we shouldn’t develop our own sense of taste, our own likes and dislikes! But because we risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

It goes back to that Creative Compost Heap, where we collect our inspirations and allow them to transform into something which nourishes our own creative process.

George Saunders on Influences

The second idea that this collided with was in George Saunders’ recent Story Club post, where he talks about influences.

He admits that when he was first asked about his own, he was all high minded and mentioned the classics. But that now he teaches, he has found what he called “silly exercises” help to loosen up his class, which feeds the creative spirit.

This is what he suggests

“I would propose one of these silly exercises and my students would feel a rush of pity for me and, you know, put their shoulders to the wheel, freed, by my silliness, of their usual strict artistic identities.

So here it is:

Get a big sheet of paper (or set up a spreadsheet) and construct a table. The column headings should mark the years of your life - the first column should be labeled “Birth to 5 years old,” and every column after that should span five years. (“5 - 10 years old,” “10 - 15 years old,” and so on, all the way up to your current age, there across the top of the page.)

The six rows of the table should be labeled as follows: “Stories/Novels/Music/Movies/TV/Experiences/People.”

George Saunders

This seems like an excellent idea to me, and I plan to do it myself later today.

Check out his post here for more details.

My Suggested Silly Exercise

And it’s especially silly in this case, as I share Dave Grohl’s view. Nothing should be a guilty pleasure.

Still, we all know what it means, right? And anything which generates strong feelings should belong on our compost heap.

In my case, I think the one I struggled most to overcome, is my teenage love of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances.

These days I admit to it (see that word! admit) and I can make some great justifications. Heyer was a fine storyteller. She wrote some brilliant characters - the ones we love to love as well as the ones we hate. Her very attractive bad boys - libertines and rakes who we’d like to reform, but not too much. And in Cotillion, one of my favourite of her novels, she beautifully subverts the conventions of the romance genre itself.

But still, I feel guilty. She was an insufferable snob. She genuinely appears to have believed that some people were born better than others - she had a weird fetish for the aristocracy. Her heroines may at times appear to be low born, but they always turn out to have blue blood and secretly have aristocratic connections.

And still, I always turn to them when I’m poorly. Comfort reading.

So I’m going to add Heyer to my compost heap, and see what she has to offer. Maybe it’s about the power of storytelling to get through people’s convictions - in my case, I refuse to accept the idea that any group of people matters more than others, regardless of birth. And yet, looking back, as well as Heyer I spent loads of my teenage years reading historical fiction which concentrated on the exploits of Kings and Queens and quite happily took sides with the monarchy against Cromwell. Perhaps there’s something here to remind us that there’s no such thing as acting “out of character” - perhaps none of us is as consistent as we like to think.

It also seems relevant that Heyer herself wanted to be taken seriously as a historical novelists - and yet her serious novels are dull as the proverbial ditchwater.

They may be a lesson in that for us writers!

I do think this is a fruitful area for me to explore. Probably while listening to Donny Osmond…

I’d love to know if you have any guilty pleasures, and whether you might add them to your Creative Compost Heap. Maybe they will liven your ideas up…

Ann