Falling Behind

[poliphilo]

I do try to keep abreast of the culture, but it's hard: so much product, so little time- not to mention the huge backlog of older stuff I've never got round to grappling with- Beowulf for instance. Right now I'm trying to catch up by reading some modern novels. I just read The Kindly Ones and The Ghost- both excellent in their different ways. Next up I'm going to nibble at some Donna Tartt.

I try to watch the happening TV shows, but I seem to have lost touch with the cinema. I read the reviews, but I don't go to see the movies. I like to think it's a blip- and somewhere down the line I'll lay in a store of DVDs and get myself back up to date- but I suspect I'm kidding myself.

One area in which I've long since given up is music. Music- and I mean popular music of course- is made for the young by the young- and I'm in late middle age and just don't care any more. I'd like to care, but I don't. Of course I hear tunes I like in passing but the last time I felt involved with the scene was when the Sex Pistols gobbed all over it- and the only artist whose albums I regularly attend to is Bob Dylan.

Comments

[sovay]

so much product, so little time- not to mention the huge backlog of older stuff I've never got round to grappling with- Beowulf for instance.

I don't think it's possible to catch up on culture. Just limiting the conversation to film, I started with black-and-white and one or two modernities that wired themselves into my childhood; I didn't really start seeing movies in theaters until my very last year of high school, and it took me until graduate school to go out to the movies on a regular basis (an activity strictly limited by finances, in any case; this year, on account of being broke, I've seen hardly anything at all). There are any number of actors working right now that I care very much about seeing. There are several filmmakers I keep an eye out for. And my knowledge of classic film is still probably better than my knowledge of contemporary film, which doesn't keep me from discovering new things all the time—from 1946, or '53, or '89! So at this point, I watch things that interest me, whether they were made three decades or three weeks ago; I'm never going to be in step with pop culture anyway, and I am infinitely happier thereby.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think the movies are over. There's nothing being done now that wasn't being done (better) at some time in the 20th century. My heart belongs to the director-driven auteur cinema of the mid century- to Welles, Fellini, Bunuel, Bergman, Powell et al. All those guys are dead now- and they haven't been replaced.

[sovay]

All those guys are dead now- and they haven't been replaced.

But do you stop writing novels because Nabokov bent the form to its outermost limit in 1962? Or poetry because after Modernism and Dada, what is left but to tell a story?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Good question. I think all the arts have been left floundering in the wake of Modernism.