Nostalgia is a form of propaganda, an exercise in laughter and forgetting, in which the right visual iconography and perceived authenticity can create a longing for an existence which is no longer possible and was in fact never possible.
The Baffler have opened up their archives, so you can now access articles from their 25 issues from 1988 to the present day. The piece quoted above, The Nostalgia Gap, was published in 1993, yet still reads as something valid and true today. It is well worth your time, as are the complete archives that I’m slowly working my way through now. Oddly, reading the old issues creates a similar misplaced longing as outlined in the quote above, which makes my head hurt a little.
Filed under: not sport, reading and writing, Uncategorized
