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.
"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?
ReplyDeleteFinally, 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteBut 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.
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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