There are many unlike ways to talk about the hereafter , but few are more self - centered than pretend how the coevals of tomorrow may judge you and yours .
Garrison Keillordid just that with his clause , “ The hereafter of Nostalgia , ” which come out in the September 29 , 1996 , issue ofThe New York Times Magazine .
Some of Keillor ’s reflexion ring genuine for those of us here in the yr 2013 : he predicts that the future of air travel locomotion will only become more and more cumbersome and he imagines that Americans ’ growing dissatisfaction with stagnant wages may become an issue . But the immense legal age of the piece reads as tender “ get off my lawn ” nostalgia . Which is to say , he ’s romanticize a past that never existed in the service of bemoaning a future that will never arrive . He begins by calling contemporary culture “ trash ” ( being careful to elucidate that the New York Times does n’t qualify as such ) and pretty much go downhill on the future of world from there .
But it ’s his vision of the media landscape of the future tense that ’s most interesting to me . Maybe because in many way of life he did n’t go far enough ( only 1,000 picture available on the net ? ) and bizarrely longs for some antediluvian interpretation of celebrity that he imply is somehow more pure . But his dominant fear — that the mode we consume media would be speedily changing into the 21st century — was one prognostication fully realized . It ’s just up to those of us live on in “ the future ” to adjudicate whether any of those changes are a good thing .
Even just holding this 1996 outcome of The New York Times Magazine in my hand makes me sharp cognisant of how much has commute in the world of publishing since then . The clip is blockheaded at 216 page and bursting at the seams with slick colorful ads — a foretoken of healthy lucre for any media way out in the mid-90s . But as more and more eyeballs ( and ad dollars ) have shifted to the digital land , it ’s hard to judge a mag by its deadtree tally .
Keillor write about the death of the newspaper and foiling with getting cyberspace images to stretch :
citizenry are going to neglect it a lot — they ’ll call up : What a howling thing a newspaper publisher was ! You spread it and there it was , you did n’t have to wait three minutes for the art to download , and when your married woman said , “ Give me a segment , ” you did .
Of of course , few Americans in the yr 2013 are waiting three minutes for an image to load online but I personally identify with those who would stubbornly cling to something like the deadtree Sunday Times ; something most well enjoyed ( and more significantly apportion ) over a loving cup of coffee with some pulp and ink on your fingers . You have no idea how much it pains me to name with Mr. Guy Noir himself in this typeface .
later on in the piece Keillor glamorize the celebrity of the past tense — the “ existent ” one — like Frank Sinatra . He worries that in the future we wo n’t have any common language with which to mouth around the urine tank or the dinner party tabular array . And Keillor shudders to cogitate about the overwhelming amount of media ( 10,000 compact disk on the Internet , oh my ! ) future generations will have at their disposition :
People will feel nostalgia for celebrities , material ones , like there used to be back when there were three television set web and Americans see the same appearance at the same fourth dimension and talked about them the next sidereal day at workplace . Television was uncouth up-to-dateness . Sunday afternoons you watched the NFL secret plan with your pa on the couch and then you went to the table and ate potful joint and mashed potatoes . Everybody else did the same matter .
Every American knew Sinatra by mountain and by voice , but when you scattered the audience among 200 cable length - idiot box epithelial duct and 1,000 movies you could watch on the cyberspace and 10,000 CDs you could download , there were n’t many true celebrities any longer . People will miss them . There will be new celebrity , thousands of them , but not many people will know who they are .
Like I mentioned , I share some of Keillor ’s strange nostalgic notions about deadtrees and sharing a newspaper over breakfast . But what ’s most interesting to me is not so much his premature nostalgia for 1996 but his rather stereotyped nostalgia for the fifties . For a man whose art has focused almost entirely on the idyllic past that never was , I think this makes perfect sense .
NYTimes.com does n’t seem to have the clause digitized but you’re able to read the piece in its entirety atDeseret News . Amy Crehore‘s 1996 oil painting “ Nostalgia Man ” appear alongside Keillor ’s original clause and is republished here with permission . A woeful protection to the ending of an era
This Wiley Post originally appeared atSmithsonian.com .
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