and what you mean about the internet. the internet is still people. so if youre passionately outraged at such and such not liking your instagram post are you feeling passionately about the internet, or about other people and your status and etc
Yeah that was a bit snidey... for what it's worth I don't agree with Self at all and I rather enjoyed Freedom./Yeah sorry I'm probably not being very clear! Thanks for taking the time to ask for clarification. I think #1 and #2 of your take are right on, though I'm gonna push back on "middlebrow" and say that the critical mentality which equates accessibility with compromised quality is itself a product of modernism, specifically the aristocratic, Mandarin, "pure" aesthetics folks like TS Eliot championed. In that light, and given the theoretical discrediting of formalism (incl. New Criticism, aesthetic autonomy, etc), I don't think we should take modernist taxonomies of taste too seriously.
I feel ambivalent in that I think some things about it are really good and some are really bad - that doesn't mean I don't feel passionate about it.I guess SOME people... Feel PASSIONATE about THE INTERNET
Most people I know (and I know most people) feel ambivalent about it.
i don't say that we're no longer interested in other people, just that the bonds are far weaker and shorter lived and the depth and intensity of our relationships has been greatly reduced, hence the kind of affectlessness of Less than Zero etc. it's a situation which is challenging to anyone wishing to write the social novel.
well we don't quite have a social field in that way any more, at least, not unless we live all our likes in a Kazak village surrounded by deep forest. all our aquantinces are casual, even our own famlies. friendships are fleeting and superficial. romances likewise. we rarely stay in one job for long and even if we do our workmates move on.
mind expanding here?btw I think the Internet showed "dematerialization" for the confused, incoherent, and facile anti- stance it was
and boring literary types trying to squeeze social media into their autobiographical yawns
just bought a book of his essays its going to be alotHow far you can remove it from the physical in terms of content? That does seem like an endpoint to me. There's a quote on the back of my copy of the trilogy which refers to it as a "terminal style" -
"In the trilogy, Beckett is creating his own death in prose, quarrying right down to that subterranean country of his heart. . . . What remains is a terminal vision, a terminal style and, from the point of view of possible development, a work at least as aesthetically terminal as Finnegans Wake."
-- A. Alvarez
the word and dematerialisation go hand in hand in a sense as the word creates environments, creates emotional, physiological responses etc out of thin air. puts you in that sweltering hotel room, venetian blinds drawn and ceiling fan churning the air.
That's a good question actually — has a fascist ever written a great novel?
I dunno whether I'll end up reading it, but Dennis Cooper's The Sluts sounds like an intriguing attempt to incorporate the internet into a novel.
"Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen of unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth."