In some magazine or another that I was reading on the plane as I came back from North Carolina, Amy Tan said that she was a "late bloomer" because she didn't publish The Joy Luck Club until she was 37.
Wow. That only gives me 7 months to meet Amy's deadline.
Fortunately, I'm not as enamored of (or cowed by) a devotion to youth culture and its illusionary definition of success. I haven't forgotten that Richard Adams didn't publish Watership Down until he was in his fifties; Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't publish The Little House series until she was in her sixties. Likewise, Raymond Chandler didn't publish his first short story until he was 45, and his first published novel, The Big Sleep, didn't appear until he was 51.
Of course, Richard, Laura, and Ray all had their breakthroughs more than 35 years ago when America at large clung a little less to the definition of youth being an essential component of success.
I'd better get cracking.
3.03.2009
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2 comments:
I wrote a big, sprawling response to this last night and then didn't send it because it was all over the place. I agree with you.
I'm wondering, because I can't figure it out: what do you think has caused this youth culture ? Most of what we do these days has an imaginary timeline that didn't exist a generation ago. Everyone seems to intrinsically know the benchmarks, even though there is no formal system and they don't actually exist. So how did we, as a nation, find ourselves in this place ?
I suspect the readily available plethora of images that glamorize youth have a lot to do with our celebration of youth culture. Young people are featured in music, movies, sports -- all fields that many Americans hold dear for a variety of reasons.
Also, post WWII, entertainment (and the discretionary funds that made participation in entertainment possible) took off, so the combination of image and actuality seemed to make youth a huge factor in our definition of success. Couple that with our national tendency to cultivate and admire a VERY short attention span in regard to history, and there you have it: youth is the word.
Anyway, that's what I attribute it to (at least in part).
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