Paul writes – I want to pull together four strands to form the content of this post. James K A Smith’s review of Hipster Christianity by Brett McCracken via this post; An written interview with author William Gibson that Len Hjalmarson points to; and last week, from NZ, a radio interview with author William Gibson (audio links at the bottom of this post).
William Gibson interview, excerpt below:
“...In the post-modern marketing intrigues in your recent books, characters like Hubertus Bigend must trace larger movements in culture before anybody else knows they are there. But if everybody is seeing the same things, dressing the same way, and hewing to the same cultural norms because of the Internet, are there any cultural differentiations left to make?
I don't know. That's a really good question, and it's going to be interesting to see how that goes. It reminds me of what some people including myself were saying ten years ago about bohemias, and whether it's still possible to do them in a culture that has evolved to detect and commodify them, and sell them back to you before you can even get into the second gear with your bohemia. Bohemias are sort of like designer lifestyles, in a way, and it seems like the Internet may have put an end to them, at least in terms of how we were viewing them before. We're post-geographical now.
Perhaps that same mechanism applies to coolness. Maybe what we're really talking about is novelty. Because a mechanism like Twitter is probably the single most powerful and efficient aggregator of novelty that ever existed. The real function of magazines, for the most part, has been to aggregate novelty, to run around to find a lot of new things, put them in your issue, and get them out ideally before the other magazines notices it—then people buy it, bring it home, and wolf down all this novelty.
Now if you've got your Twitter feed set up right, every day you can get more raw novelty dumped on your desktop than you can get buying an entire magazine store. And it changes every day. What does that mean? One thing it means is that magazines have to find something different to do—you have to find some niche that you can operate in.
If novelty is available wholesale at that level and at that quantity for free to a 15 year-old in Nebraska, what's that going to do to the rest of us? I don't know, but I'm sure the next time I'm writing a novel that's going to be one of the post-it notes on the windshield...”
James K A Smith, excerpt below:
“...I think McCracken needs to revitalize another term in his lexicon: bohemian (he mentions it early on, confusing it with dandyism). Although he generically talks about Christian hipsters, there is a qualitative difference between a Shane Claiborne and the latest rendition of the mega church youth pastor who slums it by buying a few things at Goodwill (to accessorize his jeans from the Buckle) and who presses his kids to donate to the ONE Campaign. Those who really deserve to be described as Christian hipsters might be better described as Christian bohemians who have intentionally resisted the siren call of the status quo, upward mobility, and the American way in order to pursue lives that are just, meaningful, communal, and peaceable...”
You can read the full review here.
Another from James K A. Smith, which includes a link to this quote by Slavoj Zizek. You can read the whole post here, and the one it originated from here.
"What if, in our postmodern world of ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of time, those who cling to it are the true subversives? What if, today, straight marriage is 'the most dark and daring of all transgressions?’” - Zizek, "The Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy," in Theology and the Political: The New Debate.
And finally, go here to hear the podcast of last weeks interview with William Gibson (scroll down until you find the RSS Feed).
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