There are two notable quotes in the article. First, by Alexis Grant, the author:

One comment in particular really resonated with me, made me think, she’s so right, I can improve that.

(She) said… my manuscript read too much like a report home and not enough like a story.

Bam. That was it. One sentence. It hit home, made me think about my project in a new way.

Second, by Sven Birkets, author of The Art of Time in Memoir (the quote is from said book):

Not only is the sequential approach a chore for the writer, but it’s often a deadly bore for the reader. The point is story, not chronology, and in memoir the story all but requires the dramatic ordering that hindsight affords. The question is not what happened when, but what, for the writer, was the path of realization.

As a naturally introspective person, I use a lot of self-analysis in my writing of how past events & experiences have coloured my opinions, personal philosophies & decisions. In my experiments, I believe I’ve lead myself into intuitively connecting with the path of realization Birkets recommends. Yay me.

My trouble is that, as I recollect moments from my youth & young adulthood, I relive them emotionally. There were no great traumas, but a wealth of naïveté, so much so that I suffer under the weight of regret as memories flood in. I lose good chunks of time to this & end up retreating to non-autobio writing. I have several autobio & semi-autobio stories in various stages of completion due to this.

Does anyone out there have any tips on increasing a memoirist ‘s emotional distance when recounting one’s life (other than upping the antidepressants)? Is the pain of constant introspection one possible reason why many of the greats drank heavily?

Also, how do you approach biography, autobio &/or fiction? Do you differ from theme to theme? Project to project?

So… Roman Polanski. I’ll hand it to him – it’s rare when someone can generate headlines in several decades.

To some sensibilities, I’m going out on a limb by saying he isn’t a pedophile. Pedophilia, after all, is a psychological disorder regarding sexual attraction to pre-pubescent humans; statutory rape is a legal term describing how an adult has deceived him- (or her-, but usually him-) self into believing a potential sex partner is of legal age.

Or… the body says “Yes,” but let’s ignore Lady Justice when she says “Be patient & hope it says ‘yes’ later.”

Then there’s that other pesky legal term, the one we endearingly know as straight-up, goddamned (not by Old Testament standards, though), mothereffing rape, when your objet d’affection doesn’t want to reciprocate, but you make it so she or he does, through force, coercion or dddrrruuuggggggiiinnnggg. Emphasis mine.

Polanski has made some great films in exile. I am 99% certain his artistic output would have been noticeably – if not fundamentally – different had he taken his lumps in a timely fashion. Prison changes people. And most layperson opinion I’ve read goes something like “I’ve loved his movies; they wouldn’t have existed if he didn’t flee justice, & I/we would be poorer for it.”

Yes, yes, yes & y… wait a sec. Let’s take apart that last sentence.

“I’ve loved his movies;” indeed.

“They wouldn’t have existed if he didn’t flee justice;” likely – I’ll give you the ‘yes.’

“I/we would be poorer for it.” Are we sure? Despite the previous concessions, are we sure that a talent as compelling as Roman Polanski’s – you know, they guy many of us are willing to forgive for drugging a 13 year old girl & fucking her in her (very likely virgin) asshole – would LIKELY NOT have something vital to say about incarceration, or the rescission of freedom, or even regret at the immoral theft of innocence? What could this mind have created if he’d manned-up & paid his debt to society? (Apologies for the sexist term, but old men tend to respond most strongly to having their manhood questioned.)

I have a phrase I’ve been repeating for about a week now: The only understandable defense of Polanski goes something like “I’d forgive him (cuz I’ve done basically the same thing).” Several of his peers & collaborators have been voicing an opinion that his actions should be excused, & all I can do is wonder why they take that stance. That Polanski is brilliant doesn’t elevate him over the law, nor does his (usual) status as a money machine. When arguing that his crime was ‘so long ago,’ the statute of limitations on his initial crime must certainly have expired… if he hadn’t been (1) arrested, (2) brought to trial & (3) found guilty. That he’s evaded sentencing in a country that won’t extradite him shows he’s been aware of his status as a fugitive from justice since 1978.

Not only that, but Polanski’s been quite the crybaby since his arrest in Switzerland. Part of his defense is that the DA is campaigning for reelection & “needs media publicity.” A Hollywood type should know about that, I suppose. Polanski’s concern that his victim continues to be harassed by the media falls into the too-little-too-late category. And for those laypeople who complain that the U.S. justice system played dirty pool by not ‘actively’ pursuing him for a length of time isn’t an argument at all; as with his crimes, it’s Polanski’s own damn fault for leaving the ‘safety’ of France.

(Part of a series designed to help the struggling young writer live a fuller, happier, more productive life.)

The recent market downturn is causing a great deal of angst among investors of all stripes, from professional money managers to armchair day traders, but is the fear justified? The Dow fell 8% in May–its biggest one-month drop in nearly 50 years–and June is not looking much better. The global economy is in turmoil: half of Europe is in danger of default, the China bubble is about to pop, and unemployment continues to drag down America’s chance of a sustained recovery. They say that the markets love to “climb a wall of worry,” but they also tell you “never catch a falling knife.” So which is it? Are the markets finally collapsing into the quivering mass of red ink that a nimble investor will be able to skillfully ascend, or are those looking for buying opportunities running out into a downpour of gleaming Ginsu blades?

The answer, of course, is: a little of both. Volatile markets require a strong stomach, but the fundamental truths of investing never change: you must be disciplined, consistent, and unemotional to be a successful investor. What you don’t want to do in such a market is to simply stare like a deer in the headlights; you must take some decisive steps if you are to preserve your capital and plan for your golden years so you can write your memoirs.

Here are some things a young writer might consider in these difficult times:

1. Start a Roth IRA.  The great benefit of a Roth is that, since you are investing after-tax dollars, you pay no more taxes when you retire. So while you might not get the dollar-for-dollar matching of an employer plan, in the long run these can give you a much better return at retirement time. Most importantly, you can pick and choose your own stocks, and avoid the mutual fund trap. Also, any gains you make in the market are not reported on your income tax returns, so all your profits are yours to keep.  You can open a Roth for as little as $500, and fund it regularly from your bank account.

2. Create your own hedge fund. This is not as hard as it sounds. As you fund your Roth IRA, you should be looking for a mix of high-yield (dividend) stocks–blue chips, mostly–as well as certain mid- and small-cap stocks in sectors like technology and health care. Add to the mix an ultra-short, bear, or contrarian fund that bets against those very stocks you’re holding! Hold your positions for one year, then see who came out on top–sell the winners and hold onto the losers until they are in the black*. Remember: losses aren’t real until you sell. And remember Warren Buffett’s First Rule of investing: Never Lose Money.

3. Compound, compound, compound. My own rule of how to become rich can be expressed as W=P/M*T, which stands for Wealth = Patience divided by Money times Time. You must always have more patience than you have money; over time that will yield bigger results than you can probably imagine right now, wondering how on earth you could become rich with only $500 (and at least $200/month going into your Roth, preferably)**.

The fact is, you won’t become rich in 2, 5, or 10 years; not even in 20 years. But you’ll have a hell of a lot more money than you do now. And that’s the point. If you follow this advice I’m reasonably sure that, at some point in 25 years or so, you’ll look back and say “that OW son of a bitch was right.”

That’s why this advice is for “young writers.” If you’re old and don’t have any investments for your golden years, you’re already fucked.

- – -

*(One popular strategy for maximizing yearly gains is the Dogs of the Dow, which focuses on only the highest-yielding stocks over any given year.)

**(If $50/week is too much, you can start with $10/week instead; and if you can’t afford that much then why are you reading this? Get a job! The point is, you must pay yourself first. Always.)

He will generally be looked upon as strange or different.  And he will be, of course, since what makes him tick is that mysterious element “X” which his fellow-man seems so well able to do without.

– Henry Miller, Big Sure and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

The above quote, as succinct a one as I’ve ever seen on the definition of what makes an artist “different” from others is as interesting for its vague qualities as its very concrete qualities.  It seems to be at once the most perfect description possible and also written in a kind of childlike “writer speak” that makes it frustratingly incomprehensible for anyone who is not already tuned in to this kind of language.

But it goes sort of like this, I think:

When I first moved to the Baltimore area, I went to this Industrial Goth club to try to pick up women.  Well, that didn’t always work out.  OK, most of the time it didn’t.  I’d mostly end up talking to other lonely guys.  Well, once, this guy asked me “what I did.”

“I’m a writer,” I said.

He sort of looked me over, taking note of the cheap beer I was drinking and said, “No, I mean, what do you do for a living.”

This asshole wanted to know what I did for money!  I couldn’t believe it.

This is probably the question that is asked most when “getting to know someone.”  In fact, for many people, it is the definitive question.  By what method do you lease your soul for a number of hours a day in exchange for a few pieces of silver?

I had just started a job slicing lunchmeat at a deli counter at a supermarket.  But that seemed like the least important thing about me.  Fuck the guy. I was, I am, a writer.  And many other things.  I’m a deli slicerman last.  Absolutely last.

I think that people possessed with the “element X” will answer the question “what do you do?” with an answer similar to my own.  Others, the vast majority, will answer with something like “I’m an orthodontist” or “I masturbate goats for science” or something like that.

Sometimes, very rarely, what we for a living is the same thing as “who we are” but not often.

An artist is possessed with element X because her entire nature is devoted to creation.  Others possessed with it might build houses or farm the land or invent things or research the cosmos.  They are also artists.

What they do, who they are, the most important parts of their lives are entirely of their own making.

Dare to be stupid. For a while.

So, you’ve just received your BA. Maybe your Masters. You’re a twenty-something young gun fresh off the campus. And you’re a writer. Or you want to be a writer. You want to make a name for yourself. You know it all. You’ve got the world by the balls. You have a plan. Or do you?

I’ve been banging around the underground lit scene for a while now. I’ve learned some shit, I’ve seen some shit, but I’m certainly no seasoned veteran, no expert. But what really irks me is seeing the young guns cut their own heads off, and quickly.

Or maybe they’re not cutting their own heads off, but they’re certainly not earning respect. Or maybe they are. But not mine. What am I talking about? I’ll get there. Just bear with me.

Forums. Blogs. There’s a million out there. For writers. Some are fun, some are stupid, some are just…I don’t know. Something else. Everyone wants to be seen, heard, read, what have you. Everyone wants to make a name for themselves. Is there a magic formula for success? No, none that I can see. But being patient is important. Being kind is important. Being supportive, active, consistent, and willing to listen is important.

Oh, wait. Let me say that again—being willing to listen is important, and for the young guns it’s vital. Well, for the old guns too, but more so for the young guns. The old guns should know better. Some do. Some don’t.

But why should I listen? The young gun might ask. I know everything. I’ve got my Masters degree in creative writing.

Exactly my point. As a young gun, you’re at a distinct disadvantage because you do know everything, which , when loosely translated, means you know nothing.  For those in their early twenties, you don’t even know who you are yet. You’ve got a head filled with ideas, but you’re a super-saturated sponge dripping all over the place. And it occurred to me this morning, as I was shoveling snow, just who these young guns are.

Teenagers. They’re teenagers who just got their license and think they can drive well. But let me tell you something—having a license doesn’t mean you can drive well. It just means you’ve passed a few tests and can now operate a motor vehicle legally. I see them driving around with their sunglasses on, backseat over-capacity with screeching cohorts, bumper nearly touching the road. I keep my distance.

Having a degree in your hands, fresh off the presses, gives you, in a sense, an intellectual license, but it doesn’t mean you can drive your brain well. Not yet. It takes years. It takes a lifetime. What you think you know now will be dashed apart in a year, maybe two, or maybe even tomorrow. Our brains will constantly be learning and unlearning and learning again, and as the years roll by, our sense of who we are and what we know will slowly take shape. It will forever be pliable, which is what makes it exciting. It’s the understanding of our ability to evolve.

Sigh.

I really shouldn’t care. Being outspoken in forums, or even behind the scenes, is a way. It’s a way to go about things. Maybe it works. In some cases I’m sure it does. But to what end? You get attention. Is it earned? I suppose, but is that the way you want to earn it? By being a caustic, confrontational douchebag?

But it’s all about the writing, says the young gun. I’m a sick writer.

Okay, maybe you are. Hooray for you. But you’ve already shown me your ass out in public. Eyes are everywhere. People remember. Objectivity is compromised. Editors are imperfect people too. Sometimes.

What’s my point here? I’m not sure. I guess it’s just a message to the young guns out there. Take it easy. Really try to think before you speak, and when you do speak, try to say something that makes sense. Something simple. Concision is the brother of wisdom. Or maybe the half-cousin.

And I’m not saying I’m a perfect person either. Far from it. But I do try to listen. Reading some of the blogs and forums out there is like watching an old episode of Cross Fire. The shout downs and the thick, twisted verbiage are laughable. News Flash: You’re not saying anything. And I’m actually dumber for having read it.

But thank you. I should end this note with a thank you. Thank you for being that person. Thank you for being that boisterous young gun with all the answers and all the experience. It makes me smile. You’ve filled that role with gusto, which means I don’t have to play it.

A Naked Opinion by Joe Smith

These are the end times. Not because North Korea and Iran will soon have the bomb; not because the partisan rancor in Congress and across the nation threatens to destroy our country; not because the popularity of Hannah Montana continues unabated. No, these are the end times of another sort. These are the final days of words on paper.

As much as I hate to admit it the writing is on the wall, and I’m not talking about the “wall” on your stupid Facebook page. In fact, to say that I “hate” to admit it barely does my sentiments on the matter justice. Too many of our everyday experiences are automated and virtual; so many, in fact, that I find myself suddenly interested in things that are “real” or doing things “the hard way.” For example, I recently started gardening, just to experience the trials, tribulations, and (occasional) joy of growing my own food.

I guess I’m naïve, but I never thought reading would become something I’d have to do the hard way. But thanks to human penchant for fixing things that aren’t broken, here I am. And where am I? The end of books as I know and love them. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the following:

In “The Future of Books Is Smartphones” (New York Times, June 23, 2009) Paul Boutin proclaims, “I’ve seen the future of portable book reading” with all the urgency and zeal of someone who’s been to the future and back. He goes on:

“I was hanging out at the bar at a Silicon Valley mixer when [some guy I’ve never heard of] whipped out the only Palm Pre in the room. He flipped it open to a shockingly easy-to-read copy of “Angels & Demons,” by Dan Brown.”

The significance of the moment was not lost on him.

“This is the future of book reading on the run. Instead of waiting for magic e-paper displays, we’ll pull out our smartphones—not because they’re the best reading device but because they’re there. Just as we took to doing everything else on a smartphone because it beat not doing it, we’ll end up downloading books that take only three seconds to load.”

This is all well and good, but who reads “on the run”? If he means reading while one is in a hurry, I’d argue that it can’t be done. If he means reading when traveling, what does that have to do with speed? I always read while I travel—I can’t even get on a plane or a subway without something to read—not because I can do it quickly, but because I find it calming. It is the perfect antidote to the chaos and stress of travel, the latter of which occurs because everyone is in a hurry. And by the way, traditional books take zero seconds to download. (N.B. Note how this techno-enamored writer is obsessed with speed and efficiency.)

I do, however, get his point. If we’re already carrying phones, why add an e-book reader into the mix? Then again, why not leave the phone in your pocket or purse and just carry a book. It’s a great place to hold your plane ticket while you’re waiting to board the plane.

But Maybe I should just “shut up” like Chris Dannen wants me to, as suggested by his article “Book Lovers: Stop Whining about the Wonderful ‘Feel of Paper’” (Fast Company, Feb 26, 2009). To be fair, Dannen wants book aficionados like me to “stop whining about the feel of paper,” or so the title of his article suggests. However, it’s clear that he reserves his ire for people who like books themselves, not just the paper on which they’re printed.

“[Book lovers] croon wistfully over the printed book’s demise, and express wariness of the digital book era. I am here to tell them to shut up.”

So let me get this straight: I don’t get an opinion because I don’t (enthusiastically) suckle at the giant techno-teat that nourishes our society and economy? (I’ll give you a hint as to what you can do with that Kindle of yours.) Anyway, assuming that bookworms like me will react negatively to his assertions, he tries to anticipate our criticisms.

“E-book readers, as these things are called, are not meant to replace books. They’re meant to render them anachronisms, much the way that cassette tapes did vinyl records.”

Okay, I’ll give him this one, partly because he’s reinforcing a point I made above. Once books attain this anachronistic status, we’ll all have to go out and buy e-book readers. Am I tilting at windmills? Probably, but what choice do I have? As he acknowledges, “As a consumer, you have surprisingly little to say about this transition.”

I do not agree with him, however, when he says that e-books will save the publishing Industry.

“Book publishers are drowning under the crushing legacy costs of producing printed books. Their only chance at profitability is an IP-only business model centered on digitized books. Without this transition, these companies can’t stay in the business of publishing their authors.”

Can’t you just hear the violins? If there’s a problem with the industry, it was created by the publishing houses themselves—Twenty-five dollars (or more) for a hardcover? No wonder the industry is in trouble.

I also don’t buy his argument that we ought to roll over and play dead because “devices like [the Kindle] will be—everywhere—within our lifetimes.” Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s any good. Anyone remember Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli? They were “everywhere,” too.

Worst of all, though, is his spurious attempt to portray e-book readers as “green.”

“If you have a green conscience, you should be that much more pleased to give up paper. While most of the paper used for books is farmed, not wild timber, the immense cost of producing and shipping heavy books across the world accounts for a massive carbon footprint that could be almost entirely eliminated. As the process works now, book publishers print thousands of books in their first print runs, and end up destroying the ones that don’t sell. This isn’t just an inefficient way to run a business; it’s a waste of valuable resources.”

Yes, there is an environmental cost to books—there is to everything. But to suggest the Kindle is some sort of “green” product is complete crap. That’s not cellulose it’s made of, it’s plastic, and the process of making its electronic innards involves all sorts of chemicals and creates plenty of pollution. And by the way, what happens to the first-generation e-book readers when the second an third-generation models come out? All of a sudden, books are looking rather environmentally friendly. And by the way, paper is a renewable resource.

Yet, after telling us to “shut up” and browbeating us into getting with the program, he makes a half-hearted effort toward peace and extends us bibliophiles the following wispy olive branch.

“So, book lovers, relax. No one will try to pry your beloved first editions from your hands. But look forward to the day when your prized copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is more like an antique and less like a commodity.”

Booklovers get this a lot. Suddenly, in the face of e-books, the traditional books that we love (first editions or not) become either museum pieces or worthless pieces of crap. Well I don’t know about you, but my books are neither worthless nor priceless heirlooms, and they don’t sit on shelves, getting dusty. I read and reread them. I dog-ear their pages. I underline passages. I lend them to friends.

Thus, when I read something like that last quote, I wonder if the people who are all ga-ga over e-books even know what it means to appreciate a book. I wonder if they are even capable of putting any stock in the tried and true methods of doing anything because they’re too busy following the herd to the next big thing. But most of all, I wonder if they’ve ever loved something that suddenly became “anachronistic” just because some idiot was hell bent on creating a market for something that wasn’t needed.

[This Naked Opinion comes courtesy of Joe Smith's new zine, The Aardvark. To order a copy, please send 1.00 to The Aardvark / Red Roach Press, PO Box 771, College Park, MD 20740]

a Naked Opinion by Bruce Hodder

I may get into it at some juncture, but right now the return of the football season bores me to tears. It only seems two seconds since the last one finished, for Heaven’s sake. And what is football, when all’s said and done? Twenty-two people trying to prevent each other from kicking a round thing between two posts. Blimey, no wonder nobody reads books anymore when they’ve got that to occupy their minds and spirits.

Which is snobbish and simplistic, of course. Who said that football has anything to do with the nation’s reading habits? (It doesn’t.) But equally who said a person proves his legitimacy as a human being by conspiring to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator? I get fed up of people asking me why I use long words when I could use short ones. Why do you buy an expensive flat screen television that can do crossword puzzles and make your breakfast for you when you could have one that just sits in the corner and plays a poor reproduction of “Emmerdale”?

I was sitting in the bus station the other day reading a book about Allen Dulles. I looked up from the page for a moment to give my eyes a rest and glancing around me I could see only one other person reading: an exceptionally old lady whose youth probably predated television. Everybody else–that is, if they weren’t talking or just staring off dull-eyed into the middle-distance–was staring at the tiny screens of their mobile phones.

Half of them accessing the internet, no doubt, which you can’t do on my mobile because it’s too antiquated. And that’s another reason why people don’t read books anymore. We have passed the age of books now that all this new communication technology has become available to most people. A lot of those who might have read books just don’t bother anymore because it’s too labour intensive and seems like yesterday’s diversion. Something you might do “on the beach” according to the lifestyle magazines we do still read because a magazine takes no effort and holding them tells other people we’re part of the club.

There are more complex reasons why nobody reads books these days, or why only an unappreciable minority read them, but I don’t want to get into them now. It’d take a huge volume to analyse the subject with any intelligence and we’ve already established that nobody would read it.

But it’s about having come to the end of something; the end of the forward momentum of intellectual and spiritual development that we’d been riding, unknowingly, for perhaps a couple of hundred years. The 1980s was where the wave, as Hunter Thompson put it, “broke and rolled back” leaving each generation since that terrible decade more intellectually backward and spiritually impoverished than the one that came before it.

I’m not talking about everybody, of course. Some of the worst atrocities in the history of human kind were committed in the middle of the last century, long before Margaret Thatcher was allowed to seize 10 Downing Street and wreck the country. And I know people half my age who are more advanced in every way than their parents or grandparents.

What I’m talking about is impoverishment that comes down from the places where opinion is made. Where ideas about the development of human society begin. There appears to be nothing happening in those places anymore. Now we’re just asked to see the art in the curve of a McDonald’s golden arch. Education, at least in England, is only the moribund arm of industry these days and the workplaces of the nation are filled with people who don’t even know where to put an apostrophe.

(this post was written by Bruce Hodder and uploaded by Naked Opinion editor Tim Hall)

I suppose there are people who fit that description, but they are not who I think of when I speak of outsiders.

Perhaps to Sanford, outsiders are like minor league baseball players, always trying to improve their game enough to get that call up to the majors. That could mean earning an MFA or PHD in English or Creative Writing, finding a teaching post, seeking tenure, searching for grants and stipends, and perhaps, eventually, being appointed to an endowed chair at a prestigious university.

Let me be so arrogant as to suggest that the above-described path may not appeal to everyone interested in writing. Let me be so bold as to infer that some writers might be independent minded enough that they’d rather work for an hourly wage than play the game of becoming a literary academic.

When it comes to the moniker “outsider” there are as many options as there are writers.

There may be multiple career paths for prose writers: Journalism, Technical Writing, Advertising, Travel Writing and so forth. A few persistent writers will pen a successful novel or play. But when one poet meets another, a first query is often “Where do you teach?” This is assumed, because not even the U.S. Poet Laureate can earn a living from writing poetry. But if there is no way around that, what difference does it make whether one teaches or builds houses? Whether one conducts writer’s workshops or works as a debt counselor, a welder, a waitress or a waste water treatment technician?

Now I’ve got nothing against people who have the time and money to pursue a degree in writing. Everyone has to learn certain things one way or another. A university education may be a short cut to that end. But paying tuition so that someone who can’t make a living writing can teach you how to not make a living writing doesn’t seem fiscally prudent in any economy.

The NCAA advertises that most college athletes plan to go pro in something besides their sport. Most have degrees in something besides the sport related fields of study.

I know many fine writers who have gone to school but majored in something besides English. I know many fine writers who went to school while they also worked at something else. And I know many fine writers who have never darkened the doorway of a college classroom. If I listed names I’d start something, either by inclusion or exclusion, so I’m going to refrain and hope you can come up with examples from your own reading.

When I read I’m looking for something that punches me in the face. I am not interested in tired, worn, boring lines. I am not looking for the author’s name, or where he published his last piece. When I write, I’m looking to do the same thing for someone else, punch him in the face. By the nature of our differences, I will not be able to write something that appeals to everyone without thinning it down to something so insipid it won’t inspire anyone. In the end, what we do to pay the bills doesn’t count for anything. Once we put them out there, the words must stand by themselves.

As I grow more critical I am most critical of myself. I find my production of poetry slowing to a trickle, and I’m fine with that. For all his flaws, Bukowski was certainly right about one thing, “Don’t Try.” I don’t. Things come when they’re ready. It’s not like I need it to keep the lights on.

In Latin America everyone is thought of as a poet. That doesn’t mean they think they’re Pablo Neruda or Octavio Paz though.

I will never be a Bukowski, or a Frost. But I’ll always be a poet. And I’m staying an outsider.

*Rank and Slush Pile
by Timothy Schaffert
Poets & Writers Magazine
Volume 37, Issue 3 (May/June 2009)

[This post written by David Blaine and posted by N.O. editor Tim Hall]

There are so many places I could go with this information I don’t know where to begin. I could say that creative writing doctorates are nothing but a market response to the deflation and devaluation of the MFA (way too much supply, way too little demand). I could point out that the luxury consumer education racket is just that, a racket, and that by accepting the legitimacy of it we are allowing big business to game the corporative of authorship itself. I could point out that the rise and dominance of MFA programs is no different from the rise of MBA programs through the 1980s; both are business degrees. I could also conjecture that the current MFA bubble has only been made possible by the MBA generation; that without those suits creating the conditions of a bull market, cheap debt and plentiful cash, there never would have been an MFA boom to begin with.

Don’t think I’m bashing MFAs or PhDs here. I like the trend, because a country that graduates more MFAs than MBAs (as we began doing around 2002) is a country that is deliriously rich and confident, and those are nothing to be ashamed of. But I have my reservations, and some caveats.

The rise of the MFA is a far more decadent development than the flood of MBAs of the Reagan decade, and just as the children of Betty Friedan’s problem-with-no-name grew up to explode the repression of Eisenhower America in the glorious 60s, so too will the MFA generation give rise to a far more savvy, rebellious, and hopefully creative generation. And just as with every previous rebellion, the hip parents will be shocked, scandalized, and outraged by the youth. We believe we have outsmarted and co-opted every avenue of possible rebellion, and history has shown us that is always when the time is ripe for another one. When it happens we will look back on the previous decades as a golden age, just as every other generation has done.

Getting back to my aspiring doctor, this brought up two immediate thoughts. First, who conferred the first creative writing PhD, and what were his/her credentials? This puzzles me. Who is qualified to teach the first doctorate in a particular field? The only truly qualified people would not have earned PhDs in writing, since none existed that I am aware of. Even among the greats–Vonnegut, Hemingway, Twain, Porter, Powell–who would have qualified? Who can confer a degree above his or her own? (That is not a rhetorical question, I really want to know.)
Second, I thought about the future. What comes next? Really, what comes after a doctorate in creative writing? I think I have the answer–as readers of this space know, whether it’s how to be authentic, or what to do about the problem of ambition, or how to save big publishers, Oprah, or the best accessories to pair with epaulets–I’m always trying to help. So here’s where I think we need to go after every MFA has been upsold to a PhD, and the market for luxury degrees has finally begun to stagnate.

In order to future-proof the writing degree we will have to break it into parts. In the future you will have doctors of grammar, doctors of metaphor and analogy, doctors of punctuation, doctors of dialog, etc. When those run out, schools can take a page from Freemasonry and develop degrees of aptitude; you could therefore be a 33rd Degree Grand Wizard of Hyphenation, for example. It’s like those characters on Star Trek: just put some blobs of latex at different spots–ridges over the eyebrows, horns on the chin–have them all speak perfect English and call them different species.

Schools could offer limited-edition degrees, co-branded and sponsored by various businesses. “Oooh, you got the Princeton-Random House-Eddie Bauer Deluxe Xtreme Off-Road Black Leather Doctorate of Intergalactic Grammatics with built-in GPS. Lucky bastard!” You get the idea.

From there, once all those options are exhausted, there will be only one choice left: to offer a doctorate program of the writing degrees themselves. You will be able to study the history and evolution of creative writing programs, and be conversant in all of them. And won’t you be the life of the party then.

—

A quotation is, of course, the repetition of something already said or written.  As such it adds nothing new to what is in the process of being said or written.  It merely gives the illusion of amplification, of enlargement, of progress.

But in fact, a text built on quotations (regardless of whether these come from an external or an internal source) cannot go forward, cannot advance;  it can only backtrack into time or into itself.  Therefore, one could say of the Postmodern text, what Diderot once confessed about himself:  I listen only for the pleasure of repeating. And so, here is the quotation that will give the second part of this presentation the illusion of going somewhere.

These few general remarks to begin with.  What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed?  By aporia pure and simple?  Or by affir-mations and negations invalidated as uttered — or sooner or later?  Generally speaking.  There must be other    shifts?  Otherwise it would be quite hopeless.  But it is quite hopeless.  I should mention before going any     further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means.

These general remarks were pronounced by The Unnamable at the beginning of Beckett’s novel by that title.  [Yes, Beckett again, the first and last Postmodern writer, as I declared earlier].  These general remarks summarize, I believe, the dilemma of Postmodernism.  Or what I called in Part One:  the supreme indecision of Postmodernism.  From its beginning to its end — by affirmations and negations invalidated as utter-red– Postmodernism questioned itself as to how to proceed?  As a late Postmodernist (late in the sense of belonging to a
movement which has already departed), I seem to have a similar problem here.  How to proceed beyond Postmodernism, beyond what is in the process of finishing — of dying?  Well, obviously, by leaping from quotation to quotation.

Therefore, let us leap-frog to The End of Postmodernism_

Preparing this essay, some months ago, I wrote a letter to twenty of my friends (writers, critics, professors, enter-
tainers) asking them to answer these two questions:

1.  Do you think Postmodernism is dead?

2.  If so, what killed it?

To my great delight, all twenty correspondents replied, but all asked not to be identified.  These are the twenty answers I received:

1.    Postmodernism was an exercise in discontinuity, rupture, break, mutation, transformation, therefore doomed from the beginning …

2.   As with all new things, once absorbed by the economy Postmodernism was finished …

3.   Now that the effects of Postmodernism are evident in sectors as diverse as dress, food and lodging, and are in
those forms understood, the end is not far …

4.   Postmodernism began as a genuine if loose literary movement and ended as a department store curiosity …

5.   When the academy starts to take sides & quibbles about Postmodernism, it quickly kills what it discusses …

6.   In winning the day, Postmodernism, of course, loses …

7.   Because Postmodernism was viewed both as a movement and a perfume, and both as an intellectual disposition and a bowl of fruit, it had no chance to survive …

8.   Postmodernism as a literary notion was invented to deal with the Holocaust.  The prewar split between form and content was incapable of dealing with the moral crisis provoked by the Holocaust, and therefore writers like Beckett, Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, Primo Levi,    Raymond Federman, Jerzy Kosinski, and many others, invented Postmodernism to search among the dead, to dig     into the communal grave, in order to re-animate wasted     blood and wasted tears ….. or perhaps simply in order to create something more interesting than death (as Claude Lanzman did in SHOAH, for instance — one of the great Postmodern films).

9.   When something completes its intellectual and moral journey it is enshrined within sealed cases in the various Sorbonnes, like the relics of saints, and is venerated in much the same way and with the same use-less result, and so it is with Posmodernism …

10.    When among critics the tone of the debate shifts from intellectual to moral, then we know that Postmodernism is
dead …

11.  The death of anything is, of course, a trope not for its death but for its utility, its applicability.  Now Post-modernism no longer avails, no longer applies …

12.    When a movement becomes a choice and not a necessity, as Postmodernism has now become, it signifies its death.  But since one can never speak one’s death in the present– one’s death can only be spoken by others after it happens — the death of Postmodernism is now being spoken     by everyone, everywhere …

13.  The central, fundamental literary texts of Postmodernism: Texts For Nothing, The Library of Babel, Cosmicomics, Lost in the Funhouse, The Voice in the Closet.  These texts announced and performed the end of Postmodernism while pretending to serve as its beginning …

14.  The current reactionary literary climate dominated by works in received forms does not indicate the death of Postmodernism as much as the persistence of the power of market economies to define the arts …

15.  Literary fashions have more to do with the reception of literature than with its creation, and therefore more to do with its end than its beginning …

16.  While it is true that the current literary scene viewed from a certain perspective looks sterile, it is more true that it is extraordinarily fallow, ready to submit, ready to compromise, in a quiveringly receptive mode.   Post-modernism died because it refused to compromise …

17.  When the great painters of New York City (Stella, Johns, Rauchenberg, etc.) went to work for Women’s Wear Daily, as they did en masse in 1960, the end was at hand (the visual arts always lead, the literary arts follow).  The death of Postmodernism was sealed in 1960, the same year     it was born …

18.  The great works of any age always spring from a personal necessity that is only subsequently elaborated into this or that theory and chiefly as a means of publicizing said great works.  Theory killed Postmodernism, but the irony is that theory was also Postmodernism …

19.    Postmodernism was responding to the end — the end of Europe, after World War Two.  Just as Modernism, earlier, responded to the breakdown of self-evident truths (the consistency of truth, one might say) elaborated during  the 19th Century, Postmodernism cried and decried nothingness, nonsense, and death, and in so doing cried and decried its own nothingness, nonsense & death …

20.     It isn’t, to say it again, that Posmodernism is dead but like any other identifiable phenomenon of a certain value– such as impressionism, dadaism, surrealism, modernism, abstract expressionism, new criticism, feminism — after a fixed period of bubbling at the surface, it sinks and    recombines with other like elements to form again a part of the generative stew of art and culture, and that moment of rot is called the death of a movement …

The general sense one gets from these replies (some quite fascinating, I think) is that Postmodernism is indeed dead, finished: on the one hand because it was swallowed and digested by the economy and eventually excreted and disse-minated into the culture, on the other hand because it was stifled by academic bickering and consequently turned into a futile debate (especially in America).

Now some people might say that this situation is not very encouraging but one must reply that it is not meant to en- courage those who say that.

Oops, I think I’ve already said that, in Part One, and other places too.  Oh well, like all good Postmodernists, I suffer from intertextuality and repetition.

But one could ask, to continue in the questioning mode:  Why did Postmodernism allow itself to be swallowed and digested by the culture, or to be stifled by academic theorizing?  And the answer would be:  Because Postmodernism, and more specifically Postmodern fiction, moved from continuity, from fluidity, coherence, linearity (in history as well as in literature) to discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, plurality, metafictionality, intertextuality, decentering, dislocation, ludism, to become series of disconnected states, combinations of impulses, incoherent lists and verbal doodles, it eventually destroyed itself.

But, one could also ask, isn’t literature language?  And isn’t language always stable?  Yes, of course, literature is made of language, but language limited by the permutations of a res-tricted number of elements and functions.  However, what made Postmodern fiction interesting and important, and vulnerable too, is that it tried to escape these restrictions, it tried to say what is beyond language, that is why Postmodern fiction was doomed from the beginning.  Even though the unspeakable can never be spoken, Postmodernism attempted to speak the im-possibility of speaking the unspeakable.

But isn’t literature an invention, and as such can it not invent its own language?  [My imaginary questioner is very stubborn]. No, literature is always a re-invention, it never creates anything new, it simply re-invents the nothing new, in other words — just as the sun every day, having no alternative, rises on the nothing new.   Postmodern fiction only re-invented what had been banished, hidden, or expelled from individual or collec-tive memory, this is why it was accused of being plagiaristic, and of working Against Itself.

DIGRESSION: Allow me to clarify this last statement with an-other quotation, this time from L’ENTRETIEN INFINI by Maurice Blanchot:  To write is always first to rewrite, and to rewrite does not mean to revert to a previous form of writing, no more than to an anteriority of speech, or of presence, or of mean-ing.  To rewrite is a form of undoubling which always precedes unity, or suspends it while plagiarizing it. [My translation]  [End of Digression]

But isn’t literature independent of its author?  Literature may pretend to be independent of the personality of its author, but it is always about some profound (subconscious) obsession of the author and of the society in which he lives.  This was particularly true of Postmodern Fiction.

But isn’t literature always a form of orientation?  Literature either confirms, accepts, supports, defends the status quo, or else questions, challenges, denounces, rejects the status quo. Whatever the case, orientation presupposes a disorientation, and that is exactly what Postmodernism did:  it disoriented.

But isn’t the spirit in which one writes decisive in exerting a critical response?  The boundary between writing and reading is not always clearly marked.  The spirit in which one read Postmodern fiction was often decisive in exerting a negative critical response.  But as Roland Barthes pointed out in THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT.  The author cannot choose to write what will not be read in his book.

These are the reasons why the Postmodern writer was, in fact, different — different and therefore disorienting to most by that difference.  The Postmodern writer understood that at the heart of the heart of his otherness, he had a right to his difference, to his way of seeing and writing the world, how-ever confused and confusing that world may have been.

To write fiction during the Postmodern era [I would like to remind you that I am still speaking of Postmodernism in the past tense] was above all an effort to create a DIFFERENCE (or DIFFERANCE, with an A as Jacques Derrida spelled it), and not continue to pretend that fiction was the same — the same as reality.

If there seems to be a contradiction here in terms of what I said earlier about Postmodern fiction being mere repetition, or re-invention of the already said or written, it is because the Postmodern difference I am trying to point to here, was not a difference of subject or of subject-matter, but a dif-ference of process — process of telling, of presenting rather than re-presenting.  That is why the originality of convention in Postmodern fiction grew more and more absolute and arbi-trary, for invention consisted in devising new sets of rules by which the familiar pieces could be rearranged.  For to play the same old game by the same old rules would have been mere competence, rather than artistry.

If traditional realistic fiction was a representation of the same, Postmodern fiction was a presentation of difference –
a liberation of what was different.  And what was different was the difference.  Or as the Postmodern re-incarnation of Scheherazade explained in CHIMERA:  It’s as if — as if the key to the treasure is the treasure.

Reflecting on the contemporary discourse (circa 1970) Michel Foucault wrote:  In order to liberate difference we must have
a contradictory thought, free of dialectic, free of negation.  A thought which says yes to divergence;  an affirmative thought, whose instrument is disjunction;  a thought of the multiple;  a thought which does not obey a scholarly model, but which addresses insoluble problems with a play of repe- tition.  [My translation]

As good a definition of Postmodern fiction as any.  For pa- radoxically, by playing with repetition Postmodern fiction created a difference, a difference which negated all claims of adequacy to the natural or to the true.

As such Postmodern fiction offered itself as a playful object, and even as an object of pleasure, a toy, a game with which the reader was asked to play.  One needs only to reread Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Steve Katz’s Creamy & Delicious, Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid,and so on, to see, to feel, how Postmodern fiction offered itself as a toy, a game, an object of pleasure.  Or as Roland Barthes so joyfully demonstrated in the PLEASURE OF THE TEXT, Postmodern fiction found a way to speak pleasure — no_ even better than that, found a way to exult bliss.

Of course, not everyone is willing to be discomforted or un-settled by a Postmodern text of bliss.  Allan Bloom (a critic who has probably never known jouissance) in The Closing of the  American Mind dismisses Postmodernism when he tells us that Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around that movement.  According to him, the Postmodern writer was infected with relativism, believing that all values are only opinions, and one opinion as good as another, and there-fore this misguided writer lived in a daze of universal tolerance, apathy, blasphemy, and ignorance.  Whether or not Allan Bloom is correct is quite irrelevant.  A large and fascinating body of Postmodern fiction is still present today and still in need of serious evaluation.  What is disturbing to Allan Bloom is that Postmodern fiction depicted a reality that he prefers to deny — a confused reality, certainly, but a depiction of it that is a far more accurate delineation of quotidian existence than the illusions of reality devised by the writers of the thirties and forties, or the retreating neorealists of the eighties, or the virtual realists now emerging in the nineties.

It is the likes of Allan Bloom who put an end to Postmodern-ism, or displaced it to some other cultural region to become an inoffensive topic of cacademic debates.  By disguising his argument for the preservation of what one might term the comfortable familiar as a reference for an indisputable paradigm, Allan Bloom is able to dismiss four decades of astonishing radical literary activities.

And he is not alone in this.  There are many fools of all kinds, these days, who have decreed foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure [I am quoting Roland Barthes here], either by cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism or by political moralism or by criticism of the signifier or by stupid pragmatism or by snide vacuity or by destruction of the discourse, loss of verbal desire.

E. Donald Hirsch’s trivial list of requisites for a properly informed culture, Robert Richman’s desperate call for a revi-val of good old-fashioned literature, William Bennett’s demand for a return to the basics of education are all symptoms of a last-stand, a tightening of the circle of wagons against the attack of the Postmodern barbarians upon the comfortable familiar.  All these fools (as Roland Barthes calls them) are begging for the preservation of sameness against difference.

What Allan Bloom and all those who think like him want is to be told, re-told, what they already know.  In other words, they want to be comforted in their knowledge.  This is why they must oppose or dismiss all innovative activities, all experimentations which discomfort (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom).  Postmodern fiction certainly made many of its readers uncomfortable, as it unsettled their historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, by disrupting the com-fortable relationship of words and things, by bringing to a crisis their relation with language and with reality.

Michel Foucault called this linguisic disruption or displace-ment, an heterotopia, and in LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES he put  it this way:  Heterotopia disturbs, no doubt because it secretly undermines language, because it prevents this or that to be named, because it destroys or confuses the meaning of common words, because it ruins syntax in advance, not only the syntax that constructs sentences, but that less visible syntax that holds words and things together.  [My translation]

As the theoreticians of literature have demonstrated in the past few years, all works of literature can be viewed from two perspectives:  constructively or deconstructively.  To borrow two useful terms from Roland Barthes, all works of literature can be viewed as studium or as punctum.  The studium approach to a work of art determines its cultural, and even its social context.  The studium is the source of the viewer/reader’s usually mild, polite interest in a text, the same sort of vague, casual, irresponsible interest one takes in certain people, objects, clothes, various forms of entertainment which one finds to be simply all right.  In other words, an interest without excitement.  The punctum approach breaks through this complacency of response, thus provoking a more intense and personal (subjective) reaction in the reader.  Moreover, the studium sends the reader back to the predictable reference, back to the referential terms which made the work of fiction possible, but in which the reader, in fact, has little in-terest.  The punctum, on the contrary, locks the reader into the text and gives him both a sense of excitement and disco-very, but also a sense of discomfort and anxiety.  The studium gives statisfaction for recognizing what one already knows — it produces the comfort of easy recognition.  The punctum represents the encounter with the unknown, with the unpredic-table — it causes the agony of unrecognition.

However, if one must choose between easy recognition and the agony of unrecognition, the punctum approach is preferable, for as Postmodernism has clearly demonstrated, history is a fiction already told and cancelled, a bad dream already dreamt and forgotten, particularly in the Western World which, for centuries, has been seeking a form of agony worthy of its past.

The denial or dismissal of any avant-garde activity is, of course, the usual method of disposing of what discomforts, what unsettles, of what creates a crisis.

No doubt the end of Postmodernism, which of course corresponds to the end of the avant-garde, has changed considerably the conditions of labor in literature.  But I am not of those who believe that this situation brings an end to experimentation, or an end to the exigency of the new and the innovative.  I am not ready — and I am sure I speak now for many of my fellow Postmodernists or Surfictionists — to renounce the urgency of innovation, and simply abandon literature to neo-realistic forms, pre-digested by mass-media demands.  I do not think that literature can submit that easily to the possible.  On the contrary, I know that literature, today as always, faces the impossible, faces the inadequation of language and of thought to apprehend or even comprehend reality, and yet, always in quest of new forms, literature will succeed in giving life once again to the impossible.  Where, and when, and by whom?  That I am not ready to say, for we are today still in the same confused predicament which forced Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable to ask, some fifty years ago on the threshold of his own tale, and the threshold of Postmodernism:  Where Now?  Who Now?  When Now?

Still, one should ask:  does Postmodernism have any future?  And the answer could be both No and Yes, since by its very nature and definition it existed and performed in a kind of futurity, in the POST-(modern), even the POST-(contemporary).  In fact, one should no longer speak of Postmodernism, but of Post-futurism.  But leaving aside these useless verbal games,

perhaps it is time to discard such terms as Past, Present, Future, and replace these with Before, Now, After, with the understanding that the NOW is no longer a fixed point in time (the present, our present), but a moment in constant shift in relation to what happens before and what happens after.  In this sense the term Postmodernism may indeed disappear, though the ideas and innovations of Postmodernism may continue to have validity.  After all, isn’t it the fate of all ISMS to be already obsolete the moment they are articulated?

Nazism, Fascism, Communism, but also Futurism, Surrealism, Existentialism, and all the other Isms of recent history were based on a retroactive ideology or aesthetic, and whatever is retroactive can only inspire itself of a violence and a deca-dence already nostalgic when it happens.  All Isms are retro-active scenarios of power and of death already played out at the very moment when they appear in history.  And that was also the fate of Postmodernism which, in the last resort, was the sign of a simulation of a decaying movement, the sign of what had been, of what had already passed — that is to say Modernism.

That is why Postmodern fiction, even though called an avant-garde movement, was such a mystifying, and yet necessary historic retroversion.  But of course, one’s critical response to Postmodern fiction depends on whether one approaches it from the studium or the punctum.

It is true, however, that using terms such as Postmodern and Avant-garde in the same context immediately raises some com-plex and ambiguous issues, largely because certain events within Postmodern culture have tended to blur the distinction
between avant-garde and mainstream art.  This interaction of mainstream and avant-garde started during the 80′s when the traditional distinction between high-art and pop-art became a central defining feature of Postmodernism itself.  Today such distinction is, if anything, even more difficult to maintain.

For instance, should rock videos by Madonna, Peter Gabriel or Laurie Anderson be considered mainstrain simply because they are enormously popular, even though they employ visual and verbal techniques that twenty-five years ago would have cer-tainly been considered highly experimental, and therefore Postmodern?  Is William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel NEUROMANCER avant-garde and therefore Postmodern since it uses unusual formal techniques (collage, cut-ups, appropriation of other texts, bizarre new vocabulary and metaphors, temporal dis- placement, etc.)?  Or does its publication and success in the science-fiction domain establish it as a pop novel?  Are television shows like MAX HEADROOM, some of the early SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, or David Lynch’s recent TWIN PEAKS series to be categorized as avant-garde underground works because they utilize many features associated with Postmodern innovations, or as Popular Art because they are in fact merely television shows?

These are complex questions.  And facing such questions one should definitely abandon the term Postmodern to describe these activities.  Or else invent a new term such as POST-POMO or AVANT-POP, as someone has already proposed.

What makes such questions and distinctions increasingly meaningless has to do with the rise of the media culture and the changes in the way art (including literature) is manufac-tured, bought and sold.  Specifically, as the market economy (Capitalism in other words) has expanded its operations into previously untapped areas, or areas which at one time were considered unmarketable, it recognized (and of course took advantage of this situation) that there is a significant and potentially profitable audience-market for even the most in- novative, radical, shocking, disturbing, unsettling works of art, even those works of art whose avowed purpose is the demolition of the capitalist system itself.

Hence the seeming anomaly of The Sex Pistols’ dada-esque brand of enraged anarchy, utter nihilism, violence and pure noise being successfully marketed in England and in the U.S.  But there are many other equally unusual and revealing examples: Derek Pell’s darkly humorous and bitingly satiric collage-and-text works, Dr. Bey’s Suicide Handbook, Dr. Bey’s Book of Strange Curiosities, Dr. Bey’s Book of the Dead, all published by a major New York publisher, Avon Books;  the gradual rise to literary stardom of Kathy Acker, whose nightmarish punk novels (all derived from Postmodern techniques) such as Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, Empire of the Senseless, and In Memorium to Identity are among the angriest and most graphic treatments of sexuality and violence publi-shed in the United States in this century;  but there is also the commercial success enjoyed by movies like Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s surreal and disturbing portrayal of the violence and sadomasochism that lies, barely concealed, beneath the bland surfaces of America’s suburban dreams;  the equally unlikely success enjoyed by performance artist Laurie Anderson, whose quirky blend of experimental minimalist music, stand-up comedy, fragmented lyrics of found language, and the use of odd instruments (a violin that plays human voices, a vocoder that electronically alters human voices) became popular concert attractions and best-selling albums.

All of these in many ways can be considered Postmodern works.  But even the controversial novel, American Psycho, by Bret Eston Ellis, for better or for worse, is a product of Post-modernism.  As a decent citizen, reader and writer, were I to condescend to read such a book, I would fully expect to hate it, and to find it totally boring and not worthy of any intel-ligent reaction.  Yet, curiosity drove me to that novel, and  I read a good portion of it (I stopped before the end since I was not really interested to find out how such gruesome sto-ries are resolved).  Nevertheless, it turns out that Ellis has actually written a rather interesting novel, somewhat experi-mental in its narrative technique.  It is a funny, obsessive novel, full of memorable voices, and of course, extremely vicious, violent, disturbing, unsettling.  And yet, it may be the best book, or at least the most revealing book written about the 80′s Republican/Wall Street/Me Too/Rich & Famous/ Greed/Cheat/Gulf-War America.  No doubt Ellis, like the rest of the Brat-Pack, and most of the Cyberpunk Fiction writers (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Rudy Rucker) or the new young thugs of innovative fiction, Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Mark Amerika, William Vollmann, Eurudice, Criss Mazza, and several others newly arrived on the literary scene, grew up during the Postmodern era and learned their tricks from the old masters and makers of Postmodernism:  William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and many others.

But then, that Post-Pomo generation — these bright and risen angels, to play on the title of a recent and fascinating novel by one of these Post-Pomo writers, William T. Vollmann — has as much right to its vision of reality, however twisted or preposterous or virtual it may be, as the previous generation.

This anomaly of the popularity of an art which openly and de-fiantly denounces what makes it live, of an art that bites the hand that feeds it, is not only evident in literature, but in much of the visual arts too, and of course in the new Rock Music, in Rap, in MTV, which consists of non-sequential, rapid fire profusion of disjointed bits of images and informations thrown in the face of the capitalistic system.

But why shouldn’t these new writers and artists not live in their time and be shaped by their time:  the era of computer, fax, video, telecommunication — but also the era of greed and fraudulence.

The Postmodernists of the 1960s and 1970s reached the age of reason (or unreason) in the 1940s and 1950s, and their in-tellectual and aesthetic sensibilities were shaped by Exi-stentialism and Structuralism, by the Beats, Jazz (especially Bebop), Abstract Expressionism, and the appearance, at least in the U.S. of authors such as Kafka, Nabokov, Borges, Beckett.  Today, the cultural matrix that produced the first wave of Postmodern fiction seems as distant and old-fashioned to us as love-beads, incense, communes, flower-people, and phrases like: turn on, tune in, drop out.

Though no one ever really felt comfortable with the term Post-modern, nonetheless for several decades it served to define a
certain avant-garde activity played out on a high intellectual and artistic level, at times even accused of being elitist, until that activity was absorbed into mainstream culture by the economy and quickly turned into Pop-Art.  And so now it is time, perhaps, to abandon the term Postmodern.

Octavio Paz may have, in fact, put an end to all further dis-cussions of Postmodernism when in his acceptance speech for the 1990 Nobel Prize he reflected on the elusive meaning of the concept of modernity.

What is modernity?  It is, first of all, an ambiguous term:  there are as many types of modernity as there are societies.  Each society has its own.  The meaning of the word is as uncertain and arbitrary as the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle-Ages.  If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle-Ages of a future Modernity?   Is a name that changes with time a real name?  Modernity is a word in search of its meaning.  Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history?  Nobody knows for sure … In recent years there has been much talk of Postmodernism, but what is Postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity? [My emphasis]

Octavio Paz may be right.  Postmodernism has now become the Middle Ages of the next, as yet unnamed, era.  But while waiting for that era to be named, discussed, debated, argued, explained, dismissed, so that it may in turn become the Middle Ages of the subsequent era, let us admit that Postmodernism was a great fun adventure.  It is only too bad that all the explorers involved in that adventure could not have survived to see The End.

I began this essay by quoting from Beckett’s Stirrings Still, I would like to close with another few words from that last gasp of Postmodern fiction — a passage which seems to describe so well the present predicament of the Postmodern writer:

Head on hands half hoping when he disappeared again that he would not reappear again and half fearing that he would not.  Or merely wondering.  Or merely waiting.  Waiting to see if he would or would not.

What puzzles me about this presentation (part 1 as well as part 2) is that in attempting to explain how Postmodernism came to an end, I may have, in fact, written yet another postmodern text.  Oh well_  As Beckett’s Unnamable once put:

Here all is clear … No all is not clear … but the  discourse must go on … so one invents obscurities … RHETORIC.

Raymond Federman can be contacted via his website: www.federman.com
Photo credit: Simon Wilches