Reading: Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck, at Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

Shared Article from wisdomofcrowds.live

No, Culture is Not Stuck

You just can't see what it's become.

Katherine Dee @ wisdomofcrowds.live

The idea that culture is stagnating, as Ted Gioia puts it — or that it’s stuck, as Paul Skallas says — isn’t new. Neither is the observation that there’s something different about how bad things are in this particular moment. The cultural malaise is palpable and cross-generational. The complaints are more than just old man yells at cloud. Everyone feels it.^[1]

Consider film and television, an easy target for cultural pessimists, and for good reason. The signs of decay are hard to ignore. . . .

. . . If you complain about these trends, the responses you’ll get typically fall into two camps. One sympathizes with you, but offers only a resigned How are you just now noticing? The other dismisses your concerns as a symptom of aging. There’s plenty of great music, movies, literature, and fashion, and if you don’t like it, that’s your inability to keep up.^[2]

Both responses miss something important, though. They both assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.

There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.

We just don’t register it as culture. . . . We’re witnessing the rise of new forms of cultural expression. If these new forms aren’t dismissed by critics, it’s because most of them don’t even register as relevant. Or maybe because they can’t even perceive them.

— Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck
Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

1. ^[1][Everyone? Nah. Come on. —R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][For what it’s worth, this latter is actually the response I’m most often inclined to give when I hear this kind of stock complaints about, say, television and film: I don’t even know what people are talking about, unless it’s just to say that they’re tired of going to the movies and so can’t be arsed to find movies to go see. If you’re tired of superhero movies or Star Wars series or whatever, well, that’s fine; don’t watch that stuff. There’s a ton of weird, non-franchised, stylistically varied and highly idiosyncratic movies and series coming out every year. You don’t have to be some hipster bastard digging through the bottom of search results to find it; just make the effort to go to an arthouse theater or watch the foreign films up for an Oscar this year or whatever. Last year’s Best Picture nominees were wildly divergent, artistically ambitious, ranged from quietly meditative reflections on midlife regret to alt-Victorian Living Dead Girl picaresques and practical-effect atomic bomb explosions, and more or less all were completely different from the sort of genre pictures that the Stuck Culture bellyachers routinely and absurdly claim to be all-devouring and inescapable. I take Katherine Dee’s point in this essay that there’s also a lot of other stuff to look at; but it also just seems like the core complaint about stuckness hardly ever really reflects the real range of activity in the cultural medium alleged to be stuck. It’s not even prima facie compelling after a moment’s thought about what you could find in fifteen minutes’ worth of looking. —R.G.]↩

You’re only as old as you feel.

Born on this day, July 27, 1987.

From The Best American Poetry: 2004, eds. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, pp. 233ff. Just act like nothing’s going on.

Bounden Duty

I got a call from the White House, from the
President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal
favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr.
President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act
like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would
mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?” “Why,
sure, Mr. President, you’ve got it. Normal, that’s
how I’m going to act. I won’t let on, even if I’m
tortured,” I said, immediately regretting that “tortured”
bit.^[1] He thanked me several times and hung up. I was
dying to tell someone that the President himself called
me, but I knew I couldn’t. The sudden pressure to
act normal was killing me. And what was going on
anyway. I didn’t know anything was going on. I
saw the President on TV yesterday. He was shaking
hands with a farmer. What if it wasn’t really a
farmer? I needed to buy some milk, but suddenly
I was afraid to go out. I checked what I had on.
I looked “normal” to me, but maybe I looked more
like I was trying to be normal. That’s pretty
suspicious. I opened the door and looked around.
What was going on? There was a car parked in front
of my car that I had never seen before, a car that
was trying to look normal, but I wasn’t fooled.
If you need milk, you have to get milk, otherwise
people will think something’s going on. I got into
my car and sped down the road. I could feel those
little radar guns popping behind every tree and bush,
but, apparently, they were under orders not to stop
me. I ran into Kirsten in the store. “Hey, what’s
going on, Leon?” she said. She had a very nice smile.
I hated to lie to her. “Nothing’s going on. Just
getting milk for my cat,” I said. “I didn’t know
you had a cat,” she said. “I meant to say coffee.
You’re right, I don’t have a cat. Sometimes I
refer to my coffee as my cat. It’s just a private
joke. Sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?” she
asked. “Nothing’s going on, Kirsten. I promise
you. Everything is normal. The President shook
hands with a farmer, a real farmer. Is that such
a big deal?” I said. “I saw that,” she said, “and
that man was definitely not a farmer.” “Yeah, I
know,” I said, feeling better.

— James Tate (2004).
From American Poetry Review.
The Best American Poetry: 2004, 233-234.

1. ^[1](At the time this poem was published (2004), George W. Bush was President of the United States. –R.G.)↩