FILL: Twisting Historical Aphorisms?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 20 Dec. 2009

This is just a little plaything. The other day on one of the lists I read someone was commenting about how people who haven't read older fiction sometimes don't recognize that what they think is a new piece is actually just a rehash of something older. I was turning this over in my head and said, "That's the literary equivalent of those who forget history are condemned to repeat it." Then I started playing with how to phrase that.

Those who do not read historical fiction are doomed to regurgitations of it?
Those who do not read historical fiction are condemned to read repetitious recapitulations of it?
Those who do not read classic fiction are doomed to experience reenactments of it?

Repetitions, recitations, resurrections?

I'm not sure what's the best way to phrase it. But I thought you might want to play along?

FILL: Cultural Individualism as the Anti-Trend?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Kind of interesting. Over at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126136236068199631.html there's an argument that the technology of the new millennium -- the first decade of the 21st century -- has killed big trends, especially in the area of creative art. He's arguing that the shift from common TV channels and other centralized media to individual choice and downloading and so forth has created a culture of fads instead of trends, the growth of diversity and niches where "not enough people agree about anything to allow artistic trends to flourish."

With sidebars from Simon & Schuster's Martha Levin talking about shifts in book publishing -- "I don't want to sound either naive or like Pollyanna but I just want people to read. I know we'll figure out the rest of it."

Peter Jackson, movie director -- a decade of defensiveness, but, "I'm hopeful there's a new generation that in the next 10 years will explode onto the scene. His tenure. As the period in which the technology of making movies has become affordable and available to everybody. That has to result in an explosion of creativity."

And Walt Disney's Bob Iger -- "The dawn of the digital age has sped everything up, and in doing so it has created a fair amount of challenge.... it doesn't rule out the possibility of doing something that has endurance; no matter how much choice or how much clutter there is, those things that are high in quality last forever."

The un-trend -- audiences of passionate enthusiasts, cultural individualism, and the death of lemming-like consensus?

Take a step back and think about the first decade of the 21st century. How would you characterize it? And what would you predict for the next 10 years?

Is 2010 the last year of first decade or the first year of the second decade?