I’ve recently become suspicious of my favorite things.
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If you were to cue Julie Andrews and ask me to list a few of my favorite things, I’d have little trouble doing so:
Favorite author: Thomas Pynchon
Favorite book: Gravity’s Rainbow (with Blood Meridian as a close second)
Favorite musician: Sam Phillips (the singer-songwriter)
Favorite album: Cruel Inventions
Favorite movie: The Matrix or Blade Runner, in constant agon
Favorite car: 1968 Cougar
Favorite rock and roll drum song: “Barracuda”
Favorite female vocalist: Ann Wilson (Heart)
Favorite male vocalist: Robin Zander (Cheap Trick)
Favorite music producer: T-Bone Burnett
Favorite guitarist: Robben Ford
I could go on, I’m sure. The answers are pretty well rehearsed by now.
And that fact has given me pause. My favorite things are well rehearsed because they haven’t changed for at least two decades. Some of them haven’t changed for even significantly longer; I was a kid of single-digit age when I fell in love with the Cougar’s hidden headlights and sequential turn signals. That’s half a century….
I didn’t really notice how persistent my favorites have been until I wrote my 10-Day Movie Challenge post about Midnight Run, in which I noted a progression of favorite comedies: What’s Up, Doc?, followed by The Jerk, Stripes, and All of Me. At that point, Midnight Run took top spot and hasn’t been displaced since — for 25 years? longer?
If this were the only example, this might make sense. Maybe I really haven’t found any comedies funnier than Midnight Run. But isn’t it a little suspicious that nothing I’d identify as a “favorite” originated in in this century? I mean, some of these favorites extend into the present: Sam Phillips is still recording; Cheap Trick is still touring; Pynchon published a new book five or six years back (though he’s in his 80s now, which makes me nervous).
But I don’t really follow them as closely as I’d expect if they really were favorites.
Let’s take Gravity’s Rainbow as a case study. I discovered it in grad school, sometime in the mid ’90s. It blew me away (and I’m not alone in that reaction). Its range is crazy; politics, physics, psychology, the paranormal, rocket science, statistics, academia, cinema, international business, war and its after-effects, the black market, drugs and drug-induced paranoia (and clarity)…. And it’s written in a range of literary styles, from fairly traditional narrative to picaresque, from absurdist to sentimental, from show tunes to scatological porn…. I’ve never read anything like it, despite critics’ lavish use of the phrase “Pynchon-esque” to describe books with a paranoid or experimental bent.
For these and many other reasons — some of which I can’t even articulate — I love this book.
And yet… it’s a challenging book, comprised of 750 difficult pages. When a professor assigned it for a class, he recommended that we read it in advance, over the break; I took that advice, though I waited until the last two weeks, figuring I could knock off fifty pages a day. I couldn’t. It was that hard.
So, as much as I love it, I’ve only read it twice, and I’m not sure I will ever read again. (I may read it a third time, since I now have a “companion” book (with historical and geographical references, etc.), but it won’t be for the joy of it — the way, say, I used to read Tolkien every year, or the way I still revisit Neuromancer every time William Gibson is about to release another novel.
Worse, I rarely recommend Gravity’s Rainbow. People have to convince me that they’re experienced and committed readers; I don’t want them to hate me….
What kind of favorite is that?
I think my point here is that my favorites have ossified. They’ve become like a cliche, or a dead metaphor. They seem like they’re saying something, but that’s only because they sound familiar. They really aren’t saying much at all.
More important, they suggest something that I’m not comfortable admitting: there’s at least an extent to which I have ossified. If nothing “new” can displace these “favorites,” perhaps this is a sign that I’ve become mired in nostalgia.
To be fair, I do try to make sure that I don’t revisit only my past, at least in the areas of books and film. I have a couple nerdy checklists that I use to remind myself to read a range of books, balancing “light” texts with “literature” (with all the problematic baggage that entails), graphic novels, philosophy, history, biography, poetry, etc. And I do something similar with movies, reminding myself to seek out foreign films, documentaries, “cinema” (with all the problematic baggage that entails), etc.
But I may have just stumbled onto the reason I need these reminders. There’s nothing like nostalgia.