What makes a postmodern novel

Courtesy The Rumpus, I found a link to an entry on the LA Times books blog listing 61 "essential" postmodern novels. I was more amused by the alleged common attributes of a postmodern novel, as defined by the author -- LA Times books columnist and reviewer Carolyn Kellogg -- than by the list itself (of which I have read 12 of the 61 books). The list of common attributes:

• author is a character
• self-contradicting plot
• disrupts/plays with form
• comments on its own bookishness
• plays with language
• includes fictional artifacts, such as letters
• blurs reality and fiction
• includes historical falsehoods
• overtly references other fictional works
• more than 1000 pages
• less than 200 pages
• postmodern progenitor

To that list of attributes, I would add "refers to pop culture ironically, i.e. in such a way as to both embrace it and distance itself from it."

technorati: books, postmodernism

Old ladies making church

My friend Sara, whose religious conversion and consequent founding of a successful Food Pantry was the subject of her book Take This Bread, told me once that the old ladies who gather on the sidewalk for hours before the pantry opens to distribute food are, in their community with one another, fulfilling a spiritual need. "That's church too," she said of their alfresco klatsch.

I remembered Sara's words when I stumbled across this video:

Isn't that church too?

technorati: postmodernism,dancing, church, Sound of Music