Memo From Turner

Some thoughts on artistic nihilism from Megan McCardle and James Lileks. McCardle writes:

Back when I wanted to be a fiction writer, I wanted to be the kind of fiction writer who has a dramatic slide into the abyss. It wasn’t long after I stopped writing short stories that it occurred to me that dying old, desperate and alone probably wasn’t nearly as inspiring for the people it happened to as it was for twenty-year olds looking for an excuse to smoke too much.

In my teens, I caught a similar whiff of nihilism listening to the Velvet Underground and watching Mick Jagger and–phew!–Anita Pallenberg in Performance. I’m not sure what its youthful attraction is, but if it dates back to Fitzgerald’s time, it’s a remarkably long-lived trend. Which dovetails nicely into this post on the proto-youth movement of the 1920s and its sadly obligatory cynicism.