In this article about a Boston University graduation ceremony held 40 years after the fact, Peter Simon (photographer and member of the Class of 1970) points out the all around awesomeness of his generation. “Mr. Simon said that when he speaks about his photography around the country, students frequently say to him, ‘God, I wish I’d been alive and been part of your generation because it’s really boring now.’ He said he responds by saying: “But you have all this texting! You have cellphones! … And they say they’d give all that stuff away for the kind of experiences we had,” he said. “And I have to say, I agree.”
Here’s David Shields writing at The Millions, in rather calculating defense of his book Reality Hunger: “We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I’m on a plane, it’s all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent.” Argh. The idea that his “literary collages” are all that can authentically exist today is as tired and transparent as the idea that novels offer the ultimate representation of human experience. I mean, argue away…but why pretend that one side has to prevail?
Jezebel’s Jenna Sauers attends a panel on Generation Y as the guest of 14-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson, and is privy to sweeping generalizations including, “The future is here and now and we are making it happen all around us!” and “Nobody says, ‘I got it on sale’ anymore. They say, ‘I got this on deal.’ That’s the language Gen Y is using” and “Blogs, blogs, blogs. Nobody really cares about objectivity anymore.” Afterwards, Sauers reports, she chatted with Gevinson about “Sassy magazine, and [Gevinson] showed off a 1992 issue of Details with Nirvana on the cover, which she had just acquired from Marisa Meltzer. Kurt Cobain looked particularly dejected in one of the photos inside. ‘Maybe someone just told him, ‘Robert Pattinson is going to play you in a movie one day,” deadpanned [Gevinson's] friend Nate Erickson.”
Cracked looks at six “supposedly ancient traditions that totally aren’t,” including Thanksgiving, Wicca, and The Pledge of Allegiance (“ancient” being pretty subjective here, of course).
The New York Review of Magazines looks at the past decade in magazines, inviting readers to “dip into nostalgia” as they look over some “memorable moments.” In a separate piece, the Review collects some quotes arguing for and against the continued relevance of print publications.
The Boise Weekly interviews NPR host Renee Montagne, who has been one of the main voices of All Things Considered for as long as I can remember. “It was always sort of wonderful not to be seen,” she says. “People would come up and say I didn’t think you looked like this … that you were taller….I can’t even say what I look like, but it’s not what people thought. People say that about everybody on NPR, but we’re losing that because today we’re a click away to see someone’s picture.”
In Splice Today, Noah Berlatsky wonders what Walter Benjamin et al would have thought about contemporary technology.
Finally, I love the photo of Dan Savage that goes with this profile of him in New York Magazine, in contrast to the one that’s on his Wikipedia page, and most other official places.
