Author: Mike Scalise

While this whole book, to me, was a remarkable articulation of what many, many New Yorkers felt about 9/11 and it unfortunate (and squandered?) aftermath, I most notably identified with Spiegelman’ s statement in the preface that he felt that outside of the city, he felt like he’d "wandered into an inverted version of Saul Steinberg’s famous map of America as seen from Ninth Avenue". I moved to New York a few short weeks after 9/11, and had the rare vantage point of experiencing the event from afar, but the immediate aftermath of it up close. I do have to say that New Yorkers have an almost indecipherable ownership of the event that really can’t translate to much of the rest of the country (aside, from, of course, here in DC). I don’t necessarily agree with all of Speigelman’s commentary about extra-NY sentiment, but his viewpoint is a locationally rare one worth examining. 

Of all his re-allocations of century-old "comix" characters, I thought his keenest was McManus’ Jiggs as an iBook-addicted, paranoid theorist led astray by the media, which fed his faulty logic. The character here is less of an indictment of American foreign ignorance as in the "Bringing Up Father" plate, but rather an examination of an American made ignorant by an irresponsible media feeding off its public during one the most vulnerable times for this country’s public in recent memory. Spiegelman does the same thing with the Happy Hooligan, highlighting the fascistic abuse of the airwaves many major media outlets used then to forcefully paint a unified face on the country’s sentiment. He does acutely what his predecessors did obtusely, and his insights on the media in these regards say very completely and eloquently what (usually great) media watchdogs like FAIR have been trying to since the event’s genesis.

I’m interested, though, to discuss the other re-allocations, especially Verbek’s "Upside Downs." Spiegelman’s prose in his essays lends to a mostly-aesthetic commentary on those old plates, but there is so much more afoot here, and I hope we can talk about the possibilities in class.

That being said, nice blogging with you all.   

 Small update: just read an article about digital imagining as a branding tool. Has nothing to do with this week’s class, but still relates to some stuff we’ve talked about this semester.

Lots of Fight Club this week. It’s hard to know where to start, and how not to annoyingly retread everything we’ve discussed up to this point.

An interesting thread, through the novel and film, is the question of sociopolitical presence within Project Mayhem’s movement to reclaim masculinity. My wife, who has seen only the film, often bemoans the "obtrusive whiteness" of it, then compulsively watches it anyway to see Brad Pitt shirtless. Giroux’s essay, however, critiques the film’s sociopolitical ignorance in a more articulate and effective way, and I thought all of his points were powerfully made. As I read the essay, though, I kept returning to why he chose to analyze that text as opposed to the novel from which it originated.

The only thing I could think of may be the admission of the novel’s genesis in Chuck Palahniuk’s introduction in the post-movie reprint: " . . . I’d seen a Bill Moyer television program about how street gangs were really young men raised without fathers, just trying to help one another become men." (Palahniuk, xvi) And that is the closest either text comes to acknowledging that there is an underprivileged social population that exists below those in the locus of effect for Fight Club, Project Mayhem, etc. So maybe, in an attempt to keep his argument foolproof, he avoided the novel altogether.

But I am interested in ways, if any, that the novel is less susceptible to that criticism, because I really don’t see many. Apart from plot technicalities involving the "twist" ending, Marla’s eventual involvement, and how the narrator "met" Tyler, the social commentary between the two is fairly consistent, (if not more strongly developed in the novel. So Giroux’s choice to criticize only one text is a curious one. I sided with Giroux’s comment that the "human sacrifice" scene as being "curiously Republican" (14), and I admit that the homework assignment always struck me as counterintuitive to the seemingly more communal goal of Project Mayhem, which seems to be a forced dehumanization and equal standing for all involved in hopes of teaching them their "higher power." Then again, "hitting bottom" just to start all over again does, in a way, speak to the cliche of conservatism for people to "pick themselves up by the bootstraps" (aside: Giroux’s definition of neoliberliasm sounded, to me, in many ways like the current definition of neoconservatism. I’m ignorant. Can we discuss the difference?). But that scene was very similar in both the film and novel, as well as other scenes that Giroux very effectively held up to scrutiny, such as the lye-on-the-hand scene (arguably even more pivotal in the novel), and the end where the buildings crumble (which carries the same narrative sentiment in both). Is there material in the novel that would negate aspects of Giroux’s argument, or is it just that as a major film release, backed by "brand name" studios, directors, and people, it more effectively scrutinized as a cultural commodity? Maybe book reviewers were not as responsive to the novel’s release as movie critics were  to its mostly-fathful film adaptation. Sad thing that says about the state of literature; when a film adaptation draws a more thoughtful critical response than the printed manuscript.

Note: a similarly-toned story that may effectively address what Giroux notes as faults in Fight Club (political ramifications, socioeconomic standing, violence, counterculture) is David Foster Wallace’s "Girl With Curious Hair" which can be found in the collection of the same name.  

It seems to be the involvement of stolen masculinity and violence that, Giroux says, both propels the action of, and acts as the ideological failure of logic throughout (the novel and film of) Fight Club, and I thought it may be interesting to highlight one area where a real-life movement is afoot with a similar ideology, without the complication of gender roles and violence. I don’t know if I’ve blogged about this before, but Kalle Lasn is the editor of a magazine called Adbusters, which could be seen a more direct "Paper St. Soap Company," in that beneath it all, he attempts to foster worldwide action against corporations’ influences on the world through advertising. He’s written the very manifesto-ish Culture Jam (also moderately popular, ranking 100,744 on Amazon), and from it has spawned a Lasn-lead Culturejammers Network, which, like Fight Club or Project Mayhem, has rules and assignments as ways to subvert consumerism’s hold over society (albeit less violent). Aside from gender-related criticisms, many of Giroux’s arguments with Fight Club could apply to Lasn’s ethos as well, but I thought I would at least highlight a real-world example for possible avenues of discussion.

This was great; my wife and I hadn’t spent time geeking out like this since we were undergrads living in dorms. Big ‘ol postmodern cyberhunt at the Scalise household this weekend. Good stuff.

Though much of this was covered in John’s post and the comments that followed, the most striking metaconstruct around this movie is its very functional role in a larger intertextual experience that is much, much more outwarldly-reaching than the events in the originally-released film. It seems as though the film exists only to create a world to perpetuate an investigation of its framework independent from the thing. For instance, go here to understand how to navigate the movie’s website, which is, in itself, an experience almost completely outside of the actions of the movie, and they both reflexively inform one another. The movie, itself, is in a way just a large dramatization of events related to the larger experience of The Philosophy of Time Travel, which seemed create a fully functioning "accidental subculture" reailty around the movie.

My question is: why the 80s? With the intertextual elements so clearly engrained, the broad events of this strory are intrguiing enough for it to be set in present day. I kept wondering the reasoning behind setting the backdrop in such a highly politicized time, with the space-time continuum opening up over the Fairfax/DC area a week before the 1988 election? (My only reading on this, and it’s a poor one, is that it’s an anti-republican commentary, that HW Bush’s defeat of Dukakis caused a corruption in the universe.) Casting Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze in lynchpin roles was clearly a move to create an homage to the decade that ushed them into popular culture, but is it just Gen X nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake? The soundtrack (and everything else) was so stylized as to create an almost obstructive pastiche of the time period (which, if you buy into the theories behind the film, is a slice of tangental time that never really should have existed anyway). The slow-mo, MTV-type of camera moves over Tears for Fears or Echo & the Bunnymen came off as a clear ironic answer to the 80s John Hughes films exploited so famously.

Something to think about. 

 

I started off reading White Noise by marking an asterisk on the top corner of each page that held a passage that might be a good starting point for my weekly blog post, but then it turned out that by page 80 or so, every page of my book had an asterisk scribbled on it, so I just stopped marking them. It’s hard to narrow down what to discuss first, or what might be a helpful contribution to what I’m sure is going to be a fairly fun class discussion. Here goes.

At some point while pre-discussing this book, I remembered Prof. Sample suggesting that we keep our eye out for how DeLillo makes use of common objects (his example was the various meditations and connotations placed on the helicopter). Maybe the most reflexive image re-introduced in different contexts throughout is the television (55 mentions in 40 chapters). It seems that with each chapter, its purpose is re-allocated and re-characterized in some way that I hope we can discuss in class. Early Gladney confesses its role in his daily "formal custom" (16). Later, in that tremendously desperate conversation in which a number of characters boldly define the contents of their lives in relation to scatological things they did during pop-culture deaths, it plays as more of a lifeline anchor (Stompanado: "For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. . ." [66]). Later still, it acts as a mirror to Gladney and his relationship to Babette and his semi-kids (103-105), and scenes throughout are punctuated by TV commentary ("The TV says:") as if it is an actual character amongst the revealing and absurd dialogue spars throughout the book.  

The most interesting TV-related scene for me was Babette’s reading of the tabloid for the huddled masses at the camp (pgs. 142-147). It goes without saying that this whole section of the book is a mass commentary on technology and people’s flimsy relationship to what they perceive as authoritative information, with groups huddled around anyone (or anything) with a story to tell (machines, children). This particular grouping was a technology-barren re-enactment of the act of watching episodic or documentarian TV. Both the audience and Babette (who seemingly plays the role of the actor, projecting voices to the subjects profiled in the tabloid articles) seem to acknowledge that they aren’t gaining situationally-related news or instructional information, but are simply engaged with the hopeful theatricality of the dynamic. Gladney’s narrative characterization of the what is maybe the most primitive situation of civility and simulation at the camp highlights both our reliance on techo-media and our blind optimism for what it tells us: "They were content to exchange in brief and unrelated remarks, as during a break for a commercial on TV. . . Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope." (146-147)

I kept returning, throughout so many passages of this book, to that bizarre incident of the JetBlue crash landing of Flight 292 that happened recently, and the role television had in people’s perceived expectations of airplane disasters (seeing as every passenger had now a schema for not one, but two massive national disasters). I’ve been researching this event for a project I’m writing that is unrelated to this course, and I’m continually struck by how the in-flight broadcast of the situation (which, like any cable news event, flip-flopped between reportage and "expert" punditry) either magnified or diminished the passenger’s relationship to the immediacy of the situation. In many ways, the nature of the cable broadcast encapsulated the camp scene in White Noise, with expert pundits dispensing hopefully useful information, newscasters reporting often-speculative news as fact, and actual commercials broadcast in between (I know, this can also apply to many aspects of the crash landing in the first third of the book, but it applies differently there). In the days that followed the incident, armies of media were uncovered or made available, and its all really quite exhaustive, but unstoppably interesting at the same time. Here are some links to some media regarding the incident, if you’re not aware of the situation or are as morbidly interested in it as I am: 

• The actual story of the crash landing [MSNBC]
• Video of it, sadly, from Fox News, which is not my first choice (.wvm) [The Poltical Teen]
• A link to a Podcast of the pilot’s recordings during the landing (.mp3) [Fly With Me]
• A strange follow-up peice about C-List celebrity Taryn Manning’s experience as a passenger [MSNBC, imdb]
• Anderson Cooper’s interview with a pregnant passenger (.wvm) [mccanta]
• A This American Life episode with insightful interviews with passengers (Note: this is a HUGE .ram file, so be careful downloading it) [This American Life]

Because it seems I now have to somehow form thoughts about hypertext fiction/literature that go beyond my usual, terrible wince, I spent some time researching the ethos and history behind it, and I found some things that I suppose might shed some light on the excercise.

I found a moderately enlightening essay (which says it’s "posted by Gary Hink" but I don’t know if that means he’s the author) that characterizes hypertext fiction like this:

"[it] is not text that readers comprehend by traveling within or throughout; rather, it is text with potential narrative that readers actualize through their reading sequence." (para. 9)

Basically – and this seems to be the the operative buzz word – the defining characteristic to latch onto as a reader is the temporal nature of what you’re reading, which means that instead of the printed text, which stresses "where" you are as readers (with regards to plot or physical page number), hypertext stresses "when" you are, which is a fun headache. The essay goes on to cite Sartre’s idea of "existing in the constant present" (para. 22), wherein each timed second is its own, independent of its preceding second as well as the one who follows (each step you take is the first step, etc.), and that since hypertext has a wide array of enterances (links), it puts the reader in a position of the beginning of the story no matter where they first click (same goes with the end, which Hink says happens "when the individual reader stops reading" [para. 37]). The essay cites Hegirascope an awful lot, so if you were confused or frustrated about your expected role as a reader during that whole experience (as I was), this essay should probably throw you a bone as to what Moulthrop and others are trying to accomplish with the form.

In a way, examining hypertext lit triggered for me a slight crossover to Jameson’s comparison of the Peasant/Diamond Dust Shoes in The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, but this may be a stretch. I’ll give it a shot anyway. Aside from the formal construction of a hypertext, its physical existence may somehow embody the "flatness or depthlessness"(Jameson, 60) Jameson cited regarding the Warhol peice. Conversely, the book, as an object, could be the agent "stressing the raw materials" (58) (with its labor-related attachments of printers, papermakers, booksellers), as in the Van Gough. We’ve re-applied this theory to many things such as TV ads (Nike shoes, etc.) as a way to examine the erasure of the labor history behind the element at its core; since hypertext is essentially something that could easily be a self-published venture, couldn’t this too be viewed in the same light?

Then again, this could be because I used work in publishing. And it could also be because it seems to me that hypertext might just be something primarily created so that cultural critics and armchair smartipants folks could write about it. It may be the only literary form birthed without the sole intention of the non-academic population as its audience. I’ve got nothing to back that up, though, so lets not dwell on it.

Regardless, here are some links:

See you all in class. Adios.

Most of the time, my first reaction when I read these books is to look at the formal constructs the authors use to frame their stories. As a writer, that’s how I’ve been trained, and those types of critiques tend to come more easily to me than many of the things we end up discussing in class as lynchpin elements of a text. So I apologize if this isn’t necessarily on topic, but as I read through Dream Jungle I was continually impressed with how Jessica Hagedorn handled the varying intertextual constructs within the book.

Many times, these types of fictional elements (excerpts from Pigafetta’s journey’s with Magellan, interview transcripts of discussions, a courier-fonted excerpts of Pilar’s memoir, footnoted excerpts, etc.) can have a counteractive quality that disrupts the reader more then enriches the text, and that didn’t happen here. Though the content bears almost no resemblance, I kept seeing the same authorial instincts to use these constructs as Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich used in Crown of Columbus, where intertextual references play a large part in establishing a fictional "history", but establish also a depth the to story instead of highlighting surface aspects. I keep thinking of why these elements worked so well, and I think it may be the double-culture revelry that the books share. Dream Jungle does deal directly with American pop culture, but not exclusively, which adds a certain cultural weight to the "bells and whistles." In Dream Jungle, somehow they work to achieve a distinct "history" to the fictional elements to the text that worked along with historical characterizations of place, such as the characterization of the Philippines throughout. Books built around intertextual meta-elements that deal solely in discussing American pop culture (anything by David Foster Wallace, really) tend to have the hurdle of reader alienation to deal with, and I think it may have to deal with the nature of our pop culture’s inability in many instances to look past its own influence (which Wallace once wrote an essay about, ironically), which can cause self-reflexive aggravation in readers when authors revel in it. Hagedorn in her books finds a way to dodge that trap by pitting American pop culture against a staid history, and I think that may be what I responded to most here.

There were many elements of this essay that have evolved quite interestingly in the years since Benjamin published this work, and as I read it I kept thinking how he would react to the evolution of certain aspects of film and photography, not to mention print media.

I was really intrigued during the passages that explored the photograph/film’s disintegrating relationship to the aura of an image’s authenticity through mass production, which. He notes that both forms "lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition" (221). I was struck by the paragraphs on pages 224-225 that the relationship of the cult to the mass audience, and I kept wondering how Benjamin would categorize to recent advent of rotoscoping filmed images. (Quickly: this is a type of software-based animation technique developed recently and used in music videos, commercials, and widely released motion pictures starring shoplifters.) I’d be curious to see what Benjamin would have made of this further delusion of an image’s aura, and how it further relates to his passages on page 230, where he uses quotes by Rudolf Arnheim to re-characterize the actor in relation to filmic complexities.

These passages then caused me to think about the advent of bluescreening, and Arnheim’s idea of "treating the actor as a stage prop. . .inserted at the proper place."  (230). Considering the prevalence of certain major motion pictures to rely almost entirely on bluescreening and CGI, this statement takes on much more weight, and again, I’d be interested to see what Benjamin would maybe have said about it.

Some of his thoughts on print media and photography, have in some way or another, manifested themselves on the web. His passage on page 235 about the elk to illustrate the relationship to the cult being co-opted by art made me think of an interesting magazine called Found, which is almost completely comprised of objects discovered and submitted by its readership. This not only speaks to the reallocation of an intended audience to apply artistic value, but it also speaks to the later passages on 232 where Benjamin talks about the evolving role of literature: "At any moment, the reader is is ready to turn into a writer" (232). And of course, something that screamed out THIS IS APPLICABLE TO BLOGS, LOOK LOOK: "Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property" (232).

Lastly, his discussion of Atget’s photographs on page 226 were interesting, and I was wondering what he would make of photoshop culture to ascribe a "hidden political significance" to something seemingly normal.

I, too, found myself looking for undercurrents of direct similarity between Song of Solomon and the selections we read previous to this one. With each book up to this point, there seemed to be in common with all of them some sort of stylistic choice being made by the authors that I didn’t see in SOS, and it’s been something I’ve been struggling to put my finger on. Many posts have already mentioned identity and naming issues regarding the books’ characters, and it may be an interesting excercise in class to hold these characters’ names (and maybe their relationship to what they "signify"?) up to some of the theoretical approaches we’ve applied to the previous books. But Morrisson deals with these naming issues early and often in the text (I think of the early conversation about the naming of Pilate, which was such an apparent exercise in erasing the meaning behind it that it was impossible not to suspend traditional associations with not only this but nearly every other character), so much so that I could only think of the characters’ names as inverse, role-playing tags in what is a long, involved allegory.

It may also be that this novel, more than the ones that we read preceding it, dealt with social conditions over pinpointed decades of "real" time (as opposed to the time-shifting trajectories of The Lathe of Heaven or The Female Man) that causes the rift between the narrative aesthetic between this and the previous books. I’d be interested to discuss issues of chronology and social evolution in relation to character development.

I’ve also been looking at some crtitical approaches to this text to try and find a linking element between this and the books we’ve read leading up to it, and have been hard-pressed there as well. I’ve found some interesting mythological comparisons (Milkman=Icarus), but unlike critical approaches Pynchon, Whitehead, etc., excercises in which the themes and aspects are pulled through an explicit postmodern-theorist’s filter are thin if nonexistent. Interested to see what the class discussion will focus on.

OK, so this is my postmodern moment of the week.

What struck me most about re-watching Memento this week (besides the fact that I found I disliked the movie much less than I initially did when I saw it a couple years ago, when I wrote it off as pretentious and gimmicky), were the structural similarities to Lot 49. Both stories find their arcs within what are basically splices of their character’s lives, and end with the effect of an ellipses. With Oedipa it’s at the auction, and we as readers are unsure of the validity of the Trystero situation, but we do know now that it’s Oedipa’s to maybe endlessly decipher. Memento’s treatment of Leonard’s re-definition of his own meaning (“you can be my John G.,” etc.) is handled more self-effacingly, in that he knows and acknowledges the fundamental flaw then chooses to wipe it away, but we’re left with the notion that his work will never be done. I’ve been thinking about it, and I may be off-base here, but if it weren’t for Nolan’s choice to merely chronicle one of the many, many detective searches by Leonard, he may not have been able to succeed in using a backwards-told storyline. What the splice effect does is remove the expectation of a finite solution, in which the actual search slowly begins to take a decided backdrop (when the black and white portion bleeds into color) to the truth behind his condition, and the characters actions in relation to it. I’m still trying to work this one out.

I also thought Nolan’s choice to install a sense of placelessness to the whole thing was interesting. We only get place-related history in two ways. “I’m Leonard Shelby from San Francisco,” and license plates to automobiles, which leads me to believe that it was set in California, but we can’t be sure. As opposed to other notable noir films like L.A. Confidential, Bound, and Chinatown, which were so rooted in place that the setting very quickly became a character, the setting in Memento is drab, forgettable, and unstylized. I keep thinking how the story would be different if it were set in Paul Auster’s New York, or James Ellroy’s Los Angeles. It then would have been more of an obstacle for Leonard in a way that the nameless place Nolan chose wasn’t, and in a way erasing that prospect allowed for the storyline to be essentially a one-man character study (Teddy, Natalie, and even Sammy Jankis are arguably two-dimensional characters). So far, the texts that we’ve read have had a strong sense of place that often colored their outcomes, but is this placelessness something born of postmodernity? The idea that “this story could happen anywhere” applies also to the DeLillo story we read early on in the course, and I’m wondering how it relates.

I think what’s most interesting about this book, and Whitehead’s approach to it, comes from both his deep knowledge of form and media-laden familiarity with critical approaches (before completing this book, he was a television critic for the Villiage Voice, as well as an accomplished freelance journalist). The somewhat optimistic ending to this book (aside from the elevator allusion) proves an evolution in postmodernist literature that may have been one of his driving intentions behind writing it. The Intuitionist is clearly an African-American-themed take on Lot 49, but more interestingly it’s an extension of the postmodern literary style that benefits from Pynchon’s foundation, yet takes it a different direction almost entirely. NY Times critic Gary Krist wrote in his review of The Intuitionist:

"The idea of physical elevation, of course, has obvious metaphorical significance in this context, and Whitehead makes much of it, framing his subject as a contest between warring conceptions of how best to lift people from one level of being to the next. And since any attempt to replace ‘the robust edifices of the old order’ is likely to spawn a thicket of deceptions and betrayals, his use of the film noir idiom proves cunningly apt."

Whitehead’s framework and stylistic influences for the book are steeped in film noir, and he uses the construct to build his story, and I think this approach adopts post-modernity in a completely different way than we’ve been studying that allows for more positive resolution, but still stays within the rubric of post-modernity. The reliance on a film construct to greatly inform a literary novel such as this was a tremendously interesting choice (a nice way to approach using the simulacrum), and one I hope we will discuss tomorrow.

Further, I’m hoping to discuss issues of subculture with regards to this book and how its similar and different to that approach taken in Lot 49. While Pynchon used the possibility of the Trystero mail culture as ultimately a red herring, something that may have been constructed only for the torture of Oedipa, it’s interesting to see what Whitehead does with the same idea. Fulton’s works, while misinterpreted on a mass scale, gave way to a fully functioning underculture of Intuitionists, which has a ring of authorial conviction to it that we didn’t get to really see in Lot 49. Given the books’ undeniable similarities, why do you think Whitehead made this choice?

I’m focusing my post on the Harvey piece this week, mainly because its content compelled me the most. Most notably, his assertion that “postmodernism can judge the spectacle only in terms of how spectacular it is” (56-57) while discussing “the loss of a historical community” in relation to Barthes’ theory of jouissance. My thoughts regarding this returned to America’s forced reconstruction of two national landmarks over the last five years: the World Trade Center, and more recently, the city of New Orleans.

While both are in still-debated stages of rebuilding, the debates behind those efforts seem to point to a discrepancy amongst certain circles as to what the motivations should be for their reconstruction, and I believe that the issue of how to recognize the historical roots of each through the reconstruction is what is causing the polarization between arguing factions. Both were emblems of different value sets in this country, and Harvey’s piece lends slightly to the difficulties that many have had reconciling how to replace them effectively (if at all).

The Freedom Tower, chosen as the replacement for the collapsed World Trade Center in 2003, has been a hotly-contested issue with regards to its functionality and design. What’s happened now is that a historical community (however short the history) has ascribed itself to a space and idea that never originally had one. While the original Towers were fundamentally symbols of capitalism, what happened to them tweaked their meaning to the world at large and to the city they resided in, and reconstructing them has proven to be an exercise in searching for the appropriate meaning, both thematically, and architecturally, for which the Freedom Tower will stand. Designer Daniel Libeskind has been under constant fire from various groups regarding the intent and goals of his design (Donald Trump wants it to be, of course, “bigger and better,” which speaks directly to Harvey’s “judge the spectacle” remark), and I think the reasoning behind much of the fuss is that no one is really sure what the new hub for commercialism should be. Is it an artistic landmark, a tribute to its past, or a functional headquarters through which worldwide business is channeled? The efforts to satisfy the the various aspects relates to Harvey’s sentiment that PoMo architecture “takes bits and pieces from the past quite eclectically and mixes them together at will.” It seems as if Daniel Libeskind is forced by the multi-pronged requirements of the artifice to adhere to a PoMo design aesthetic, yet held hostage by the fact that what he is designing has to find an appropriate history to respect and acknowledge.

Something different, however, is happening with the early discussions of how to rebuild the city of New Orleans, which, unlike the World Trade Center, carried with it an assured history and historical community. Yet many now feel that the prospect of rebuilding the city may only give way to the Disneylandification of it, a PoMo topic both talked about in class and discussed in the Harvey piece while discussing Levittown. He quotes Venturi:

“One does not have to agree with hard hat politics. . . to support the right of the middle-middle class to their own architectural aesthetics, and we have found that Levittown-type of aesthetics are shared by most members of the middle-middle class, black as well as white, liberal as well as conservative.” There is absolutely nothing wrong, they insist, with giving the people what they want, and Venturi himself was even quoted. . . “Mickey Mouse teaches the architects,” saying “Disney World is nearer to what people want than what architects are giving them.” (60)

So what to do with a city like New Orleans, where the “middle-middle class” doesn’t face the greatest challenge? Here is an instance where the prevalence of PoMo, history-erasure tendencies certainly may have a dire effect on not just the aesthetic history of a rebuilding effort, but issues of gentrification and socioeconomic displacement enter into the fold as well.

(On a side note, Harvey closes out his piece by discussing corporate and capitalist roles in PoMo art. the same issues are brought up continually by Kalle Lasn’s magazine, Adbusters, which recently had an issue devoted to this very topic.)

As you may notice (or soon will), a number of the selected readings for this course are narratives that critique what could be called the culture of subculture. In an attempt not to ruin the theatrics of the future readings for the rest of the class, I’ll say only that a recurring theme amongst several of the readings is the indirect pervasiveness of intended counterculture movements. In more than one case throughout the selected readings, a counterculture movement is established with certain goals and edicts in mind, yet is somehow hijacked or co-opted along the way to become something other than what is originally intended.

Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, critiques the culture of subculture to comment existentially on both the emergence and flimsiness of the ready-made subculture. Pynchon constructs his narrative in a way that never explicitly outs the Trystero mail subculture as accidental, but he allows for the idea that it could be, which opens up avenues of discourse on the topic. One could be subcultures’ tendencies towards various types of subdivision. For instance, as Oedipa encounters the various factions of the Trystero subculture, it’s interesting to note how Pynchon seems to be using Trystero as a framework to point out how subcultures inevitably give way to further subcultures, such as the inamoratos or that of Maxwell’s Demon (which subdivides even further to “sensitives”). By compounding what is already a convoluted subculture into further (and seemingly unrelated) subcultures, what is Pynchon saying about the nature of counter-movements? Is showning their serial lower factioning a way to comment on subcultures as mere outlets for demagogues, or as small staples of a necessary opposition to traditional thought?

One instance where subculturism has followed similar paths to Trystero would be that of the the modern polyamorist. In an essay for the online magazine Nerve entitled “Husbands and Wives,” writer Meghan Daum profiled the Ravenheart family, who consist of “three men, all heterosexual, and three women, all bisexual.” They no doubt belong to the polyamorist subculture, but ascribe to the subdivision that belongs to the Church of All Worlds, which uses as a near-bible ritualistic behaviors from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land to govern their sect of polyamory. Daum’s profile of the Ravenhearts certainly highlights the argument of demagogue versus bona fide movement, as well as questions the Ravenhearts’ interpretation of the original intent of polyamory. I’m interested to see what the rest of you think about these aspects of counterculturalism as they relate to postmodernist thought.

Note: “Husbands & Wives” by Meghan Daum was revised and retitled as “According to the Women I’m Fairly Pretty” for her essay collection, My Misspent Youth.