File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1999/avant-garde.9903, message 180


Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 13:57:10 -0500
From: Barry Smylie <barrysmylie-AT-iname.com>
Subject: Re: Vs: a puddle of Irony


> I apologize my lousy English, and my not-so-practical dictionary...
>
> "She said, 'I know you...you cannot sing'.
> I said, 'That's nothing, you should hear me play piano.'"
>   - Morrisey

you think you English is bad you should see my final place Finish!

but you are right... i looked into my little electronic practical dictionary
for the term "postmodern" and got:

post·mod·ern or post-mod·ern (post-mòdčern) adjective
Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier
modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of
style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: “the
post-modern mode of tapering the tops of buildings” (Jane Holtz Kay).
— post·modčern·ism noun
— post·modčern·ist adjective

This definition is very odd because either you return to traditional modes or
you take modern principles to the extreme.  It can't be both.  I think that
taking modernist styles to the extreme was modernist.  How much more extreme
can you get than DADA or "Happening" or their legitimate children the whelps
"Conceptualism" and "Performance".  Non-objectivity in visual art seems to be
the goal of modernism.  Is that extreme?  Or is returning to traditional and
objective values (like an artist making a thing in real material) extreme?

I have to confess, I don't know anything about PostModern lit, but I was
presuming a "multi- authorial" chorus of voices (like media arts writers doing
a sitcom) or the multi personalities of John Barth.  Cubist literature?

hehehe (i am loosing my mind).

I mean, isn't "postmodern" a noun?

gulp

zap (shock therapy)





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