"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal”. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."
>manchild spoiled brat of two loaded liberal professors I don't care what the fuck he has to say.
Luke Parker
don'y want to spoil it but a pretty good movie
Charles Campbell
>the end of the tour I'll check it out
Henry Price
None of this shit describes what's going on.
Alexander Nguyen
It does for me
Wyatt Cox
ETA was kinda like this Burmese trainset charity
Brayden Torres
David Foster Wallace once wrote a piece about David Lynch. In the piece, he coined a new term: "Lynchian". Wallace described a Lynchian tone as "the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal."
He described a husband beating his 1950s housewife to death because she bought the wrong brand of peanut butter. "I told you to buy the JIF," he'd say as he's clobbering her to death. This, he said, would qualify as almost perfectly Lynchian.
I think "I Am Jazz" enters into Lynchian territory. The .webm above shows a simple domestic scene. The women look like average suburban moms. They're relaxing on the couch. One imagines they might be discussing casserole recipes when we cut to them. But it slowly dawns on us that in the living room, with placid expressions on their faces, they're talking about the woman's transvestite son's genitals.
Despite the obvious subtext and the producers' hope to normalize this horror, the average person is totally disgusted. Nevertheless, the viewer is fascinated. We're drawn further into this. The sheer naked horror of what they're saying, the blase quality with which they're saying it, it creates this brutal paradox that almost rapes the viewer's basic sense of what is decent.
>To an extent, although really the book is strategically set in the future. It’s not really supposed to be a reflection of the way things are now but a kind of extrapolation on trends. I remember seeing Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where everybody has TVs coming on rods out of their foreheads and everybody’s watching TV all the time… it’s not quite that. When you think about how first HDTV’s going to come, then there’s going to be virtual reality, and then there’s the prospect of things like virtual reality porn… we’re going to have to come to some sort of understanding about how much we’re going to allow ourselves, because it’s probably going to get a lot more fun than real life.
Can an intellectual not resort to using alphabet soup to make his point? The impact is the same had he used simple sentences and concise wording, but no, he has to make his shit unavailible to many of the very people he wishes to read his work.
