The Sky is Falling!

Another creative writing workshop tonight. Another philosophical quagmire. What do we writers do to ourselves? And, in the name of fun! Tonight's blue plate special is Modern vs. Postmodern literature, which is really just another arm of Is Art Subjective. Now my professor, very nice pregnant woman who loves to use movie analogies, a woman after my own heart in that respect, believes that all characters must have arcs--they must change, have epiphanies. Our stories, literature in general, is better, it was hinted, when there is an apparent theme. We cannot meander along through the stream of consciousness, whetting our thirst where we may--every girl scout knows that we must boil that water to make it potable--but we must tell stories with an agenda, or discover our agenda as we tell a story, but a point there must be. A point I say!

But if life represents art and life is often pointless... Step back, my existentialist self! Is there not beauty in chaos? And, is it not meaning when the reader derives that meaning for themselves? Personally, I think that meaning, like anything else in Zebra land, exists in shades of grey, in both fine and wide strokes of ink.

I had a conversation this summer in Italy about Andy Warhol. About how Warhol is not art. Soup is not art. Repetitive figures of movie stars in pre-school primary colors are not art. I could not get across that that is exactly what Andy Warhol was trying to say--that art is all around us. It doesn't have to be a depiction from the bible or a portrait of a stuffy rich man with his pet terrier at his side. It lies in everyday objects--It lies in nothing. And in literature, you don't have to be Austen or Steinbeck--you can be Plath and Calvino. You can play with language and play with meaning and allow your reader to... not to color inside of the author's lines but instead to pick out the lines among splashes of color. Existentialism may say that everything is meaningless. But, there is art in meaninglessness.

It came down to the age old rosy glow of nostalgia. We all love the known. It seems better because we've had time to digest it, to discover it, to consume and digest and grow fat with complacency. These writers nowadays, gee whiz, some of them just have no definitive theme, by golly. Yes, and that horseless carriage was unnecessary hoopla that abetted fornication at roadside motels. Yes, and the Beatles were Hell's Minions, sent to signal the rampant decline of morality in America's youth. Yes, and that darn South Park... let me tell you.

I suppose I take everything out of proportion. Especially considering that it was all fun and philosophical games (what we writers won't do for kicks!). But I suppose I consider it a slight against my generation and, more importantly, my style of writing--my lack of theme, my chaos, and my post-modern leanings. Perhaps, though, when I am old and grey, when no one picks up physical books anymore to feel the width of their pages between fingers or the smell of their spines in the nostrils, to curl up with on the couch or stack on shelves to stroke with reverent fingers, I will say, "Back in my day, when literature was still good... I don't know about the state of things today... What happened to the old classics like Napoleon Dynamite? Ha. A liger. Ha ha."

"Shut up, grandma, and go back to your rocking chair. Sheesh!"