October 12th, 2010 / 3:24 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Matthew Simmons—
What if I don’t want to read about “the way we live now,” because I spend all my time living the way we live now and am getting kind of sick of it?
gotta get you some science fiction.
I don’t want to speak for Mr. Higgs, but I will anyway.
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!
I’d say that being sick of the way we live now is, generally speaking, the perfect time to read a book about how we live now, depending on the writer.
Yeah, I don’t really care to read about how we live now, especially given that I never, ever, ever recognize myself or people I know in those books.
I think you should read what makes you feel happy and good.
A-fucking-men.
Then change the way you live.
So…. you live like a homeless Arab child? Or the daughter of a rich jet setting sultan who has experienced astral projection for the first time while giving a blowjob? You’ve lived like a Chilean man trying to start a new family after his previous life was taken away because he refused to sell out his country? Or… I guess you’ve lived like a young african-american male with a chest abnormality who has seen a ufo, experienced a time-paradox events, and can sense the energy of the universe.
See, the things above actually happen. Just because they contain fantastic elements doesn’t negate the fact that this universe we exist in is bountiful in the truly amazing. Sure, you’re (possible) instant aversion to the more fantastic elements of the above (and the quick acceptance of the others) is likely due to the established mental grooming of the cemented societal powers.
The way we live now, is only a corner-edge of the possible ways one can live “now”. And now is such a relative term given the fact time is not linear, and the information one “suddenly consciously receives” may very well be the reverberating energy waves of information coming from the collision of atomic particles 10,000 light years away or 4 million years from now or 150,000 years previous.
You’re a smart cat, right? So what you read cannot be so limited as to make you sick because it seems like a cyclical regurgitation. Perhaps you’re looking for a different way of expressing how we live now. Breaking down the inherited ideas we seem to be going back to, pumping out, and I mean everyone.
Generally, I think the idea of realism is a false one. When you speak of realism, I think Vonnegut had it right. The elements he dealt with are a part of the natural universe however slightly filtered through the lens of the fictional form. I mean, how much historical evidence can one read and view before we begin to realize this…. And of course this will go on ignored because such claims are crazy. And these things can only exist in fiction. Because to relegate such events to the annals of the creative history we weave turns it into mere entertainment instead of a gateway to our enlightened freedom and final re-integration into the earth, into the natural order of things.
For cryin out loud….
how do we live now?
I just clicked on the “comment” link thing with the intention of writing: YES!
Ken is right. I say: amen. Although…
I may have a caveat, a development in my perspective arising from the fact that I am currently studying “theories of the everyday,” which has complicated my previous blanket dismissal of all such writing by allowing me to discover ways of writing about “the way we live now” that can be interesting and rewarding; of course, these interesting/rewarding works to which I am referring are decidedly experimental, works like Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, or Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, which approach “the way we live now” by amplifying the mundane minutia of life to the point where the very idea of “the way we live now” comes into question.
More to come on this whole “everyday” thing, for sure.
If anyone happens to be interested in learning more about the theoretical aspects of the everyday, here are a few key figures/texts:
(i) Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre
(ii) The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau
(iii) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory by Ben Highmore
(iv) Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present by Michael Sherrington
(v) “Everyday Speech” by Maurice Blanchot
(vi) Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity by Marc Auge
(vii) Guy Debord and the Situationists
I don’t live now. I lived then,
Chris: Awesome. I hope you will do a full-blown post on this idea.
There are billions of different ways “we” live now, and there is no collective “we,” in the sense you mean. There are multiple realities. I don’t know you, but I can guarantee that you don’t live the way I live. You don’t experience reality the way I have or do. We could be living in the same neighborhood with the same economic circumstances and live in totally different ways. How could I get tired of so much variation?
There are billions of different ways “we” live now, and there is no collective “we,” in the sense you mean. There are multiple realities. I don’t know you, but I can guarantee that you don’t live the way I live. You don’t experience reality the way I have or do. We could be living in the same neighborhood with the same economic circumstances and live in totally different ways. How could I get tired of so much variation?
I never read how we live now. I don’t even get it. People in medieval armor had OCD and over-polished their armor. How do we live now?
There’s this crazy thing I do when there’s something I don’t want to read. . . I don’t read it.
thank god I’m not the only one
This post is indefensible.
This post is (or is about) “the way we live now”. Why should I read it?
There are billions of different ways “we” live now, and there is no collective “we,” in the sense you mean. There are multiple realities. I don’t know you, but I can guarantee that you don’t live the way I live. You don’t experience reality the way I have or do. We could be living in the same neighborhood with the same economic circumstances and live in totally different ways. How could I get tired of so much variation?
I sympathize
The thing about books and articles about “the way we live now” where “we” is the author or the author’s friends, is that this kind of writing is easy. The research is free. The details are at hand. There’s built in interest — at least from the author’s friends. And we live in kind of crazy times, where stuff is changing so fast that we can hardly keep track, and the internet seems to have made zeitgeist-tracking really profitable. So there’s even more reason for writers to gaze at the plural present navel.
As a result of all that, there’s just way too much of that kind of stuff. Some is great, most is crap. Just like everything else there’s too much of.
Future generations may find “now” way more interesting than i do. I hope we remember to make a backup of human history, and store it in an off-site location.
i’m with dawn, to attack any label saying we’re the same. but moreover i think it’s better to try to find connections, showing how one weirdo might be slightly similar to some other weirdo, particularly if severing the jut of generations.
Yet, if you’re not a weirdo, you indeed hide in the hideous “we”.
With seriousness, do feel you have friends? (art comraderies, i mean). I feel like I’m a mallard misplaced, see never feathers, only minnows with whom I cannot mate.
Because you’re dying to find out who we are
Then read about “the way we lived then” and try to ignore the similarities.