Bunny Mellon had a silly name, but an impressive art collection and gardens.
I’ve read this essay twice. “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture”
Yes, Minecraft is awesome.
“Only one in 20 Americans aged 25 to 34 whose parents didn’t finish high school has a college degree. The average across 20 rich countries in the O.E.C.D. analysis is almost one in four.”
I shocked someone last week, when I told them that we eat dinner together as a family almost every night. No TV, no cells. Lots of trivial pursuit questions about geography, trains, and the presidents.
Apt. 11d 
My son says they’ll be using Minecraft in class this year. Probably the pocket edition because they have chromebooks. I’m still trying to figure out how enchanting works after the new update.
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We usually eat dinner together. S rarely eats what I make, but she gets mad if I don’t call her down so she can have a yogurt or peanut butter while we eat. E grumbles because he has been dragged away from HW/internet/latest Full House rerun, but will sit with us for a while and sometimes even eat what I make. We never have tv on because having tv in the background drives my husband crazy (sensory input issues). Sometimes I have my cell, but usually it’s because we’re talking about something (usually schedule-related) that I need it for.
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We have family Sunday afternoon dinner with my mom every week. People are shocked and amazed by that. Not sure if they are amazed because it isn’t a southern thing or because we eat between 2:30 and 4 in the afternoon. We don’t do family dinner every night because my husband is away most of the time.
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I’ll probably have to read that “Death of Adulthood” article more than once too. A few quick thoughts:
If I didn’t have a teenage daughter, I would probably not have read any YA lit. My daughter is the one who pushed me into it out of her love for certain books, and guilted me into reading them as “something we can share”. But I was pleasantly surprised—-and really appreciative that she gets to read female characters who are tough, smart, resourceful, take on risks and leadership, and are complex rather than wooden. Easily 95% of my reading is nonfiction, and I chalk that up to the sucky choices I had for fiction in the 70s and 80s. Also, the Hunger Game and other dystopian fiction is universally popular in her peer group because they all see themselves as living in the equivalent of District 12, and they’re not exactly wrong. Maannn, as a kid during the Reagan Depression, we sure coulda used “the Hunger Games”.
Left out of his discussion was any mention of the centralization of media; how the control of whose stories get greenlit for production matters. Moan about grown women reading fiction designed for their daughters all you want, but when “Adult-Adult” fiction promoted for women is geared toward the wooden, stereotypical characters and scenarios of “chick lit”, while fiction geared toward the mainstream audience has female characters merely as fodder for male character development….well, what do you expect? Woman are a huge and growing audience for SF/fantasy and comics because it seems to be the only way certain stories that center us can be told–we have to have an alternate universe instead of the real one. Go figure.
And I find it strange that he didn’t mention “Chicago Code” or “Detroit 1-8-7” as examples of adulthood on screen. Those shows received a lot of critical acclaim and did fairly well in ratings considering their time-slots, but were promptly cancelled rather than rescheduled. Wonder if the fact that women (especially women of color) were centered as protagonists had anything to do with it). Again, who has the power to green light stories? Not many women making those decisions. A notable exception is Shonda Rimes, who is enjoying a lot of success in her Thursday night slot. She’s not magic; in interviews she cites the fact she produces the stories she wants to watch as the reason for her success. Frankly, I’m not impressed with how men write women (notable exception: Wally Lamb). But as the audience, I don’t have a voice—I just get to walk away. Another reason for SF/fantasy/comics popularity—much, much more responsive to their fan base.
Anyway, is adulthood less “adult” when represented by the women of Law and Order, or Grey’s Anatomy, or Chicago Code, or Detroit 187, or CSI, or Southland? And why is it that women in authoritative, adult positions necessarily connotes “emergency” treatment, emergency stories?
Also absent in his adulthood analysis is the mention of paychecks. When/where I grew up earning a paycheck was a big marker of adult recognition and treatment. The lack of available jobs means less access to the autonomy that comes with adulthood. Which is another disconnect for me in his conflation of adulthood with responsibility—rebellion against certain tropes of “adulthood” can just as easily be a move towards responsibility and adulthood, a move towards greater control and decisiveness over one’s own life. The author admits that traditional views of adulthood sucked for women, but he doesn’t explain that the reason they sucked was because of the extent to which they infantilized women, and denied the authority and autonomy of adulthood to women.
Which brings me to: adulthood as passivity; as reactive rather than active. Again, who gets the forum to tell the stories? Whose characters get the chance for an audience. We get stories of sober adult responsibility. And we get stories of rebellion against that vision. What we don’t get are stories of revisioning adulthood; visions of restructuring institutions to be responsive to the lives we have. That’s why Shonda Rimes is so successful; women are responding to how her characters aren’t in the typical narrow box. We don’t have enough of these stories.
Yes, adulthood brings added responsibilities. But it also brings artificial restrictions that are unrelated to real life. Why is playing golf more “adult” than playing in a garage band? Because it’s boring? Part of the construct of modern adulthood is to be a passive agent–go and do your work, but when you go home, be a consumer. Live vicariously through others, be they celebrities or your children. For god’s sake don’t indulge your own creative spirit; that’s for the professionals! We can sell that to you!
Aging brings a necessary slowing down of the body and mind. But it’s an artificial construct of adulthood to pre-empt physical and mental debility thirty-some years beforehand by playing it safe and not challenging oneself, decades before material reality catches up. A lot of what is marked as “childlike” is damn challenging. We know that the way to stay functional into our later years is to “keep it moving”…our bodies and our minds. Stretching the limits. Pushing. Doing what we think we can’t (or what others think we can’t). So…why deride surfing or skateboarding or playing an instrument or any number of “aren’t you too old for that” activities as “second childhood” or “midlife crisis”? We’re getting to the grave soon enough.
And that’s the new thing–adulthood as one foot in the grave. Used to be, children were more likely to get there first.
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La Lubu–I really liked your comment on YA fantasy literature, especially the comment on why adult women might read it–
“Woman are a huge and growing audience for SF/fantasy and comics because it seems to be the only way certain stories that center us can be told–we have to have an alternate universe instead of the real one. Go figure.”
Anyway, I got curious to read the “Death of Adulthood” article and–my–what a mess! Trying to read it was like sitting next to a very opinionated guy who had way too much to drink and was not making much sense.
I had to read most of his sentences twice–he would say something at the beginning and then contradict himself by the end. For instance, he writes:
“In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand. I may be a middle-aged white man, but I’m not an idiot. In the world of politics, work and family, misogyny is a stubborn fact of life.”
So he’s suggesting that partriarchy is dead, except for the stubborn fact that so many pesky hallmarks of patriarchy still exist, so therefore he would be an idiot to say patriarchy is dead so that therefore he isn’t saying that. Except when he is.
It was very hard to read. I don’t think I’ll try to read it again to see if it makes more sense the second time around.
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Isn’t a lot of contemporary adult literary fiction kind of terrible? I don’t blame adult women for wanting to read books with characters and actual plots.
Come to think of it, there’s a long tradition of books moving from being grown up best sellers to being children’s books. I believe Nabokov talks about this somewhere.
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If my partner scores this new job for which he’s applying, we might actually be able to eat dinner as a family more than two nights a week. I can dream, can’t I?
I find that a lot of adult literary fiction reads like self-indulgent you-know-what. I’ve put aside a lot of that and gone back to my favourite historical authors, looked up others that are recommended in the same vein at places such as Goodreads or looked for recommendations from reviewers whose taste I’ve liked in other picks.
This mostly means that I read one out of 50 of the current “hot picks” but I like much more of the fiction that I pick for pleasure reading. I also shamelessly indulge my taste for cozy mysteries, historical romances and histories outside of my research interests. Interestingly enough, I read a lot more for pleasure even though my work schedule is wildly busy.
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“I find that a lot of adult literary fiction reads like self-indulgent you-know-what.”
Yep. I haven’t had the guts to read much adult literary fiction, but isn’t it more the rule than the exception that those authors aren’t really thinking very hard about the fact that they are supposed to be entertaining us?
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There was a lovely interview with Neal Stephenson posted on Slashdot ten years ago in which he went on at length about the different publics to whom authors are accountable in the literary fiction world vs. the popular fiction world. (Question 2)
[T]here is a cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them—hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer’s conference. Because she’d never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer—one so new or obscure that she’d never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn’t be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.
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There’s a great story from the Mad Men era – probably not true, but it should be – of the launch of a new dog food. Tremendous ad campaign, endorsements, etc. Sales started very strong, then plateaued and started declining. Desperate meeting of principals to think what was going wrong, how to fix it. Young new-hire ad man from the back of the room: “Maybe the dogs don’t like it?”
In the post-War period, Italian intellectuals were all waiting for the next great Italian novel, lots of devices and ideology slathered on all the candidates. And – blam! Il Gattopardo. NOT what the chattering classes thought they were waiting for, relatively linear plot, worked hard at character development, definitely NOT Marxist. Top selling novel in Italian history. The dogs liked it.
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We love reading Neal Stephenson. Also Tom Wolfe. It gets really fun when the children get old enough to read the same books.
I have a very short list of modern literary fiction worth reading. Much of it seems depressing, precious, and condescending. Many of the figures are suspiciously like writers, able to spend vast amounts of time away from work. In comparison, I find nonfiction more interesting these days.
Then again, it seems hard to find movies to watch. The movies we like tend to be available on Netflix, as we don’t live in L.A. or New York. The wide-release movies seem to be crude, not clever (if comedies), and brutal if drama (which is usually shoot-em-ups). There may be no dearth of writers, but a lack of good writing.
Perhaps the YA fans are not refusing to act like adults, but choosing to read books with plots? and character development? and characters who are not filmmakers, artisanal cheese-makers, nor other quasi-employed? And perhaps the language is not as vulgar as some modern literary authors seem to believe adults use these days? Pining after a crush and flirting with someone is much more interesting to a reader than consummation; think of how many t.v. shows end when the romantic leads marry each other.
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cranberry said:
“Perhaps the YA fans are not refusing to act like adults, but choosing to read books with plots? and character development? and characters who are not filmmakers, artisanal cheese-makers, nor other quasi-employed? And perhaps the language is not as vulgar as some modern literary authors seem to believe adults use these days? Pining after a crush and flirting with someone is much more interesting to a reader than consummation; think of how many t.v. shows end when the romantic leads marry each other.”
Yes.
And the characters are somewhat sympathetic and the reader can identify with them?
I can’t tell you how many movies or TV shows we’ve flicked off over the last few years saying, this is good, but I don’t like ANY of these people. They are all terrible human beings.
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cranberry said:
“We love reading Neal Stephenson. Also Tom Wolfe. It gets really fun when the children get old enough to read the same books.”
Husband and 12-year-old are both big Terry Pratchett fans.
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Yes! And Neil Gaiman, Iain Banks, Charles Stross (Laundry), and Dan Simmons.
Haven’t found any “chick lit” worth reading.
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Also, isn’t it typical of that kind of book that the author takes a 1/4 teaspoon of plot and tries to make it flavor a 5-gallon bucket of book? You know the kind of story which is basically, “one interesting thing happens 20-50 years ago and then we talk about the next 20-50 years in which nothing much happens”?
Boring, boring, boring.
As a teenager and young adult, I read a book entitled, “How to Write a Novel” by novelist John Braine.
It’s very, very good.
As I recall, he had some pretty good rules, and one of them is that a novel of reasonable length should cover no more than about a year in time. You should be focusing on a time and place in which a lot of stuff is happening pretty quickly (see, for example, The Great Gatsby).
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We have dinner together every night, without fail. I don’t care if it’s grilled cheese or a four course meal, we eat together. Everyone stays at the table until everyone is done and we all clean up. I’m half-ass parent in so many ways, but this is something I have right. We used to do Sunday dinner with the extended family, but frankly my divorce made it complicated. My kids were sometimes with their dad. My ex became less comfortable when my boyfriend started living together. We still do special occasions, but the Sunday dinner is gone for now. We’ve replaced it with Sunday breakfast out for the adults (2 aunts and uncles, me and my boyfriend, my cousin and my grown daughter). I really think ritual is something so important to keep us bonded and relevant in each others’ lives. Meals are a way to do that.
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