--- Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
"McCarthy's "The Road" is a bleak example of what happens when the mainstream novelist tries to imagine something beyond his exhausted genre's usual concerns."
Thanks, Dwayne. I mistook McCarthy for Frazier.
BobW
Michael Brownstein's poem "World on Fire" is a kind of novel, or epic, set in a post-Peak Oil landscape.
> Robert Wrubel wrote:
>
>
> Writers whose roots are not in the mainstream
> culture
> may still have a lot to say.
>
> ...............
>
>
>
>
> So people say, with a hopeful lilt in their voice.
>
>
> In practical terms, this works out to be, for
> example, a story about a
> Lagos family's angst instead of the dramatic goings
> on of a London or
> New York based clan.
>
> Or, there are the "non-mainstream voices" found
> within: the musings of a
> clever young Indian American woman, the daughter
> of immigrants, who
> lives in two worlds and seasons her opinions with,
> to the Western mind,
> "exotic" or folksy references to Shiva et. al.
> instead of that staple,
> the clever young Anglo woman or that other, more
> recently crafted trope:
> the 'strong, independent' African American woman.
>
> And of course, there's a whole world's worth of
> troubled young and
> disappointed old men to choose from. China's vigor
> will no doubt gift
> us with a shower of translated novels and novelized
> travelogues about
> that future shocked land, but told, sadly, from the
> usual points of view.
>
>
> None of this takes us anywhere, does it? I can weep
> and laugh and gasp
> at the grandeur of fine writing with the rest of you
> but none of it is
> telling me anything about the deep systems - of how
> we're situated
> within the natural world of bio-evolved and human
> built things.
>
> McCarthy's "The Road" is a bleak example of what
> happens when the
> mainstream novelist tries to imagine something
> beyond his exhausted
> genre's usual concerns. That unrelenting book is
> about the ultimate
> dead end: an apt symbol of mainstream novelists'
> failure to examine
> structure and super structure and see what strange,
> new places that
> might take a story.
>
>
>
> What I want: a fiction as brave as a simple scene in
> a Michael Mann
> film; the camera's eye patiently settles on an LA
> street in the dead of
> night in such a way that the hidden things, the
> vastness, the adapted
> wildlife, the deep technological-ness of the place
> is made clear.
>
> A Mann shot seems to look through the skin to the
> skull beneath.
>
> That's what I want. That is not what mainstream
> novelists are giving.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> .d.
>
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