Saturday, March 06, 2010

Nostalgia


A friend has accused me of being too nostalgic lately. Looking for art to scan for this blog I ran across this idyllic photo of me romping in the surf with my grandma in California in the mid-1960s. So I guess I must plead guilty!

Grandma was Dorothy Scott Horst Holden; she was married to my grandfather for only a few years in the late 1920s/early 1930s, and then remarried in the 1980s. She passed on in the early 1990s.

3 comments:

  1. "Accused" of nostalgia? I've been enjoying your stuff immensely. It might be old to you, but a lot of it is new to me. The "Poles and holes" piece has had me scratching my chin and pondering for a week now. I really liked it. The anti-american art stuff is a hoot and fits in nicely with some of my current anti-american resentments. Isn't nostalgia an emotion? Or an emotional sensation? How can you be accused of experiencing too much of an emotion?
    Finally, we are getting to a certain age. I spend a lot of time wondering how I got here. I don't mean how my few years have turned out but how the generations that produced me ended up here.

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  2. Heh heh. Well the friend who made this accusation is also working on a documentary...about the early years of the AIDS epidemic in NYC in the early 1980s, which he like me also lived through. So I think there was some pot/kettling going on there.

    But I truly appreciate the feedback, Jon. I have to say that since I've been focusing on this blog, including all the backward-facing navel gazing, I find my mind more engaged with ideas out around me: reading more, thinking more, paying attention, articulating better. It's good for would-be codgers like us.

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  3. I've always found that any progress has to begin with an understanding of the ground I'm standing on. If I'm proceeding from unexamined assumptions I will get nowhere. It might look like navel gazing but it's all about forward motion.

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