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Games described as forgotten typically earn that classification because they deserve to disappear; it’s a modifier historians employ to marginalize or dismiss a given event, often for dramatic effect.
The contest has disappeared from the world’s consciousness, buried by time and devoid of nostalgia.
No American minority is less represented in the national consciousness.
Once people decide they want you to do something, they don’t really care what your qualifications are. However you describe yourself becomes proof that you’re the ideal candidate. This is true in journalism, and in life.
When we think critically about monsters, we tend to classify them as personifications of what we fear.
From a creative standpoint, these fear projections are narrative linchpins. They turn creatures into ideas, and that’s the point.
The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will never truly be finished with whatever it is you do.
This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed.
If you’re a nostalgic person, it means you’re mentally projecting a belief that life was better in the past, regardless of the evidence. You are trafficking in sentimentality and arguing that progress has been (on balance) bad for society. If you dislike nostalgia, it means you believe that same projection is an interpretative lie and that the world is constantly improving, even if it feels significantly worse.
Some problems never disappear. Sometimes that’s because there’s no solution to whatever that problem is. But just as often, it’s because the problem isn’t problematic.
Every so often (like right now), people interested in culture become fixated on a soft debate over the merits or dangers of nostalgia—as it applies to all art, but particularly to popular music.
The dispute resurfaces every time a new generation attains a social position that’s both dominant and insecure. I suppose if this ever stopped, we’d be nostalgic for the time when it still periodically mattered.
It’s an uncritical form of artistic appreciation. If you unconditionally love something from your past, it might just mean you love that period of your own life. In other words, you’re not really hearing “You Oughta Know.” What you’re hearing is a song that reminds you of a time when you were happy, and you’ve conflated that positive memory with any music vaguely connected to the recollection.
A secondary criticism boils down to self-serving insecurity: When we appreciate things from our past, we’re latently arguing that those things are still important—and if those things are important, we can likewise pretend our own life is important, because those are the things that comprise our past.
A third criticism is that emotively dwelling on the past is lazy and lifeless.
It’s based on the premise that we are nostalgic for things that transport us back to an earlier draft of ourselves, and that this process of mental time travel is either wonderful or pathetic.
What if the feeling we like to call “nostalgia” is simply the by-product of accidental repetition?
The picture is just a delivery device for the memory.
It doesn’t make sense to assume any art we remember from the past is going to automatically improve when we experience it again, solely because it has a relationship to whatever our life used to be like.
But most other old songs only replicate that sensation. The song connects you with nothing tangible, yet still seems warm and positive and extra-meaningful.
It’s nostalgia without memory.
What seems like “nostalgia” might be a form of low-grade expertise that amplifies the value of the listening event.
Maybe things don’t become meaningful unless we’re willing to repeat our interaction with whatever that “thing” truly is.
It’s uncomfortable to admit this, but technology has made the ability to remember things irrelevant. Intellectually, having a deep memory used to be a real competitive advantage. Now it’s like having the ability to multiply four-digit numbers in your head—impressive, but not essential.
Remembering creates meaning.
Connectivity will replace repetition. Instead of generating false nostalgia by having the same experience over and over, we will aggregate false nostalgia from those fleeting moments when everyone seemed to be doing the same thing at once.
Equally bizarre is the way both groups perceive themselves as the oppressed minority who are fighting against dominant public opinion, although I suppose that has become the way most Americans think about everything.
JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH of people believe something does not make it true.
But blind faith is the only kind of faith there is. In order for someone’s faith to be meaningful, it has to be blind.
We are comfortable with the idea that extra-bad people possess something real that helps them win football games.
Very often, young Americans are simultaneously pessimistic about the world and optimistic about themselves—they assume everyone’s future is bleak, except for their own.
He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different from anything else.
In fifteen years, they will be publishing books and directing films and writing broad jokes for unfunny situation comedies that will be downloaded directly into our brains. And like all generations of artists, they will traffic in their own nostalgia.
Modernity is not detail oriented.
For sports to matter at all, they have to matter more than that; they have to offer more cultural weight than merely deciding if Team A is better than Team B. If they don’t, we’re collectively making a terrible investment of our time, money, and emotion.
Moreover, I cannot deny my perpetual enslavement to the very elements of modernity that I bemoan; for the purposes of my own psychological security, it would be nice to believe that “progress” is actually progress, even though it (usually) is not.
This is how optimistic Americans used to be: We used to imagine that cars of the future would probably run on uranium, potato peels, and distilled water.
That fucking car was in the ground for fifty fucking years, and I still couldn’t get there on time. It’s too bad the 9/11 terrorists did not patronize Northwest Airlines; they undoubtedly would have been stranded in Logan International Airport until they all collectively renounced Islam.
If “nostalgia” is remembering the past as better than it actually was, what word is its opposite? What word describes inaccurately imagining a future that will be worse than logic dictates?
And what I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall.
So self-awareness has become such a huge part of what I think about.
Which brings us to the hinge-point in the career of Kobe Bryant: the night he checked into a Colorado hotel room, had sex with a woman who worked there, and was subsequently arrested on a sexual assault charge. A year later, the charges were dropped and Bryant apologized. But the incident will (obviously) never go away. When Bryant dies, the accusation will probably appear in the second paragraph of his obituary. And he knows this.
To classify a man as “important” is different from merely calling him great, because an important person needs to matter even to those who question what he’s doing.
there are at least four ways an author can become semi-important: He (or, of course, she) can have massive commercial success. He can be adored and elevated by critics. He can craft “social epics” that contextualize modernity and force op-ed writers for The New York Times to reevaluate How We Live Now.
In fiction, there are no accidents. And maybe not in nonfiction, either.
What do you worry about? What would be the worst-case scenario for your career? Global pandemics. I do worry about global pandemics. But I’m not a compulsive hand washer or anything.
Even when people read fiction, they want to know what’s real.
They want to know if who the writer is dictates how his work should be taken.
“Here’s the thing about inauthentic people,” he says on the train, speaking in the abstract. “Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.”
“You’re not even Irish. You’re just white,” the elder Murphy told him. “Fairness only matters when you’re in a position of power and you’re trying to make things fair for someone else. Life is not fair. You’re a white, upper-middle-class male in the United States of America. The world is insanely unfair, and 99.9 percent of the time it’s unfair in your favor. You’ve actively marginalized yourself, and that’s your choice. I respect that. But tomorrow, you can cut your hair and become like everybody else. Try being black.”
