Now what?

[version]

I was reading through one of the old Ballard threads last night and came across this,

Personally, i think he's found himself stunned by the Millennium - it had been hanging around the corners of his pre 2000 work and when it came it was like Nick Cave finally finding redemption or William Burroughs faced with the enormity of AIDS as a non-symbolic sex virus; "where do we go now? We've spent our souls on documenting unseen horrors, millennial tensions etc and we've dragged ourselves beyond the pale and now...now... THIS.

Who else could this apply to? Who else was lapped by reality? Some of my favourite DeLillo's post-9/11 but there's a sentiment that he was writing about 9/11 for so long that when it finally happened it left him with nowhere to go.

 

[craner]

Killah Priest

 

[IdleRich]

Can't immediately think of examples (though I feel that there are some on the tip of my tongue, or ought to be), but I just want to suggest that it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing for a writer. Or certainly, in life, it can be quite common to live in fear of something happening for years, and when, somehow, the worst finally occurs, sometimes it can end up being freeing. I can well imagine that some writers might similarly find it freeing if they were forced by reality to find a new raison d'etre for their writing... I think it's one of those things that could go either way, some might collapse while others are inspired to reinvent themselves with a new lease of life.

 

[version]

Who's an example of inspired reinvention?

 

[DannyL]

Seems to me like a lot of the norms of youth culture are disappearing/have disappeared
The importance of music, intoxication etc

 

[version]

Pynchon might be another example. A lot of what he was writing about happened and the later books fall back on just supporting your family and friends in the face of these tyrannical systems he predicted and documented.