GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[Dave Monroe]

Mark, jbor, et al.: yeah, I was going to bring up Venturi myself, do indeed
think he's relevant here, if only in that "in the air" kind of way.  That
redemption of trash culture thing, for satrters ... Jencks seems largely to
go dismissed as a  crypto- and/or neoconsevative these days, too tired to
reconstruct just why.  The whole sick crew, of course, Fiedler, Sontag,
Klinkowitz, Hassan, Barthelme, Tanner, will have to look into Chase and
Stevick.   In re: Bretonian automatism vs. Olsonian chance, well, I guess
I'd argue that it doesn't matter if the effects are largely the same--just
because lines intersect at some point, doesn't mean they either came from
or are going to the same place (if you'll pardon mon Euclideanisme here)
.   Who's argument was it that modernist works concerns themselves with
epistemology while postmodernist works concern themselves with ontology?
Brian McHale (Postmodernist Fiction)?  Alan Wilde (Horizons of Assent)?
Well, whoever, I'll invoke that for the time being.  At any rate, that's
the sort of distinction I was getting at.  And, yeah, another little
parenthetical suggestion I neglected to make was that Rand's, er, dynamism
might indeed be shelved along with Marinetti's, for more than, other than
mere stylistic, thematic reasons ... Gotta look up that Ebert paper, but
... but I guess I'd tend to consider Nabokov, Finnegans Wake, Beckett
somewhere along the line (I'm sure you can see the Hassan influence here,
see his The Dismemberment of Orpheus), maybe even Borges already
postmodern, with Sterne and Roussel as esp. interesting anomalies, lines of
development not taken up, not in their own time, at any rate, and Stein as
sadly overlooked as Braque in the big picture o' modernism.  And I THINK I
topuched on a distincton along the lines of your own in re: politics 'n'
postmodernism, but ... but thanks for continuing to respond, suggest,
provoke, bibliographize ...