Reading and Writing

More sport this morning, so spent the time upstairs reading selections from the following books to do with literature,culture,society and the postmodern condition.

On the last few pages of Terry Eagleton's “The Function of Criticism”, as it is due back at the library by Tuesday. Also finishing off “A Roland Barthes Reader” and “Baudrillard, From Marxism To Postmoderism”. Then I can get back to reading a book that Zoe lent me, Sarah Walters “Tipping The Velvet” (Virago). I am not certain why I am reading this racy sapphic novel ; however, having read a third of it, it is a good page turner.  It was dramatised by the BBC a few years ago I believe.

Roland Barthes said that literature is like phosphorous, it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment it attempts to die.

Barthes construes writing as an ideally complex form of consciousness, a way of being both passive and active, social and asocial, present and absent in one's own life. Literature is a language that has undergone an upheaval , and has been displaced, liberated from ungrateful context, such as poetry.

Barthes defines the writer as “the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses” and hence, a deferred activist. Perhaps, philosophy itself, is a form of deferred activism in the discourse of postmodernism.

Writer's Block: Happy birthday John Lennon!

[Error: unknown template qotd]Perhaps not in my lifetime and, despite the sentiments of "Imagine", I suspect that peace will only come when the human desire for conflict is drilled out of us, either by calamity, alien invasion, or the transmogrification into a totally cbyernetic  post human form. However,once the idea of materialism and post industrial ennui is finally over, we might survive into a golden age of new Enlightenment as visioned by Gene Roddenberry's philosophy in Star Trek .

He saw religion as the cause of many wars and human suffering. and that religion and mystical thinking were not to be included in any of the Star Trek franchises, and that in Roddenberry's vision of Earth's future, everyone was an atheist and better for it.