The Lure of Opulent Desolation

[PrettySquareGal]

I was curious about her other writing, and found some of the reviews (non-paid) of her book say similar things as some of us are about her style:

One star:

http://www.amazon.com/review/produc...ing=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

All:

http://www.amazon.com/review/produc...cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

 

[Paisley]

I think you are right that she is generaliziing, but all writing is. You are assuming that what you have to say or share is going to ring true to a certain group of readers. the more it rings true for, the better writer you probably are as you approach universal truths. I would be quite surprised if most writers spoke to your experience because you are unique and tend to stand outside the norm.

I think it is unfair to criticize a writer for not matching your experience. You have a right to not like her piece or all of her writing, but she must speak for enough people that she is run in a major media source. I think she speaks for a lot of people in discussing the confusion of modern times, especially when held up against a myth that was then and now sold to us as reality. if enough people do not share her experience, and her generalization is way off, she will not last long as a writer. her readers are nto those that want to learn about others, it is those who wish to reflect on themselves.

I think it is too common for people to stat crying "generalization" as if it is a dirty word. All human thought is categorizing, generalizing and drawing distinctions. We would be lost without our ability to find commonalities amongst people, thinks or whatever. While there is a place for writers who just write "their experience" there certainly is a place for those who wish to find common general experiences, and those who do it well, are recognized as great commentators and writers.

Funny, I was just reading a book on this subject. If you can't generalize, you can't extrapolate from your own experiences. But generalization applies better to the natural world than to people, although humanity has universal experiences.

With some writers, I wonder, where do they find these people they're calling "we"? Instead of their saying "we" or "our generation," maybe they should just say "I" (or "three coworkers, my cousin and I"). I find it more intriguing to read about an experience written so vividly that I can imagine myself there. Maybe the author of the article could have found someone living the high life in the 50s and written about some experience that showed both the surface and reality.

 

[Senator Jack]

Well, reading up on her now certainly puts the facetious angle out, doesn't it?

 

[Paisley]

I was curious about her other writing, and found some of the reviews (non-paid) of her book say similar things as some of us are about her style:

One star:

http://www.amazon.com/review/produc...ing=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

All:

http://www.amazon.com/review/produc...cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

I'd forgotten about that book where Ms. Warner writes about how hard it is raising two little babies in a comfortable suburban home.

From what little I know about Ms. Warner, she seems to have an ideal about how to live and is in pain about not living up to it. I hope she finds some peace.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

From what little I know about Ms. Warner, she seems to have an ideal about how to live and is in pain about not living up to it. I hope she finds some peace.

Or at least reach maturity which recognizes ideals for what they are-goals and not measurements of success.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Apparently still labouring under misapprehensions …

[edited]

"No matter how lost we are, no matter how confused, no matter how foolish we feel, we can judge ourselves the winners. "

Social commentary. Why do "we" - in wildly general terms - like to watch Mad Men, for example? Is it because we like the idea that our dad, when he wasn't in the house, or getting ready to return home at 5pm on the dot for his dinner waiting for him on the table, his whiskey poured, and the kids forming an absurdly excruciating greeting party, was hunting around for the freshest virgin on the block to have a piece of? (Amazingly enough, not my opinion: Mad Men. Could easily enough be the Sopranos, an equally ridiculous satire)

No we don't like that idea. But we watch it anyway. Maybe so that we can convince ourselves (rightly in my opinion) that our forebears were just as sordid, just as screwed up, just as nasty and unable to cope as we ourselves are. it helps us get through the day. By suggesting that "it was soooo much better back in the day" we are simply judging our peers inappropriately, using unjust standards - standards which never existed, and never will exist.

Once more, and ever anon: The author does not believe in any of the stereotypes of the 1950s put forth in her piece. There is no evidence in what she's written [The current piece] that she does believe in them. We can critique the writing (boy, can we!) but this entire thread is about ascribing ideas to the author that do not emanate from the author. Barthes spinning like a top in his murky grave!

OR...is she trying to be facetious with that last line, trying to turn the tables on the viewers who are taking joy in seeing their misery, make them think about why they actually enjoy the show? Could be, and then I'd have to give her credit, but if she is being Swiftian, I don't think she's made a very good job of it. It's been a long time since I read A Modest Proposal, but I don't recall Swift vacillating like she does.

Regards,

Jack

You got it Jack. The viewers are her, she is the viewers. Nosotros/Vosotros have the same views/stereotypes about the 1950s. And we're all wrong.

But to be honest with you, man: Swift wasn't too subtle.

bk

 

[PrettySquareGal]

We seem to have drifted from this fantastic misunderstanding of the meaning of the article:



I am very irked by this commentary. The author uses the following to describe the fifties:

No, she doesn't. She's quoting or paraphrasing, or distilling, how other people - namely authors and TV producers - see the 1950s, and particularly how they see the role of women and stay at home Moms in the 1950s. She is unequivocally saying that all the following are WRONG!! (i.e. inappropriate generalizations since people who fit these stereotypes did, do, and will ever, exist.)

bk

I acknowledged my misunderstanding many posts back, check it:

http://www.thefedoralounge.com/showpost.php?p=704856&postcount=37

 

[Baron Kurtz]

whoops, sorry about that. I'll edit out that bit. I think the last sentence is still causing some trouble (Jack [bad] (sorry that's the only time i've ever used the waggin' finger and I've been itching to do so.)) so i'll leave my critique up there for discussion.

bk

 

[Baron Kurtz]

p.s I really liked DHermann's post earlier (very early on). The idea that nothing much changed from the 40s, to the 50s, to the 60s … and i assume into the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s? People just kept on keeping on, as someone (paraphrased) once said; i don't recall whom.

This is certainly my experience of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s: Things haven't changed. People are as they always were. There's nothing to yearn for, except misplaced idealism … which is, frankly, idealistic and misplaced.

bk

 

[jawisher]

The Point

I just read and really enjoyed this article. I am firmly in the Baron's camp on this, and I think that a lot of posters misread the peice. She is not really writing about "the fifties" (i.e. 1946 through 1966) at all. She's really writing about the "Baby-busters" (or what I still prefer to call Gen X). The point of her article was what the GenX perception of the "fifties" says about the GenX itself.

All my life (I was born in '63), I was brought up on the Baby-Boomer critique of the "fifties" as a bland, white-washed and white-bred era, and the disdain for this period was the cultural disdain that the subsequent rebelious pop-culture felt towards the old status quo. I think the brilliant point that Judith Warner makes is that the current pop-cultural view of the "fifties", lead not by the "boomers", but by the "busters", is a bit different. We are not by and large a rebellious generation, and in any case we are not rebellious against the WW2 generation's status quo which was largely destroyed by the time we came of age.

My generation mostly would like nothing better than to have the white picket fence and middle-class solidity of the "fifties", but the fact that we cannot accomplish that with the apparent ease and effortlessness that they did leaves us envious of them. I think what she is saying is that it is this sense of envy that causes so many of the current versions of the "fifties" to trash them morally or find some dark underbelly so that we can consider ourselves superior to them afterall. This is a new and subtely different critique from the standard "Baby-Boomer" critique of that generation (which simply labeled them as old and stodgy and not genuine), and I think she is on to something.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

She is not really writing about "the fifties" (i.e. 1946 through 1966)

I forgot to mention that point. I was at a loss as to how she defines the fifties as anything other than 1950-1959. But maybe I am not learned enough to understand the subtext of numbers.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, you've got the chronological fifties, and the "cultural fifties," which would basically cover the postwar era up until the assasination of JFK. It's pretty arbitrary, depending on who's doing the writing, but it's not an uncommon way of classifying the era.

Of course, you could also consider the "baby-boomer fifties", which begin with the mass advent of rock-n-roll c. 1955 extending thru the arrival of the Beatles, which might even be a more common way to class the era based on the self-focus of most boomer sociologists. Point being it's less about the calendar and more about the zeitgeist of any given era.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Well, you've got the chronological fifties, and the "cultural fifties," which would basically cover the postwar era up until the assasination of JFK. It's pretty arbitrary, depending on who's doing the writing, but it's not an uncommon way of classifying the era.

Of course, you could also consider the "baby-boomer fifties", which begin with the mass advent of rock-n-roll c. 1955 extending thru the arrival of the Beatles, which might even be a more common way to class the era based on the self-focus of most boomer sociologists. Point being it's less about the calendar and more about the zeitgeist of any given era.

I think my blindness to this (and thanks for the lesson, truly!) is that I spend so much time with actual source material from the time that I am quite literal in my interpretation of the period. I really am not at all versed in the various labels given to the general time in retrospect, other than "Baby Boomers."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Of course, we also had the "mid-coast Maine fifties," which lasted till about 1973. And if you go up the County, they're *still* going on.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Of course, we also had the "mid-coast Maine fifties," which lasted till about 1973. And if you go up the County, they're *still* going on.

It's one of the things I love about Maine!

 

[Viola]

My interpretation of the article was much in line with Baron and Lizzie.

That said, I always giggle about articles of the idealized '50s because of the people I do know "who were there" they don't particularly fall in line with any of it. Both my grandmothers worked.

My mom's descriptions of her '50s childhood are nostalgic in some ways but there was no white-washed whitebread suburbia about it. Neither very middle-class nor ethnically homogenous nor terribly peaceful or monotonous.

She can't abide the fashions I ask her about, though. She's no help at all! ("That was my MOM'S stuff, I hated it...") Dirty hippie! lol

 

[Feraud]

My generation mostly would like nothing better than to have the white picket fence and middle-class solidity of the "fifties", but the fact that we cannot accomplish that with the apparent ease and effortlessness that they did leaves us envious of them. I think what she is saying is that it is this sense of envy that causes so many of the current versions of the "fifties" to trash them morally or find some dark underbelly so that we can consider ourselves superior to them afterall. This is a new and subtely different critique from the standard "Baby-Boomer" critique of that generation (which simply labeled them as old and stodgy and not genuine), and I think she is on to something.

Very good observations.

 

[Senator Jack]

Taking into account just one of several similar reviews of Warner's motherhood book, we find a pattern of vacillation emerging.

Warner spends almost 300 pages trying to figure out whether she's trying to evaluate the mothering cultures of France and the U.S. (when she was in France, she found it far inferior to the U.S.; now that she's back in the States, it's clear that France is superior),

Her problem is not her opinion but her writing, and I think the article would have worked far better for her, and her point made clearer, if she stuck to the first person singular instead of switching to the plural at the end. 'I read these books. This is how I feel. This is my catharsis: yes, I'm ashamed to admit that I'm envious of these people, so the best thing to do is judge myself to be the winner.' Instead of owning up to her shortcomings, she shifts the blame to an entire generation of women, and maybe that is, again, how she determines herself to be a winner. Her editor ought to have caught that.

Regards,

Jack

 

[Fletch]

An editor's job used to be to catch stuff like that. Any more, the job is basically:
(books) to put together deals that look like they'll generate maximum cash flow;
(mags) to make sure nothing that might hack off the publisher or the advertisers gets into the mag.

I'm sure editors would like to focus more on content, but they have to work in the industry and the industry today is totally numbers-driven. And there are only so many hours in the day.

It's like expecting a made-to-measure suit for $500 - those days are gone, though fresh in the memories of the middle-aged and older (like me).

 

[carter]

Her problem is not her opinion but her writing, and I think the article would have worked far better for her, and her point made clearer, if she stuck to the first person singular instead of switching to the plural at the end. 'I read these books. This is how I feel. This is my catharsis: yes, I'm ashamed to admit that I'm envious of these people, so the best thing to do is judge myself to be the winner.' Instead of owning up to her shortcomings, she shifts the blame to an entire generation of women, and maybe that is, again, how she determines herself to be a winner. Her editor ought to have caught that.

Senator Jack makes a good point. The writer assumes that a goodly number of readers will identify with her and be familiar with the source material she has mentioned. Then she assumes that those readers will share her angst which is mired in longing for a perceived way of life that is no longer obtainable. Her argument is that the unobtainable way of life has been demonized by current media (books, movies, television).

When I eliminated the prose that preceded her argument, I found this. It certainly seems more coherent without her unfortunate closing paragraph.

"...We keep alive a secret dream of “a model of routine and order and organization and competence,” a life “where women kept house, raised kids and kept their eyebrows looking really good,” ...

...But that order and routine and competence in our frenetic world proves forever elusive, a cruel ideal we can never reach....

...The fact is: as an unrebellious, cautious, anxious generation, many of us are living lives not all that different from those of the parents of the early 1960s, yet without the seeming ease, privileges and benefits....

How we seem to love and hate those men and women we never knew. What we would give to know their secrets: how Dad managed to come home at 5 p.m. to read the paper or watch TV while Mom fixed dinner and bathed the kids. How Mom turned up at school, every day, unrumpled, coiffed, unflappable. And more to the point: how they managed to afford the lives that they led, on one salary, without hocking their homes to pay for college, without worrying about being bankrupted by medical bills.

How we make them pay now, when we breathe them back into life. Our cultural representations of them are punishing. We defile the putative purity of the housewives — those doe-eyed, frivolous, almost simple-minded depressives — by assigning them drunken, cheating, no-good mates. We discredit the memory of the organization men by filling them with self-loathing and despair. Each gender (generation?) invites its downfall, and fully deserves the comeuppance that history, we know, will ultimately deal it...."

She fails to provide a coherent closing that ties her thoughts together. This certainly isn't it.

That’s where the pleasure comes in. No matter how lost we are, no matter how confused, no matter how foolish we feel, we can judge ourselves the winners.

Is there a closing that eschews the notion of pleasure and more clearly summarizes the writer's thoughts about why current media demonizes the 50's and why reading and viewing those offerings is such a guilty pleasure?