A meandering post from the Convention to literature, music and "zeitgeist"
Well, that was weird. Much of the commentary on the abbreviated and Zoom-based Democratic Convention seems to be that it worked relatively well. Since conventions don't generally have much political impact, I see any such assessments as rather silly, but some people feel compelled to make them anyway. Nevertheless, it was weird. It was visually weird, it was tonally weird, and all around, it was weird. Some of the speeches were good, and made weird by the lack of a crowd. All around, weird.
Appropriately so. 2020.
I generally avoid words like, "zeitgeist." Imprecision is the bane of scholarship, and such a word is too imprecise for my scholarly tastes. Soft and squishy. Malleable. Worse yet, it changes as soon as you look at it, and attacks when you look away, like the weeping angels from Doctor Who. Yet, I find myself using it, not just in reference to the convention, but in reference to art lately.
First stop, a book. A Song For A New Day, by Sarah Pinsker. I just started this book, but so far, it is outstanding. Pinsker writes about a near future in which a combination of a plague and a series of terrorist attacks combine to ban any large gatherings. Everybody hides in their houses, working from home, a sort of VR becomes the new thing by technological necessity, and musicians... well, that's the focus. Care to guess why this book was calling out to me?
Pinsker won the Nebula for this, which she wrote before the COVID craziness, yet part of the reason for her Nebula was undoubtedly the "timeliness." The feeling, as you read, that she is capturing by merely months foresight, what the world would be as fear ofa pox COVID would drive people into their houses to hide and work from home, communicating via their computers, and so on. Did she get everything right? Of course not. But that's not what I'm getting at. I'm getting at the feeling. The feeling conveyed by the characters as they look at the world-- the totality of their world-- and what happens as our world is consumed by the ultimate exogenous event.
And within that world, you have a character like Rosemary, and the tension between her desire to go out, and leave the confines of the house in which she has grown up and been kept safe, interacting almost entirely over the computer, her parents' desire to keep her there, and anxiety over actually going and being out in a world with possible threats that have been hanging over her and being her perception of the world.
Pinsker writes with nuance, and that's what makes it work. As I said, she doesn't get everything right, but she couldn't be expected to do so. I'll probably write more later. Again... just picked this one up. For now, though, highly recommended.
So there's something here about the "zeitgeist," right? Well... a lot of these books have risen to prominence lately, and most of them weren't quite so recent. I have commented on a few on this blog. Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven was published in 2014. 2014 was a very different world. It's odd to think about how much the world can change since 2014, but it can. Mandel wrote about a disease wiping out everyone, and people trying to rebuild something, so when COVID struck, Station Eleven got renewed attention. Also, it's an amazing book. One of the interesting things about it is that, through nonlinear narrative, you get to watch the world fall apart through multiple perspectives. Pinsker writing in 2019? OK, sure. There was already plenty wrong in 2019. See: Levitsky & Ziblatt. 2014? The biggest problem we had in 2014 was a political unwillingness to deal with impending climate disasters, but that's more about inevitable future disasters rather than what's wrong now. Other than that, contrary to all of the lies Trump was telling in 2016, the economy was continuing to grow steadily, crime was at an historic low, and yadda, yadda, yadda.
Or consider Ling Ma's Severance. Ma published Severance in 2018. It's another disease-wipes-out-everyone book, and I strongly recommend it, as long as you can overlook a terribly written ending. Ma portrays a kind of anomie associated with economic success in pre-COVID New York, from the perspective of an Asian-American child of Chinese immigrants, but that life is characterized as people walking around like mindless zombies, so when a disease makes people go through their routines mindlessly... you see the point.
It winds up being a very interesting read, and "timely" in a sense, but not really one that captures precisely this moment.
Pinsker did it. Mandel? Kinda. But as long as we're talking authors and "zeitgeist"... the reason Orwell is a perennial reference is that any time a country is faced with authoritarianism, doublespeak or anything of the sort, he's relevant again. Suddenly, we're withdrawing troops from Germany and our President lets Russia put bounties on our troops. We're at war with whom? Who's our ally?
That book was published in 1949.
And maybe this is why I'm struggling with the concept of art and zeitgeist.
So let's turn to music. The album of 2020, I suppose, would be the Drive-By Truckers' The Unraveling. Yeah, yeah, I know, I can't stop with the Drive-By Truckers. You read this blog, you're going to read me pushing the Drive-By Truckers on you. Their new album is The Unraveling, and it is as much a commentary on 2020 as any album you will hear. Songs include "Babies In Cages."
And yet, that may not be the album that necessarily captures everything about 2020.
In 2016, on The Unmutual Political Blog, I had a little musical tic. When commenting on my own uncertainty and the weirdness of the 2016 campaign (oh, for the normalcy of the 2016 campaign!), I would end the post by embedding one of my favorites from the 1990s grunge scene. Mad Season's "I Don't Know Anything," from their one album, Above. For my money, Mad Season was the best thing to come out of the grunge era. Right now, I'm stuck on Living Colour's second album, Time's Up.
Living Colour was a bit of a one-hit wonder, and oddly so, from the late 80s. They were a rarity-- a hard rock group consisting of African-American musicians, heavily influenced by funk as well as hard rock. Vernon Reid was as great a guitarist as you'll ever hear, and they had a moment in the sun with "Cult of Personality," from their first album, Vivid. That song is rather appropriate these days.
Yet their second album, from 1990, had so much to say. From "Information Overload," with a relatively self-explanatory title, to "Pride" and its commentary on African-American culture and its place in American culture... Go. Listen to that album. I mean, seriously. Even the title...
Yet consider 1990. From... whose perspective? The Berlin Wall fell the previous year. The Soviet Union was collapsing. GDP growth went negative in Q4, but basically, the economy was stable. (Have a little perspective, people.) Of course, things looked a little different if you were African-American, and living in a redlined neighborhood amid the crack-cocaine era.
To one segment of society, the 1980s is a glory era to which we should seek to return. That would be the "I want my country back" crowd. The... "make America great again" crowd. Of course, Trump himself has done nothing but trash-talk America all his life. You're being taken advantage of, laughed at, blah, blah, blah. That's been his schtick for his entire life. Regardless of any temporal inconsistency, to one segment of society, the 1980s will remain a glory-decade for a variety of reasons.
Why don't you hear "I want my country back" from, well, Corey Glover? When was it his? When was it Sarah Pinsker's? In order to want it back, you have to believe that at some point, it was yours and not theirs. Of course, the big problem with one particular political movement right now is the assertion that if you are a white male, then no matter what else is true about you, the world is necessarily your oyster.
Eddie Murphy did a great Saturday Night Live sketch many moons ago, in which he turned this into a great joke. It was, however, a joke. The world is far more complex. Lines of distinction, and all sorts of stuff with which I ain't done in that other series, but I'm gettin' off track here.
The point, though, is that how you look at a time like 1990 depends on your perspective. How you look at the 1980s depends on your perspective. This, I think, is why trying to describe a "zeitgeist" gets messy, despite the fact that a book like A Song For A New Day reads as so timely right now, and the fact that an album like The Unraveling has so much power right now.
I have no idea what this post was. Sometimes that's the case. Sorry. At least you got some book and music recommendations.
Appropriately so. 2020.
I generally avoid words like, "zeitgeist." Imprecision is the bane of scholarship, and such a word is too imprecise for my scholarly tastes. Soft and squishy. Malleable. Worse yet, it changes as soon as you look at it, and attacks when you look away, like the weeping angels from Doctor Who. Yet, I find myself using it, not just in reference to the convention, but in reference to art lately.
First stop, a book. A Song For A New Day, by Sarah Pinsker. I just started this book, but so far, it is outstanding. Pinsker writes about a near future in which a combination of a plague and a series of terrorist attacks combine to ban any large gatherings. Everybody hides in their houses, working from home, a sort of VR becomes the new thing by technological necessity, and musicians... well, that's the focus. Care to guess why this book was calling out to me?
Pinsker won the Nebula for this, which she wrote before the COVID craziness, yet part of the reason for her Nebula was undoubtedly the "timeliness." The feeling, as you read, that she is capturing by merely months foresight, what the world would be as fear of
And within that world, you have a character like Rosemary, and the tension between her desire to go out, and leave the confines of the house in which she has grown up and been kept safe, interacting almost entirely over the computer, her parents' desire to keep her there, and anxiety over actually going and being out in a world with possible threats that have been hanging over her and being her perception of the world.
Pinsker writes with nuance, and that's what makes it work. As I said, she doesn't get everything right, but she couldn't be expected to do so. I'll probably write more later. Again... just picked this one up. For now, though, highly recommended.
So there's something here about the "zeitgeist," right? Well... a lot of these books have risen to prominence lately, and most of them weren't quite so recent. I have commented on a few on this blog. Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven was published in 2014. 2014 was a very different world. It's odd to think about how much the world can change since 2014, but it can. Mandel wrote about a disease wiping out everyone, and people trying to rebuild something, so when COVID struck, Station Eleven got renewed attention. Also, it's an amazing book. One of the interesting things about it is that, through nonlinear narrative, you get to watch the world fall apart through multiple perspectives. Pinsker writing in 2019? OK, sure. There was already plenty wrong in 2019. See: Levitsky & Ziblatt. 2014? The biggest problem we had in 2014 was a political unwillingness to deal with impending climate disasters, but that's more about inevitable future disasters rather than what's wrong now. Other than that, contrary to all of the lies Trump was telling in 2016, the economy was continuing to grow steadily, crime was at an historic low, and yadda, yadda, yadda.
Or consider Ling Ma's Severance. Ma published Severance in 2018. It's another disease-wipes-out-everyone book, and I strongly recommend it, as long as you can overlook a terribly written ending. Ma portrays a kind of anomie associated with economic success in pre-COVID New York, from the perspective of an Asian-American child of Chinese immigrants, but that life is characterized as people walking around like mindless zombies, so when a disease makes people go through their routines mindlessly... you see the point.
It winds up being a very interesting read, and "timely" in a sense, but not really one that captures precisely this moment.
Pinsker did it. Mandel? Kinda. But as long as we're talking authors and "zeitgeist"... the reason Orwell is a perennial reference is that any time a country is faced with authoritarianism, doublespeak or anything of the sort, he's relevant again. Suddenly, we're withdrawing troops from Germany and our President lets Russia put bounties on our troops. We're at war with whom? Who's our ally?
That book was published in 1949.
And maybe this is why I'm struggling with the concept of art and zeitgeist.
So let's turn to music. The album of 2020, I suppose, would be the Drive-By Truckers' The Unraveling. Yeah, yeah, I know, I can't stop with the Drive-By Truckers. You read this blog, you're going to read me pushing the Drive-By Truckers on you. Their new album is The Unraveling, and it is as much a commentary on 2020 as any album you will hear. Songs include "Babies In Cages."
And yet, that may not be the album that necessarily captures everything about 2020.
In 2016, on The Unmutual Political Blog, I had a little musical tic. When commenting on my own uncertainty and the weirdness of the 2016 campaign (oh, for the normalcy of the 2016 campaign!), I would end the post by embedding one of my favorites from the 1990s grunge scene. Mad Season's "I Don't Know Anything," from their one album, Above. For my money, Mad Season was the best thing to come out of the grunge era. Right now, I'm stuck on Living Colour's second album, Time's Up.
Living Colour was a bit of a one-hit wonder, and oddly so, from the late 80s. They were a rarity-- a hard rock group consisting of African-American musicians, heavily influenced by funk as well as hard rock. Vernon Reid was as great a guitarist as you'll ever hear, and they had a moment in the sun with "Cult of Personality," from their first album, Vivid. That song is rather appropriate these days.
Yet their second album, from 1990, had so much to say. From "Information Overload," with a relatively self-explanatory title, to "Pride" and its commentary on African-American culture and its place in American culture... Go. Listen to that album. I mean, seriously. Even the title...
Yet consider 1990. From... whose perspective? The Berlin Wall fell the previous year. The Soviet Union was collapsing. GDP growth went negative in Q4, but basically, the economy was stable. (Have a little perspective, people.) Of course, things looked a little different if you were African-American, and living in a redlined neighborhood amid the crack-cocaine era.
To one segment of society, the 1980s is a glory era to which we should seek to return. That would be the "I want my country back" crowd. The... "make America great again" crowd. Of course, Trump himself has done nothing but trash-talk America all his life. You're being taken advantage of, laughed at, blah, blah, blah. That's been his schtick for his entire life. Regardless of any temporal inconsistency, to one segment of society, the 1980s will remain a glory-decade for a variety of reasons.
Why don't you hear "I want my country back" from, well, Corey Glover? When was it his? When was it Sarah Pinsker's? In order to want it back, you have to believe that at some point, it was yours and not theirs. Of course, the big problem with one particular political movement right now is the assertion that if you are a white male, then no matter what else is true about you, the world is necessarily your oyster.
Eddie Murphy did a great Saturday Night Live sketch many moons ago, in which he turned this into a great joke. It was, however, a joke. The world is far more complex. Lines of distinction, and all sorts of stuff with which I ain't done in that other series, but I'm gettin' off track here.
The point, though, is that how you look at a time like 1990 depends on your perspective. How you look at the 1980s depends on your perspective. This, I think, is why trying to describe a "zeitgeist" gets messy, despite the fact that a book like A Song For A New Day reads as so timely right now, and the fact that an album like The Unraveling has so much power right now.
I have no idea what this post was. Sometimes that's the case. Sorry. At least you got some book and music recommendations.
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