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[...] Whosoever has let in one genuine sentence, one paragraph, has felt that seduction like a golden thread being pulled slowly through one. . . .
The future will be gorgeous and reckless, and words, those luminous charms, will set us free again. If only for a moment.
[...] Why must we now pay $25 for a book? Not because of the cost of producing the book; we pay $25 so that everyone along the way can get his cut, as inadequate as that cut may be. No one wants to consider what the actual costs are; no one, especially the publisher, wants to consider this because it raises the question of what need there is, or isn't, for all the middlemen, including--as presently constituted--the publisher.
on ebooks
Does it make any difference whether literature survives? Maybe not, but only in the sense that to people alive right now, it may not make any difference whether the environment survives; they won't be around to choke on the water or to breathe in pure CO. Both literature and the environment have to do with the quality of life, as do music, ballet, museums. We can, of course, survive without ballet, but survive to do what?
[...] No one will agree with this and I don't want to spend the time arguing it. Or: Hemingway's fiction created the American male. Again, I don't have the time. [...]
thought this was funny
There's also the possibility that in a society as deracinated and stripped of tradition and continuity [...] as our own, the void that emptily exists where common experience would ordinarily repose is filled by elements of popular culture so anchored to a specific time that they become part of the lingua franca, staples of the manufactured conversation, endlessly in medias res, that takes the place of shared heritage. In effect, trends in television, movies and popular music and fake nostalgia for their various incarnations are our shared conscious heritage (in other words, Nick at Nite is not kidding), in a way that literature can never be, since fiction blasts aside most temporal restrictions with its persistent availability, as opposed to the unavoidability of popular culture [...]
[...] Many of the books currently being manufactured as part of a "Generation X" "movement" have at their dead cold centers the vacillating heart of the advertising executive. Kept aloft--that is, "relevant"--by a constant barrage of moronic platitudes concerning the meaninglessness of life (as if this were a new discovery), the emptiness of the sexual relationship (the latter-day democratization of whose romantic aspects is a dwindling luxury afforded by high capitalism's temporary redistribution of wealth), the absence of God [...] the narrator immediately reveals that what the second-person protagonist--implicitly the reader--really desires is re-entry into the world of middlebrow pleasures: a Ralph Lauren Sunday brunch of croissants, the Times, and a nice clean girl. [...]
Life Before Theory (or the Time of Tweed). Roughly 1930-1975. The scholar's life was predominantly male and upper-class (less so from the middle-sixties on). [...] Ideologically, the dominant was New Criticism and its modernist cult of the aesthetic. Literature as religion. There was also, significantly, the strong residual presence of historicism/philology and its vestigial ideology of "the great books," "the classics," and "the Western tradition." [...]
The Age of Theory (in which all of the above is French Fried--and to a crisp). Roughly 1975-1982. Poststructuralism and deconstruction sweep onto campus and are merged with sixties politics of various stripes, producing: Queer Theory, ACT UP, French Feminism, post-Marxism, Cultural Studies and the New Historicism. [...]
[...]
The Postmodern Condition (the New Regime of Performativity). Roughly 1982-present. Theory left modernity and its ideological mission not even a few shards to shore against its ruin. The postmodern moment is one of great and very rare opportunity. All is fluid. [...]
incidentally, Of Grammatology was first published in 1967 (English version in 1976)
But who was behind it all? Mikhail Gorbachev? No one will disagree that, with perestroika and glasnost, and, most of all, with his explicit rejection of force, Gorbachev set off the avalanche of revolutionary change. But did he know what he was unleashing? I'm sure Gorbachev intended to free the European satellite countries--even East Germany--of Soviet hegemony, but did he mean for East Germany to simply disappear from the political map of the world and be absorbed into its West German brother state? [...]
But Berliners complained the loudest. They felt threatened by the Wall's new porosity. The almost forgotten phrase "Polish housekeeping"--meaning chaos and disorder--resurfaced. A few people said outright what they didn't like about the Wall: it wasn't solid enough. Finally people saw, and admitted to seeing, how good they had it living in the western shadow of the Wall. It cost nothing to assail the oddity as a "Wall of Shame," so long as its builders in the East maintained it and made sure it had no holes. [...]
in the spring of 1989, right after the Polish regime made it easier for its citizens to travel to West Berlin and thousands of Poles arrived and set up a flea market near Potsdamer Platz, to the chagrin of many West Berliners