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books . . .
>Quoth jnf:
>
>This, however, *is* inside my age-group's window of reference, *and* it
>shares our post-post-modern mindset...
Heh. There is no post-post-modern. The post-modern would eat it. In
the first place, by calling itself post-modern, the post-modern already
admits that it is not really past the modern. Like as long as you obsess
about your ex-lover, you're not really over him or her. Only when your
life stops being defined by how "over" the ex you are, does your life
truly move past the ex. Sooooooo, the only way to get past the
post-modern, or the Modern for the matter, is to come up with a label
that doesn't refer to the past. Otherwise you're just co-dependent
aesthetic theory. Post-post-modern is just a variation on a theme.
Humbly submitted for the aesthetics freaks among us. :p
Lately I've been recommending _The Crying of Lot 49_ by Thomas Pynchon.
Written in the sixties. An' speakin' of the postmodern, this qualifies.
With a twist. The heroin tries to deal with a world where meaning has
become spectral. She herself still has agency. Radical pomo stuff
usually robs the protagonist of agency. Or robs the protagonist of the
category of protagonist. Quite perplexing. It's like going to work and
being told to do a job that doesn't exist, but having to do the job
anyway. Like that. But _Crying of Lot 49_ isn't like that. It just
features a woman discovering what may or may not be an ages old postal
conspiracy and at the same time dealing with her unraveling personal
life. Yeah. Really funny, sometimes disturbing. Good short read.
(Unlike most of TP's novels, which are hu-freakin'-mongous.)
"Tmesis": "Literally a 'cutting.' A fairly rare verbal figure whereby a
word is cut into two parts between which other verbal matter--one word or
more--is inserted. . . . Pound used 'consti-damn-tution' in _The Cantos_.
Tmesis should probably be avoided in ordinary discourse." Harmon and
Holman's _Handbook to Literature_. :p
In the same vein with _Lot 49_, I recommend a much longer book by Umberto
Eco called _Foucault's Pendulum_. For fun, a bunch of editors decide to
put together a history of the world based on the assumption that all of
history is a Templar plot. (See movie _The Saint_ for short short short
summary of what a Templar is . . .) Anyway, you find out in the first
chapter that they're actually right, and in trouble, and the rest of the
book backs up to the beginning and tells you how they got there. That
makes it sound like an adventure story, but actually it's much headier
than that. Lots of esoteric knowledge, academic bantering. I loved
reading it. Eco is an all around brilliant guy. Great Italian fiction
writer, essayist, scholar. Unbe-freakin'-lievably smart.
G'day to y'all.
Fred
np: Philonous (aka Jim Spiegel)--Into Memory
nr: Jack Kerouac--On the Road
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