You’re living in the past, people tell me. I tell them they’re right. I don’t understand non-fungible tokens, modern monetary theory, or cryptocurrency. Video games do not attract me the way pinball machines manufactured by Chicago manufacturers Gottlieb or Williams did in Paris cafes. As of today (June 1, 2022), I do not own a smart phone. The flip phone I have is strictly for emergencies and I seldom remember to take it with me when I leave the house.
It cheers me no end to hear Edmund Wilson say, upon picking up and perusing a copy of Life magazine, “I feel I do not belong to the country depicted there, that I do not even live in that country.” This was back in 1956 when Wilson turned fifty, and Life was the great American magazine in the soon-to-end era of popular magazines that people read on the Chattanooga Choo-Choo between Penn Station and Baltimore.
Imagine how the author would feel today now that Life is dead. The best unpaid-for ad campaign for the defunct weekly was Marshall McLuhan’s “consider the alternative.”
Taking stock, Wilson in 1956 no longer wanted to contend with “the kind of contemporary conflicts” that used to interest him. He no longer made the effort to “keep up” with what younger writers were doing. He reserved his time for the classics he had not yet read. Nevertheless, Wilson concluded by saying that he finds himself “at the center of things – since the center can be only in one’s head,” a swell cri de coeur.
Wilson would have been happier, he says, in the eighteenth century. Not me. I am far more sentimental and predictable. The year of my birth (1948) in the city of my birth (New York) would suit me fine, though I would not object to the city as it was when I turned eight in 1956, and there were fedoras, automats, women’s hats, night clubs, and all the other things I associate with being a grown-up.
In the morning, the newscaster on the radio in the kitchen signed off with a chorus of “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Jackie Robinson played his last season for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rocky Marciano retired undefeated. Grace Kelly married the prince of Monaco. Frank Sinatra played Frankie Machine, the drummer, poker dealer, and smack addict in The Man with the Golden Arm. I fed on my mother’s matchless chopped liver, her contagious laugh, the merriment in the kitchen, and an afternoon movie at the Alpine, maybe Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat.