Another Nostalgia Post - Inspiration

 I have one worry about my writing. That I am indulging in sentimental nostalgia. Lit Hub published Tobias Becker's What’s Old is New Again (and Again): On the Cyclical Nature of Nostalgia, which strikes at my worry in this paragraph:

More specifically they use it, as we will see, first in an emotional sense, implying that people returned to the pop cultural past because of a personal, sentimental attachment; second in an aesthetic sense, synonymous with kitsch; and finally in a temporal sense, to denote an orientation toward the past and an inability or unwillingness to go with the times, forsaking innovation and originality for imitation and repetition.

I dislike the maudlin sentimentality of James Whitcomb Riley - this is not the Indiana I knew and still see around me. I write that even though I know the goblins will get you if you don't watch out. Booth Tarkington is almost unreadable (well. Alice Adams is) while also establishing for Indiana writers a minor key realism. Theodore Dreiser alone works to raise his head above the foxhole of sentimental nostalgia.

No, I think Kin Hubbard has always been more of my sort (The old Indianapolis News used to continue running his quips into the Seventies; my Great-aunt Elsie took the News and I recall first reading him there.

Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.

Another point from the original article: 

The last aspect, which the pop cultural critique shares with the other critiques, is the most important one, and as in the other instances, it was based on an implicit modernist understanding of time. Pop culture critics tend to conceive of time as homogeneous and linear, as a straightforward timeline. By contrast, the word retro implies a cyclical temporality: every style (or aspects thereof) returns after a certain number of years.

That paragraph and the following brought to mind another word other than retro and nostalgia: recycling.

Jumping between decades and tracing elective affinities between them, the chapter hopes to break up and complicate the established chronology. Positioning itself against the cliché of retro as imitative and derivative, a mere replica of past styles, it argues that looking back is a source of inspiration rather than a sign of stagnation. In following these various strands of revivalism and the critique of them, it examines the role of the concept of nostalgia in how they are perceived, explained, and criticized and thereby how nostalgia’s meanings changed and shifted.

Speaking of pop culture and music, which the original writer did, brings to mind the difference between The Blasters and The Stray Cats. Both represent the rockabilly revival, but the former used rockabilly tropes for their own purposes, while the latter never escaped the tropes.

If the past is an inspiration, and I think it is, then how to avoid nostalgia? When I first had a real ambition to write fiction, I wanted to emulate William Faulkner. I gave that up. Not that he does not continue haunting me. When I again thought of writing fiction as a serious matter, I found my stories were not the fall of a rotten slave aristocracy, but the failure of capitalism in Indiana's factory towns. This borders the territory set out in Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. But there is still Faulkner with his the past is not even past that has me recycling American history for my own uses. That is how I hope to avoid a whitewashing sentimentality. I guess that puts me in the camp that sees the past as inspiration.

What else I have written about this problem: The Problems With Nostalgia, Escaping Realism, Fending off Nostalgia, and Nostalgia Has a Use?.

And that is all for now.

sch 12/17