"The perfect crime is the murder of reality"
Ah, Baudrillard.
"It will never again be given to us to return to the idea of an ambiguous, undecipherable world; it will be totally deciphered. This is integral reality, which, as I see it, is entirely unbearable. At some point, there will surely be a massive counter-transference against this total integrism of reality, which isn't even objective any more, since there's no longer any object! "

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Got it.

I can't figure out how to unsubscribe...

Help.

I gave it a try and decided it wasn't for me. I'm not sure what I was expecting it to be. I think I just don't like the email format for group discussions.

ah, shite

scat reveals much about an animal's life
health and habits

I'm almost there. Gotta wait until my exit doesn't look like sour grapes. At least I said something, which makes me feel better....

Well, I just gave up on the Canpoetics listserve. Anyone else? It was brutal today. What a load a shite.

S1ngularity::criticism

I haven't checked out S1ngularity::criticism for a while, which is a shame. It has a great discussion of Donald Barthelme, one of my favourites, including a weird comment from John Updike: "Donald Barthelme? Is he read now, by people of your age...? He's become a curiosity.... There are fads in critical fashion, but a writer at his peril strays too far from realism. Especially in this country, where realism is kind of our thing." What the fuck is that supposed to mean? They also link to a couple of commentary pieces on science fiction. Jonathan Lethem has an interesting essay on where sci-fi went astray: "It's now a commonplace in film criticism that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg together brought to a crashing halt the most progressive and interesting decade in American film since the '30s. What's eerie is that the same duo are the villains in SF's tragedy as well, though you might want to add a third name, J. R. R. Tolkien. The vast popular success of the imagery and archetypes purveyed by those three savants of children's literature expanded the market for "sci-fi", a cartoonified, castrated, and deeply nostalgic version of the budding literature, a thousandfold."



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The king is dead, long live the king!

Especially liked this bite:

"Most people outgrow it when they stop feeling insecure or threatened."

"Postmodern literary theory is now transforming itself so rapidly that Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic critics (and others) are flocking back to the drawing board in droves as they search for new approaches to writing and teaching."

Couldn't this have happened when I was in school? Better be careful what I wish for... I might still be there. (LOL* ALDaily)



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Oh my, just when I was catching up on all those essays I never read at university. While I despised its power, like I despise all totalitarian forces, I love what it did to the dusty old professors who used the same lecture notes on Adam Bede for twenty years. It really was a war you were in if you studied the humanites in the late 80's, and once the dead and wounded are all parceled away, who does not fondly remember wartime adventures?

BTW, a hilarious attack on the theory-head figure in Philip Roth's The Human Stain. Pee in your pants hilarious.

Death of the Critic

Die! Die! Die! You freakish theory-headed hydra.



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Some Ivanhoes Choose Their Daddios

What's the freaking point** being made here again?



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Postmodernism is Dead

Long live critical realism.




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Kill the Critics...

...And leave their corpses for the dogs.




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