At 11:55 13/10/99 GMT, Richard Caddel wrote>
- um. Sorry to saddle you with that metaphor, it was late, I was tired
>etc.
Don't apologise - I like boats.
> as always with pomo,
>context is important... and yet... it's hard, even now, to look at
>Jackson MacLow, Amiri Baraka, Larry Eigner etc (to pick 3 names common
>to both anthologies) and line their work up WITH a status quo. Even
>Ginsberg's Howl (again, in both) - in spite of its American Cultural
>Icon status - still retains a rawness, an ugliness which stops it
>being s.q. - osistm.
Agreed. Individual works (even bodies of work) do transcend the s.q. This
is particularly true when one considers the context in which they are
produced. But it still seems to me that the movement (and you are correct
that it is not a movement as such) - perhaps I should say the _momentum_ is
towards an absorption of the oppositional. The howl isn't so much drowned
but incorporated into the loud wallpaper of the everyday. Everything
(wallpaper included judging by the surfeit of DIY programmes on TV) is thus
endowed with meaning, yet is simultaneously bereft.
As you said, it 'is always "not" something or "more than" something'.
I'm reminded here, too of poignant duality of some current docu-soaps which
whilst pandering to voyeurism and Warhol's predictions nevertheless,for me
at least, contain moments of pure wonderment.
>I don't get the feeling that at this point we're at all anxious to
>line up under a banner called pomodrenism anyway -
No. Banners are not a la mode.
> And I'm wary of the idea that pomo has to have a
>unified "stance" in order to be taken seriously outside itself.
No this would be against the spirit of the thing.T
>I'm happy enough - in fact I prefer it -
>if the terms stay flexible - humptydumptyish, to return to my first
>point.
Its the flexibility which interests me. Aren't 'Flexible friends' are also
a source of great debt and folly?
But, I do like the idea of Humpty. The smashing of egg-heads!
wishes,
orlando
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