Klosterman's But What if We're Wrong? is bubbling in my brain. I mentioned it before, and I've pushed deeper into it since then. In it, Klosterman tries to imagine where and how the next great piece of literature will come into being. His argument is that it will be someone fringe--someone who is outside of societal mores, someone who is part of a minority so small that no one can really anticipate or think of anything worthwhile coming from that direction.
The argument makes a lot of sense, as he explains it (and, though I'm not done with the book, I do recommend picking it up). I'm only sketching here, because his thinking got me thinking about the past, rather than the future.
As I drove from a lunch with a former student, I texted my friend, who is our resident Classics expert, and threw down a different idea of how we could define what a classic is (as opposed to the Classics, of course). It's something that has been nebulous if only because we're defining it through intuition as we go along, trying to figure out what does and doesn't fit into the classification.
Since our conversations are always about what's a classic from the past, I threw the idea of what would have to be written now to be a classic in the future. My hope was to extrapolate what we discovered about the permanence and worth of our moment in time--and how to express that via literature--so that we could more firmly apply the extrapolation to the past.*
The conversation is too fraught to be rendered over texts, and, like all good conversation, it was rhizomatic, but I think it's a worthwhile starting point.
Then, when I sat down to write this essay, I got distracted by video essays on YouTube. There's something to be said for the direction that video essays are going.** The combination of thoughtfulness, audio, visual--it all appeals to me. Some are better on the visual side (the Folding Ideas channel is not one of them), which is interesting. In terms of medium, YouTube would be the one that makes the case for heavy visual styling as integral. Sometimes it is, depending on the video.
The particular video I watched was a look at the band Arcade Fire and their critique of society. I'm not a fan of the music--from what's sampled in the video essay, I don't think I'd be adding them to my playlist--but that tension between technology (used in its modern, rather than older, more nuanced sense) and our human experience is definitely cool. (Plus the video demonstrates a way that a French phrase could be heard as a pun which works profoundly either way is really neat.) That got me thinking about Guy Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle, which is a slender book of criticism from 1967. I haven't read it all, though I've poked at it a handful of times. The main thesis of the book is summed up in its first section:
This is part of why I'm talking about the Classics at my school. There's a swirl of the new, of the technological, of the progression of society. The spectacle of reality is becoming more and more ingrained in how we think and behave. There's a sense that such a drift is the wrong way to go, the wrong way to look at the world--and wrong because it leads to damage, to lesser lives, to a lack of understanding of the way things are. That's a terrifying prospect. As a result, we've decided that there is something "there", something tangible and permanent and real inside the literature that we select for our students, for the way that we approach the creation and implementation of the curricula. I don't disagree with that assertion--indeed, I find it immensely compelling--but I am unsatisfied with how we know what a classic is.
When asked how much success we've had in defining what makes a work a "classic", my friend glibly responded, "At least there's a list."
Well, that's a starting point. Now to figure out how that list was made--and I don't mean by the writer of the list.
----
* Okay, and maybe because then I could figure out how to write something that would be considered "classic". So it's super selfish. Pretend you didn't read this footnote.
** Because it's summertime and I have luxurious breakfasts, I usually listen to one or two essays whilst eating. I'm a fan of Nerdwriter, the right Cinefix playlists, and After Hours from Cracked. MovieBob also has some cool thoughts, and though they don't make enough videos, I also like Feminist Frequency.
The argument makes a lot of sense, as he explains it (and, though I'm not done with the book, I do recommend picking it up). I'm only sketching here, because his thinking got me thinking about the past, rather than the future.
As I drove from a lunch with a former student, I texted my friend, who is our resident Classics expert, and threw down a different idea of how we could define what a classic is (as opposed to the Classics, of course). It's something that has been nebulous if only because we're defining it through intuition as we go along, trying to figure out what does and doesn't fit into the classification.
Since our conversations are always about what's a classic from the past, I threw the idea of what would have to be written now to be a classic in the future. My hope was to extrapolate what we discovered about the permanence and worth of our moment in time--and how to express that via literature--so that we could more firmly apply the extrapolation to the past.*
The conversation is too fraught to be rendered over texts, and, like all good conversation, it was rhizomatic, but I think it's a worthwhile starting point.
Then, when I sat down to write this essay, I got distracted by video essays on YouTube. There's something to be said for the direction that video essays are going.** The combination of thoughtfulness, audio, visual--it all appeals to me. Some are better on the visual side (the Folding Ideas channel is not one of them), which is interesting. In terms of medium, YouTube would be the one that makes the case for heavy visual styling as integral. Sometimes it is, depending on the video.
The particular video I watched was a look at the band Arcade Fire and their critique of society. I'm not a fan of the music--from what's sampled in the video essay, I don't think I'd be adding them to my playlist--but that tension between technology (used in its modern, rather than older, more nuanced sense) and our human experience is definitely cool. (Plus the video demonstrates a way that a French phrase could be heard as a pun which works profoundly either way is really neat.) That got me thinking about Guy Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle, which is a slender book of criticism from 1967. I haven't read it all, though I've poked at it a handful of times. The main thesis of the book is summed up in its first section:
The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.I want to iterate here that this was in 1967, long before cable television, the summer blockbuster, the Internet, or smartphones. Duh. The idea that spectacle, the least impressive of dramatic arts according to Aristotle, has become the purpose of life is fascinating to me, and it fits in snugly with the Arcade Fire video's analysis. I'm still of the opinion that the world's woes are not unique within history, but our awareness of them is higher than we had before. (I wrote on this in a more optimistic time back in September 2016.) What is unique is the ubiquity of "technology" within our worlds. We aren't equipped for the digital age, much as we weren't equipped for the nuclear age, or the age of war, or any of the other ages that have come upon mankind. That we're focused on the digital--and use the digital to critique the digital--is expected. Why should we focus on the perennial problems that feel intractable when we can focus on the flashy new stuff and blame that instead?
This is part of why I'm talking about the Classics at my school. There's a swirl of the new, of the technological, of the progression of society. The spectacle of reality is becoming more and more ingrained in how we think and behave. There's a sense that such a drift is the wrong way to go, the wrong way to look at the world--and wrong because it leads to damage, to lesser lives, to a lack of understanding of the way things are. That's a terrifying prospect. As a result, we've decided that there is something "there", something tangible and permanent and real inside the literature that we select for our students, for the way that we approach the creation and implementation of the curricula. I don't disagree with that assertion--indeed, I find it immensely compelling--but I am unsatisfied with how we know what a classic is.
When asked how much success we've had in defining what makes a work a "classic", my friend glibly responded, "At least there's a list."
Well, that's a starting point. Now to figure out how that list was made--and I don't mean by the writer of the list.
----
* Okay, and maybe because then I could figure out how to write something that would be considered "classic". So it's super selfish. Pretend you didn't read this footnote.
** Because it's summertime and I have luxurious breakfasts, I usually listen to one or two essays whilst eating. I'm a fan of Nerdwriter, the right Cinefix playlists, and After Hours from Cracked. MovieBob also has some cool thoughts, and though they don't make enough videos, I also like Feminist Frequency.