Rob Goodman looks back at how the Romans dealt with the boredom that follows excessive indulgence and stimulation:
Decadence is a useful way to understand any situation in which an existing pleasure becomes cheap, and it takes the ingenuity of a Petronius to fight off the boredom. That is now the case with information—the small burst of satisfaction that comes from a refilled inbox or a new text, from connecting with friends, or sharing the meme of the day. Millions of us are now richer in these pleasures than our parents’ generation could ever imagine. But our capacity for enjoyment is still finite: We’ve built up a tolerance to the pleasures of information, just as Trimalchio built up a tolerance to the pleasures of food.
The reason the directors and producers hiring them are mostly men is because the audience for porn as you have admitted is – overwhelmingly – men. And so it follows that the men who become porn actors are not chosen because it’s thought they will appeal to women (though this may be the ‘no-homo’ rationalisation that goes through some men’s heads). They’re chosen because – in addition to being able to maintain a large erection for hours in front of a camera and crew, something which most mortal men can’t manage – they appeal to men. Most men like and admire big arms. Big abs. And big dicks. Men are so low-class.
If porn is all about the women, then why do all male porn actors have such massive cocks?
But say you don’t care about local cultural experiences. Say you just care about books. Well, then it’s easy: The lower the price, the more books people will buy, and the more books people buy, the more they’ll read. This is the biggest flaw in Russo’s rant. He points to several allegedly important functions that local booksellers play in fostering “literary culture”—they serve as a “gathering place” for the community, they “optimistically set up … folding chairs” at readings, they happily guide people toward books they’ll love. I’m sure all of that is important, but it’s strange that a novelist omits the most critical aspect of a vibrant book-reading culture: getting people to buy a whole heckload of books.
These days I buy pretty much everything on Amazon. I occasionally walk into bricks-and-mortar bookshops but I usually wander out without buying anything as book shops really are nothing more to me than expensive places where you can get your hands on (some) books without having to wait for postage.
However, what drew me to this article is the fact that it raises an eyebrow at the claim that bricks-and-mortar shops form a part of literary culture and that by putting them under economic pressure, we might be damaging the culture as a whole. Simply stated, this is not my experience of book shops. I have never encountered a book shop that was part of any kind of ‘literary culture’ with the possible exception of the LRB Bookshop near the British museum and even then, I’ve never been to any of the talks they host.
I’ve also heard this argument wheeled out in favour of protecting games shops but I am equally sceptical of those arguments as again, my experience of games shops as central to some local community is limited to the point of being non-existent.
My agreement with the article thus flow from two places:
Firstly, I don’t believe that bricks-and-mortar bookshops do form a part of a literary culture beyond their capacity to distribute books.
Secondly, even if they did form a part of that literary culture, I’m not sure I’d be willing to pay a premium for that service. I’ve never been to a talk in a bookshop and I’ve never relied upon a recommendation from someone working in a bookshop so why would I pay 30-50% for the books they sell? Hmm.
American commercial filmmaking has, in the last decade or so, been increasingly characterized by what I call the stylistics of post-continuity. This is a filmmaking practice in which a preoccupation with moment-to-moment excitement, and with delivering continual shocks to the audience, trumps any concern with traditional continuity, either on a shot-by-shot level or in terms of larger narrative structures.
Shaviro’s heroic attempt to put meat on the intellectual bones of mainstream action filmmaking. Long overdue and hugely righteous, Post Cinematic Affect (2010) is easily one of the best books I read in 2011.
A decade after 9/11 we seem no closer to defusing the sinister power of what Waldman describes as the “bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed” and “the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred”. “So much sacredness”, as the novel unflinchingly points out, that there’s “no limit to the profanity justified to preserve it.”
Awesome piece on the legacy of 9/11 and America’s imperial wars.
I am always shocked by the number of (self-styled) leftists who are devoted to the truism that “there are no new ideas.” And I think it’s very important to some people to tear down anyone who doesn’t produce work that functions with bibliographical exactitude, or even just takes risks. For me, theory is ultimately a political project, and it is most meaningful when it is performative and provocative. A pristine, perfect film theory of shuddering complexity isn’t going to help anyone without the tools to read it, and this sort of thinking is, quite frankly, usually elitist and counter-revolutionary.
Academia has done a very good job of establishing its stylistic quirks as necessary trappings of erudition. Dyer takes the hammer to this conceit by approaching academic writing as a kind of genre:
What the reader discovers, however, is that Fried will continue to announce what he’s about to do right to the end: “Later on in this book I shall examine … ”; “I shall discuss both of these after considering … ”; “I shall also be relating… . ” Fried’s brilliance, however, is that in spite of all the time spent looking ahead and harking back he also — and it’s this that I want to emphasize here — finds the time to tell you what he’s doing now, as he’s doing it: “But again I ask … ” ; “Let me try to clarify matters by noting … ”; “What I want to call attention to… . ” But that’s not all: the touch of genius is that on top of everything else he somehow manages to tell you what he is not doing (“I am not claiming that … ”), what he has not done (“What I have not said … ”) and what he is not going to do (“This is not the place for … ”).
Then:
Lest you think I have been quoting unfairly, take a break here and run your eyes over a couple of pages of WP in a library or bookstore. You’ll be amazed. You’ll see that this is some of the most self-worshiping — or, more accurately, self-serving — prose ever written. I kept wondering why an editor had not scribbled “get on with it!” in huge red letters on every page of the manuscript — and then I realized that the cumulative flimflam was the it! And at that moment, as I hope to show, everything changed.
Suppose that you meet someone who is a compulsive name-dropper. At first it’s irritating, then it’s boring. Once you have identified it as a defining characteristic, however, you long for the individual concerned to manifest this trait at every opportunity — whereupon it becomes a source of hilarity and delight. And so, having experienced a crescendo of frustration, I now look forward to a new book in which Fried advances his habit of recessive deferral to the extent that he doesn’t get round to what he wants to say until after the book is finished, until it’s time to start the next one (which will be spent entirely on looking back on what was said in the previous volume). At that point he will cross the border from criticism to the creation of a real work of art (fiction if you will) called “Kiss Marks on the Mirror: Why Michael Fried Matters as a Writer Even More Than He Did Before.”
Pining for boredom seems absurd. But I think there’s something to be said for an empty space you then have to fill. I spent a vast amount of my life daydreaming and I had a rich interior life when I was a kid, a real kid, before I had the focus of music. I used to have stories in my head and I don’t really know what’s going on in my son’s head. He doesn’t seem to spend much time staring into space. He’s always flitting between his computer and his various games and devices. He’s a totally modern, networked kid. He has emailing and all these things. He has a YouTube channel where he makes these little videos and stuff. I don’t get the sense these things have the function that daydreaming had for me. His metabolism seems much more hyped-up and he seems more restless than I would have been – where I would just sink into reveries as a child or I would write and draw, stuff like that. My son does those things a bit, but there’s this whole array of distractions for him and I wonder if a lot of people are like that because that’s how the technology kind of encourages you to be.
Given that universal access to all forms of culture is normal in the digital age, does digital nostalgia mean yearning for a time when we were not overloaded with information? Does modern-day nostalgia manifest as a yearning for boredom?
In the Western world, cyberpunk was born out of the new wave science fiction literature of the sixties and seventies; authors such Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick - whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was the basis for Blade Runner - were key proponents in its inception, creating worlds that featured artificial life, social decay and technological dependency. The hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett also proved influential with regards to the sub-genre’s overall pessimistic stance. What came to be known as cyberpunk by the mid 1980s was thematically characterised by its exploration of the impact of high-technology on low-lives - people living in squalor; stacked on top of one another within an oppressive metropolis dominated by advanced technologies.
Live-action, Japanese cyberpunk on the other hand, is raw and primal by nature, and characterised by attitude rather than high-concept. A collision between flesh and metal, the sub-genre is an explosion of sex, violence, concrete and machinery; a small collection of pocket-sized universes that revel in post-human nightmares and teratological fetishes, powered by a boundaryless sense of invasiveness and violation. Imagery is abject, perverse and unpredictable and, like Cronenberg’s work, bodily mutation through technological intervention is a major theme, as are dehumanisation, repression and sexuality.
