Notes on the youthly rebellion(s)

One of the my most recent enjoyable lectures was The Poetry Lesson by Andrei Codrescu. A writer and a Romanian now living and developing his skills abroad, just like me (but I wouldn't take the comparison further than that), he actually teaches Poetry to university students and he recalls it in a most funny and dreamy fashion in the book. Which of course, makes one think about Dead Poet's Society. :)

I will not speak more on the whole matter here because I will do it elsewhere, but I would like to share a certain remark from the text for purposes to be revealed later:



“Being “gay” is mostly theoretical, and so evident to many young women scholars of Queer Studies that they didn’t even notice the widening gap between theory and practice, as they got married, had children, and began shopping and joining health clubs. Everything happens fast and everything happened a long time ago, or else nothing happens but the endless production of nonsense. On the floor above the one where I was tormenting poets, tenured professors tapped steadily on their keyboards, completely uninterested in the deep ravine that ran between their professional thoughts and their lives. No wonder that the young mocked (or would have liked to) everything that was glaringly hypocritical in their elders. It had always been thus, but it was worse, I think, now, when every proof for one thing or another is intellectually available, but tips and hints on how to really live are rarer than asparagus stalks in Eskimo cuisine. And never in the history of the world had we a more prosperous commerce in “how to live” manuals, television channels, and spiritual disciplines. The menu is immense. A young person looking at the cornucopia has little choice but to faint, vomit, or overdose, though even that had been done by the punks and duly marketed.” (p 57-58)

The most "classic" piece of work specifically focused on inter-generational conflict is P. P. Negulescu's "Conflictul generatiilor si factorii progresului" (Generations' conflict and the factors of progress), which, although an "open-minded" book full of hope and optimism that stresses the importance of the youth's questioning of the cultural "establishment" or "status-quo", sounds so communist and dull and almost ridiculously boring compared to the passage transcribed above!... Although the points the book makes are valuable and the book is a good one, how faint it is felt when it is only known... Is the mental world suddenly aging more quickly, just as the media-tic one? Is the new's ephemeris so contagious?