as a teen I read Coupland’s Generation X and wasn’t then aware that it was the name of Billy Idol’s first band. but turns out that’s not where he got the name anyway.
Doctorow’s blog featured this link a couple days ago which explores Paul Fussell’s 1983 book Class, as it pertains to an emerging class that had somewhat-successfully been meme’d (later, by someone else) as the “creative class”, but which was defined by Fussell:
X was not a class, but a “self-cultivated” meritocratic “category” in which anyone could join: “You are not born an X person, as you are born and reared a prole or a middle. You become an X person, or to put it more bluntly, you earn X-personhood by a strenuous effort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are indispensable.” Fussell saw Category X as a “parody aristocracy” who “pursue remote and uncommonplace knowledge” such as ”Serbo-Croatian prosody, geodes, or Northern French church vestments of the eleventh century.” Coupland liked Class so much he wrote Fussell a fan letter.
“I have X’ed myself from your world” - Charles Manson, July 24, 1970, the first day of testimony in the Tate-LaBianca trial; he’d carved an X into his forehead the previous night.
In “The Warhol Diaries”, Andy mentions meeting with the Ford family in Grosse Pointe, MI in regards to doing a portrait, and he expresses fear at going because “…isn’t that near Detroit?”
This guy who’s lived in NYC for nearly his entire adult life being scared of Detroit amuses me greatly.
