Bad Writing is Criminal

The Composites uses fiction and forensic art to trace the limits of criminality and transgression and come up with a list of literature's most frequent crimes. Murder is the most prevalent at 26%, followed by Racketeering and Sexual Predation tied for second place with 11%. If they put together the stats for Fallen Woman and Sex Workers, it should come in at third place with a combined 11%.

Surprisingly, Bad Writing also makes the list. It comes in at last place, tied with Forced Confinement (Boo, Mr. Rochester!).  One would think Bad Writing would place higher, but I guess they were only counting fictional crimes and not the actual bad writing in literature itself. But Bad Writing, in whatever form, should be criminal.

Pomo: A Few Notes

From Megan Fox and cars to Judd Apatow's movies, it seems like anything and everything can pass for postmodern these days. Chris Daley weighs in on the abuse of the use of the term "postmodern" in mainstream media: "When the term “postmodern” is used in major international publications, does it bear any relation to its theoretical roots, or has it been hijacked as yet another hot, empty signifier, like 'iconic' or 'staycation'?"

And Daley should know what she's talking about, as she "pays hundreds of dollars a month in student loans for a degree that certifies she has studied postmodernism extensively ." Ah, the indignation of the Comparative Lit major.

Daley gives us a few things to consider about the term postmodern:

1. It was first used as early as the 1870s, but theorists Jean-François Lyotard and Frederic Jameson are generally credited with making the term "postmodern" popular.

2. When used in an academic setting, “postmodern” usually refers to a sense of style featuring “disjunction or deliberate confusion, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, a kind of cool detachment, a deliberate foregrounding of constructedness, a suspicion concerning neat or easy conclusions.”

3. Postmodernism is more concerned with process than product. This can be seen in the meta “[blank] about [blank]” construction that often identifies the “postmodern”: art about art, writing about writing, architecture about architecture, etc.
It seems like postmodern is the go-to term when you're not sure what else to say but you want to sound smart. I.e., the actress Megan Fox describes her next project, a film written by Juno's Diablo Cody, as "really dark” because Cody’s “like a postmodern feminist or whatever.” Since nobody's really sure what it means anyway, you're free to use it. Ta-dah. Instant smartness.

Elsewhere in the L.A. Times, to ensure that you know what you're talking about when you're blinding us with jargon, they've prepared a list of 61 essential postmodern reads. It comes with a cheat sheet of qualities that pomo writing has.



The list includes David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Yep, pomo, that one) but also Shakespeare's Hamlet and Tristram Shandy, which again leads us to ask: How can a text written before the modern period ever be postmodern? (And a tangentially related question: How can anyone say that one of the things they're looking for in a date is "He must be postmodern?" But then again, maybe this is a gay guy thing.) What the hell does that mean? This is why Postmodernism (and I'm tempted to say "and everything connected with theory") is the Root of All Evil.

Reading Anna Karenina in Africa

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech takes a jab at the internet for its seduction of a whole generation with its many "inanities:" "[E]ven quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

Aray.

Okay, I felt alluded to. But I think that comment was less about about dissing the internet, but more about how reading books and experiencing great literature really satisfies a hunger for knowledge. A huge part of her speech tells about the difficulties of getting books, what more a proper education, in Africa, where a book may cost one several months' wages. But still, people read books, a third of Anna Karenina at a time, like that young woman waiting for her ration of water in a store.

Buti pa nga yung babaeng iyon nakatapos ng 1/3 ng Anna Karenina, which I can't claim for myself. And I probably have more books than entire villages in Africa. I'm the downfall of the human race. Pero oks pa rin, kasi sabi ni Lessing there's a storyteller deep inside all of us.

Now if only that storyteller quits blogging and starts to work on her bloody thesis. Gah.

via

IM IN UR WASTELANDZ RUINING UR LITERATUREZ

I knew it was just a matter of time: presenting the LOLification of T.S. Eliot:

april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has. (1)
april in ur memoriez, making ur desire.
spring rain in ur dull rootzes.

Tepidmonkey points out that the LOLcat Wasteland sort of misses the point: "There’s just no point to this if there are no pictures of cats to look at. The lolcat pidgin isn’t that interesting in and of itself. Lolcats took off in the first place because everyone likes to pretend that their cat has thoughts and feelings and is trying to talk to them when they meow, and because everyone likes looking at pictures of cute kitties. But this text-only stuff? Do not want."

So somebody was game enough to suggest that perhaps this photo can accompany the text.

But all in all, I found it amusing, and I'm assuming this isn't just an English major thing. It was rather interesting to follow the ensuing comments in the Mefi post as LOLcat grammar was applied to other literary works. But anyhow, consider Proust:

I made you a madeleine.

But I eated it.

There were two Basho haikus, here and here.
Somebody took a stab at Jabberwocky, the Tiger.

But my favorite is William CatLOLs Williams:

OH HAI i saved you a plums, but i eated it,sry

via the always amusing