two quotes about postmodernism

"the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. that is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like . . . 'which world is this? what is to be done in it? which of my selves is to do it?' other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of teh literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: what is a world? what kinds of worlds are there, how are they constructed, and how do they differ?"

--brian mchale, postmodernist fiction.

"by crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials . . .it is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. it is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes."

--jean baudrillard, simulacra and simulation

beckett

today, i woke up and ate an apple. is this the kind of thing you usually put in a blog? now i'm going to read some notes on contemporary drama. i got beckett's letters in the mail, an entire book of them, from 1929-1940. i have it in my notes that vivian mercier says, about godot, "it's a play in which noting happens, twice." probably my favorite characters ever are vladimir, estragon, and don quixote de la mancha. in general, i like characters and make them always be in my stories.