Thanks to Douglas Anders of the Agora for tickling the funny bone and pointing to a little time-waster that provided the below insight on yours truly.

	You are Rowlf! You don't draw attention to yourself much, preferring to keep your cool and stay in the background.
Take the What Muppet Are You? Quiz!

Continuing with the elusive subject of postmodernism, here are some pertinent observations made by Jonathan Franzen on his article Mr. Difficult from The New Yorker issue of September 30, 2002.

...I identified a canon of intellectual, socially edgy white-male American fiction writers. The same names—Pynchon, DeLillo, Heller, Coover, Gaddis, Gass, Burroughs, Barth, Barthelme, Hannah, Hawkes, McElroy, and Elkin—kept showing up together in anthologies and in the respectful appraisals of contemporary critics. Though various in their styles, they all seemed to take as a given that something was new and strange and wrong about postwar America. They shared the postmodern suspicion of realism, summarized by the critic Jerome Klinkowitz: "If the world is absurd, if what passes for reality is distressingly unreal, why spend time representing it?"

...conventional fiction, driven by substantial characters and based on a soul-to-soul Contract between reader and writer, was simply inadequate to the social and technological crises that twentieth-century writers saw developing all around them. Both the moderns and the postmoderns resorted to a kind of literature of emergency. The moderns employed new, self-conscious methods to address the new reality and preserve the vanishing old one. The postmodern enterprise was even more radical: to resist absorption or cooptation by an all-absorbing, all-coopting System. Closure was the enemy, and the way to avoid it was to refuse to participate in the System. For Pynchon this meant flight and paranoia; for Burroughs it meant transgression. For Gaddis it meant being very angry—so angry that, at a certain point, he stopped making sense.

One frequent problem with the literature of emergency is that it doesn't age well. In the fifties and sixties, Gaddis and his cohort sounded alarms about the emergence of a world in which we've now been living for decades. Our suburban, gasoline-dependent, TV-watching American present looks a lot more line 1952 than 1952 looked like 1902. As the decades pass, the postmodern program, the notion of formal experimentation as an act of resistance, begins to seem seriously misconceived.

...the essence of postmodernisn is an adolescent fear of getting taken in, an adolescent conviction that all systems are phony. The theory is compelling, but as a way of life it's a recipe for rage. The child grows enormous but never grows up.

Kat recently discussed the case of Cassie Bernall, the Columbine girl who was shot after supposedly answering affirmatively to Dylan Klebold's question, "Do you believe in God?" Supposedly but not at all, as Cassie's schoolmate Emily Wyant has repeatedly stated. Kat provides a link to a relevant article, but allow me to provide a better link.

Now hold it right there, you pretentious boob. Do you mean to tell everyone that some links are better than others?

Well... Yeah. I do believe some links are better than others. Consider this: Kat's link pointed to a standard Salon directory page. But, with all due respect to the Salon design team, those pages are shit. They have ugly headers like "salon :: :: news :: feature :: Who said 'Yes'?, By Dave Cullen :: Page 1," and they don't have a printer friendly version. And the font size and the margins around the boxes are all wrong. The other link, which displays the page as it was originally published, returns a better looking page. Which does have a printer friendly version.

Preposterous! Since when did anyone assign you as the link Gestapo?

Hey, easy! I never said I was some kind of link police. It's just that I think people should be aware of how lame those pages from the Salon directory (URLs start with dir.salon.com) look, and all I'm doing is suggesting that instead they switch to the archive version (URLs start with archive.salon.com) which displays the pages as Salon originally published them. Besides, Salon doesn't link to the original page, hiding it from those not in the know; to me, it smacks of revisionism.

But don't you care about how you make Kat look by saying her link was "bad" and yours is "better?"

Look here, this isn't meant as criticism on Kat. I'm sure she's enough of a grown-up to realize I'm not dissing her in any way. And if she felt I did, well, too bad. I mean, it's not like we are friends or anything. We read each other's weblogs, comment on them, and that's that. I don't feel that should stop me from criticizing her weblog from time to time.

Well then, if all you meant was to tell the world to "switch to the archive version" of Salon's older pages why didn't you start by saying so?

Mmm... Because I thought an example would better drive the point home?

You presumptuous nit.

Look who's talking, buddy.

Hollywood is sensitive — to the bottom line
By Renee Graham
October 22, 2002

The opening paragraph of this Boston Globe article states: "Twentieth Century Fox last week delayed the planned Nov. 15 release of its crazed-sniper film, Phone Booth, in light of the deadly sniper attacks in the D.C. metro area. The conceit here, of course, is that there will be a more appropriate time when filmgoers will want to see a movie about a guy picking off innocent people with a high-powered rifle." A bit of news which regular readers of this log might remember was discussed some time ago.

Furthermore, Renee Graham writes: "...the studio seems to want credit for delaying Phone Booth, at least until the recent sniper attacks are a distant nightmare. Some argue that Hollywood, as in the shadow of Sept. 11, is again attempting to behave with some kind of compassion and moral responsibility in reaction to a terrifying and still-unresolved crisis. Still, where's this noble sense of compassion and responsibility when such questionable films are greenlighted in the first place?"

Which sounds a little like my own comments: "If studios were really sensitive they'd either be making less exploitative, better thought movies or releasing them and facing the music." And no, I'm not congratulating myself for having made such a point before. Actually, I think it just shows how unoriginal I was. A newer, bolder stance is necessary; something that moves, if not against, at least tangentially to the current.

Let's consider Ms. Graham's closing paragraph:

This isn't to suggest that filmgoers be fed a diet of flabby movies with plotlines less challenging than a ''SpongeBob SquarePants'' episode. Yet it shouldn't take the urgency of headlines blaring death and mayhem to make studio executives understand that some subjects shouldn't be peddled as entertainment.

All right, let's try this one for size: No! All subjects are fair game to be turned into entertainment. If studios took Ms. Graham's suggestion to heart, we'd have never had movies like Trainspotting or Dogma. It's all a matter of treating the material correctly. So bring on the junkie dramas! Bring on the Holocaust comedies...!

Perhaps this "bolder stance" business shouldn't be attempted so lightly.