The Pale King and Post Postmodernism

We wait. Wait for moments where we’re no longer waiting, like when we’re having sex or are on vacation. And this goes on for about 80 years until we wait to die.

How do we combat self-imposed boredom? We think. And we feel. We think so much because we feel so deeply. And that’s how most people live. Waiting for about 95% and 5% living. There may  be occasional balances but for the most part it is skewed thusly.

A 50/50 balance is hard. Very hard. I can’t even imagine 100% living – maybe that’s what Buddha and Jesus did? It requires practice and meditation. When we find ourselves waiting and living in the waiting, this is called excitement. But excitement can quickly build expectations, which when disappointed mean that you lived maybe for a while, but prematurely returned to waiting.

This is what The Pale King seems to be about, according to Lev Grossman’s review. Which is why it sounds so good. DFW couldn’t deal with waiting anymore. But he knew about the imbalance. Infinite Jest documents it with the aid of postmodern gewgaws, which make it the postmodern novel, but which also detract from the human side of the novel. It aligns more closelywith the ironic farce postmodernism esteems. Perhaps The Pale King is one of first true forays into post postmodernism. I’ll let you know.

Subjectivism

By now you should be familiar with all my different modernisms: postmodernism, post postmodernism, metamodernism, etc. And while these all have bearing upon my work, I think it's most important to articulate that my work is about one person. Hot Love on the Wing explores one subjectivity.

Whereas modernism was about exploring different subjectivities objectively, and postmodernism was all about rejecting the possibility of such a thing, this new movement is all about the individual.

Why do we all Tweet whatever we're doing, update our Facebook status, let our friends know where we are on Foursquare, blog on Blogspot? To get noticed. To be understood and accepted.

We're all curating our online experience to each other. Whoever is most popular, has the most friends, followers, is the coolest. Even capitalism is in on it when businesses are vying for Twitter followers. But ultimately it's about you.

The number of memoirs published has blown up thanks to e-publishing. Why? Because everyone who has a story is now able to share it.

This technology is so new that the repercussions of this are difficult to fathom. But you can bet your bippy they're going to start showing over this decade. Don't believe me? In Egypt they joke that “Nasser was killed by poison, Sadat by a bullet and Mubarak by Facebook.” Just wait.

Postmodernism Revisited

Okay, enough is enough. I’ve read most classic literature, and I’ll get back to it. But it’s time to flex my postmodernism muscles.

I started American Psycho last year and put it down after a hundred fifty pages. I picked it up again this morn and remembered the wave of disgust that it left me with. The violence, crudity and pornography all make for a page-turner, but the true skill of Ellis is when he describes men’s fashion; when he delves into the psycho’s mind as he wonders about whether his lover would love him more if she weren’t cheating on her boyfriend; and when he notes the evasive eye contact of enemies.

Generally, however, I feel sick after reading it, and I wonder whether it’s a testament to the power of the work. Does good art inspire visceral disgust? Or is that a symptom of entertaining middle-brow work? I touched on this in my Black Swan post, and want to suggest the latter.

This is termed the grotesque. We continue reading to see if the grotesque can be conquered, but in this case, it is the reader who has been conquered, fooled. Thus the postmodernism. But something tells me that the best works of art do not invite reaction by appealing to the most basic human emotions, but rather, to the loftiest. 

Free Associative Post Postmodern Descriptions

 My friends are naming their dog Prince Chicken Sandwich Can't Be Asked Jackson and that's the condensed version. But this allows you to call the dog any of the above, or whatever the fuck you want.

So you can basically call anything you want, anything you want. Let me provide an example:

"Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hill-flanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark." (Look Homeward, Angel, 144).

How great is that? Soluble means able to be dissolved, and yes dark is able to be dissolved. But you know this dude had this word shoot into his head and was like, "That dark is soluble. The morning is pearl-gray." And it was so.

We've reached the height of postmodernism, when you can incorporate whatever you want to achieve absurdity or high seriousness. So if you want to describe your dog, the first thing that comes to mind is as good as any.

You can call the dawn whatever you want. Let's try. The orchid blue morning broke suddenly like a storm-washed crescent over the slop-bricked town. Pretty shitty, right? But at least you get a vague idea of what I'm talking about, the reality I'm trying to define. Outdo me, please. That is the beauty of this post postmodernism thing.

Thomas Wolfe's Modernism

Thomas Wolfe is a badass writer. Although he wrote Look Homeward, Angel at the height of the modernist movement, in 1928, he employs various postmodern techniques. For example, upon his birth he manages to remove some of the self-indulgence of writing a bildungsroman by asking the reader if you are familiar with what had happened during the course of history up until that moment.

He goes on to list a number of current, as well as ancient, events in order to both minimize the effect of his birth as another common circumstance, while aggrandizing it in a list of notable historical occurrences. In this series of postmodern paragraphs, he moves from second person to first and eventually back to third. The modernist techniques are most apparent when he attempts to probe different consciousnesses. He soon thereafter describes how he, as a little baby, thought:

"He had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come through language."

So now I plan my own escape, again, through language.

The Hipster's Diminishing Cultural Capital

A review of the new book “Whiter Shades of Pale” has me lamenting the continuous barrage of self definition and satirical placement white people love. The author of “Stuff White People Like” may have a point in mocking his fellow whitey, but in a way, isn’t he perpetuating the system? White people love to feel guilty about being white. An essay in the New York Times discussing “the hipster,” examines how this has occurred.

De gustibus non est disputandum, or, concerning matters of taste there is no dispute. The hipster and the modern white person show that there is. Elevation of one and suppression of another is what being human is about, but what if, instead of feeling a sense of superiority or political correctness, we could simply observe and appreciate the average lower-class and the aging middle class hipster, in the same non-disparaging way?
  
We know that there are levels of quality in everything, but to justify our knowledge of quality over others is the mark of Bourdieu’s “cultural capital.” We want to prove to ourselves that we deserve what we have because of what we know, and that those below us economically must know less. In fact, they know about different things, or perhaps have learned the same things in a different way. True artists  should be able to appreciate all kinds of people and ideas without condescending or pretending, or even feeling layers of guilt for political incorrectness. That should replace the ironical self-consciousness of postmodernism.

The Javits Center and Post Postmodernism

Yesterday Daniel Adler went to a trade show at the Javits Center, that huge structure that will one day be remembered as a relic of postmodernism. You know when you go to one of those old malls that has pinks and turquoises everywhere and you think, wow this place must have been great – 35 years ago. That’s what will happen to the Javits Center in about another 20 years. Because I.M. Pei designed it, it will look a better for wee bit longer.

While I was away from the office, I received a nice e-mail highlighting 10 aspects of postmodernism. I have been stewing about post postmodernism recently, and have used some of those aspects to redefine the shape of a couple of tenets described in the above link.

1.    Opposition to authority has become a general acceptance of authority. Religion no longer inculcates morality. The police do that these days. You don’t kill someone because you’re afraid that you will spend a lifetime in hell as was thought maybe fifty years ago; you don’t kill them because you are afraid of being caught and send to prison. When Foucault adumbrated this notion, it led to a resistance against the system. These days, we accept it.

2.    Postmodernists rejected Truth. Post postmodernism embraces it in our era of digital similitudes. It is understood and transmitted that there are certain universal emotions, like love, anger, and sadness. These are conveyed in an intimate manner in contemporary arts, often encouraging the viewer to interact to better understand the universality of such notions.

When Will Post Postmodernism Start Already???

 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dickens’ famous first sentence still resounds so clearly because of its universality – every age can apply it to their own. But that doesn’t mean we’re all vain; it means that we all need to focus on what makes our moment special.

Jonathan Franzen has won rave reviews for his new book Freedom, inspiring a new word – Franzenfreude – to describe the feelings of anger from mass entertainment writers as they deplore his Time cover and title of “Great American Novelist.” The book came out yesterday, but it seems to be special not for what it attempts to do, but for what it does. That is, there are no attempts toward a post postmodernism, or a stylistic avant garde art as he admitted there were in The Corrections, but instead, he depicts a culture through a novelistic lens.

That doesn’t mean that avant garde art doesn’t have a place in today’s society. The reason Franzen has been so widely lauded is that he has reverted to expressing human psychology simply – the way many of the best novels do. That doesn’t mean there’s not room for innovation. And while the specialization of last decade’s novels – the delving into ethnic family histories, the intricate layers of narrative and information – was arguably the end of postmodernism, the fact that Facebook Places has just been released as a way to update your exact physical presence means that we are still in the end of that movement, according to Frederic Jameson.

Everyone is in a tizzy, but we have still yet to fully embrace a new era, at least artistically. It seems that political revolution breeds artistic revolution. Modernism took at least the first 20 years of the 20th century to begin, and was a response  to a catastrophic war. Postmodernism was a response to JFK’s assassination and the race riots of the 60’s. Let’s hope that post postmodernism, or whatever they will call it, won’t need the same kind of catalyst.

I'll Be Carving Your Cantaloupe Tonight

Tonight's a great night to carve fruit, I thought, digging my spoon into the stringy ganglion of the cantaloupe. I can do it with a knife, but it's more difficult to get all of the seeds in the garbage can; it's much easier with a spoon.

I sit at the table with my cantaloupe on the plate and I cut it into crescents using Guillermo's white handled Brazilian knife. I then lie it flat and quickly dice at it, like a cantaloupe chef, but not to cut through the rind, just enough to allow me to bend the slice against its natural propensity and see gaps between bite size orange teeth smile back at me. I suck so the juice doesn't spill down my fingers and flecks of juice don't fly onto the table but this proves useless and sounds unattractive. I sit back down with a paper towel in my hands. The fruit is succulent, ripe, sweet. I eat my fill and wipe the table down, put on a pot of water for tea and clean the kitchen.

I brought the plate with half a cantaloupe over near the sink, and collected the eaten canteloupe slices with difficulty - like wet fish they flopped and slipped through my hand. This is all that fit in the garbage. I unhooked the plastic bag from its holder and sitting it on the floor tied the handles, an angry up-facing cantaloupe stuck out at either gap. It would be too late to turn it over now, I thought. And I took out the garbage.

As I was walking back up the stairs I saw a girl who was with me yesterday on the subway. Watching me stare, she said "Hey." I  said "Hey," in disbelief. It was not the girl.

Postmodernism Between The Ancients

Scene: Heraclitus and his wife in a supermarket deciding on tomorrow's dinner. 

He: Plotting is living. It is the driving force behind human consciousness, the advancement of the individual, the state, the world. How can we bear death without organizing life's events? 

She: What is a life only of events? 

He: Without a plan, empty chaos, undeserving of death's culmination.

She: Meanwhile, time flows and your plots are oars in the river. Friendship, love, enmity, it all drifts away from you before you see it. 

He: The plots help us for when the time comes to square up against fate. 

She: If you let it carry you, you could see more landscape. 

He: We would get lost. When we fail, the challenge of structure is satisfying in itself.

She: You said it, we fail. What's the point of planning for failure? 

He: Failure is certain. Life is uncertain. What's the point at all?

She: That's exactly it. None.