Miasma in the House of Bite Me Grassroots journalism & current events, cyberculture, technology, privacy, with a little new criticism, feminism, postmodernism, radical pedagogy, & new media theory thrown in.
You know, fun in a kind of obverse way. Forgive me for not having time to get through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius yet. It is on my shelf. Summer reading, I guess.
What? Inverted Tina and Harry Come to America crossed with Bret Easton Ellis (sp?) Bright Lights, Big City?
I'm not sure. I'm not sure I would like Toby Young's book, but I like thinking about it from a distance. Some parts of this review I liked, and a bit of quirky analysis:
"On the simplest level, Young's book is about totally fucking up at Condé Nast. But it's also about a country -- or at least a city -- where all other values have been subsumed by ambition and status. "Why do New Yorkers attach such importance to the state of your career?" he asks. "To a certain extent, they define each other according to the usual demographic categories -- gender, ethnic origin, religious background, etc. -- but these things pale into insignificance besides the jobs they do. It's as if there are no alternative sources of identity."
How to totally fuck up at Conde Nast. I suppose. Like I mentioned, a variant of Bright Lights, Big City. Conde Nast. Tina and Harry etc.
Someone named Miasma would know about totally fucking up. The version on academia has been done to death, however. Wanted: alternative sources of identity.
Another paragraph that struck me:
"He is very good at detailing the process whereby smart, philosophically sophisticated people learn to nihilistically celebrate flash and triviality. For Young, it's precipitated by irritation with the recondite enthusiasms and ironic disdain for mass culture of his college friends. "Popular culture was strictly divided between stuff it was okay to like -- independent films, alternative rock, any form of cultural expression associated with minorities -- and the mindless pap produced by the American entertainment industry," Young writes. If mainstream pop culture was "enjoyed at all," he says, "it was strictly in a spirit of camp condescension."
Pop culture. Like who? Camp condescension. I tend to like camp anything, but I'm not sure exactly what "camp condescension" is. Well, yes I am, but I don't like it, so I pretend not to know. To love camp, to REALLY love it, is NOT to condescend to it, but to embrace it wholeheartedly and with utmost serious unseriousness. Yeah, I know most people don't get that far in. Their loss.
But this really struck me, these two views of pop culture. I wish some of my journalism co-workers could get this idea somehow, but I don't expect it. The folks I'm around right now think pop culture is simply celebrity adulation and not nearly fringey "entertainment industry pap." They got the "pop" part, but miss the "culture."
What I get for hanging around people with massive mass media blindspots. They only conceptualize a passive audience, and thus, have less frame of reference for participatory cultures.
Feeling like a mental somersault? It feels good to stretch a little. (no comment on why I ain't been stretching much lately):
"Of course, this pose is itself a kind of post-ironic irony, a Warholian irony that cloaks itself in gee-whiz earnestness. Yet Young's carefully calibrated faux-enthusiasm for celebrity culture becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. "Some form of transference had taken place and I'd ended up fully embracing the belief-system I'd only flirted with before," he writes. "I couldn't wait to strut around in my Armani dinner jacket, waving around the gaudy symbols of my success for all the world to see. Check out my Rolex! Get a load of the tits of my girlfriend! Am I cool, or what?"
Post ironic irony cloaked in gee-whiz earnestness? Is that something like being serious about the non-serious embrace of camp? Postmoderns R Us. Transference, to embrace the thing you once hated. OK, I got that real good. I been hating mass media corporate journalism monopolies since the late 80s. I'm not quite ready for that full body embrace and crotch grind just yet tho.
I guess that would be the "anti-culture-snob snobbery, cheerful embrace of hype and refusal of all distinctions save degrees of hotness defined the '90s." Nope. Hope to never go there.
In the end, I feel less like I would like this book at all, even as in the second part, the author tries to convince me of its charm. I ain't getting charm at all. I feel like he is describing half of Dave Eggers, with half the talent. I'll get through Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius first, I guess.
The Karma of Literature... BookCrossing.com