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Frank (Frank)
Username: Frank

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 85.222.86.72
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 03:03 pm:   

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/13/in-theory-alain-robbe-gril let-fiction
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 03:26 pm:   

The 21st century is, like, so over.
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Frank (Frank)
Username: Frank

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 85.222.86.72
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 03:38 pm:   

Ah, but you have to admire the pomposity.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.166.117.210
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 03:40 pm:   

I am.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 03:40 pm:   

This ties in exactly with what Guy de Maupassant tetchily proclaimed, in his preface to the novel 'Pierre And Jean', that every generation needs to invent its own literary rules rather than harking back to the critics set favourites, in his case I believe it was Flaubert. I agree with him... all artforms need to evolve to stay fresh and relevant.
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Frank (Frank)
Username: Frank

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 85.222.86.72
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 03:46 pm:   

BUT, isn't part of this argument that writers have yet to write of living in the 21st century as it is lived?

Any debate about whether or not future generations will be able to read such work and find enough in it to recognize this as being 21st century literature rings a little hollow.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 04:01 pm:   

De Maupassant's point was that he considered it unfair (as indeed it is) for critics to lambast a novel for not following the established literary rules of its time - for not reading like a novel.

He proclaimed the right of the author to follow his own creative instincts, set his own rules, let the readers respond emotionally to the work as they will and let history be the judge of whether great Art had been created or not.

Brave authors like de Maupassant or Kafka or Burroughs or Easton Ellis, who deny convention and stubbornly follow their own wayward path, are the ones who create the "voice of their age" without ever consciously intending to... it's a matter of greatness will out.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 81.153.251.53
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 06:06 pm:   

These are, retrocausally, the great novels of the 21st century:

WITNESS PROTRACTION by Joel Lane
KOSMOS by Mark Samuels
EBLUM by Quentin S Crisp
THE COAXIS by Mark Valentine
NEMONYMOUS NIGHT by DF Lewis
JANGO'S RIFF by Rhys Hughes
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Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus)
Username: Rhysaurus

Registered: 01-2010
Posted From: 80.4.12.3
Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 - 09:00 pm:   

Alain Robbe-Grillet was a great writer, though.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.143.99.210
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 06:03 pm:   

Quoted from above:
==========================

These are, retrocausally, the great novels of the 21st century:

WITNESS PROTRACTION by Joel Lane
KOSMOS by Mark Samuels
EBLUM by Quentin S Crisp
THE COAXIS by Mark Valentine
NEMONYMOUS NIGHT by DF Lewis
JANGO'S RIFF by Rhys Hughes
====================


I posted that list last year.
I've now today formulated some actual book cover designs (in rough) for them in the comments to the blog post that listed them HERE.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 06:19 pm:   

Witness protraction being presumably what my readers will do – at least until they shut the book and start doing something else.

Howard Jacobson is writing about the 21st century, to take one example from outside genre fiction. THE FINKLER QUESTION could not have been written before early 2009.
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Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker)
Username: Stephen_theaker

Registered: 12-2009
Posted From: 92.232.184.206
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 06:26 pm:   

Does David Shields really think that Flaubert's writing seems antediluvian? Maybe he's been reading it in translation!

Madame Bovary's a novel about someone who runs up huge lines of credit. You couldn't get more relevant to the 21st century if you tried!
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 08:39 pm:   

God, yes. I was astonished by how relevant MB was to the latter-day when I reread it last year.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 09:46 pm:   

'Full Dark House' (2003) begins with one of the major characters being killed, in his 80s, in a terrorist bomb in central London. It then expertly flicks backward and forward between 1940 & 2002 contrasting and commenting upon the troubled times we live and lived in. It is a masterful novel in so many ways than just straight entertainment.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.106.185
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 11:44 pm:   

But not much of genuine interest or novelty has happened in the 21st century yet. Seriously.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 11:56 pm:   

Nah, it's been the most boring start to a century I can remember...
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Frank (Frank)
Username: Frank

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 85.222.86.21
Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 - 11:58 pm:   

Joel - HJ - a man of all seasons...sorry, centuries...pass me the JD and the revolver (:
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.122.109.109
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 12:21 am:   

'But not much of genuine interest or novelty has happened in the 21st century yet. Seriously.'
Thank God!
Er, unless you're talking about art...
I feel on the brink of being interesting at the moment - at least to myself.:-(
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 78.152.195.111
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 01:44 am:   

"Nah, it's been the most boring start to a century I can remember..."

Can you really remember the Sydney Olympics? I can't. Nothing new has happened that hasn't happened before, with the possible exception of social networking (and even that is more evolutionary than revolutionary).
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.18.30
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 02:20 am:   

The USA has elected its first black president. The good stuff stops there. As for the rest... The UK has been involved in three wars, one of them an outright colonial annexation. The capitalist system has crashed into its worst systemic crisis since the Great Depression. The ruling class in the UK has used that as an opportunity to destroy the NHS, the welfare state and the public sector in general. (That's still happening but will need a lot more resistance to stop it than New Labour are capable of.) Independent publishing and bookselling have been virtually destroyed. Arts funding has been virtually destroyed. As a result, the UK literary landscape has been burned to a charred ruin. All that in the last decade and most of it in the last three years. Boring?

Tony, take it easy. I hear what you're saying. Feelings can be unreliable. Use your power of reason and keep talking to those around you. Remember that despair is just anger turned inwards. Every human being is a miracle, every day is a miracle. People not only deserve a better world, they are capable of building one.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 03:07 am:   

Umm... 9/11, the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, first black president, global economic meltdown on a scale the world has never seen before and hasn't felt the worst of yet, mass uprisings in the Middle East & North Africa that threaten the stability of the entire world and could usher in a Third World War (watch this space), social networking changing the way people interact on a global scale, extreme climate change, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, disappearing ice-caps, flu pandemics, oil disasters, nuclear disasters - like I said all rather boring.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.88.102
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 03:43 am:   

So the usual round of war (international, intercultural and class-based) and economic and environmental turmoil. Nothing new there, it's just applied to different targets and the volume's been turned up here and there. I think that nobody's been successful at making great art out of 9/11 because there actually isn't anything inherently interesting about it but people have been fooled by its magnitude into thinking there must be significant. Extremists on both sides stand to benefit from that belief.

A new black president who is happy to be pictured sitting down with his staff to watch an actual snuff movie doesn't feel like progress to me.

No paradigm shifts yet. There were several in many fields in the 20th century: physics, economics, transport, biology and psychoanalysis.

But, we're only 11 years in. Something will happen soon enough.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 04:39 am:   

I foresee this century being one of inescapable decline and whatever paradigm shifts happen will most likely be in reverse.

The first decade has been the most concentrated period of turbulence and instability, on virtually every front, that the world has seen since the Second World War and I fear worse is to come...
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 09:11 am:   

On the plus side, we had a very warm April and my tulips have come up lovely.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.89.229
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 12:23 pm:   

"Thanks for appearing on our panel Proto, Stevie and Gary. Next week on Gardener's Question Time..."
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 12:24 pm:   

" . . . my wife and I like fucking in the bushes, but the thorns continually get stuck in our arses. What can we do?"
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 01:25 pm:   

"Plant some nice rhododendron, much more amenable to sexual adventure and will save the blushes of your neighbours..."
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.1.175
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 03:03 pm:   

Stevie, the mass uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East are the only major good news of the last decade in terms of social and political change. What do you mean by "threaten the stability of the entire world" – threaten the stranglehold of capitalist exploitation, corruption and neo-colonialism? How is that a bad thing? It's always tempting to assume that "instability" is a bad thing but just carrying on with a bankrupt ideology and a destructive economic system could be the worst thing of all. A lead weight dragging humanity down to the bottom of the sea is stable, cutting the chains and rising is unstable.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.118.75.129
Posted on Saturday, May 07, 2011 - 08:33 pm:   

I don't know. The Kadhafis and Husseins were enthroned by the nations who, in the wake of the Treaty (or treatIES) of Versailles, divided the remains of the Ottoman Empire between them. The descendants of the Prophet were promised independance and other things, but were denied a voice and even grossly made fun of. I don't have to name those nations, do I? My point is that these people (let's call them 'arabs') have never known anything like democracy and are most likely to revert back to the tribal skirmishes of yore.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 71.228.39.43
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 07:38 am:   

I'm with Shields on this one. Too many novels read like someone's idea of a novel and not like someone's idea of what contemporary reality is like.

Fiction is good at depicting relationships among people. Contemporary relationships, or at least a great many of them, are electronic, varied, sometimes so jargon-filled as to seem encrypted in code. The sites, applications, and technologies involved are eternally in flux: to specify one in your fiction is to aim for a moving target (at best) and to permanently date your work in the past (at worst). Fiction has a hard time with such relationships -- a hard time describing them and a hard time making them interesting.

A few nights ago I wanted to tell my wife about a funny line I'd come across on the web. I couldn't tell her how I'd gotten to the site in question because I couldn't remember. It was an interview with Ian Rankin by a member of the Scottish band Mogwai. My wife had no idea who Ian Rankin was or who Mogwai was, so I had to explain all this to her. The funny line (it wasn't that funny) had to do with Lionel Richie (my wife knew who he was), and specifically with a music video he made in the 80s, which my wife hadn't seen. I had to explain that to her as well. By the time I got to the funny line, it wasn't all that funny anymore.

This is contemporary life: to pass along the near-worthless nugget of goofy info, you have to go through half an hour of setup and explanation. Can fiction do that? Probably, although to do this while maintaining a reader's interest can't be easy. Still, this is what fiction should be doing, because to do otherwise is to describe someone else's time period, and that's missing the point.

That being said, Shields's take on literary license -- ie, that plagiarism is a good idea and should be an acceptable literary gesture -- is imo complete bollocks. His last two books have been full of the stolen text of other writers. This doesn't strike me as revolutionary, or even as representative of contemporary reality -- it strikes me as lazy.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.30.71
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 11:53 am:   

I've been a victim of that. A novelist told me'd included a few pseudo-documentary details from my first novel in his own rather similar novel, as a 'tribute' – with full acknowledgement. He sent me a copy, so he obviously assumed I'd be happy with what he'd done. But it turned out he had packed part of the book with material lifted from my novel in a way that made it look like his own invention. And the 'acknowledgement' turned out to be only the inclusion of my novel alongside several hundred other books, films, records and comics in a list of 'influences' that went on for several pages. How much else he'd stolen I don't know.

This is one reason why I'm intolerant of shameless thieves like Wes Craven. Another reason is that the postmodern 'there is only theft, nothing is new' argument has had fifty years to prove its cultural value and has utterly failed to do so.
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Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus)
Username: Rhysaurus

Registered: 01-2010
Posted From: 212.219.233.223
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 12:52 pm:   

> Another reason is that the postmodern 'there is only theft, nothing is new' argument has had fifty years to prove its cultural value and has utterly failed to do so.

Anyone who has read the hilarious montage stories of Donald Barthelme will probably disagree with that... Taking something out of its original context so that it effectively reinterpets itself is an old postmodern technique that has saturated modern culture to the point where we no longer perceive it as 'postmodern'. Here's a fairly simple example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmxra03b1nQ

There's nothing original here; the individual components of the entire 'work' already existed but the combination creates something completely new. It's like the water molecule. It might be formed from oxygen and hydrogen but it has properties that are unique to it and in fact water doesn't behave at all like oxygen or hydrogen.

Sure, a cry of 'postmodern irony!' can be used to justify laziness or even plagiarism. But anything can be used to defend anything, really. Blaming postmodernism specifically for that is a tactical ruse. We could, for instance, blame traditional ghost story writers for the same thing: copying. How many writers copy M.R. James without any irony in their approach at all?

Postmodernism is a dirty word to you lot, true, but here are some writers who are often (or generally) listed as postmodern writers:

Felipe Alfau
John Barth
Roberto Bolaño
Jorge Luis Borges
William S. Burroughs
Italo Calvino
Umberto Eco
Carlos Fuentes
William Gaddis
William H. Gass
Alasdair Gray
John Hawkes
G. Cabrera Infante
B. S. Johnson
Ismail Kadare
Danilo Kis
Jerzy Kosinski
Haruki Murakami
Vladimir Nabokov
Jeff Noon
Milorad Pavic
Victor Pelevin
Georges Perec
Thomas Pynchon
Raymond Queneau
Tom Robbins
José Saramago
Will Self
William T. Vollmann
Kurt Vonnegut

Every single one of them (in my view) superior to Mr.R. James, Lovecraft or Machen...
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 01:30 pm:   

Sure, let's not straw man. There are "hard" and "soft" forms of postmodernism.

And appropriation is not necessarily ventrilloquism.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 01:43 pm:   

Of that lot I've only read; Borges, Burroughs, a bit of Murakami (wasn't impressed) & Vonnegut.

I find there's a fine line between great writing of revolutionary technique that flows naturally from the author, bearing the stamp of a genuinely new voice, and self-conscious posing for the sake of literary cleverness.

The difference is something impossible to define but can only be experienced by reading the works, and is, of course, entirely subjective - though a consensus of opinion can be arrived at, for what it's worth.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 01:46 pm:   

I have read one Nabokov short story and liked it very much, enough to ensure I will get round to reading his novels.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 01:50 pm:   

Love Martin Amis. He's a postmodern author.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 01:51 pm:   

Sorry, Joel, but I'm with Hubert. The situation developing on the doorstep of Europe can only be described as volatile in the extreme and worries me very much.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 01:52 pm:   

I really didn't enjoy the Will Self I've read.

I like Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapter - kind of postmodern.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 02:05 pm:   

J.G. Ballard is the man for me!

He was writing books that mapped out the 21st Century back in the 1960s and people are still trying to catch up with him.
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.5.62.2
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 03:18 pm:   

"Postmodernism is a dirty word to you lot, true..."

To which lot, sorry?

"How many writers copy M.R. James without any irony in their approach at all?"

Far too many. Substitute (for a few instances) Stephen King or Clive Barker or Lovecraft for James and the same answer applies. However, since you cite James, it can be argued that in his frequent play with narrative and parody he himself fits the postmodernist mould.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 03:22 pm:   

So does Tristram Shandy (1759).
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.108.112
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 03:57 pm:   

"By the time I got to the funny line, it wasn't all that funny anymore."

So what was the Lionel Ritchie gag? Was it about the video for "Hello"?
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.7.212
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 05:50 pm:   

Writers imitating Clive Barker – himself a postmodern magpie – are rather like Lady Gaga imitating Madonna's imitations of 'classic' pop instead of assembling her own record collection.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 71.228.39.43
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 10:10 pm:   

Proto, the Lionel Richie thing has to do with why Mogwai named a song "You're Lionel Richie," and it can be found here (http://thequietus.com/articles/05697-ian-rankin-mogwai-stuart-braithwaite-interv iew), although you'll have to watch a nine-minute video to get to it.

Don't expect much, though, okay? As I said, it's not that funny, especially if you have to get through lots of explanation to get to it.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 71.228.39.43
Posted on Sunday, May 08, 2011 - 10:17 pm:   

Also, Rhys, I have no problem with postmodernism. I've read every author you listed there except for two. I'm a fan, actually, of many of them. My quarrel comes with Shields, whose last book, REALITY HUNGER, is comprised solely of material cribbed from other writers. Literally. He wrote not a single word in it.

The argument he makes for this work isn't pro-postmodernism, really, it's pro-collage. It's that sampling is legal in music, in visual arts, in film, but not in literature. To some extent I'm sympathetic with this argument -- I like Donald Barthelme, too -- but Barthelme put his stolen text to fresh uses, placed the text -- often taken from instruction manuals and highly technical sources -- in new contexts. Shields (in my view) is just stealing.

Also I don't really see how cribbing text from others supports Shields's overall thesis that readers crave reality in fiction. I agree we crave reality. I just don't see what stealing text has to do with that.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.5.221
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 01:17 am:   

Rhys, if you define every writer who uses irony, literary reference and formal parody within a literary framework as 'postmodern' then your list would have to include Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Poe and many others since the earliest days of literature. What defines postmodernism for me is a cynical contempt for any notion of commitment, purpose or identity, a hatred of creativity, a hatred of honesty, a shallow and exploitative eagerness to appropriate the ideas of others and demand applause for doing so. Postmodernists are eternal sixth formers convinced that their facile cleverness is the greatest of human intelligence. As far as I'm concerned they can go on deconstructing the architecture of their own back passages until the end of time.
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Weber (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.147.137.23
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 01:39 am:   

So, you're not keen on postmodernism then?

I'm not sure, I'm just picking up a vibe here...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 01:42 am:   

I kind of agree with that, Joel, although not with your slagging off of Clive Barker.

For me literature is all about storytelling, first and foremost, and whether that's done in a classic, effortlessly readable style (such as Barker excels at) or in an original, convention defying style (as with Ballard, Burroughs or Vonnegut) is immaterial to me as long as I am gripped by the story and made to care about the characters.

Postmodernism is a term I refuse to give any credence to.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.5.221
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 01:50 am:   

Postmodernism was primarily a counter-revolutionary movement among French academics that opposed the radicalism of Sartre, Camus, Althusser and others. It insisted that class, struggle, consciousness and revolution were nothing more than cultural 'tropes' to be mocked and played with. While claiming to be anarchic and subversive, postmodernism has always endorsed the capitalist free market, opposed solidarity and attempted to disable any kind of collective action against injustice. Postmodernism announced the end of history. The last few years have shown it to be utterly wrong in that judgement.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.5.221
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 01:56 am:   

I'm not actually attacking Clive Barker, whom I consider a skilful and eloquent writer. I'm just saying what should be obvious to all of us: that he is a magpie who presented a collage of ideas taken from Bradbury, Leiber, Matheson, Sturgeon, Reamy, Ellison and other American horror writers and reworked in a British context. But at least he read those writers, unlike the overwhelming majority of his fans.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 71.228.39.43
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 03:08 am:   

Joel, you're one smart dude, but I disagree with you here. In American academic circles (at least), postmodernism is a loose grouping of approaches to literature generally characterized by a suspicion of objective reality, by metafictional narratives, and by literary gamesmanship of one sort or another. It's a loose "movement" -- no one can seem to agree who belongs and who doesn't -- but I don't get the sense that it was counter-revolutionary in any political/philosophical sense. (Are you referring to Derrida?) It always struck me as just a bunch of very bright authors who found the usual character/plot/setting approach to narrative a little boring and thought they'd spice things up a bit. Pynchon, Barthelme, Coover, Barth -- surely these authors are just having fun?

Still, lots of people can't stand it, I know.

I'd agree that the movement (such as it is) exhibits a "hatred of honesty" only to the extent that (like many in my generation) it's suspicious of sentimentality, but I can't agree much more than that.

Your political/philosophical analysis intrigues me, however. (Certainly I've never heard the term framed that way.) I was under the impression that postmodernism grew out of Beckett/Sartre/et al -- the existentialists -- and not out of some sort of opposition to them. But I admit I've never much studied the subject, and I could be wrong.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.29.254.73
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 07:47 am:   

As I said, there are "hard" and "soft" forms of postmodernism. Let's not straw man.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.28.87
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 08:49 am:   

Fair comment, both. But I do think postmodernism is very deeply opposed to existentialism and to socialism. Hence its popularity in the 1980s.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.28.87
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 08:57 am:   

NB I'm really talking about postmodernism in relation to political ideology. Postmodernism in relation to literature is certainly a looser and more volatile element. But I'm wary of it, especially when it defends derivative writing by arguing that all writing is necessarily derivative. Existentialism is built around the principles of personal commitment, authenticity and intervention. Postmodernism quite explicitly denies that these concepts have any meaning.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.28.87
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 09:01 am:   

There is, of course, a valid argument that postmodernism (especially in Lyotard's original formulation) was an objective account of cultural decline rather than a prescriptive ideology. But that really changed in the 1980s as it spread from academic to popular culture.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.28.87
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 09:06 am:   

A good example of what postmodernism means in terms of modern culture is 'channel-surfing'. Sitting on the sofa, flicking from one channel to another, sampling dozens of different TV programmes in two or three minutes, is a postmodern experience. It's also, necessarily, a passive and shallow experience. But it gives you a 'fast scan' perspective that you wouldn't get by actually giving anything your full attention.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 220.138.165.174
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 10:46 am:   

Rhys, I think if you read some Machen you might be surprised at how versatile a writer he was. As a fan of Borges, I assume you're aware of his appraisal of Machen?
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.5.78.224
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 11:43 am:   

Has Rhys gone away?

I have to say that as a writer I've never concerned myself much with what I am (except a horror writer). I've been claimed to be post-modernist ("The Franklyn Paragraphs"), magic realist ("The Long Lost", I think it was), and so on. For me all that matters is that what I write should engage my imagination, otherwise there's no point in writing it at all.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 01:49 pm:   

Somewhat ironically in the context of this discussion, the use of invented texts and the pseudo-documentary embedding of them in fictional narratives is a strategy whose use in weird fiction was pioneered by Machen.
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Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus)
Username: Rhysaurus

Registered: 01-2010
Posted From: 212.219.233.223
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 03:22 pm:   

I haven't gone away, Ramsey. I just don't have internet access on my own computer (a direct result of my personal austerity drive). I get two hours internet time every day and often by the time I see something I'd like to respond to, it's old news!

I've called myself a "postmodernist" frequently in the past and I'll continue to do so. I'm a "soft" postmodernist most of the time, but every morning when I wake up, or whenever I get aroused throughout the day, I become the "hard" type...

Anyway, as a self-confessed postmodernist, I certainly don't support capitalist values (I don't support communism either, as it happens) and I'm not even against existentialism. For me, Chris Morris' post above sums up my own attitude exactly ("...Pynchon, Barthelme, Coover, Barth -- surely these authors are just having fun?")
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 03:53 pm:   

I am right in thinking that postmodernism was a reaction to modernism which was a reaction to traditionalism i.e. a growth from establishment certainty to radicalism to playful absurdity - and that this process can be applied to all areas of human thought, government and creativity.

Surely this is a cycle that has been going on since the dawn of civilization and only the appropriation of the word "modern" has muddied the waters making us think we represent the pinnacle of human intellectualism. Today's radicals become the traditionalists of tomorrow and the pranksters who stand aloof poking fun at both sides have always been with us - the meaningless term "postmodern" is merely one of their cleverest jokes.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.143.99.210
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 04:13 pm:   

I've never really understood what being a post-modernist really means. It sounds good - with a retrocausal tinge...!
Having just looked it up, I reckon I am both a post-modernist and a modernist, with my liking of both Philip Glass and Anton Webern. but I don't know where Nemonymity and the Intentional Fallacy fit in.
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Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus)
Username: Rhysaurus

Registered: 01-2010
Posted From: 212.219.233.223
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 04:32 pm:   

> Having just looked it up, I reckon I am both a post-modernist and a modernist...

You've nailed it exactly, Des. That's what most creative people (in my experience) actually are, even though we're not supposed to be allowed to be both at the same time.

The first use of the term "postmodernist" was back in the 1930s: it applied to mainly painters who were in opposition to modernism. The term was resurrected later for other purposes.

The pinnacle of postmodernist writing wasn't the 80s, as Joel Lane stated above, but the late 60s and early 70s. The great classics of literary postmodernism were mostly produced then: the story collections of Donald Barthelme, John Barth's best novels, Sorrentino's mishmash novels, etc. Personally I associate these works, and that type of writing, with the lighthearted fun of the psychedelic era and not with the "greed is good" pseudo-ethic of the Thatcher years.

However, if we are talking specifically about postmodernist architecture then yes, Joel Lane is absolutely right: the 80s was the heyday of that.

I love postmodernist literature above all other kinds apart from OuLiPo, but postmodernist architecture is a bit depressing really, to my mind at least.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 92.15.195.100
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 07:27 pm:   

Hmmm... I probably shouldn't wade into this because it's far to big a subject, but I think the caricatures of post-modernism that are being given here are symptomatic of a current wilful misunderstanding of it.

Joel, I think you are wrong about post-modernism being a reactionary force. In the discipline where I first encountered it (history) it was a direct outgrowth of Marxist history. It provided a direct challenge to those who would insist that history should only be written taking 'official sources' as referents because then you end up writing the history of those who wrote those sources: on the whole, thousands of years worth of white males.

Post-modernism is the force that allows histories of cook-books and the light they cast on social movements; histories of advertising, popular song, nursery rhymes, oral traditions. Post-modernism in history (and in criticism as far as I'm concerned and I'll argue that with anyone Barthes-onwards, I'm not up on the early structuralists) is a necessary explosion of the approved readings, a hugely inclusive movement that allows things like gender studies, queer studies, study of classical texts from the perspective of an ethnic minority to take their place in academia.

Because of this, it tends to get a bad rap from middle-aged white men. Perhaps most egregious is Francis Wheen, whose misunderstanding of postmodernism as relativism in his Mumbo-Jumbo is incredibly facile. Unfortunately, it seems to be all anyone else has read, and when you hear Richard Dawkins, Nick Cohen, even - disappointingly - Derren Brown fulminating against postmodernism because it is 'relativist', Wheen is usually all they've read.

Postmodernism does reject absolute readings that require reference to values outside a text. It's true that it doesn't claim a moral imprimatur for any particular reading. However, it doesn't, then, follow that all readings are equally correct, but that one cannot be declared right by an appeal to outside interests. This is a liberating, democratising experience, in which all readings are worth evaluating on their own terms. It clearly is not a statement that they are all of equal value.

This is the key misunderstanding, and it is pushed hard by the 'Euston left' with their Amis-esque talk of moral superiority and clashes of cultures, their certitude growing with each follicle that closes.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 08:11 pm:   

Rhys, I'm Joel Lane in the workplace, but here I'm just Joel, if that's OK.

I'm a lot more familiar with postmodernist criticism and political theory than with postmodernist writing, as I said above – so my comments reflect that bias.

Natt, I think there's been an interesting shift in the balance of academic thinking since the 1980s, and it's one I should have recognised in my comments. In the 1980s academic postmodernists tended to describe themselves as 'non-left' or 'post-Marxist' and to be quite dismissive of any notion of class conflict. In the 1990s the kind of more nuanced and politicised thinking you describe started to emerge. With postmodernism as the dominant academic culture it developed its own 'left wing' and 'right wing'.

However, I reserve the right to chuckle at such utterly clumsy academic postmodernist statements as (these are real examples, from career academics in the UK) "You need post-structuralism to talk about differences between women" and "Racists superimpose the binary opposition good/bad on the binary opposition white/black".
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 09:43 pm:   

I'm bored with this... postmodernism is so passe.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.116.51.48
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 09:56 pm:   

Post-modernism is basically about how we've come to the end of our tether and started looking backwards, quoting from all manner of stylistic highlights that went before, in lieu of trying something really new.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.253.77
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 10:08 pm:   

My postman is very modern. He's down with the kids. Innit.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.143.99.210
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 10:09 pm:   

The word 'innit' was on the National News today. It's now allowed in Scrabble.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.14.108
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 11:27 pm:   

Natt, another thing... 'queer theory' has spent the last decade proclaiming as its own unique insight what Kinsey established through empirical research half a century ago: that the overwhelming majority of people who identify as heterosexual have some level of persistent homosexual desire and vice versa. It's a striking example of how academics won't admit what's under their noses until they have developed a theoretical framework to account for it – then they claim it as a new insight.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Monday, May 09, 2011 - 11:58 pm:   

Some academics.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 92.15.195.100
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 01:18 am:   

Joel - I would heartily endorse your chuckling. It's a valid response to most academic theories. I have had to hold my tongue whilst people told me of their theories of how punctuation reinforces the patriarchy.

However, I think that's the point of academia. To play with ideas. To say bizarre and counterfactual things and see where the ideas take you.

And, with regards to your second point, I was observing that the fracturing of the academic gaze caused by post-modernism validated new perspectives within academia. Not that it created them. Those perspectives existed, of course, before they became academically acceptable, but my point was that post-modernism was the conceptual framework within which they became acceptable academically.

(I'm tempted to argue that there is no such thing as post-modern literature, that post-modernism is an analytical tool rather than a creative one. Post-modern with reference to creative arts just seems to me allusive or 'interestingly structured'.)
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.116.51.48
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 02:14 am:   

Is there much difference between post-modernism and ecclecticism?
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 07:44 am:   

>>>I would heartily endorse your chuckling. It's a valid response to most academic theories.

I find the amount of cliche-driven stereotyping on this thread quite astonishing. It's like judging religion by fundamentalist ravers. Come on, guys, you know better than this.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 07:45 am:   

>>>However, I think that's the point of academia. To play with ideas. To say bizarre and counterfactual things and see where the ideas take you.

What?!
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 07:45 am:   

>>>It's a striking example of how academics won't admit what's under their noses until they have developed a theoretical framework to account for it – then they claim it as a new insight.

Eh?!
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 08:02 am:   

>>>>However, I reserve the right to chuckle at such utterly clumsy academic postmodernist statements as (these are real examples, from career academics in the UK) "You need post-structuralism to talk about differences between women" and "Racists superimpose the binary opposition good/bad on the binary opposition white/black".

Believe me, the great majority of academics are laughing with you. Well, at least 99% of them. I think that's statistically signficant. I'll do a T-Test to prove it, if you like. Set the alpha level at 0.01 instead of the standard 0.5, just to be robust. I'll screen out all extraneous variables wherever possible. That should make the findings more reliable.

I mean, really.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 08:27 am:   

I'm not annoyed really. Just chuckling. :-)
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.10.203
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 08:54 am:   

"I'm tempted to argue that there is no such thing as post-modern literature, that post-modernism is an analytical tool rather than a creative one. Post-modern with reference to creative arts just seems to me allusive or 'interestingly structured."

That's a very attractive way of looking at it.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.10.203
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 09:14 am:   

"Those perspectives existed, of course, before they became academically acceptable, but my point was that post-modernism was the conceptual framework within which they became acceptable academically."

Which of course makes, without irony, the same point I was making about the academic world: it won't accept the existence of frogs until it has set up a department of batrachian studies to place them in a theoretical context.

That doesn't mean academic research can't impact on the practical world, as the current proliferation of academic private sector awareness departments producing 'think tanks' to help drive through privatisation demonstrates. No current business conference is complete without an academic explaining the 'guiding hand' of the free market.

Here's another quote, from a professor at an event I attended two years ago: "Health and safety legislation is an attempt within our socialist society to imitate the effects that a free market would have."

Sorry Gary, I'm sure you and others are doing good work, but I'm just not the mood to be fair and balanced. I'll come back when my mood has improved.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 09:28 am:   

You know you're basing your observations on the "newsworthy" looney fringe. Such Daily-Mail-reader-ese is unworthy of you, Joel. :-)
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 09:33 am:   

I was at a conference recently in Taiwan and some free market guy who wanted to privatise all social care was pretty much shunned by all the delegates. I recall the phrase "he's a fucking neocon" being hissed all weekend.
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Allybird (Allybird)
Username: Allybird

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 210.185.13.86
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 10:55 am:   

I have written about sex slavery, trolling on the internet and many issues which are presently a problem.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 01:50 pm:   

"You know you're basing your observations on the "newsworthy" looney fringe. Such Daily-Mail-reader-ese is unworthy of you, Joel."

But an example like the last speaker I quoted would be as much appreciated by the Daily Mail as he was by the businessmen at the conference I attended.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 01:57 pm:   

And Gary, I'm sorry but there's a hell of a lot more where those quotes came from, e.g. 'Madonna's videos reverberate across the significatory network' (from a Cambridge lecturer in English literature) to 'If you read queer theory you'll see that many people are bisexual' (from a London sociologist).
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.118.73.192
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 02:42 pm:   

you'll see that many people are bisexual

All people are bisexual to some degree. Nobody is 100% gay or straight. Furthermore, individuals tend to fluctuate between the theoretical extremes of 100% gay or 100% straight.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 02:51 pm:   

>>>>>And Gary, I'm sorry but there's a hell of a lot more where those quotes came from, e.g. 'Madonna's videos reverberate across the significatory network' (from a Cambridge lecturer in English literature) to 'If you read queer theory you'll see that many people are bisexual' (from a London sociologist).

My simple point was, Joel, is this kind of thing enough to justify statements like this:

>>>It's a striking example of how academics won't admit what's under their noses until they have developed a theoretical framework to account for it – then they claim it as a new insight.

That's objectionable to a great many academics, who are doing good, important work. As I said, some academics are like this; most aren't.

Hey, I'm hardly up in arms about this point (see above), but I did feel you were generalising in a rather careless way.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.159.173.170
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 02:54 pm:   

Let me put it this way: in my experience, judging academia by the examples you cite is akin to judging horror fiction by Shaun Hutson and other splatterers. Yes, they exist, but then so do a lot of quieter folk, doing work that deserves wider attention than such excessive, crowd-taunting proponents.
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Steveduffy (Steveduffy)
Username: Steveduffy

Registered: 05-2009
Posted From: 86.158.81.217
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 03:56 pm:   

All people are bisexual to some degree. Nobody is 100% gay or straight.

Granted, in the cheerful spirit of polymorphous perversity. But is it necessary to read queer theory to arrive at this insight, or could you - fnaar, fnaar - just come upon it by your own efforts?
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.118.73.192
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 04:54 pm:   

It so happens I have read Kinsey - and a few others. The Spada Report was an eyeopener as well. Today some are trying to ignore or bypass Kinsey's findings (after all sexual mores are not as free as in, say, the eighties) but I believe the basic tenets are still valid. The use of terms like 'polymorphous perversity', on the other hand, brings to mind the British witch hunt on gays in the fifties. But I'm sure 'twas done in jest
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Steveduffy (Steveduffy)
Username: Steveduffy

Registered: 05-2009
Posted From: 86.156.99.53
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 05:04 pm:   

Like Freud, I use the phrase in a wholly non-judgmental sense. Unlike him, I also do it for laffs.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 06:50 pm:   

OK Gary, I'm allowing mild annoyance based on personal experience to bias my judgement. Sorry. And actually I met lots of very good academics when I was a student, some of whom helped me and influenced my thinking.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.181.16.203
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 06:54 pm:   

It's all cool, sir. :-)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.143.99.210
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 07:03 pm:   

COOL AIR
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.37.225
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 07:36 pm:   

Hubert – yes, what amused me about the 'queer theory' claim was the assumption that only academic study, as opposed to experience, could validate such a statement.

I still cherish singer and crime writer Kinky Friedman's description of his visit to a Texan gay bar: "I turned around and there were two men kissing. I was so shocked I nearly threw up over the guy I was dancing with."
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Steveduffy (Steveduffy)
Username: Steveduffy

Registered: 05-2009
Posted From: 86.156.99.53
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 08:08 pm:   

That's what I was getting at, Joel. But you wisely eschewed cheap innuendo -

Damn, I'm doing it again.
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.68
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 08:44 pm:   

"All people are bisexual to some degree. Nobody is 100% gay or straight."

And I imagine there are more spankos on here besides me.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 11:51 pm:   

Dare I ask, Ramsey?
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.14.24
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 12:26 am:   

Can we please take this thread to a place other than total share mode?
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.24.14.24
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 12:29 am:   

Sorry, I didn't mean that. It's none of my business what people talk about. I need some sleep.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.12.184
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 01:14 am:   

"All people are bisexual to some degree. Nobody is 100% gay or straight."

I'm not sure that this is correct.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.116.48.36
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 09:59 am:   

According to Kinsey it is. I no longer have the books at hand, but as I recall he says every individual is positioned somewhere between the theoretical extremes, and furthermore that he may shift slightly or substantially in either direction in the course of his life. This makes perfect sense to me.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.183.53
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 10:53 am:   

Ramsey - thank you so much for that insight. I have been agonising over my motives for a long time and this has helped me
It's coincidental but over the past few days I have been watching a documentary about a man in the US who after a beating by some local youths started staying at home collecting action figures and putting them in a miniature village he built in his garden. He started putting them in various positions, photographing them in a way that made them look real. It was his alternative life. He had figures that represented himself and people he liked or knew. It was an incredibly moving documentary. In the end he got spotted by a photographer and ended up having an exhibition in New York. The gallery owner said he was a pure artist, that his work contained not a scrap of irony or sense of winking at the camera found in much modern art. This was his life and nothing more. This has helped me, too.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.183.53
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 11:05 am:   

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/geek-pride/201011/not-childs-play
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 147.252.230.148
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 03:03 pm:   

"According to Kinsey it is."

I think that at one end of the scale the data disappears into the noise of being attracted to general human characteristics (i.e., eyes, mouth). So I think to say that one can't distinguish someone to any meaningful desgree then we can say that they're hetero.

Someone might be (say) 1% homo, but if the statistical noise of general attraction to human traits is (say, 5%), we can't meaningfully distinguish between heterosexuality and bisexuality. In other words, we can't disprove that they're 100% hetero.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 03:31 pm:   

I agree with that, Proto.

I have distinct memories of being physically attracted to a boy in primary school (P4 to be exact) with blonde hair and blue eyes, to the point that I would make excuses to get sitting beside him, even though we had nothing in common and he turned out to be a bit of a teacher's pet - which put me off completely.

I had no idea at the time why I "liked" this kid but understand now that sexual attraction is hotwired into us as one of the most powerful biological instincts - every bit as much as hunger or aggression (when faced with a threat to our survival).

Since those days of exponential growth, both biological and psychological, I was lucky enough (given human prejudice) to have ended up pretty much rampantly heterosexual - to the point that I feel sorry for women with having to put up with us males' poor pitiful excuses for human bodies(as objects of desire).

I went through a similar experience around the age of 12 when I went through a period of thinking Chris De Burgh (god help me) was the greatest musical genius the world had ever produced. Then I vied for a while between Queen & Dire Straits for my favourite band. Dire Straits won. Then I discovered Talking Heads (and had my first shag) at around the same time... and the rest is my personal history.

People are complicated and but by a quirk of fate I might have ended up an arse licking homosexual Queen fan rather than the satyric idiot I am nowadays.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 147.252.230.148
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 04:07 pm:   

"I went through a period of thinking Chris De Burgh (god help me) was the greatest musical genius the world had ever produced."

It's against nature!
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 129.11.76.229
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 04:24 pm:   

>>>Then I discovered Talking Heads (and had my first shag)

Over to you, Joel . . .
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 04:31 pm:   

Needless to say I still have all my Talking Heads & Dire Straits albums, the best of Queen & nothing at all by C De B.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.116.57.3
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 06:56 pm:   

the noise of being attracted to general human characteristics (i.e., eyes, mouth)

If you mean that we're attracted first by certain physiognomical characteristics and then discover (sometimes to our dismay) what the sex of our 'prey' is, you're right. It has happened to me a few times. But it is possible to be attracted to, say, someone's intellect or way of talking while the talker is physically not at all 'our type' or even totally the opposite of what we like.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.116.57.3
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 06:59 pm:   

the noise of being attracted to general human characteristics (i.e., eyes, mouth)

If you mean that we're attracted first by certain physiognomical characteristics and then discover (sometimes to our dismay) what the sex of our 'prey' is, you're right. It has happened to me a few times. But it is possible to be attracted to, say, someone's intellect or way of talking while the talker is physically not at all 'our type' or even totally the opposite of what we like.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 178.116.57.3
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 07:00 pm:   

Oops. Sorry about that!
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.63.32
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 08:23 pm:   

Yes, Hubert, but it can be even wider than that - sensual but non-sexual.
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Mick Curtis (Mick)
Username: Mick

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.179.195.21
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 11:01 pm:   

I'm absolutley shocked at this news, Stevie. I mean, Chris de Burgh? There's no excuse for that at any age.
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Frank (Frank)
Username: Frank

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 85.222.86.21
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 11:04 pm:   

I don't know, Jan Hammer was a close thing for me...not the man, but the God like musicianship.
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Mick Curtis (Mick)
Username: Mick

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.178.81.136
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 11:31 pm:   

Sorry, that should have been "absolutely"...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.4.19.77
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 11:52 pm:   

I know, I know... but in my defence I am Irish and I was 12 at the time. Let it go, people, please!

The shame...
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.186.66.88
Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2011 - 08:28 am:   

OK, we'll let it go. As moderator, I'll make sure of it.

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