Punk, literature and midlife creativity: ordinary stories, ordinary men

This chapter sets out to detect traces of punk’s ideological and aesthetic legacy as it assimilates with midlife cultural and creative labour as detected in contemporary creative writing, leaving behind musical fandom and musical ingenuity (Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. PM Press, 1985), ‘DIY’ fashion (Hebdige, Subculture: the meaning of style. Routledge, 1979), and territorial sociality of a scene (Straw, Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music. Cultural Studies, 5(3), 368–388, 1991; Bennett and Peterson, Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Vanderbilt University Press, 2004; Crossley, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–80. Manchester University Press, 2015) and, alternatively, considering punk as something of a conscious, retained ‘philosophy’ that’s endured over time and understood via the words of creatively active people within the field. Seeking a unifying theory of creative disposition and tenacity, taking the form of three portraits of middle-aged male writers, the data is drawn from a larger and diverse intersectional ethnographic study on the personal meaning of creativity (Miles, Midlife Creativity and Identity: Life into Art. Emerald, 2019). It is concerned with philosophical, sociological and psychological aspects of what it ‘is’ and ‘means’ to be creative, drawing on quasi-Bergsonian experiences of time, action and meaning that are often connected to embedded ideologies and identity (Bergson, Key Writings (K. Ansell Pearson and J. Ó Maoilearca, Eds. and M. McMahon, Trans.). Bloomsbury, 2014), examining the shift towards a realisation of the creative muse that harnesses the lingering energy and intent of the original ‘scene’ into the creation of, inter alia, memoir, motion picture screenplays, science fiction novels and the odd work of musical biography.