Skiffy Theory

"Stories are the original virtual reality device; their internal rules spread out into reality around us like a bite-transmitted virus, slowly but inexorably consuming its flesh. They don’t just stand around “being metaphors” whose sole purpose is to represent things in the real world; they eat the real world."

scott westerfeld

The moral of the story being: Zombies are kind of awesome.

Post-Mod Sux!

So--I'm not post-modernism's biggest fan. But I don't totally buy into the Stuckists. Some of their assertions I totally agree with:

"Post Modernism, in its adolescent attempt to ape the clever and witty in modern art, has shown itself to be lost in a cul-de-sac of idiocy. What was once a searching and provocative process (as Dadaism) has given way to trite cleverness for commercial exploitation."

but they have a really (un?)educated naivete which I find disturbing. The first point on their manifesto:

"Stuckism is the quest for authenticity. By removing the mask of cleverness and admitting where we are, the Stuckist allows him/herself uncensored expression."

Maybe I've been reading literary theory for too long--this makes me all, "Althusser, mofos, 1970, you can't escape interpellation into an ideology." Writing a manifesto about 20th C theories of aesthetics without a basic reading of 20th C theory? Makes you look foolish. Also the name. Also this:

"It is the Stuckist’s duty to explore his/her neurosis and innocence through the making of paintings and displaying them in public, thereby enriching society by giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience."

Also, it makes me look foolish by turning me into an old lady sighing about how people don't read anymore. Stupid post-modernism, this is all your fault!

on "the Great Stories"

"It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali had discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories, you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic."

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things