Over dinner at Virgil's last week I was complaining about some douchebag's characterization of Heraclitus' fragments as "strikingly postmodern," because how unnecessary is that honestly, when Adam sweetly brought it to my attention that I don't know what postmodern means either. And as I consoled myself with pulled pork and peanut butter pie, I also consoled myself with the knowledge that very few people I've ever encountered seem confident they can define the term. But as literature scholars we are legally obligated to use it at every possible opportunity, and since the definition is so amorphous the word "postmodern" has lost all meaning. It's elusive, seductive, a chimera. It is different things to each of us. So listen, monkeys, I know that all of you have said this word at least once without being entirely sure that it actually applied - that's why I need you to take part in my fancy Postmodern Poll! Read on:
Comment or email with your definition of postmodernism. THE RULES: 1) Your submission may not exceed 300 words. 2) Your submission may not bore me. 3) Your submission may not come out of a textbook. The winner will have their submission posted in Highfalutin and Lowdown as the blog's OFFICIAL DEFINITION and will also receive the privilege of writing a guest entry. Try not to pee your pants too much, I know. The deadline is January 8, 2009. Anyway, so far I'm pretty sure I'm winning, but if you can top this, BRING IT ON:
The beginning of a weekly feature here at Hifalutin - letting all you creepy internet spiders inside my head and my iTunes every Saturday because what is writing if not the most socially acceptable form of egocentrism. This one's for Lexi, whose phone calls I'm really going to return when I have the twelve hours I want to spend talking. They won't all be this laden with meaning, but I'll forever associate this with the secret computer lab in the Social Sciences building, watching "The Office" on tv-links while there was still tv-links, walking around the west side of campus in March when everything smelled like orange blossoms and gliding home along empty highways with orange streetlamps in the liveoaks. Thanksgiving is over, but Lexi trust me, every day I am thankful for you and Freddie Mercury:
The systematic infantilization of the English language continues full throttle, and now it's Milton's turn, bitches! Stanley Fish is indignant, but that is hardly a surprise to anyone. Anyway, this blogger could not be happier - go for it, Dennis Danielson, Oldspeak is for unpersons! It's so the right time for somebody to get rid of all that pesky poetry standing in between the readers and that thrilling narrative to which none of us know the ending.
Hey! Hey everybody! Guess what? Our new President fucking reads! Books! Like that book he's holding right there! Everybody already knows that Obama's a poet, but did any of you take Ben Lee's class on Contemporary Poetry and Identity in 2005? Is that why the book looks familiar? (Note the helpful arrows!) Because it's the collected work of Nobel-winner Derek Walcott and your adorable soccer-playing married poetry professor made you write papers about "A Far Cry From Africa" while you tried to figure out how to write him love notes on your eyelids, and your boyfriend who sat next to you underlined your favorite passages? And the book sat on your shelf until you gave it away during the insane breakup six months later, drunk on Green-Apple Bacardi, but you saw it again at a Barnes & Noble in downtown Chicago shopping for a housewarming gift for another boy you liked but who, well, lived in Chicago? And then you decided to apply to grad school after finding out that Derek Walcott taught at Boston University and were thanked for your application but roundly rejected anyway?
Right. Walcott's collected has more or less been the bane of my existence. His motto is, "No You Can't." But, Oh!Bama, I don't care, just read aloud to us from the volume sometime on one of your fancy YouTube addresses, okay? You can make Michelle hide her copy of Somebody Blew Up America until the taping's over.
What the hell, England? You like to slaughter the innocent tea-drinking inhabitants of your trans-Atlantic colonies all day long, wearing fashionable scarlet outfits and just bayoneting the shit out of everything, because they asked you politely to lift the tax on Being Alive. And yet you allow your subjects at home to have opinions about poetry? THESE ARE NOT BEST PRACTICES FOR GOVERNANCE. Especially since as it turns out, the Poet Laureate of England has actual responsibilities - compare to our primitive colonial appointee, whose job has historically been to eat lobster in hot tubs and speak to roomfuls of elderly ladies and write a poem sometimes. Of whom will the British public collectively glance up from their porridge and signal their approval, as the shackles are clamped on their hands and feet and they are led in grimy single file to debtor's prison? Hifalutin will report on this story as it develops!
There's another more, uh, sane-sounding post coming on this subject (thankfulness) soon, but I'd just like to say this holiday season that I am giving thanks because my friend John, one half of the (former?) sarcastro-noise hot-pants-wearing musical miracle Wolf Wolf, started these shenanigans. It promises to be fucking epic. I hope all of you mutants had wonderful Thanksgivings. I sincerely mean that. Each and every one.
I love Bob Dylan. Not everyone I know loves Bob Dylan. The reasons are numerous and always interesting. 1) He can't sing. You've definitely got me there. He has more or less always sounded like a male goat in early adolescence, who has just been rejected from goat chorus at goat high school, because his voice is breaking and he is unbearably awkward. 2) His lyrics are nonsense. Well, yeah, he was usually pretty drunk. 3) His lyrics are too polemic. But he did throw Phil Ochs out of a cab one time, calling him a "singing journalist". 4) He should have stuck to folk and he never returns my calls. Is that you, Joan Baez?
Etcetera. The weirdest one though, and I've heard this from a few people, is He's not relevant anymore. As in, listening to Bob Dylan is anachronistic. As in, he no longer applies. As in, history has clearly pronounced its judgement on impassioned, outraged, hopeful folk music - hope lost, meaning lost, what's relevant now is Amy Winehouse. And I really like Amy Winehouse. But I think this is sort of silly. There are different kinds of art, that are called for in different situations. Sometimes art is fashion. Sometimes art is ego. Sometimes it's confession, or prayer, or plea - just, hear me, I want to talk to you, all of you, I need to say this, please. And sometimes it's prophecy:
I have been listening to this all weekend. Today Barack Obama spoke in my home state. Tomorrow night he will be president. It's true, there's still no such thing as a good political poem, and I am being way more earnest than usual, but isn't it funny how timeless this is, a song about how the times they are a-changin?
I will be back to my normal snarky self sooner or later. Just watch it and be moved, buttheads.
