Just for the Record

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 10 May 2000, Richard Romeo wrote:

> I reiterate that there are plenty of good books.  For those who's boat is 
> floated by the likes of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, fine.  It can be argued 
> that their vision is more acclimated in most cases to the ascendant 
> solispistic narrator, usually male, worried about, usually, females.  Blame 
> the academy for the placing of such writers in the traditional frame, not 
> me.  But from what I've read of them, I believe they are far removed from 
> "traditional" post-moderns like Pynchon, Gaddis, and Coover, e.g., who 
> incorporate more of the outside world into their texts, whether it be film, 
> mythology, aspects of the supernatural, hard science, and the like.

You're not saying characters in Pynchon, Gaddis, and Couver don't
"worry" about women? What's a boy child to worry about fer heaven sake?
Being killed in wars or losing one's job are child's play by comparison.
What mythical world can one envision where this would not be the
case? That p-list-households tend to exist in relative harmony between the
sexes is of course my fervent prayer. In mine there is relative
tranquility enough of the time I suppose. But let's be realistic. Hell,
let's be postmodern. Which brings me to my real concern which may well be
yours as well. Does it make a lot of sense to have a special
classification for novels that are a bit hard to read, indeterminent in
outcome, slightly leftish, and with a generous melding together
high and low culture. Seems like there are better ways to classify
things. It's true the idea of the postmodern had quite a vogue for a
while. I'm not really up on things but do authors still use the word all 
that much, like they did ten or fifteen or so years ago. Architecture
critics once did not not so much now. Funny looking mixes of the
commercial and stately are taken for granted. Some one could
look up and see how many titles of recently published books or articles
contain the word. Anyway, just a few random thoughts. 

				P.