Nostalgia and Utopianism
I think the Lincvolt is an interesting confluence of things. Young's comments about his latest CSNY movie seem to have a reasonable handle on the effectiveness of nostalgia:
The film will be given worldwide cinema release, but Young has no illusions about its box-office appeal. “I don’t expect it to last long,” he admits. “I mean, let’s be realistic: it’s a film about war and a bunch of old hippies, so that’s the way the public will view it. We spent a lot of time on it, and it means a lot to us, but in the overall scope of things . . . it has a moment, and this moment is coming up, and after that it’ll be a DVD, then it’ll be gone. It’ll be a piece of history.”
And yet nostalgia persists in the choice to modify a classic car to meet future needs. We need both a future and a past, I think. But we also need to be able to tell them apart.
Utopians
I think a lot of people go through a sort of utopian phase— I know I did. Joseph Duemer pointed at a NYT obit for Kathleen Kinkade today, and it brought back memories. While I was in high school, I read both Walden Two by B.F. Skinner and A Walden Two Experiment. I definitely preferred the latter; it had a pragmatic edge that wasn’t as “hippy” as most of the other commune experiments of the time.
What I remember most was the idea that the more disgusting a job was, the more it should be worth—garbage collectors should make more money than CEOs. It seemed reasonable to me at the time. The arc of the obit is interesting, and the memorable spots for me were:
Coming Attractions
Stanley Fish’s article in the NYT struck a chord, given the way that I so often “miss” the glory of Shakespeare:
Shakespeare does many voices but identifies with none of them. (His, as Keats said, is a negative capability.) He’s hard to find, as his would-be biographers well know. Milton has many characters, but they all speak with one voice — his. You don’t have look for him; you can’t get away from him. Despite the variety of scenes and genres there’s always just one guy talking to you; the conversation goes on and on and it is a conversation in which, as Barrow first said, everything is at stake. This is a poetry that reads you.
One of my great flaws as a reader is my inability to track massive casts of characters during a story—I’ve always been drawn to lyric, to one voice that sings its own song. Conversation, in my experience, is always more rewarding in small groups rather than massive crowds. Fish continues:
Helms is dead
I've been portrayed as a caveman by some. That's not true. I'm a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners or niggers.
Jesse Helms, North Carolina Progressive, February 6, 1985
Let the independence day festivities begin.
