luka
Well-known member
Barney Ronay is funny, works on a deliberately small scale, little observations, gentle piss taking, sort of comments your mate would make while you watch the game together on telly. Very human. I can't see the comparison.
David Foster Wallace
- Thread starter francesco
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Barney Ronay is funny, works on a deliberately small scale, little observations, gentle piss taking, sort of comments your mate would make while you watch the game together on telly. Very human. I can't see the comparison.
william kent
Well-known member
Oh yeah, it's totally possible and I believe it when he's discussing stuff like mental illness and AA, but the general sincerity, the stuff like This is Water, feels a bit off to me.
william kent
Well-known member
His best stuff is his nonfiction, imo, the stuff where he has an external subject to focus on and can't talk about himself too much.
blissblogger
Well-known member
the reported story about going on a cruise is top
william kent
Well-known member
I liked the Federer one a lot.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
To me it's about making sport, not *more* vivid than it is, but *as* vivid as it is, but in prose. Which I think DFW does. I think this is true of both these writers, because I don't really give a fuck about sport and I'll still read them writing about it. Except Barnay Ronay strikes me as a try hard sometimes, a forehead strainer.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I much prefer reading about sport to watching it.
I suppose because sport is about boredom punctuated with stimulation, and writing is about constant stimulation...
Really, then, I was lying just then - I want it to be *more* vivid than sport, cerebrally speaking.
I suppose because sport is about boredom punctuated with stimulation, and writing is about constant stimulation...
Really, then, I was lying just then - I want it to be *more* vivid than sport, cerebrally speaking.
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Agent
dgaf ngaf cgaf
Can't help noticing someone has recently revived threads about Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, JG Ballard, and Richard Powers. Side bets on the next canonical postmodern novelist to get a thread? My money is on Philip K. Dick. Natural progression from the Wake-McLuhan-psychedelic nexus. If it was up to me, it would be Bret Easton Ellis, who actually has some new material worth commenting on, or Joan Didion.
Agent
dgaf ngaf cgaf
Yeah his essays on the McCain campaign trail and the late 90's porn convention are so funny and heartbreaking at the same time. I mean, all of these writers (DeLillo, Pynchon, DFW, etc.) have souls, just divided, heartbroken, long-suffering ones. Come to think of it, maintaining a balance of funny and heartbroken might be the prerequisite for success as a pomo artist. Or it was the prereq since pomo is dead. It's like The Walking Dead, version. Time to just let go and move on, we're in the zombie apocalypse now and you just have to let go (I can't do my fucking Rick Grimes impersonation anymore I should just end it).
william kent
Well-known member
What comes after postmodernism?
Agent
dgaf ngaf cgaf
Interesting. If you take a dialectical approach to the question, and employ the vaguest possible definitions of modernism and postmodernism, you could arrive at the synthesis of absolutism and relativism as the answer. Now, what that would look like, I have no idea, and it could be something like gnosis/anamnesis. But I'm working on it, or it is working me over, all the time.
william kent
Well-known member
I've seen the term "metamodernism" bandied about, but I don't know much about it.
In 2010 the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker introduced the term metamodernism [24] as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their article 'Notes on metamodernism' they assert that the 2000s are characterized by the emergence of a sensibility that oscillates between, and must be situated beyond, modern positions and postmodern strategies. As examples of the metamodern sensibility Vermeulen and van den Akker cite the 'informed naivety', 'pragmatic idealism' and 'moderate fanaticism' of the various cultural responses to, among others, climate change, the financial crisis, and (geo)political instability.
The prefix 'meta' here refers not to some reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond.
In 2010 the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker introduced the term metamodernism [24] as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their article 'Notes on metamodernism' they assert that the 2000s are characterized by the emergence of a sensibility that oscillates between, and must be situated beyond, modern positions and postmodern strategies. As examples of the metamodern sensibility Vermeulen and van den Akker cite the 'informed naivety', 'pragmatic idealism' and 'moderate fanaticism' of the various cultural responses to, among others, climate change, the financial crisis, and (geo)political instability.
The prefix 'meta' here refers not to some reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond.
Agent
dgaf ngaf cgaf
I don't know. That doesn't feel like a synthesis. More like a compromise between modernism and postmodernism. I suspect whatever it will be will absolutely annihilate the idea that we were ever modern at all. Like breaking through on DMT or Salvia. You just stare in awe realizing you exist on a very low level of the evolutionary chain. More advanced technology and beings are in, around, beyond us all the time.
william kent
Well-known member
Apparently he lifted a bit from Gaddis too.