squarely landing between 1965 and 1980who are these masked people? what have they written? who are the best?
those born then only, not those who wrote *in* that period.
dfw,who else
Darrieussecq
>>23545006I hate that I’m 2 years off the cutoff date and have to associate with grimy millennials.
>>23545006What is with the post Gen-X generations with their thinking social generations fall neatly between years and the general obsession with social generations?>>23545121You are clearly a millennial in attitude, 2 years would not make a difference.
>>23545131it's just a provocative way to sort a group of otherwise uninteresting people. relax and toss a name into the bucket
>>23545131How so? Because I guarantee you I’m just as cynical as any Gen Xer,
>>23545187>,
People yap about boomers, millenials and zoomers, but Gen X are able to avoid criticism. They have failed.
>>23545228at what? they get plenty of flak in other forms of media. writing just doesn't seem like it's in their wheelhouse. i guess JK Rowling is technically a Gen X author of repute, so they have to accept that.
>>23545187Gen-X is not cynical, we grew up being taught we could do anything and change the world and we believed it and still believe it for the most part. But we learned a thing or two about setting realistic goals and that the way we can change the world is by focusing on our own little corners of the world so we started co-ops and farm shares and independent everything. We may not be reinventing the world and tearing down everything we find wrong but we are still doing what we can towards our ideals and goals.
>>23545502i knew your kind would come if i put out the call. it's nice to know your perspective, genuinely.
>>23545590This all goes into the issues with things like irony which is not the irony itself but the subtext carried by that irony which in common usage is defined subrosa without anyone ever realizing it. The subtext carried by the irony of one generation is completely different than that of another and almost completely lost on other generations which is part of its point, our friends get the joke while our parents at most realize that they were just insulted. But it goes far past irony and is the general ever evolving subtext of language which tends to shift with the major cultural changes that also help define our social generations. This is why humor tends to have such a short shelf life, even if we can understand the subtext we can't do it in that reflexive way that humor requires. It is difficult not to see other generations as uncaring and cynical, we never get their jokes.
>>23545975i have found that generations distant are more comprehensible than those close, there are often far too many similarities in nearby generational identities and narratives that their chants seem quaint or facile, be they from the past or the future branching outward from your own position. naturally, a significant difference is afforded to distant generations, even something like a british gentleman from the 17th century gets more sympathy for his position than my parents, say, they're the ones who are here in this pit, their positions are no better or worse than mine, the distinction is too slight, there are too many overlapping factors. broaden the search though, and there are outliers, they simultaneously represent their generations while also breaking the mold their generation represents.being able to recognize that lingering, evergreen talent *within* the groups is the task of the critic. the genuine task of the critic is to authenticate, to distinguish the failures from the legitimate. not to trash the failures, or to overpraise the successes, but as a service of appraisal.
further, to identify the evergreen talent within your own generation, that's a special capacity indeed. that's what an ezra pound might be, for example.
>>23545006MNM-DR
>>23545221Fuck off
>>23545131>general obsession with social generations?It dates back to the silent generation with Hemmingway.
>>23545006All the 90s debuts are squarely Gen X writers. Every goddamn writer of note being a boomer and the industry hard crashing in 2008 makes it hard to get a feel for their lit. They tend to reject boomer culture as much as they take from it, growing up in the 70s and 80s left them with a different view of it than what the late boomers had. They're the children of key parties. They fucking hate hippies even though they try to make something out of the better part of the movement. Mostly they seem to have checked out of society and do their own thing, or are waaaay too wrapped up in mass media that they don't understand. The novels are about the failures of hedonism and a kind of small scale personal culture, or look like genre fiction but use the tropes and structure to make a point about culture and how that kind of narrative influences people's lives and perceptions. I like their work in general, although it overlaps heavily with early millennials and doesn't differ as much as different generations of contemporaries did. I do think it can be out of touch or dated at times, some of it didn't do well on release because of that.
