Perhaps I should be praising Monson for the broad risks he takes in his form. The footnotes, the arrows, that whole page of “Me”, his use of font sizes, arrangement of text…all that jazz. Really though, I want to praise him for using the language of today. Perhaps it’s only me, but does it seem that everything we have read since middle school is old, sounds old, feels old. We spend a lot of time learning about the past, how things were, why things were, what were the results and consequences of these things, how are these things reflected today… If you are an English major, you spend time dissecting the political allegories of Spenser or Swift, you look up symbolic colors and political parties of Britain from hundreds of years ago.
Well, I think that I’ve finally found a piece that 50 years from now, I am going to know exactly what everything means and the future generations are going to be the ones looking this stuff up. I know about things like Word, Helvetica, autocorrect, CD’s, DVD’s, InDesign, PhotoShop, GIF, JPEG, and on and on. These are things we talk about all the time, especially as college kids, yet there never seems to be any creative academic representation (unless you take computer science or a class the specifically uses these things) of this, or someone sitting back and reflecting on society and saying, “Hey…everyone is using this stuff to create…I am going to write about it.” Perhaps I am not seeking our the right stuff, but I would love to read stories where people text, Google things, and download silly apps on their IPhone. Perhaps it is an inherent bias many people have as scholars, to discount the present and proclaim the past as the pinnacle. Much like many people view classic rock and the Beatles as the pinnacle of music. They may or may not be right, but I supremely enjoy the direction in which Monson is going…props.
Jeeze — we should have talked about that in class, too — the uber-contemporariness of this essay. You’re so right: it’s very much a product of these times, and Monson was certainly aware of it. But really, George, you thought David Foster Wallace’s work sounds and feels old? Dude. Come on!
Hah, I speak in sweeping generalities. The DFW essay is actually one that came to mind as I was typing that sentence. It does not feel or sound old at all, but in the end it’s just a drop in the bucket of our literary scholarship over the past 12+ years. Perhaps I was just jaded by taking a class specifically on Spenser last quarter…