I'm working on a draft of a paper, and particularly on that crucial sentence up front that announces exactly what the paper is intended to do. In this sentence I used a couple of verbs, one of which was "reconstruct." But then I thought that "reconstruct" wasn't quite right, and I started cognitively casting about for alternatives. The word "deconstruct" came to mind. And then I thought, "Wow, 'deconstruct', you know, there's a word I haven't heard in awhile." Followed by: "And, you know, I think I'm better off for it."
I know someone who told me about a student who was writing a paper on "Postmodernism and Blogs." To which my first reaction was: "I thought blogs were what came after postmodernism." (By which I think I meant that many of the things that were 'good' about 'postmodernism' are so thoroughly exemplified by blogs and various Internet-based cousins that they seem nearly self-evident, whereas various things that were 'bad' are now widely understood as a part-pathos-of-a-particular-age and part-now-kitschy-retro-fun.)
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My major pet-peeve in grad school was a specific set of books by Suzi Gablik, on the nature of modernism failing and postmodernism in art. One semester in hell, mostly talking about postmodernism, when everyone knew that in order to define a movement in art, you must be PAST that movement in art. How could we be IN the postmodern movement if we were DEFINING it? And this class had oral midterms and finals, on these two stupid books! Forget the rest of what we had learned...
To make a long story short, I struck the words "postmodern" and "deconstruct" from my vocabulary the moment I graduated. And here you are, managing to use them so carelessly and throwing back to the dark days of academia. "Postmodern decontructionism" "Antidisestablishmentarianism" "excrescence" "perceptual modalities"
AAaahhhhh!!!!!!!
It diminishes any imperative to post tomorrow. Not that I should really be feeling any imperative anyway, but sometimes I do.
An honest date in your blog is worth more than your nursing imperatives, or so think I.
Steve
Wow, I just realized how much more than one post a day I've been averaging recently.
Go to bed (turn heat down first).
Do you still remember where they keep that lil thang called a "thermostat" ?
--Just joshing ya.
(I really did get a chuckle that you didn't know what, or was it where?, the thermostat was. You should tell that story more often to broaden your appeal)
My bill was $500.
Do you know that a major cause of hair loss is fiddling with blog dates?
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