Did you read the entire article? The concern of the writer seems to be that much of the serious discussion about current affairs will disappear in an ironic giggle or a knowing wink as on the Colbert Report and nothing at all will be done about it since, ironically, nothing ever has been done.
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2012 9:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: How to Live Without Irony - NYTimes.com Arthur wrote: > NY Times Nov 17, 2012 > > If irony is the ethos of our age - and it is - then the hipster is our > archetype of ironic living. > > The hipster haunts every city street and university town. > [snip] > http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-ir > ony/ I can't decide whether this is 21st Century Navel Gazing by the kind of person who will only be happy when she has a regular psychiatrist, a personal trainer and spirituality guru; or if this is really some kind of problem in urban culture today. But then, I'm old enough to be a year or two ahead of the boomer cohort, way before Gen-X, and, in the pop vocabulary of generation classification, my cohort is a small and little-memorialized one that occurred in an interstix between the Beats and the Hippies: Desperados. You won't likely find even a mention of us on Google unless you know to include "Tom Parmenter" in your search. Maybe Desperados were (are) still doing literary jokes and high-brow culture instead of "inside jokes and pop culture references". I've re-read the above twice to determine if I may have somehow unintentionally committed an irony. I don't think so. But then, "irony" is one of those words I have trouble with [1] in one way or another. - Mike [1] Irony; ergodic; ontic [2]; neoliberal; proactive; meaning, inter alia. [2] I keep thinking I should write the Canadian Lit book entitled "Ontic, Eh?", dedicated to Aldous Huxley [3] but I don't know what to put into it. May plagiarize the above referenced Times article in toto? Have I committed an irony in thinking that? [3] Author of "Antic Hay", q.v. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
