When I was a kid, I collected comic books. This was back in the 80s, before the Tim Burton Batman movie turned "comics" into something else, into movies, I suppose.
I was obsessed with comics, and my best friend at the time was my best friend in large part because he was the other kid who was really into comic books (there were other common interests but for the sake of anonymity I'll leave those out).
I stopped collecting comics in the early 90s for a very straightforward reason- I got a girlfriend. It was that simple. I went from spending all my money on comics to never buying one for years. I was done with them and I never really looked back.
Well, that's not really true, or else I wouldn't be writing about them now. More like, every few years I would go to a comic book store, sometimes one I'd frequented in the past, where the owner would remember me with a mixture of nostalgia and resentment, and I'd pick up an issue of what had been my favourite comic book, the Fantastic Four. I'd read the issue I bought, mostly confused because I'd lost all the plot threads. And was never so taken by whatever I read I sought out older issues to better understand what was going on. This was probably a sign.
I still have my comic books, or, my parents do. They sit in a pile of white boxes in a storage room in their basement, and we talk a lot about them sending these eight boxes to me, the final repatriation of stuff that has been sitting at my parents' house in the quarter century since I left Calgary.
After the birth of my first son, I started to indulge again in some of my youthful interests more than I did in that liminal space between childhood and parenthood. As an example, over the years, I've bought some of the omnibus editions of the Fantastic Four, big thick volumes that collect 30 issues in a hardbound dust jacketed "prestige" edition. I've usually bought them on sale at BMV, a local second hand bookstore here in Toronto, while also somewhat inebriated, alcohol being the royal road to nostalgia.
I've had them for years, but it was only a few weeks ago that I started to read the first one, which collects the first 30 issues of the Fantastic Four, "The World's Greatest Comic Book Magazine". I'm reading them mainly because I'm sleep deprived as a result of the birth of my second son, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to read, say, Wieland's Des Esels Schatten at night, or anything else that's a) in a language other than English or b) more involved or complicated than a magazine article.
As I've been making my way through the omnibus, an issue or two per night, a thought kept creeping in, one that was there the last time I read some of these treasured stories about a decade ago - they aren't very good. The stories, the art, they aren't very good.
Maybe it was pride, or nostalgia (it was nostalgia) that kept the thought at bay, but yesterday I happened to read an essay by Sam Kriss about the death of nerds. As someone who used to try to talk about hipsters on this very blog, to try to figure them out, I'd never really thought about the fact that nerds really did take over.
And the idea, which I'm taking from Kriss' essay, that hipsters were just snobs except in the wrong direction, seems correct, in part because I talked about this myself 14 years ago! So I think he's right about how the hipster and the nerd have functioned in our culture, and how we do seem to be moving past them.
For my own part, I never considered myself a nerd (I'm sure everyone else did!) but in my defense, I'd always been a pretty bad nerd - for one, although I was obsessed with comic books, and collected them with a verve bordering on what we'd probably call OCD now, I really did enjoy them. I really liked the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man, and all the other superheroes - I liked their adventures, and had a lot of fun reading them and talking about the latest issues with my friends.
But then I grew up.
To be sure, when I was in junior high, my friends and I would discuss the literary merits of comic books, their aesthetic value of course on a par with the great works of Shakespeare and Beckett, but given none of us had read any literature at that stage, it seems like in hindsight, what we were doing was learning to perform the Anglo-American-Canadian culture two step, where we affirm that whatever mass media product we're slurping down at the time is just as good as anything that has a higher aesthetic value - snobs are really just nerds with ascots!
But back to me. I don't think it's a coincidence that I stopped reading comic books around the same time I got into classical music - the girlfriend was definitely the last straw, but the signs were there. The last year I bought comics as a teenager, it was more out of a sense of duty- I wasn't reading them, I was collecting them, but the love wasn't really there anymore.
What did I love instead? Bach. And Monteverdi. And so on.
***
All this being said, I don't want to pretend I spend all my time listening to Xenakis on a $10,000 soundsystem while reclining in a late 60s Finnish recliner. For one, I like Star Wars, and I dutifully watch all the shows and movies, and I've even bought some of the novels and comic books. Most of them aren't very good, and it feels a lot like Kriss' description of nerdery, where I'm really consuming it because it's not great, but Star Wars has always held a particular place in my head, and even though I sometimes resent it, it doesn't really matter.
It's more like a sickness, in the way that Goethe and Heine described Romanticism as a sickness. It's something I have, and deal with, but it's not going away, and you have to treat it. But pretending like it isn't a sickness is as good an explanation as any as to why so much mass culture sucks so badly, where you have so many smart, creative people turning out bland slop to audiences who don't even know if they care about this stuff anymore.
Have I just spent a morning writing a blog post on how I'm not really a nerd? Yes, I think so. But I'd also like to start talking about taste again, maybe in a slightly more philosophical way, and this seemed like a good place to start.
Soon I'll start talking about Heinrich Heine's thoughts on taste, but not today.
But soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment