Thoughts on irony from a real human

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like there are articles written like this NY Times Opinionator column every 5-10 years, basically by someone who's grown up and tends to look at their own past too nostalgically, seeing in current 20-to-30-year-olds something that their generation did just slightly better.

Of course I'm sort of biased myself, being at the tail end of my 20s. The article is so smart in many ways, and its overall idea of taking an honest self-inventory and cultivating sincerity is an excellent framework. But the details of this column are quite odd. In a lot of places, the writing is completely blind to what I like to call basic real-human thought. Apparently this columnist did not throw up when her friend used the sentence "Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony." Did he also adjust his bow-tie and speak without moving his lower jaw? And I don't mean that entirely sarcastically/ironically.

I think we have a columnist who is occasionally a victim of over-intellectualizing and over-generalizing. If you haven't figured it out yet, I don't tend to be a fan of those things. Right out of the gates, first sentence: "If irony is the ethos of our age--and it is--then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living." What kind of a sentence is that anyway? Why start with an If that you're just going to turn around to say isn't an If at all? But I won't get too bogged down in sentence structure. How has this author figured out that 'our Age' has just this one ethos and its corresponding archetype? After rattling off her idea of exactly what a hipster is--apparently anybody who homebrews, rides fixed-gears, listens to records, and plays trombone (??)--she eventually gets to why irony might be so pervasive: "Life in the Internet Age has undoubtedly helped a certain ironic sensibility to flourish. An ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely through this medium."

The ol' Internet Age argument! If we're going to stereotype what a hipster is, how about I go ahead and use another stereotype: anyone who uses the phrase "In the Internet Age" is probably almost 40, or older than 40. If an ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely, doesn't that suggest that there might not just be one over-arching capital E-Ethos anymore? Take a peek at the Internet sometime; you can seriously find absolutely anything, and you can also find swarms of people interested in it. Practically everything has a niche and a way to flourish.

She's certainly not wrong that the ironic, sarcastic persona exists--and maybe in excess, though it kind of seems like there's an excess of everything right now--but she speaks of this persona like it's some wildly new thing to be newly feared. She even notes that her own memory might be over-nostalgic, but just rolls on and somehow remembers the 1990s as seeming "relatively irony-free." Hundreds, possibly thousands of comedians would beg to differ. Then there's the head-spinning sentence, "The Grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude..." The very idea of using the words "grunge", "aesthetic" and "movement" in the same sentence is kind of hilarious. Doesn't it seem like any real movement ends as soon as writers, critics, professors, etc start trying to find a way to classify and label the movement? Then, she references David Foster Wallace near the end of the column, talking about how he was part of something called a "New Sincerity movement" and, I think, tries to link that "movement" to an "attempt to banish irony." I wonder if she read DFW's 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. Irony has been pervasive in U.S. culture since the end of WWII, the introduction of broadcast and then cable TV, and sitcoms. Does our columnist remember M*A*S*H? What about David Letterman of the late 80s and 1990s (when he was quite good)? Or any sitcom from like 1970 onward that featured a snarky, self-loathing, ironic character? Basically, if you want to read about the intense U.S. history of irony, meta-referentiality, generational gaps, and so many other things, read DFW's essay, because it's far more comprehensive and doesn't try to tell you how to live. Where he talks about broadcast and cable television influencing U.S. fiction, you can pretty much substitute the Internet and extrapolate further. Wallace wasn't nearly trying to banish irony; nobody in their right mind would. But he was keenly aware of the dangers it presented if not used in balance with direct, real emotion. The best writers display this idea so well. It's never just good vs evil, or ironic vs. sincere, and so on. Everything's always been mixed and blurred; now we have 24/7 access to it all.

The column's penultimate paragraph is the most interesting and most disappointing part: 

"What will future generations make of this rampant sarcasm and unapologetic cultivation of silliness? Will we be satisfied to leave an archive filled with video clips of people doing stupid things? Is an ironic legacy even a legacy at all?" 

What about the rest of Youtube's archive that is incredible? Sure, there's a ton of crap on Youtube, but I can also watch an entire hour-long 1966 set of Thelonious Monk in Norway. A lot of this stuff comes down to personal choice, so instead of cataloging "How to live...", what about "How to sift through layers of bullshit." That'd be kind of awesome if the NY Times published that headline. It might turn a younger generation on to interesting intellectual thought. Or, where's the Why in the column? Why do deeply ironic people seem to have what she earlier calls "a deep aversion to risk...cultural numbness...emptiness and existential malaise." Maybe that could help figuring out why so many folks fill their computers with "stupid" videos. Could part of the problem possibly be that some folks in older generations seem dead-set on telling younger generations how they ought to do things?

I don't know what the answer is to cultural numbness, but I'm pretty sure it's not an article called "How to live..." And for someone who found sincerity in the "Grunge Movement"--a generation of folks who rejected being told how to live--you'd think our columnist would understand that this kind of writing only makes young people feel more alienated, more numb. 

Real Heroes

It is possible to love words a little too much. I had started writing this yesterday as a reflection on Veterans Day, and got warped into a rabbit hole vortex of wondering whether it sounds too joyous to say that we "celebrate" the day, a day where probably a lot of Veterans reflect on buddies who didn't make it home. Then I started thinking about the word Hero, about what it really means and how it gets flung around so much it starts to lessen the true meaning. But then I couldn't really come up with just one tried and true meaning of a Hero anyway, and also thought about how probably most Veterans don't like to think of themselves as Heroes. Most veterans I've spoken to, the ones who made it back home, use the word Lucky more than anything else.

I was thinking too much about words and the various subjective meanings everyone applies to make things fit neatly into whatever they're talking/writing about and my head started spinning.

Then I thought about how words can suddenly shrink down and feel totally puny when put into context with Action. It's not that words are meaningless--far from it--but sometimes they take a little bit of a back seat. Words are the way the story gets told, but they can't capture the essence of certain things, these universally huge things that we have important words for, like Sacrifice, Courage, Valor, Honor, Duty, Country. These words get close but still don't quite capture It (whatever it is), and it's hard to know how to feel let alone what to say.

I finally realized I should just write about a couple moments in my life where I truly understood what I idolize in certain people.

My Dad is a 1968 West Point graduate. He and my Mom married in June of '68, and from what I understand Dad was sent more or less straight from West Point to Vietnam. Of all the incredible stories I've heard about his service, two moments truly stand out for me:

1. Joining Dad at a West Point class reunion at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC, and shaking the hand of man who told me, "Your father is a good man. He saved my life." I'd never heard that story before, and Dad would never say that he saved another person's life, even though that appears to be exactly what he did. I bet what he'd say is that he did exactly what any of those other guys would have done for him.

2. Going through my parents' record collection one holiday, pulling out Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water LP, and listening to Mom talk about how she used to listen to that record, and the title song in particular, and pray for her husband to make it home safely. It was already one of my favorite records, but now I truly save it for sacred listens, imagining the power that song must have awakened in my mother, helping her hold on just a bit longer. When I really think about it, it shakes me to my core.

***

At my grandma's funeral this past September, there were so many incredible older photographs I'd never seen before. But the one at the top of this page made me need to sit down for a bit and think about the It (whatever it is) I was talking about above. That photo is of my grandpa (on my mother's side) in uniform with my grandma and their first child; it was his first time with his wife and first child after coming home from Okinawa.

***

Driving around Somerville yesterday I remembered that Sgt. Henry O. Hansen Memorial Park is just down the street from where I live. Hank Hansen was born in Somerville, Mass. in 1919, graduated from Somerville High and joined the Marines at age 18. He was killed at Iwo Jima, apparently by a sniper while being treated for wounds, on March 1, 1945; he was 25. (Both the book and movie Flags of our Fathers, and the Japanese counterpart Letters from Iwo Jima, tell the incredible story of this battle and all the subsequent drama that played out, and are definitely worth checking out, by the way). I'm not sure if it's attributed to Sgt. Hansen, but either way the inscription on a piece of granite in the memorial captures It:

When you go home

Tell them for us and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today.

There are so many other men and women out there just like these folks, and you're not likely to read too much about them, which I submit is not an accident. A journalism professor of mine at Richmond told me that, "for the most part, the people you read about in newspapers are people who want to be read about. It's the quiet folks who have the way more powerful stories inside them." 

It's very easy to talk superficially about things like Selflessness, Sacrifice, Valor, Courage, etc. It's quite another thing entirely to truly Give Yourself Up for Something/Someone Else, even if that something else is unnameable. Putting mere words and feeling into Action and embodying It takes Power on such a different level that, I think if you have that power, the thought of turning it into a story simply does not register. That's for somebody else to do.  

And that's the best part: Thanks to folks like the ones I mentioned--trust me, I simply believe deep down that there are so many others just like them, and they are very quiet and very amazing people--thanks to these people, most of us won't need to define It; putting It into the perfect wording isn't necessary. All we need to do is try our best to Remember as often as possible.

Back, Jack

Ohhhhhh yes, the blog. Back here for a little dance, I am.

Still writing and writing the ol' Novel, which now has a title: Last Night with the Holy Ghost. Should be ready to post a short excerpt from the first draft soon.

My newest band The Most Americans have just about finished recording our first album, and we just released two tracks mixed by Pretty & Nice's Jeremy Mendicino. You can stream and/or download for free on either our Bandcamp or Soundcloud pages. We'll be at O'Briens in Allston, MA Friday Nov. 16--dig it!

Pretty & Nice also just released a new EP called US YOU ALL WE and it's got my drumming DNA, and even a little vocal appearance, all over it. That above link will take you to iTunes, or you can get the vinyl, or a cassette, or go ahead and stream it at Spotify or Rdio. Look out for a full length LP sometime early next year. I made an adult decision and got myself a full-time job at a hospital this past July, which I'm very much enjoying, but it bittersweetly means I'm not P&N's touring drum-man anymore. But hey, that's life. You make strong decisions and don't regret them because regret is a little thing I like to call fucking poison.

I'm also reading Infinite Jest for the second time and it's even more remarkable this time around. If you're reading it, make sure to avoid the people who ask, "Oh, I've heard of that but is it actually any good?" I dunno man, why don't you calm down and just READ.

 THIS, though, is just incredible.

Next up after IJ is J. Robert Lennon's new book Familiar.