Not Feeling Post-Modern This Monday

 I came home early, did a little piddling around the place, crashed, and spent maybe too long with my vibrating heating pad. My back sure liked it. Off to Payless for some veggies to go with the planned poached chicken breasts - that was around 4:30 and was back here in an hour. The chicken turned out well, but not much was really done this evening.

One blog post for next month is ready to go.

Dan Brooks' Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone did get me thinking I need to pick up the pace around here.

The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.

Earlier today, I read Speculating Our Way Back to Ourselves by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi. I like speculative fiction. Ms. Siddiqui's essay fits in with why I think Americans need to read foreign writers. Poor KH thinks my protagonist in "Chasing Ashes" hallucinates Edgar Allan Poe, Captain Ahab, Walt Whitman, and Omar Khayyam when I mean them as dramatis personae. How to get some ideas across other than having them brought to life?

And then—something harder for many to swallow—there may also be the case of actual monsters. Personally, I have grown up with stories of jinns and angels, and am comfortable with the idea of invisible forces that co-exist alongside the more material, visible ones. And the dismissal of such things as ‘superstition’ or ‘magical thinking’ can sometimes feel like a euro-centric ideal that divides the world into ‘rational’ and ‘barbaric’, and that conceives of progress as a movement from a religious to a secular mentality. And so, sometimes I feel resistance towards divisions between the real and non-real, as this can evoke separations that were and still are so often used to justify all kinds of imperialist projects. But what seems to be becoming increasingly clear is that the West has no claim to higher moral, intellectual or spiritual ground than the rest of the world, and increasingly, we are questioning the idea that there is one, correct way of perceiving the world.

And so I think the whole essay is quite worth thinking about.

Now, on to a few other items before calling a night.

sch 7/30