Features Sep 11, 2013 at 4:00 am

A Manifesto Against Irony

I want to read something that makes me think or feel, even if it makes me feel like I want to go out and smash things like mirrors and windows and glass and people’s skulls. Photograph by Kelly O

Comments

1
I got a Stranger Genius Award in a box of Crackerjacks once. Entropy isn't what it used to be.
2
I got bored.
3
So said the woman who is trying to make a living off of words. I wonder what the visual artist has to say. I wonder what the mathematician has to say.

Lets just all kick back and trust the systems that we were born into, not because they are correct, but because some people in the world don't have the luxury of worrying about these things. We probably shouldn't worry about the war in Syria because to a starving family in Ethiopia it is meaningless.

This article has so much flawed logic in it, how did it get published? Retraction?
4
You mean this wasn't an angry bit of poetry slam? Oops...I thought this was the Wednesday 10pm group...*backs out slowly*
5
"The story of Babel is everyone talking to nobody understanding. / The story of the Pentecost is everyone talking to everyone understanding."

Brilliant. Thank you, Rebecca!
6
"The moist and warm and wet of it, the wait" I'm staring at you, I wonder if you can hear the dogs.

You know who you are because your words live inside somewhere.

I-guess-I-should-go-now. But I can always see that room in the back of my head, honestly.

"I look behind the footlights and into this girl's eyes as if I could tell her."

"The cry as if surprised, though not. No, this was not surprise. It had been longed for if not uttered, had been in some way said,"

"STAY, I'm thinking, PLEASE. I don't say anything."

7
This is why I love Rebecca Brown.
8
That's a whole bunch of good words. Nice stuff Rebecca Brown.
9
Great, made my day
10

Few are able to read or comprehend plain spoken English because their predilections prevent them.

Writing today comes reaffirmation and little more.

Though yes, the reason for continuing on is to be the runner in the Apple commercial who throws a hammer through the screen.


11
Well. That certainly is some hyperbole filled, arrogant, pretentious, I want me me me, hypocritical shit you have spewed here. How ironic.
12
For a treatise on language, I'm not sure this was a particularly effective use of it.
13
There would be no art at all if words meant what we were trying to say, if every utterance and gesture didn't have the shades of meaning and ambiguity, the context and the thrown-ness, that is the stuff of irony. Irony itself, from the failed quest of Gilgamesh to our association and affection for Humbert Humbert, is what delivers that tingle between shoulder blades that Brown is going on about.

It's fine to be against cool and hip. It's fine to inveigh against petty sarcasm and twee and upper middlebrow. But don't even try to take on capital-"I" Irony.
14
And this is why I've loved the words,good words, true words of Rebecca Brown for so long. Hearing The Beatles "Let It Be" at the same time didn't hurt.
15
Great article, Rebecca Brown!
Music expresses for me in so many ways when words truly cannot.
16
lol
17
i choose to read this ironically
18
"I want to read books I need to read. I want to read books that feed me, that go in my mouth and throat and down in my guts and nourish me or mess me up but feed me that way too. I want to read books a writer had to write, could not not write or she'd go effing nuts. I want a book that will make me think or feel, even if it makes me feel shitty or like I want to go out and smash things like mirrors and windows and people's skulls or maybe instead do something decent or kind, or thank someone. Or smoke and drink and have sex with people I shouldn't have sex with or maybe even apologize for things I did to someone long ago.

When I start a book and it seems like, Oh, look at how fascinating I am, I'm like, Get over yourself. I'm like, Shut up."

It is funny to me that irony and nihilism affected you so much you wrote this piece, yet within the same piece you say you enjoy reading things that make you feel, even if that feeling is shitty. It looks to me like nihilistic, ironic and 'hip' things really do produce some serious emotional responses in you.

So what I have to assume is that @17 is actually 100% right and this piece is indeed ironic.
19
There is nothing wrong with irony...it's when people get lazy and substitute sarcasm that the trouble starts.
As for the cracker jack Stranger Genius Award...unpublished, envious commentary in the COMMENT SECTION is pathetic.
20
Since the article itself is indifferent, indulgent, superior, snotty, and whining, and it is holier than thou to tell someone to shut up, the essay must be ironic. One of the beauties of irony (or sarcasm) is that you can say what you mean/don't mean. And you can hear/not hear what you want to/don't want to hear.

So the essay is on the surface telling itself to shut up, and warning us that it is a waste of time. The circular loop of this makes my head hurt because it decries the problem of irony through irony. It complains about surface meaningless through surface meaningless. My head hurting in this way is not a bad thing -- it is kind of like a verbal Escher, a cheap trick of perspective that nevertheless unfolds in odd ways and at a certain point you realize there is no there, no actual stance, just a verbal fog or visual fog in which you can impose your own meaning.

When I first read this piece about two weeks ago it really pissed me off. Rebecca Brown, a creative writing teacher, telling people to shut up? What the hell? And at the time I was also thinking, perhaps she is joking (or being ironic)?

That anyone would take the article non-ironically as I did for about a day, speaks more to an underlying value in Seattle that prefers the sanctimonious, earnest, and successful over the slippery, verbal, and failed. [At one time success was considered failure in Seattle, and when that value was adjusted (since it is clearly nutty) it seems the city went kind of nuts.] Theodore Roethke thought poets should be regarded as business men. Our major civic figures for a long time now have been business men like Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and so on. Even the Sub Pop guys are now seen as businessmen more than anything else. The article made me think a bit of Carrie Nation, the temperance movement firebrand who was egged in England for hectoring an audience about the evils of alcohol. This piece is hectoring the audience of The Stranger (The Stranger!) about the evils of irony. We are essentially reading an essay that eggs itself. That is slapstick, which Seattle needs much more than another businessman.

Nevertheless, Seattle has a strong moralizing bent and the essay struck me as coming from that place as well.

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