Your personal last word...

At a certain point, even if you keep up-to-date with new releases (books, records, films), even if you keep broadening your horizons, even if you manage to keep up with the latest things, you realise that these latest things can never be more than that, that they stand almost no chance of being the last word, because you actually heard - or saw or read - your personal last word years earlier.

Geoff Dyer, Zona

It has been said, cynically, that the golden age of sf is 14.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute & Peter Nicholls

Oh, yes, I used to keep a blog, didn't I? Since I started writing this blog, such as it is, there have been other periods where, for whatever reason, I have lacked either the time or the inclination to write anything for it, but this is certainly the longest stretch of time where that's been the case. Which is not to say that there haven't been things I've wanted to write about in the last few months. But then it's always been the case that I've wanted to write more for this blog than I've been able to. I appear to be a much slower writer than some of the bloggers who first inspired me. And partly, of course, it's no longer the novelty it once was. In retrospect, I'm dissatisfied with a substantial chunk of what I've written for this blog, but based purely on the number of posts from that time, I clearly had more motivation to engage with my shiny new toy in the first few months of keeping it.

So what inspires me now, now that life crowds in in one way or another, and the polish has clearly faded on this toy? In my head at least, these two quotations chime together. I'm sure that I've written more than enough about Geoff Dyer's work by this point, but I did enjoy his rumination on Tarkovsky's masterpiece. A page or two before the quotation above he mentions Where Eagles Dare, the only other film he could conceive of writing such a book about, and The Italian Job, beloved favourites from childhood and his early teens which also formulated his initial taste and interest in films. Their appeal is simply that they were seen repeatedly in childhood, so that they become impossible to criticise, because on some level they're such an important part of the person he now is: "To try to disentangle their individual merits or shortcomings, to see them as a disinterested adult, is like trying to come to a definitive assessment of your own childhood: impossible because what you are contemplating and trying to gauge is a formative part of the person attempting the assessment."

Which is close to the point Clute and Nicholls are making above, that those of us who love science fiction only do so because it was first encountered at such a formative stage. Of course, there are formative stages which come after childhood, and I also don't see why we have to see it as cynical necessarily. It's inevitable that the things (books, records, films) we first encounter in childhood or as young teenagers will stay with us in a way that nothing else does is simply because we encounter them at an age where we don't have nearly as much context to place them within. As Dyer puts it, we haven't yet encountered our personal last word.

You could, if you like, describe this dilemma as something of a middle class or first world problem if you wanted. But since I generally loath such currently fashionable terms, I won't. In any case, I'm not sure it's much of a problem. No doubt Bourdieu was correct to describe taste as a form of social positioning, but surely it has other uses as well. One can't after all, love and appreciate everything. There's too much stuff out there, especially these days. Taste, our own personal unique taste, which for most people encompasses both works which are masterpieces of their respective forms, as well as works which are popular crap, also has a very useful, practical function. It limits what we're interested in so that the mass of books, music and films which are more and more available to us these days, become manageable. As somebody who has sometimes struggled with the feeling that I'm interested in too much, to many conflicting ideas, fictions, etc., that actually provides some comfort. Inevitably, part of that is the person I was at 14, whilst another part of it is the person I am now, gradually finding the limits of what I'm interested in. I don't believe that there's anything unusual in this.