treyf 22's List: 11_Contemporary/Postmodernism

• (Indeed, what about a series of essays that pairs great novels with a playlist of kindred songs?)... Which brings us to the question at the very heart of the song. It occurs to me that almost all great songs, all songs that get you to play them compulsively over and over again, do so because they've got you seeking something you never find, some haunting enigma that won't quite disclose itself.

• Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss.
• modern societies constantly are on guard against anything and everything labeled as "disorder," which might disrupt order
• grand narratives" or "master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs.
• the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every attempt to create "order" always demands the creation of an equal amount of "disorder," but a "grand narrative" masks the constructedness of these categories by explaining that "disorder" REALLY IS chaotic and bad, and that "order" REALLY IS rational and good. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives," stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern "mini-narratives" are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.

2 more annotations...

• problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative.

• How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some unlikely seers.

• "You can tell postmodernist art when you see it because..."

• Blade Runner: The Complete Ultimate Visionary Final Cut Collector's Edition Is Here!

• Of the ten-thousand-and-one things that can be said of -- or read into -- Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Ford Coppola's reedited, gorgeously restored, three-hour nineteen-minute "Director's Cut" of his most insanely audacious and problematic film, the first and last have to be that Coppola's Doors and "Valkyries" and 'copters Vietnam fantasia remains just as wild and crazy and unresolved after all these years as it was when it was first shown at Cannes in 1979 as a "work-in-progress."

• "No no no no no no no no … " —Terry Gilliam, Brazil

• Americans seemed no longer united so much by common feelings as by common images: what binds us became what we stood witness to. No one did or does see this as a good change. In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.

• For millennia, great and not-so-great leaders have celebrated themselves in monuments. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia, the pyramids, the Forbidden City, the Louvre, and Monticello all convey their builders' legacies, as did the many lavish palaces of Saddam Hussein. … We asked readers to sketch their own visions for the George W. Bush Library