inspiral blog

In preparing for tomorrow’s talk to on pop culture and Christianity at Collins St. Baptist, I came across this quote in Chris Turner’s ‘Planet Simpson’. Hits the nail right on the head for me in not only critiquing pop culture and Western society in general, but in offering a way forward.

“David Foster Wallace concludes his landmark essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’with a suggestion about the new direction American prose might take, a modest proposal that might be best understood as a desperate plea for the new direction the whole culture must take:

The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles…with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh, how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s engaged fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we get to draw our own conclusions. Have to.”

Lord, grant me the gift of anti-rebellion.

I guess you have to start somewhere.

Starting is actually hard for me. I’m good with ideas. I’m even good with working out how to make them happen; it’s just that when it comes to starting something in earnest, I need to give myself a kick up the butt. I guess it comes from the misnomer that you can’t fail until you start trying. But then, if you never try, maybe you’ve already failed. Wow, that sounds really after-school-special.

So I’m putting this out there as a beginning point. Not an end point, not an I’ve-reached-perfection-so-I’m-ready-to-show-you-how-it’s-done point, just a the-journey-begins-here point. I’m hoping that this blog becomes an opportunity for discussion for our little community and beyond. I’ll fill it with all of my random thoughts about movies I’ve seen, books I’ve read, and tv shows I’ve watched. Hopefully they’ll connect with your life at some point.

So we’re starting. And maybe that’s the important thing; not whether you “succeed” or “fail”, but whether you give it a red-hot go.