What I'm Reading Roundup

Mark Bittman tells me it's okay to eat real food for breakfast, but I'm happy with my oatmeal and granola, thanks.

 David Brooks dreams of Denver and Seattle and San Diego, and apparently so do most Americans. We want newer, roomier cities with access to beaches and mountains. We want garages "filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment." I'm sorry, but that sounds like the suburbs to me. People in cities shouldn't have garages because people in cities shouldn't have cars. What happened to the return of urban density? Can we really have the machine in the garden?

Louis Menand reduces Postmodernism to two warring theories, "Postmodernism means that Modernism has won and we're all Modernists" versus "Postmodernism means that Modernism is so totally over," and then he talks about why Donald Barthelme seems to subscribe to the latter but really subscribes to the former. I don't even like Barthelme that much, but I was pretty interested in this diagnosis of a common misconception about Postmodernism, basically that it makes low culture into high art:

"It's sometimes said that the distinction between high and commercial culture collapsed when artists and intellectuals discovered aesthetic merit in things like jazz and the movies. But this can't have been the case...If you propose to admire a popular movie because it's formally interesting or morally exigent, you aren't changing the system of appreciation at all. There may be some new stuff above the line, but there is still a line. What killed the distinction wasn't defining pop art up. It was defining high art down....The point of Warhol's Campbell's soup-can paintings was not that a soup can is like a work of art. It was that a work of art is like a soup can: they are both commodities."

Well said, Louis. I also like this idea of co-opting the techniques of visual artists who are doing things with found material (like the soup cans) and using them in literature:

"The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects."

Considering writers like Barthelme (and Borges, perhaps) in this way, I have a greater appreciation for their styles. Not that I'm jumping on the Barthelme/Borges bandwagon. Although it is a very hip bandwagon to be on these days.

Coming up, as promised, this week's Tuesday Tramp.