You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
Part of the anxiety of gift-giving in New York at this moment in history arises from the fact that you can't merely buy a gift; you must supply a narrative, and the narrative must be in some sense homespun, which then positions you in tasteful opposition to the vulgar excesses of the 1 percent.
Even for the most sensitive of designers, fashion changes too often to supply a narrative of a single place or culture.
The events supply the narrative of "Fever," a new novel by Mary Beth Keane, which arrives at a time when we are once again debating the parameters of public health policy's encroachments on our behaviors.
But for the audience the experience is a concert by an infectiously passionate singer whose gift for comic innovation is unpredictable and dangerous -- with occasional dialogue laced in to supply a narrative theme.
But glam, with its self-conscious cunning, offers a way to get both sexuality and music on the big screen again by supplying a narrative framework.
She supplied brief narrative links to make up for cuts, and even added a happy ending: the dead lovers reappear for a postmortem smooch.
In the 19th century, "penny dreadful" was an unofficial literary category – used by its enemies and its fans to describe cheap serial fiction produced in weekly eight or 16-page instalments, which might, in the course of months or even years of publication, supply rambling narratives founded on poisoning, strangling, burglary, flagellation and hairbreadth escapes from drowning and sexual assault.
It is a rare, and highly successful, occasion when Disney has been content to let the visitor supply an inner narrative of awe -- which is, in a way, a reflection of the California adventure at its best.
All of which, in the accepted narrative, supplied the opening for the revolutionaries, influenced as they were by their European auteur heroes.
