Avoiding any reference to the pop would mean either being retrograde about what's "permissible" in serious art or else writing about some other world.
Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me.
But, again, the last twenty years have seen big changes in how writers engage their readers, what readers need to expect from any kind of art.
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.
Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero.
I 've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego.
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because the big R's form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment.
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.
It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called "the click of a well-made box." Something like that. The word I always think of it as is "click."
It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now.
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
Raymond Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he's supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners.
Rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set by parents, ancestors, older authorities.
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage.
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.
We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons.
Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals, whatever. These are the people pretty much all the younger writers I admire are writing for, I think.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!