Tag: New Sincerity
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Punk Ethos & the Blog: An Interview with A D Jameson, pt. 1
Read pt. 2 here. I first read A.D. Jameson’s criticism on litblogs like HTMLGiant and Big Other, where he wrote about the New Sincerity, Russian formalism, and cinema. I was interested back then in irony and sincerity, especially because I was in an environment where a lot of people I knew were doing molly on weekends, were…
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New Fiction is Psychic Occupation
“How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were?” (Woolf, To the Lighthouse) Fiction—or more generally, longform narrative text—has long been the handyman of culture, serving whatever functions are needed at a historical moment. The Greek oral tradition, famously, functioned in part to preserve cultural…
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A D Jameson & the Avant-Garde
I. I’ve been writing exclusively in long-form the past twelve months and become exhausted. Simultaneously, my writing has become more self-conscious, self-reflexive, and unwieldy, constant over-qualifications and anxious tangentials interrupting its focus. The list format used here, inspired partly by HTMLGiant’s trademark bullet-point style, is both a way to relieve this long-form burnout and to…
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Oh Boy: Christopher Owens, Headspace, and Artistic Irony
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two songs in my record collection. One is Jimmie Rodgers’ “T.B. Blues,” considered by some musicologists (e.g. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor) to be one of the first popular autobiographical songs. Rodgers made a career out of singing songs about other people—miners, gamblers, gunslingers, jailbirds. But in 1931,…
Suspended Reason 