So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Friends, Romans, blogosphereomen (and -women):  I hereby announce the closure of The Postironic Times.  Sad, I know, but necessary.

But fear not: this closure comes at the very same time that I roll out http://leekonstantinou.com, my new and improved one-stop-shopping personal web site.  All my previous posts are now available there, and from now on I will be blog from there, not only about my dissertation and academic work, but about more or less everything, including everything you ever wanted to know about Pop Apocalypse.  T-Minus 10 months till release.  Ugh, why does publishing have to move so sloooow?

Update your feeds and bookmarks, my friends!

Metafiction as R&D

To prep for the next diss. chapter, on the figure of the "believer," I've been reading lots of lit crit on metafiction and, in an unrelated line of reading, have been simultaneously perusing Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans, a terrific book on economic development that blows neo-liberal free-market orthodoxies more or less out of the political-economic water.

Through a strange associative leap, a merging of both lines of reading into a single Frankensteinian concept, I'm nursing the idea of writing a chapter or article built around the metaphor "Metafiction as R&D."

Critics who emphasize obsolescence as the driving force behind metafiction (and I know two at Stanford, who are doing great work on John Barth and the obsolescence/death-of-the-novel) are quite right to do so.  But there is an interesting assumption embedded in this model:  that literature is a form of technology, and the novel a kind of machine, one that was invented, has developed over time, and is being superceded by new machines (media) that embody superior technical paradigms.

This model of literary production, I would argue, is based on ideologies developed in the Cold War research university.  I'm not sure what character type this ideological matrix would correlate to, given my theoretical interest in ethos.  Maybe:  the avant-gardiste not as rebel but as aesthetic Research&Developer, as a kind of literary scientist.  Or maybe:  the ironist not as a subverter of dominant orthodoxies (the common assumption) but rather as a maker of "advanced" art, a figure at the very core of Establishment power and prestige.

My ideas are all mixed up in a big vague hodgepodge right now, and I'm open to suggestions and correctives, but this seems to me like a promising argument, one that may flower in a number of directions, and a good way to frame the prehistory of how the postironists have tried to retool/revive metafiction in the '90s.

You're not really suffering from OCD if...

Well, for instance:  ...if you really do have a chronic problem with typos and off-seeming sentences in early drafts of your writing.

Since I turned in my hipster chapter, I've been going over it again and again, finding (what seem to me) terrible typos and clunker phrases. At one point, I accidentally used of the term "Black Power" when I meant "Black Arts."  Ak!

All of this has led to my doing a quick chapter-revision and sending out Version 2.0 to everyone I had previously contacted, with apologies and an explanation about how this version is So Much Better than what I had previously sent.

This can, of course, get to be too much, and annoying if overdone.  I hereby officially declare to myself that all work on Hipsters must end until I get feedback.

I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which has rekindled my enthusiasm for believers.  Writing about them, anyway, and only about the postironic variety, though I do hope to lead off my chapter with a very brief close reading of Left Behind.

Academic hangover

Last night, I mailed my revised hipster chapter to my dissertation advisors and to some other people I thought might be interested in reading it.  Today, I've been feeling intellectually lazy and hung over.

I'm cleansing the mental palate by reading Charles Johnson's 1999 novel, Dreamer, a fictionalized rendition of the last two years of Martin Luther King's life as told by one of his young associates.  It's a quick read and an excellent novel, and it's inspiring me to dive back into fiction-writing, which I've neglected doing for a while.

I'm teaching a creative writing course for Stanford's EPGY program in Singapore for two weeks, starting next week, so I'll probably use my spare time after class to work on my novel-in-progress, Hamsterstan.  I've written about 13,000 of an anticipated 90,000 words.  It's funny to think that I take a vacation from writing... by writing.  But that's the shape of my life at the moment.  I can't complain.

Done with hipsters, I hope forever

I finished my hipster chapter on Saturday, at least a draft of it.  Only took me a year to write.  It weighs in at about 75 pages, and overall I'm pretty happy with how it came out.  One more major chapter to go--another 75-80 page chapter, on the postironic figure of the believer.  I believe.  Yes, I can.

The Stupidity of the Creative Class

James Hannaham has written an amusing short review of Richard Florida's latest entry in the Creative Class Franchise he launched back in 2002 with his Rise of the Creative Class, a book that at least made a gesture, however weak, toward sociological rigor. His latest salvo in this assault of shallow lifestyle sociology is called Who's Your City, a kind of guide to help creative class types pick which city to live in.

The funniest quote in the review:

If our conventional impressions of urbanites and their cities are correct, one might ask, why read about that for 300-odd pages? A trained rat could match American cities with their respective creative industries. With his research, Florida simply reassures his readers that their presumptions -- that New York is the center of the U.S. financial, fashion and publishing industries, for example, and "Nor-Cal" the center of the high-tech industry -- are absolutely correct. It's almost as good a scam as when Malcolm Gladwell reassures people that snap judgments are good judgments, or when James Surowiecki tells the masses how smart they are (even more so if they buy his book).

One should not be too hard on Florida, I suppose. Understood properly, his writing is merely the latest attempt by lifestyle journalists/academics to tap into the emerging market for pop analysis of everyday phenomena that flatter their readers as creative geniuses, make a big show of revealing counterintuitive canned insights that collapse upon even mild scrutiny, provide spicy anecdotes and clever turns of phrase perfectly suited for repetition at cocktail parties (thus ensuring they reproduce, meme-like...), and garner their authors interviews on NPR and lucrative book deals.

Gladwell is perhaps the most powerful and ingenious proponent of this genre of cultural and social analysis. He's good at this sort of writing, and I think he deserves the success he has received, so long as he's understood for what he is: a talented entertainer. Florida, whom I discuss a bit in the trendspotter chapter of my dissertation, is more dangerous because he takes his own ideas too seriously. I could write extensively about what's wrong with his project, but in my view its greatest flaw is its effort to imagine that in the age of the so-called creative class, the very category of class has transformed itself, somehow, from one's position relative to the economic and political levers of power--a structural argument--to the description of where one stands within a matrix of lifestyles. I've been thinking, for several years now, of trying to write an article about this ideological position, pulling in other people like McKenzie Wark. Until dissertation-writing lets up, a blog posting will have to do.

McCain the Ironist

Neal Gabler has written an interesting analysis of the McCain campaign for the NYT:

Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals [journalists] who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.

Gabler's analysis does not seem entirely right to me. Journalists do love McCain--and have consequently let him get away with many gaffs and misstatements, and (more seriously) have not questioned his open, nonmisstated, nonironic militarism.

But to say the press's esteem is the result of a shared love of irony--perhaps true enough--seems extremely simplistic and misses the bigger story. An ironic Democratic candidate could not, I suspect, get away with McCain's "candid" style; he (or she) would be pecked to death by the pundits. Moreover, many journalists seem to love Barack Obama precisely for his openly postironic style of political engagement; this seems to me a more plausible claim than that journalists love McCain for being ironic.

Obama perfectly well understands how our media system operates, and he can manipulate it just as well as McCain, albeit by means of a different strategy. Many pundits like Andrew Sullivan support Obama precisely in the terms of marketing theory (even if they don't realize it); Obama is a hip brand, a product line that makes a corrupted and ironic America feel good about itself again, a celebrity politician whose election will redeem us, etc. etc. Whether this idiom of support is an invention of the media itself or a cultivated strategy by the Obama camp remains unclear to me.

Whatever its other merits, the conceit of Gabler's argument gives me license to post it here and to write this silly slogan: If Barack Obama wins his party's nomination, as it seems he will, America will behold its first national political contest between irony (McCain) and postirony (Obama). For the sake of my academic career--obviously the only criteria relevant here--I sincerely hope that Brand Obama wins both the party nomination and the national election.