The golden mean
When I was in graduate school, we read "literary fiction." At first enchanted with this genre, I soon grew tired of it, because while the writing was often brilliant and ideas staggering, often there was no story to speak of, no humor, little hope, and little reason to keep turning pages.
On the other hand, many of the other books I sought out for their adventures and humor and riveting fun suffered from a lack of brilliant writing. Because I'm always looking at my own writing with a critical eye, I can't turn off my internal editor when I read for pleasure, so I have a hard time reading sloppy or awkward writing (in my opinion--books I didn't like others love, which is great). I've often thought about the need for a balance between these two worlds, the literary and the popular, the fine-tuned language and the rip-roaring adventure.
There was an article in the New Yorker about Mozart a while back that stuck with me. It seems that every art form, including music and literature, faces this same dilemma:
"Perhaps Leopold’s greatest gift to his son was the instruction to write for both musical insiders and the general public. In a letter from 1782, Mozart takes that favorite phrase of his father’s—“the golden mean”—and weaves around it a pragmatic philosophy that is even more relevant now than it was in the eighteenth century:
"'These concertos [Nos. 11, 12, and 13] are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why. . . . The golden mean of truth in all things is no longer either known or appreciated. In order to win applause one must write stuff which is so inane that a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that it pleases precisely because no sensible man can understand it.'
"One wonders what Mozart would have made of today’s musical scene, when “American Idol” contestants cover Elvis hits and university composers write super-complex, mathematically recondite works, and the happy medium seems, on most days, deserted." --Alex Ross, July '06