PoMo Studies Hoax (gets taken seriously)

Mon Oct 8 10:43:59 CDT 2018

Yes.  And I am so glad someone besides myself has read this and that you did, Laura!  (NYC courts, indeed!)     

Also, de Pavo doesn’t take himself or his writing seriously at all and he doesn't play that yucky winky-wink game with the reader, either. 

He’s got a new one out -  “The Lost Empress”  -  it’s long and has had good press.   I’m so tempted.  lol 

"(de Pavo) introduces readers to a cast of characters unlike any other in modern fiction: dreamers and exiles, immigrants and night-shift workers, a lonely pastor and others on the fringes of society—each with their own impact on the fragile universe they navigate."

“De la Pava . . . can seem like an avenging angel, at least for those with a certain view of what ails contemporary American literature . . . . Hilariously profane . . . . Thrilling . . . . Colloquial in tempo yet nerdy in content, divinely detached yet intimately casual in tone, impossibly learned and improvisational at the same time . . . . There are, to be sure, trace elements in Lost Empress of David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis and other postmodern giants. What’s unusual—electrifyingly so—is to see this kind of polyphonic, self-conscious literary performance and all-stops-pulled-out postmodernist production value brought to bear on underclass lives, and on questions of social justice that tend not to penetrate the soundproofing of the ivory tower.”
—The New Yorker

“The book oscillates between hilarious surrealism and shocking reality. As in his first novel, A Naked Singularity, Mr de la Pava (a public defender) deploys his expertise in a maximalist form reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace . . . . With messianic fervour, he conjures up marginalised voices and the horrors of mass incarceration, against a backbeat of sporting thrills and that apocalyptic crescendo.”
—The Economist

Becky
finally reading Wm Vollmann’s “The Ice Shirt”   -  sigh - loving it - 

> On Oct 8, 2018, at 7:58 AM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think the pomo elements in Dee Pava's book work better than they might because of the brutal reality (NYC courts) he's describing. The first chapter is a highly accurate portrayal of a legal aid lawyer's day in the utterly insane justice system. On the way home he encounters a roller-skating chimpanzee (if I recall) on the Brooklyn Bridge. Not that jarring after what comes before.
> 
> Laura
> 
> On Sun, Oct 7, 2018, 6:50 PM Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Thank you John.   You always make sense. 
> 
> I think pomo has kind of exhausted itself in the 21st century but some of the ideas and techniques are still around - usefully,  imo. Like for Serio de la Pava’s funky chunky little legal crime caper book,  "A Naked Singularity”  (2010?)  
> 
> 
> Becky
> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
> 
> > On Oct 7, 2018, at 2:41 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > When I first studied a smattering of pomo theory at university I found
> > it a wonderfully useful way of sidestepping a bunch of power
> > structures that otherwise seemed unchallengeable in our society.
> > Later I taught a course in it and found myself much more ambivalent
> > about that usefulness.
> > A long while later, today, I think the best thinking on postmodern
> > theory remains Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Logic of Late
> > Capitalism (which also popularised the term itself). Jameson's was a
> > very critical analysis of a network of cultural artefacts he thought
> > said something about late capitalism, ie postmodernism is the cultural
> > face of hyper-capitalism. I haven't found anything to refute this and
> > it's why I think postmodernism is both very troubling and absolutely
> > of our times.
> > On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 1:32 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> yes.
> >> 
> >> I like the word "real' here in its straightforward, hard-working way. Some
> >> say Reality, a real conception of it as real,[sic] so to speak, has been
> >> weakened in our understanding because of Po-Mo. I can't judge.   I do like
> >> this nuanced statement and only want to accent Kafka on the 'art' of a
> >> 'book/novel':  It must be like an axe to crack the frozen ice within us.
> >> 
> >> "The real issue with all arts is the degree to which it generates genuine
> >> awe, insight, laughter, enjoyment, and the degree to which it stirs the
> >> waters and compels us to think and question and see in fresh ways."
> >> 
> >> And I think talking about any work of art clearly and with whatever
> >> intelligence we can bring to it is what criticism is--or should be.
> >> 
> >> On Sat, Oct 6, 2018 at 10:41 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> While I find Morris's insults juvenile and unnecessarily troll-like. I
> >>> remember when I first joined the list and Post Modernism was used by most
> >>> participants as hip and insightful and descriptive of Pynchon.I was openly
> >>> dubious. I tried to get a grasp on what it was and found strains of thought
> >>> that were important: cultural and personal context as needed to understand
> >>> a phenomena, deconstrution as a tool, the rejection of isms you mention,
> >>> and to a lesser degree the difficulty or in some arguments the
> >>> impossibility of all communication mediated by language or symbols. I just
> >>> never saw the value or intelligence of the term itself, which seemed mostly
> >>> a way to seem hiply contemporary. It has the same obvious flaw as the term
> >>> modernism; it just can’t last. It also became obvious that people meant
> >>> different things when they used it.
> >>> 
> >>> At the time I had come to the conclusion in thinking about the labels
> >>> applied to art history that there was something misleading about these
> >>> labels. Can a “modern” artist be inspired by ancient tribal arts? But more
> >>> than such anomalies it is the individual nature of making art, the
> >>> uniqueness of artists and their work that is the problem. Often a single
> >>> one or 2 two artists or artist fit the label  and others are ineptly
> >>> crammed into the package. If these labels were really needed and helpful
> >>> they would be more justified but they seem to be a by-product of a cultural
> >>> obsession with labels rather than a clarifying and informing use of
> >>> language. Some such terms are more useful than others. Art nouveau was a
> >>> style movement affecting many products and buildings and evokes a useful
> >>> image to anyone who has seen some of the work. Of course if you tranlate it
> >>> into English it would be called new art and no-one would know what you are
> >>> talking about.
> >>> 
> >>> For me the problem with these “conservative” thinkers is that they apply
> >>> what could be called post modern analysis to Post Modernism but they refuse
> >>> to apply this same critical thinking to their own meaningless labels and
> >>> cultural blind spots. They themselves want to be associated with
> >>> “traditional” values, but they are not Christians, they are not
> >>> capitalists, they are not constitutionalists, they despise other people’s
> >>> “freedom”, and it is virtually impssible to tell what the fuck they want to
> >>> “conserve”. Do they really love the flag in some bizarre symbolic
> >>> relationship or is it the ultimate representative of their violent embrace
> >>> of conformity and the identity politics they claim to despise?
> >>> 
> >>> The real issue with all arts is the degree to which it generates genuine
> >>> awe, insight, laughter, enjoyment, and the degree to which it stirs the
> >>> waters and compels us to think and question and see in fresh ways.
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >>>> On Oct 5, 2018, at 1:24 AM, Matthew Taylor <matthew.taylor923 at gmail.com>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>> You: David Morris
> >>>> Me: Matthew Taylor
> >>>> 
> >>>> (Did I do that right?)
> >>>> 
> >>>> My point was that postmodernism is as misunderstood as it is denigrated,
> >>>> and Jordan Peterson—who is (unfortunately) extremely popular and
> >>>> influential right now—has popularized the term as a bogeyman among a
> >>> bunch
> >>>> of people who have confused and contradictory ideas about what it means.
> >>>> You can't really talk about contemporary popular understandings of
> >>>> "postmodernism" or "myth" or "archetypes" without at least mentioning
> >>> him.
> >>>> I was responding to John Bailey, agreeing with his point that it is now
> >>> the
> >>>> "catch-all term encompassing everything despised by the conservative
> >>>> neolibs who follow Jordan Peterson and the like."
> >>>> 
> >>>> Peterson himself politicizes the term, trying to associate it with things
> >>>> like Marxism. My post also argued that whatever postmodernism may or may
> >>>> not be, it sure as hell *isn't* that. I wasn't talking about politics to
> >>>> "ignore" postmodernism, I was saying that a great deal of the popular
> >>>> discourse about postmodernism politicizes it in a way that is flat-out,
> >>>> demonstrably wrong. I think any discussion about contemporary
> >>> understanding
> >>>> of postmodernism has to contend with Jordan Peterson—he is a force to be
> >>>> reckoned with even if he's a dummy. Writing a bestselling book and
> >>> getting
> >>>> ~$80k/month on Patreon means he has a hell of a platform, and I think a
> >>> lot
> >>>> of the misunderstanding of what postmodernism might mean can be
> >>> attributed
> >>>> directly to him.
> >>>> 
> >>>> "Like" it or not, I think it's probably important to at least have an
> >>>> accurate understanding.
> >>>> 
> >>>> On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 9:24 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>>> You: I genuinely don't know what you mean by saying that my post
> >>> "confirms
> >>>>>> PoMo school to be drowning in politics."
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> Me: your post focused on a political asshole, and ignored anything about
> >>>>> what PoMo is/was.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> David Morris
> >>>>> 
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>>>>> 
> >>>> --
> >>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>> 
> >>> --
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> >>> 
> >> --
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> > --
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> 
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