With the weather outside truly frightful, or at least prohibitively cold, I have been using some quiet time to catch up on ripping some albums for iTunes. I was surprised to find, for example, that I had neglected to add Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska or any Kinks to the list. How, with only twelve thousand songs in my pocket, could I have missed "Celluloid Heroes"? Just kidding. But pulling out these old CDs demonstrates to me just how flimsy a grasp we have on time. It seems like an appropriate New Year's observation.
I recall so vividly, for example, the release of David Bowie's Let's Dance in 1983. It was a smashing success, of course, and Bowie has not had as successful a studio album since. But, at the time, it was hailed as a significant "comeback" in the United States. Station to Station had been an American hit in 1976, but his next four records failed to crack the top ten. Let's Dance hit #4, ending a seven-year drought, just when people apparently thought that Bowie would be forgotten. I recall that impression. A big star from the 1970s had lost all significance by the middle of the next decade. Seven years to a fourteen year-old boy just discovering popular music seemed like an eternity. Of course, Let's Dance has now been out for more than a quarter of a century, and to a middle-aged man its release feels like last summer.
I had the same response today when I was reminded that XTC's Skylarking was released in 1986 or that Sinead O'Connor's second record was supposed to make her the first superstar of the 1990s. The nostalgia industry has already begun to repackage the fleeting stars of that decade: Fiona Apple, Shawn Colvin, Deep Blue Something, Divinyls, Duncan Sheik, Joan Osbourne, Tonic.
The modernists whom I teach struggled to find a better way to represent the passage of time in their literature, of course. The meticulous hour spent in class should not be represented in the same way as the easy hour spent in leisure, but how best to achieve this literary sleight of hand? For many authors, they sought only to draw their readers' attention to this paradox. Pages and pages were devoted to the inner workings of a man or woman experiencing a moment, and years could then pass through the words of a single paragraph.
This seems apt, as I realize that the students joining us next week, after taking a few extra months to work, were born in 1992, just as I was making application to graduate school. They feel to some extent as if they have lived whole lives, struggling through years of restrictions, navigating secondary school -- and those years, like this one past, has passed for me in the blink of an eye.
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