The Guardian again
Oct. 21st, 2008 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfI just read a piece about Hemingway, celebrating his 75th birthday. The writer of the article complains about the lack of masculine virtues in the 70s, the fact that the 70s are an 'anti-heroic age'. The article is ripe with exactly the kind of nostalgia that we also find in Life on Mars; with 1974 posing as the lifeless, pale, tame and boring 2006... This is the last sentence:
"After all the lady novelists and all the ladylike male ones, after all the soft thinking and ten cent hedonism, coming upon Hemingway again is like encountering the comfortable masculine smell of wet tweed in a room full of after-shave."
ETA: The film Funny Bones, an old favourite of mine which is all about nostalgia, really, inquires, why do all the best things in life belong to the past? There's suicidalness involved here, too - the main character threatens to kill himself right from the beginning of the film (his despair makes more sense, and is more palpable, than Sam's, though.) His excursion into his and his parents' past is intended as a last ditch attempt to find meaning before his self-imposed ultimatum runs out. However, the film ends up gently de-mythologising the past, and allows its characters to find hope in the present, because the past, it turns out, was not a magically perfect place after all, and the present does not need to be desperate.
(BTW, isn't it interesting how both Sam's nostalgia and the Hemingway nostalgia reported by the 1974 Guardian writer are so *masculine* in focus?)
"After all the lady novelists and all the ladylike male ones, after all the soft thinking and ten cent hedonism, coming upon Hemingway again is like encountering the comfortable masculine smell of wet tweed in a room full of after-shave."
ETA: The film Funny Bones, an old favourite of mine which is all about nostalgia, really, inquires, why do all the best things in life belong to the past? There's suicidalness involved here, too - the main character threatens to kill himself right from the beginning of the film (his despair makes more sense, and is more palpable, than Sam's, though.) His excursion into his and his parents' past is intended as a last ditch attempt to find meaning before his self-imposed ultimatum runs out. However, the film ends up gently de-mythologising the past, and allows its characters to find hope in the present, because the past, it turns out, was not a magically perfect place after all, and the present does not need to be desperate.
(BTW, isn't it interesting how both Sam's nostalgia and the Hemingway nostalgia reported by the 1974 Guardian writer are so *masculine* in focus?)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
good morning
Date: 2008-10-22 07:34 am (UTC)I already read all of mikes_grrl's shorter fics - I always start that way, and I tend to dislike threesomes with people I care about. I actually stopped reading fanfic when personal backstabbing made me stop writing it, but it was pleasant indeed. I think the only name I knew (again, flistflisting) was lozenger8.
Astrid Lindgren's Brothers Lionheart probably predestined me to see the jumping in a positive way, and IIRC I liked the girl switching off the TV, but Sam committing suicide to stay in the perfect 70s rather than the boring 2000s didn't fit him in my mind at all, but jumpingoffroofs currently got replaced by Tony Hill in my mind ... actually, I'm sure you know, in mikes_grrls fic where Gene falls into the coma, did he jump to get back, too?
This is so sad, and yet it's comforting that not only SGA fandom is ruled by frustrating blinkeredness. Again, I only knew lozenger's frustrated reaction although I can imagine - with difficulty - what other fen might have dreamed up.
Hah. Wishful thinking. He's got a spin-off and a US deal and no need to ever rethink. Only positive spin I can think of: what he said in interviews was after the fact, to tell them what they wanted to hear AND he's not the only one who actually made the finished product. Are there Simm commentaries? I need to get those DVDs I think now that I can feel again it's really not the Sweeney glorification I came to fear.