{"id":4215,"date":"2009-07-22T05:00:10","date_gmt":"2009-07-22T09:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=4215"},"modified":"2009-07-21T19:00:22","modified_gmt":"2009-07-21T23:00:22","slug":"pom0-fer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/pom0-fer","title":{"rendered":"Pom0-fer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gil in his 20s couldn’t have imagined that he’d one day put a thousand-plus-page Thomas Pynchon novel<\/a>\"\" back on the shelf and think, “I will never get around to reading this.” He also couldn’t have imagined that he’d spend years reading Montaigne’s essays<\/a>\"\" and, upon finishing that thousand-plus-page volume, think, “I have to go back and start this from the beginning.”<\/p>\n

But there you are. It’s the same theme you read from me a dozen times before: As I’ve grown older, I have less and less interest in contemporary fiction. Especially the (poorly defined) postmodern stuff.<\/p>\n

I was quite a pomo in my college days, but I’ve learned to appreciate the merits of a, well, traditional lifestyle<\/em> in my later years. Unlike other college-era decisions, this one had little to do with trying to piss off my parents. I think rather I had a desire to be New. I wanted to treat This Very Moment as an unprecedented one, unconstrained by past rules and laws. I imagined that novels had to be Encyclopedic in order to capture the world.<\/p>\n

In short, I was a bullshit artist.<\/p>\n

In grad school<\/a> I started wending my way back to the beginnings of literature \u00e2\u20ac\u201d as well as science & math, politics & society, and philosophy & religion, not to mention poetry, but I’m still a sucker for novels \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and began to understand how much of modern writing was merely an echo of the trends, themes and devices that were in use nearly from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Still, the occasion of this LA Times piece on the 61 essential postmodern reads<\/a> interested me a little, at least in an 0-fer kinda way. (There’s also a good 2-part interview with John O’Brien (1<\/a> and 2<\/a>), the publisher of The Dalkey Archive<\/a>. My tastes and interest have diverged pretty far from Mr. O’Brien’s mission, but I respect his vision for the press, his tenacity, and his attempt to justify publishing such esoterically unreadable works as Carole Maso’s AVA<\/a>\"\". It’s almost like the Bizarro World version of the Criterion Collection’s decision to put out a high-end version of Michael Bay’s Armageddon<\/a>\"\".)<\/p>\n

Unlike previous times I’ve broken down literary lists for an 0-fer post, I found that I needed to granulate this one a little more finely. In addition to “Read it,” “Read something by the author,” “0-fer” and “Who?”, I found that there were a bunch of books on this list that I started and never finished. Rather than put them in the “Read something by” list, I decided to add “Started, never finished.” It’s probably meaningful that this list has so many books that fall into that category. I should probably add “Will never attempt to finish” and “Why did I waste my time with this?” or “Read, but regret”, but no need to go overboard. I’ll just make little annotations on some of ’em instead.<\/p>\n

Without further ado:<\/p>\n

READ IT<\/h2>\n