Hello world!

This is my new blog for random musings, reflections and any other nonsense that I feel I want to write about.

Today I read another blogger’s piece on postmodernism. I won’t go into postmodernism other than to say that it does away with grand narratives like those of religion, science and any other systematic body of thought, in favour of meta-narratives. We can all have our own individual stories. If you want to know more, the guy who started is Lyotard. It crystallized for me an aspect of contemporary writing that I don’t care for: the tendency to leave nothing to the imagination, especially violence and sex. It explains why that, although I admire Pat Barker’s language and characterisation in The Ghost Road, I find the explicit sex distasteful.

Salman Rushdie writes: ‘the active imaging of a world accurately is one of the most truthful tools that human beings have as a way of understanding what’s going on around them. That’s what fiction does.’ (Rushdie, 1983). Not the sort of fiction I like to read! Painters stopped painting representationally with the advent of photography. Unfortunately that led to conceptual art, but it doesn’t have to. Sooner or later people with tire of art works assembled to the creator’s design by a team of lackeys and demand him/her to take an active part in crafting the work. Give me the dark and ambiguous visions of future societies in books like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World’,  Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ or Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I’d rather look to the future which is alterable than the past which is not. There are those who argue that we can learn about the present by looking at the past. Someone has yet to convine me that we can learn anything by continually revisiting WW1.