Mature works that you "outgrew" for some reason or another

Cafe Society
1

We all have books/music/TV shows/etc that we used to listen to as kids/teenagers that, upon looking back, are not as… totally awesome… as we once thought. But how about stuff that we got into in our 20s, 30s, and beyond that, looking back now, you wonder “Did I really like that? Why?”

To me, the #1 example of this (currently) is Harlan Ellison. I got into him when I was 21, 22 or so which started a good 5-10 year period where I would try to find and read everything the man wrote (especially his non-fiction essays), all of it read with the knowledge that I was reading one of the Greatest Living American Writers EVAH. I’d go to conventions and get him to sign books, making sure to attend every workshop/conference/lecture that he was scheduled for.

And, as you know, life happens. I caught up with most of his stuff so that the backlog shrank (meaning I read less and less Ellison viz other authors). I got into different authors, different mediums… also got married and had a kid. So the Ellison books were picked up less and less often, to the point where year(s) would pass before my picking up a Harlan Ellison book.

So about a year ago, I decided to revisit Mr. Ellison and recapture the love by reading through the more than 25 novels/collections/essays, spanning 4 decades, that were on my shelf. And while he is an amazingly talented author, I frankly got bored with his histrionics, the way that any and everything that he didn’t like/care for was A Threat To Liberal Civilization As We Know It. Star Wars (making people stupid). Video games (teaching kids that there’s no winning in life (huh?)). People he disagreed with politically. Child beauty pageants. Jerry Falwell. Illiterate criminals. Kitty Genovese. The list goes on and on and on and… on.

It was wearying. It was tiring. It was like listening to a perpetually angry 24-year old rant about whatever he happens to be looking at. And I realized: I had outgrown Harlan Ellison; that whatever he offered to me 15 years ago… well, that was 15 years ago. I’m different now, but he’s still the same. (If you want my opinion, it was the kid that did it. For over 4 decades Ellison wrote like he’s still 24 years old, responsible for and to nobody but himself. It would be interesting to see how having the responsibility for another life would’ve modified Ellison’s writing (as far as I know he never had children. Sure never referenced them in his writing, and Ellison loves nothing more than talking about the World of Ellison.))

How about y’all? Anybody else go through something similar?

2

When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I was crazy about Dory Previn’s songs. I bought every Dory Previn album, and I played them so often that I memorized all the lyrics.

Now that I am sixty, I cringe when I listen to this stuff. Although Dory’s songs are clever and thought-provoking, the masochistic whining is just too much to take.

I do still cherish these lines, though (From the song “Be Careful, Baby, Be Careful”):

Kick a person when she’s up,
And you can break her spirit, you know.
But kick a person when she’s down
And all you’ll break is your toe.

3

I read Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love when I was 19 or so. 35 years later, I still appreciate his sci-fi literature, but I reject his paternalistic ideas.

4

I was big into Ayn Rand in my early twenties after graduating from college, getting a good job and being confident that clearly I knew it all.

Now that I’m in my late thirties…damn. Ayn Rand? Embarrassing.
And a slightly related topic…seen The Graduate lately? Back in college I was right there with 'em. “Yeah! Get her out of that church! Stick it to the man!” Now after that same scene I think they’re idiots, totally screwed, and that maybe he should’ve had listened to those stock tips from his Dad’s buddy.

5

You forgot that period from about '70 to '75 when Ellison apparently believed writing crazed drug trips with no point was the apex of the short story form. I’ve had to revisit a lot of those in the past few weeks and it’s really grating on my nerves…

6

That’s what I came in here to post. When I was a freshman in college I thought Ayn Rand was the greatest genius/writer I’d ever been exposed to. Thankfully, my ideas about greatness have changed. :slight_smile:

It isn’t that I hate her now, I just see her in a completely different way. I suppose I will always have a fondness for The Fountainhead, but how I got through Atlas Shrugged I will never know.

7

Oooh, Ayn Rand. That’s a good one. (Though I haven’t read AS in about a decade - perhaps I ought to trot it out again to see if it fits in this category for me).

Actually, that was my thinking when I first saw the film when I was 19. But I have a feeling that a lot of people would agree with you upon a re-viewing of the movie.

8

I started reading Robert B. Parker in my early-ish 20s and enjoyed him until my early-ish 30s when his tendency to write the exact same story over and over again finally did me in.

9

Don’t forget every frickin’ detail of what every frickin’ body was wearing. Oh, and how Hawk and Spenser would shoot 50 people if it would help cheer Susan up.

10

No what really got tiresome was the rotation of Hawk-Vinnie-Chollo, Hawk-Vinnie-Chollo, Hawk-Vinnie-Chollo.

11

I have seen it lately (sometime within the past couple of years), and I think some of that ambiguity is in the last scene of the film. If you haven’t watched it recently, put it on and skip to the very end. The way Mike Nichols holds the scene in the bus for longer than expected, and you can see the feeling of “yeah, we’re awesome!” slowly settle into “my god, what have we done”. Brilliant acting from Hoffman and Ross. Brilliant directing from Nichols.

IMHO, of course.

12

The Doors. The last time I paid attention to their stuff (although not much of it, I admit), I thought it was one part good music, one-tenth part fun, and eight and a half parts overwrought melodramatic posturing.

I should probably check it out again, though, in case I was just having a bad day or something…

RR

13

When I was in middle school and high school, I loved John Jakes. I read *The Kent Family Chronicles * and the *North and South * trilogy to literal tatters.

Now that I’m older, I realize Jakes isn’t really that good a writer. Every single woman in the Kent Family Chronicles is raped, whether it’s date rape or gang rape or kidnap and rape. In North and South, the woman are also one dimensional, either being totally evil or totally angelic. He also killed off a main character and shipped one family off to California, never to be heard from until the “reunion” at the end.

Meh. But, he did thrall me for a while.

14

IMDB has this to say about the final scene:

“On “Inside the Actors Studio”, director Mike Nichols claims that the final “sobering” emotion that Benjamin and Elaine go through was due to the fact that he had just been shouting at the two of them to laugh in the scene. The actors were so scared that after laughing they stopped, scared. Nichols liked it so much, he kept it.”

So it doesn’t look like the “my god, what have we done” reaction was planned at all. And personally, I never thought that’s what the ending meant anyway. It seemed to me more of a “we’re going to be alright” ending. But I’ve only seen the whole movie once (but the ending several times).

15

Just because it wasn’t planned doesn’t make it less brilliant. I’ve heard tell that they were still working out the ending of “Casablanca” right up to when they started shooting it.

But that’s interesting, I hadn’t heard that before. Thanks.

16

I don’t suppose it will make things better for some of you to hear that Charles Webb has finally written the sequel to The Graduate. It’s called Home School.

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I saw that in Barnes and Noble the other day and according to the description of Amazon, they do seem to end up OK:

“It’s one of modern pop culture’s great mysteries: What happened after The Graduate’s Ben and Elaine busted out of Elaine’s church wedding and fled the world of hypocritical convention personified by her mother, Mrs. Robinson? In this sequel to his seminal 1963 novel, Webb’s droll answer is that, 11 years on, they’ve settled down to a quiet suburban life in New York’s Westchester County. Their sole antiestablishment gesture is to home-school their sons, Matt and Jason, using progressive educational nostrums that lead to open-minded debates over Jason’s desire to study the French Revolution by building a backyard guillotine. When a crisis arises that only her legendary wiles can resolve, Mrs. Robinson—now primly called Nan—re-ensconces herself in their lives and guest room. Horrified, Ben and Elaine figure that a dose of the counterculture will expel the dragon lady, so they invite into the house a family of hippie home-schoolers so organic that the mother still breast-feeds her seven-year-old daughter. Armed only with his stammering earnestness, Ben tries to protect his family from an improbable alliance between Nan and the let-it-all-hang-out '70s. (That was exactly right, the best possible response, he reassures Jason after the lad gently declines a swig of breast milk.) Webb crafts both a wicked sendup of the post-Vietnam cultural revolution and an acute satire of the romantic associations surrounding his characters and the generation-defining film, slyly suggesting that Ben and Elaine are the squarest people of all.”

18

“…slyly suggesting that Ben and Elaine are the squarest people of all.”

Wait… they weren’t?

Perhaps I missed the entire point of the character but from my perspective (seeing it 20+ years after it was released), the only thing “countercultural” about Ben was that he wanted to sit by the pool all day. :wink:

19

Funny thing. The Doors were the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. I can’t say I’ve completely outgrown them but my appreciation of the group was significantly declined since I was in my teens. To say Jim Morrison’s songwriting was erratic is an understatement. Sometimes in the same song a great line will be followed by a teeth-grinding clunker of a couplet just a few seconds later.

20

RiverRunner writes:

> The last time I paid attention to their stuff (although not much of it, I admit), I
> thought it was one part good music, one-tenth part fun, and eight and a half
> parts overwrought melodramatic posturing.

Assuming that there are supposed to be ten parts in a whole, that leaves four-tenths of a part unaccounted for.