Sure sign UserLand should create a full-fledged blogging application with a spell-checker included: the referral log shows two searches for Sesame Street puppets... with the spelling "Seasame Street."

Driver 8, the blog that allows its readers to create the content. Let's see, we got this from Daniel Donilov:

Roman Jakobson said that a true work of art must posses the poetic function -- the drawing of the attention of the reader to the work of art itself. If this definition is accepted, then all works of art, to some degree or other, are post modern.

To which I ventured that "Not being familiar with Jakobson's work, I'd have to guess that what he means is that the work of art must draw attention to its construction; in the case of poetry, to its imagery and phrasing; in painting, to the technique and the subject of the painting. But postmodernist self-reference is about showing the ersatz quality of the work of art, how it is only a representation of reality and not reality itself. It's making you wonder about the construction, not asking you to appreciate it."

Charly: You are correct in principle. Jakobson's poetic function points to the work of art itself -- the work of art, not the rality that it represents. What being pointed to is, most emphatically, the artifice in art. So in the case of poetry it will not only be imagery and phrasing but the rhyme and meter schemes, ceasuras, and all the devices that bring about the final product. Although I hate the term, it's a kind of deconstruction of the final product, showing how it is constructed, thereby remidning us of its ersatz quality, to use your term.

Daniel Dolinov • 10/27/02; 5:31:51 AM

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I would argue that the term "postmodernism" doesn't really apply to anything distinct from modernism.

Let's take a look at Joyce's work. Is Ulysses high modernism? It's certainly aware of its status as a novel (or encyclopedia, or chatechism, or whatever role it happens to be playing during the course of any particular episode), yet in 1919 was "postmodernism" really possible? Most accounts of the postmodern start with the atomic bomb in 1945 and generally run the course of "look what all this progress has done...it gave us a way to kill more people." Yet these sentiments began in world war I poetry, where we mark a notable change. Tennyson's charge of the light brigade becomes T.S. Eliot's Prufrock, and then moves on to even more depressing and fractitious arenas.

Defining the postmodern is tricky, but defining it as separate from the modern is even trickier.

Ian Eletz • 10/30/02; 12:42:09 AM

{Edited on October 30, 2002: Added Ian Eletz's comment and linked on the third paragraph to the post these comment's respond to.}

A thanks-for-linking goes to the mastermind behind Wonderings for linking to this weblog regarding "An interesting discussion on the classification of Pulp Fiction as postmodern or modernist..."

As you see, this weblog's author doesn't miss a beat larding on the self-praise.

Heston Takes Last Lap in the Cause of Guns
By Katharine Q. Seelye
October 23, 2002

Charlton Heston, who has symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, has begun his final campaign on behalf of the N.R.A.

It's a sad moment for me, learning that Ben-Hur himself is suffering from Alzheimer's and will eventually flip like Ronald Reagan did. My father is a big fan of Heston, and his enthusiasm rubbed on me. I don't think I ever saw one of Mr. Heston's movies at a theater (except for his cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes); any movie of his I did see I saw it on video. Still, as long as Mr. Heston has been alive, it has been somewhat comforting to think he is still out there, a constant in my life, something to rely on. His reliability did diminish when he became president of the N.R.A., but the movies remained. And now that he will slowly slip away, they are all that will remain.

{Edited on October 30, 2002. Changed "as long as Mr. Heston has lived" for "as long as Mr. Heston has been alive," and "what will remain" for "all that will remain."}

Driver 8, the blog that allows its readers to create the content. Keeping up with postmodernism, let's review a pertinent observation by Jonathan Franzen: "The postmodern enterprise was... 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."

Usually, I stop reading when I read the words "pertinant observations made by Jonathan Franzen". ;>

Kat Donohue • 10/24/02; 12:58:07 PM

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But all systems ARE phony! If it's a system, it means that there is something artificial about it, something that sets it apart from the reality that it systematizes. In that respect I think the Post Modernists are right. Where they are wrong is when the get all bent out of shape about it. So it's a system. So it's not the absolute real thing. The thing is that without some kind of system (grid) we cannot perceive the real thing -- the system is necessary.

We first realize that systems are phony when we observe something (school of thought, social movement, country) that has been established after we became thinking adults. It does not have the imposing strength of childhood associations. Then, when intellectually we realize that what we grew up with is no less phony than the new stuff, then the feces hit the proverbial ventilator.

Personally, I feel everyone can relax about it. It's like getting upset with the laws of nature. Negating systems just because they are phony WILL preclude you from emotional maturation.

Daniel Dolinov • 10/24/02; 1:03:51 PM