almost saint distaff's day, but not yet

As I remark often, Hugh kenner observes in The Pound Era that cultural information is lost when people no longer find any way of relating it to their present interests or concerns sufficiently to deem it worth preserving. (Hence the need for duty- and rule-bound archivists and practitioners of LOCKSS.)

Ezra Pound did a decent job of refurbishing neglected bits of antiquity for the edgier subcultures of the world of 1909, and Thomas Pynchon did likewise for 1966.

The novelists and poets of 2010 seem to be in more of a literary-quality disconnect, in that large bodies of cultural information are being transmitted only by novelists and poets who will never be ranked with Pound or Pynchon. Of course, there are reams of novels and poems from all eras that mediate essential cultural information—but unfortunately in vehicles that are neither aesthetically successful or comprehensible to a reader. These become the subjects of doctoral dissertations.

Blog posts are even more unsuccessful in that the writer presupposes that the reader already shares the context that makes the cultural pattern interesting. This is so whether the cultural pattern is the particular arrangement of a kitten's face, the quest for a really good King's Cake recipe, or the question of who Truffaut's camera crew was on Day for Night (or who wrote the English subtitles on the theatrical release).

Most of my posts excel in being of interst only to someone who has asked the same question already. I seldom bother to explain what the question is. More often, I am fishing to find out if anyone else has ever asked the question that is not being articulated. I got a surprise "aha" response to one of my posts recently, though you will have to guess which one.

Douglas Coupland (eek! a useful subject heading!)

Douglas Coupland is one of those pattern transmitters who lets the plot burble along so lightly that we never lose track of what the novel is really trying to tell us. Unfortunately, the manifest content sometimes becomes so perfunctory that the latent content is likely to be communicated only to those readers whose mental lives are already permeated with the questions. Everyone reads according to his or her permanent hidden prejudice. And some write to be deliberately difficult in terms of verb and adjective choice.