Status Updates From Further Fridays: Essays, Le...

my muse is the one with a smile on her face — for approaching the mystic and the tragic by way of the comic: it has to do with what (...) Umberto Eco calls "ironic double coding" (a hallmark of the postmodern condition, in Eco's opinion). In an age of hyper self-consciousness and lost innocence, straightforward mysticism (or tragicism or mythicism) is as likely to off-put the knowledgeable (contd. in comments)

Borges's great contemporary and fellow Nobel Prize-non-winner Vladimir Nabokov once said mischievously that when he and Vera first discovered Borges's writings, they felt as if they were standing on a wondrous portico — and then they discovered that there was no house. For most of us (...) that "portico" is a marvelous freestanding specimen of Postmodernist literary architecture, rich in what (contd. in comments)

'Postmodernism Revisited'
Barth is taking a master class!

'The Limits of Imagination' essay was fantastic. The next one, 'A Few Words About Minimalism', ha! NR's fav bugbear :p