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.
No comments:
Post a Comment