More fun with POMO

[Dave Monroe]

... well, just cranky enough about such things to point out that, as
amusing/befuddling/irritating/whatever so-called (still haven't mastered
that soi-dissant ...) "postmodern," er, discursive idiosyncracies might
be (and I kick them around with a certain sense of humor myself, with
perhaps the same mix of ironic amusement and actual empathy that I have
for, say, the 60s hipsterisms I just barely grew up with, but, hey, one
learns the vocabulary one learns, so ...), there are some fairly
reasonable reasons for employing them, say, not quite buying into the
old-skool Marxist and/or existentialist underpinnings of a term like
"alienation."

Different terms are, indeed, different terms, no such thing as a
"synonym," not in any perfect sense, no?  That "signal bleed," indeed,
but ... but note that ALL critical discourse (for starters ...), all
critical terms, whatever, is/are "jargon" (to use my particularly
disfavorite bit of, er, jargon), ALL specialized vocabularly.  "Plot,"
"character," "setting," "theme," what have you, some are (not so) simply
more embedded, more naturalized, than others, is all ...

Me, I've no small problem reading anything of any particular, any useful
significance out of some of the more heightened, ennobling, old-skool
aestheticisms, moralisms, even, put in play here, but, well, I realize
it's the way some (were brought up to) read, it's largely still the way
people are lead to believe they should read (even) these days, and ...
but, Terrance, you do it exceedingly well, and I've learned from, been
provoked by it, so ... well, just think stuff like that Times article,
which, by the way, I find pretty entertaining, myself (and I imagine I
might at best straddle that fine line beyond which lies self-parody) can
be read as a sort of cheap shot, a swerving of sorts from dealing
responsibly with others on their own terms, which, of course, you need
not take as your own ...