Strata Lucida

Nothing new under the sun

Scot and I had an interesting discussion at Leila's Jesus Grill yesterday (served: lamb, beef, chopped-up Marshmallow Peeps). I mentioned to him that the brilliant and almost-always right Liz Penn had blogged what I felt to be a highly eloquent screed against spam:

All the way up on the train, I felt an intangible shame and disgust, a dread at meeting anyone’s eyes, a feeling of emerging from some dark pit of linguistic degradation. But somewhere around Tuckahoe Station, I made the executive decision to alchemically convert that shame into rage. How dare you, Mr. Pussy? (I take the liberty of addressing you as “Mr.” since the default sex of the human being is apparently male, an assumption your colleagues have made freely as they express their ongoing concern for my need for penile enhancement.) How dare you pollute my beautiful pristine comment boxes, waiting in all innocence to be filled with thoughtful comments from readers throughout New Zealand, with your onslaught of meaningless filth? (I generally shy away from such ideologically loaded dichotomies as “purity” and “filth," but as Groucho Marx said, in your case I’ll make an exception.)

Scot, though, wondered if there could possibly be anything new to say about spam. "Spam is bad," he said, "I don't like spam." And other formulae come to mind too: "Random-word spam poetry can be funny." "Spammers should be shot" and its many variants (castrated, locked up in a room with Ann Coulter, eaten by squid, etc). So, pace Scot, I suppose we should paraphrase Wittgenstein and say "whereof others have already spoken, we must pass over in silence."

But there is nothing new under the sun, and the White Stripes are still good, dammit, even if they are not exactly innovative. Postindustrial capitalism makes a fetish of the original -- or rather, of the new -- because new ground is marketable ground. We're required to be up-to-date, with-it, new; if we're not, we're last year's model. And so the linguistic pleasures of a writer plying her craft against a common annoyance get swept under the table and summarized in three billboard-ready words: "Spam is bad."

I'm not writing this as a screed against Scot's take on the issue. It's not Scot who's doing this as an individual. Rather I want to point up a structural bias against old territory that's very troublesome to me. I want to defend the pleasure of unoriginality, of unoriginal themes performed in an original way -- an immediate way -- an honest way.

But I realize that it's extremely difficult to defend these without lapsing into troublesome "ideologically loaded dichotomies", without sounding like a paleoconservative longing for the good ol' traditional days -- which I decidedly am not. Is it still possible to find a space between the hidebound conservative ("tradition for its own sake") and the corrosive avant-garde ("the new for its own sake")? The endless quest for new and different pleasures seems as toxic and demeaning as the blind acceptance of old pleasures. Where to find the space of freedom between them?

Posted by Chris at April 12, 2004 10:45 AM