(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

Okay, so these last few days have been a nightmare.

Yesterday my company decided to send me (the non-employee) to lead the testing at some more bank offices way out on the outer eastern fringes of the green line (that's the metro/subway system for non-Montrealers). They send us to the wrong address, though this time it was at least the right street. Sadly, this is progress.

They give me one new guy, named Jeff, who's an English-teacher/bartender/postmodernist/dishwasher in no particular order, and who comes in, dressed casually, with his arm still red and bloody and scarrish from untreated, unbandaged, recent chemical burns.

I suggested he might want to get it looked at. He just shrugged.

The second test was cancelled with no notice. For the rest of the day, they were playing musical students, with people cancelling and signing up at the last minute. Their English isn't as bad as at their downtown office, but that isn't saying much. There was just so many of them, and only short 15-30 minute breaks between each test.

I get home, and my evening was spent trying to do an English-Postmodernese translation for the short seminar for my Canadian Lit class.

Anyway, I get told that this morning I wasn't going to need an assistant for today's test, since there were only six people for the first test, four for the second, and Erik said "I have a feeling they aren't all going to show up."

I'm never asking Erik for winning lottery numbers.

There are the full six for the first test, with 2.0 hours to do it. This required more or less perfect timing, because they all got there late, which meant having the main part of the test test done by half past, and somehow doing 6 tests in one and a half hours.

Einstienian physics suggests is possible, but requires me to travel faster than light.

I was lucky to be only about 2-3 minutes late starting the next test. Someone extra showed up for the second.

When I reported back at work, I found out that another one of the most competent employees -- Nathalie -- has been more or less forced out her job.

By the time I arrived at school, with half my presentation written in quasi-legible blue ink, I'd developed a full-blown chest cold, and my voice sounded like Harvey Fierstein's. I rasped out my synopsis of the chapter, pointing out what I thought were the flaws in Hutcheon's argument.

Had a good argument with Nick (for the two members who know him, foi_nefaste and scottevil), but civil as always. Our view of literature isn't exactly 180 degrees, but it's pretty damn close. He adores all the authors I've been ranting about here.

Comments

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

How will I know if he gets all postmodern on us? What are the warning signs?

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Some postmodern viewpoints you may recognize:

• A belief in "the death of the author" -- this is the view, boiled down to plain English, that since language is so vague, and since there are so many ways to interpret it and even more ways to interpret a whole novel, and since we can never know the author really wanted, then it's useless to think about what the author intended. The reader "constructs" meaning, and postmodernists frequently talk about "liberating" the "text"(they never say "work," because that implies someone worked on it) from the "author-god", whose intention about the meaning is only one of many opinions.
  
  One of the best critiques of this point of view is that if the author doesn't exist, then the black author, the gay author, the woman author, the Canadian author don't exist -- that shuts up a lot of voices.
  
  
• All things are open to doubt -- except postmodernism. To be fair, the better postmodernists pay lip service at least to doubting postmodernism, but I've never seen even the best really try. Postmodernists spend a lot of time "desconstructing" "totalizing ideologies" -- such as religious/spiritual faith, a belief in the existance of reality or history, or anything else outside its vision of an empty universe and its practice of cynicism.
  
  I always point out that if you're going to try and doubt everything, you can't really play favourites. There's just as much evidence for no spiritual dimension to life as there is for the existance of one. As for disbelieving in reality, I figure that's why the Gods of Irony had the ultimate disbeliever in reality outside of language -- the French theorist Roland Barthes -- run over by a laundry truck.
  
  The cynical side of postmodernism has to be hit home -- one major theorist, Michel Foucault, believed that language was about nothing but power -- even the simplest communications between friends was a jockeying for power.
  
  This "deconstructionism" (postmodernists refuse to add the -ism at the end, but everyone else does) is also used to argue that there is no such thing as nation, culture, or identity.
  
  
• Speaking of irony, the postmodernists are big on it. Postmodernism tends to use cliches, stereotypes, and history, but with what they call an "ironic distance." This is being cliched, but icing it over with some snide cynicism to acknowledge the cliche. The example given in a book by a postmodernist we just read was (paraphrasing) "Saying I love you has already been said millions of times by other people, and it's haunted by that repetition and anonymity. It's already been said by (x author whose name I can't remember). So you can establish ironic distance and make it more meaningful by saying, 'As (x author) said, I love you.
  
  Between Foucault's belief that all communication is about power, and Graham Allen needing a quotation to tell his wife he loves her, I figure it would be hell to be in a relationship with some of these people. And that's precisely the joke in Dykes to Watch Out For (do you read that?). Sydney the professor is one.

There's more to it than that, but those are some of themajor symptoms :/

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's crap.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

To be perfectly fair, not all postmodernists believe in the full package, and I haven't talked to Nick long enough to know what he believes and what he discards.

I think he does discard some of the crazier notions, but even watered down, it's still pretty awful.

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

"Yes, I'll go to the movies with you! Just say it! Say it!!"
"Ooh, baby. Let me privilege lesbian positionality by destabilizing your bodily metanarrative."

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

(and yes I know you know this one. I'm quoting it for everyone else.

Hey, when I get home, I should make it into an icon for you.)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I want that for an icon. Postmodernism has taken over my journal enough :/

Thanks for the offer, though. I have a photo somewhere on one of my disks of Foucault looking like he has a headache. Maybe I should use that if I do want a PoMo icon.