Sustained Criticism

Why is it, that when I do LJ, I am always procrastinating? Is it the nature of the friends page that makes it so totally unavoidable when I have things to avoid?

London is looking less and less likely, fuck it all. I need to contain my expectations, or I will end up furious and disappointed. Which leads to nothing good, no concentration, decapitations left and right.

(You've also just experienced what teachers and lecturers alike have been hounding me for for years: my excessive use of punctuation. The commas are there for a reason, you do not leave them out, they are important. It is a matter of style and I get to direct how you read what I write. Commas and semicolons are also the only way of getting my non-stop sentences pronouncable.)

Right, what I was really going to write, is this: I think I have come to the bottom of my postmodern project. What the internet has done is create a connection, and it created serious hypertextuality. Now all I need to do is spend a few weeks in the library, reading up on what everyone else has said about it and make lists of why, exactly, they're wrong. Perhaps this is the way I will change the world, not by cracking open chests and holding hearts, but by wrecking literature.

Great news, Katrine, I've finished The Road, and agree with you. It is blah. Terribly post-modernistic, in that it is a warning; in that he is scared of what we are doing to ourselves, our relationships, our world; in that there is very little punctuation; in that there are no names. And the list goes on. It is intriguing, as a piece of post-modernism. As a piece of writing, the work of a craftsman, it is not. Call me conservative, but I like my post-modernism with puncutation, thank you very much. I also enjoy my literature with well-crafted sentences, which McCarthy completely lacks.

The story is intriguing, and it was easily enough read for me to not throw a tantrum and refuse to finish it. But that is also it. I can't relish the writing, the soul-searching dialogue or the beautiful scenes. While a post-apocalyptic setting should perhaps rule out beauty, at least in the case of The Road, certain scenes had the capacity of heart-breaking beauty. It just didn't quite get there. The straight-forward, monotonous [fantastic word to type] prose is incapable of touching me as powerfully as the story has potential to do.

Myers wrote A Reader's Manifesto, and criticised American literature (Wikipedia article), and I agree with him on both Auster and McCarthy. I will have to get my hands on a copy of his essay. I have not yet read DeLillo, but have been drooling on his Underworld for a few years. And I think I might have found a new, wholly personal God in Myers, from what I've read of him. – Yes, I will admit that I am a nerd if you ask me to. And I want to read more literary criticism, it is.

And some educated person (I persume it is a man, for what it's worth) thinks The Road, is Post-Southerngothic. Another very interesting idea. I just have to print it out, in order to be able to read it properly.

Addendum: A Reader's Manifesto is apparently out of print, so I have to get it shipped from the US *headdesk*. But, abebooks have some very, very cheap copies. And, of course, some unnecessarily expensive ones.



(Excuse the awful pun in the title, it was, I am afraid, intended.) And I miss both New York and London.
And I found a limited edition, signed version of The Secret History.

I've spent the last two hours in bed, finishing Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. At some point I was high on post-modernism, Foer and Oscar (Schell, not Wilde, for a change); now I contemplate it and can't really make sense of it. And cannot help but think that I am not supposed to make sense of it, and be relieved that I will never have to analyse it.

The doors, or rather, the keyholes and doorknobs, embedded seemingly at random; the pictures of birds; pages 269-271, written in digits correpsonding to those on a cell-phone.

I dearly hope that no one ever brings it to the classroom, to have it picked apart by youngsters and non-readers. And I cannot, for the life of me, make sense of it.

Usually, I would run, arms flailing madly, in the opposite direction if someone tried to hand my anything resembling post-modernism. I think I still will, but Foer certaintly accomplished something.