As explicated by Adam Gopnik in the current New Yorker, while discussing "Mad Men": "The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past." Explains why pizza parlors when I was a kid always looked like barber shop quartets lived there.....
He has this lovely thought:
And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.
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Except that Gen-X has been nostalgic for the 80s and 70s since day one. It is a generation of nostalgic obsession. We all still own our Atari 2600s for goodness' sake. Check out eBay to see what people are nostalgic for.
Not to mention that John Hughes -- pre-Dalmations and Home Alone -- had an uncanny ability to capture the 80s. He made films that were nostalgic for the 80s during the 80s. I still find them brilliant. The best?
"She's Having a Baby" hands down. Alec Baldwin's performance in that film is fantastic.
Is the feeling some people have for fantasy environments such as Middle-Earth akin to nostalgia?
Michael Moorcock, in his must read essay on Tolkien, argues that it is. He also argues that LotR isn't worthy of the praise it receives due to its nostalgic nature.
Not sure about the demonization of nostalgia. One definition I found suggests that it's akin to homesickness. Therefore could be a key emotion for people who revere and wish to return to the best values and habits of the past. As a spur to that kind of revivalism it could actually be beneficial. Which doesn't mean that a radical like Moorcock would be any more likely to approve.
Strange things happening with comments. Couldn't "approve e this, so am pasting it in:
Christian Lindke has left a new comment on your post "The 40 Year Rule":
You really should read Moorcock's critique of LotR. I don't agree with him regarding the merits of the work, but his arguments are cogent and an interesting examination.
I should and shall.
Ran into someone a couple of days ago who insists that Game of Thrones owes a huge unacknowledged debt to M.Z. Bradley's Darkover novels. Some checking confirms that I read a couple of them in my youth as Ace Doubles, but the details are blurry, to put it mildly.
Um... okay... sure...
The Darkover books have more to do with C.S. Friedman's excellent Moorcockian Darkfire Trilogy or the Dragonriders of Pern books than Game of Thrones, but if your hipster friend wants to be cooler than cool he/she can come over to my house and play the Eon published Darkover board game.
Martin borrows from many places. Historically, he borrows from the Wars of the Roses and the 100 Year's War. Mythically, he borrows from the Saga of the Volsungs -- right down to hangin' with the huns. Some characters bear a passing resemblance to Melniboneans with their Dragons and all.
Martin's fantasy is a mish-mash. That is part of what makes it great. It is a collage of the history of the genre.
Where it lacks is in its presentation of religion. How can one assert a divine right of kings without an established or organized religion? Seems implausible.
Why "hipster"?
Anyone who pulls out the "Darkover" guns when discussing GoT is a hipster. It's the "I've read deeper fantasy than you, and can explain how your fantasy is a ripoff." That is the definition of hipster.
The fact that the series they are promoting is little read today makes it even more so. Given that Darkover is getting a TV show, it is likely to increase readership. This is a good thing. Bradley is far too little read these days, and I'd like to see more people reader her books.
One could point out that the Darkover books themselves have certain legacies in obscure pulp tales, but doing so would make one an even more annoying hipster.
FYI, the Horseclans novels owe more to Darkover than GoT. I think I'll go read those.
Bit of a conversation stopper, is the point.
Currently reading Lin Carter's first DAW colleciton of "The Year's Best Fantasy."
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