There are subtle hints in Ozu's movies about the occupation, and in one, the Father is talking to someone and mentions that his daughter has regained the strength she lost in the work camps.

The thing that really strikes me about the Ozu movies is that they chronicle the change from Eastern to Western dress and furniture and ways of life. The business world was very Western even before the war. You see this particularly in one of Ozu's pre-war silent films.

Good Morning, which is one of my favorites, takes place in a village, and you can see the initial resistance to and gradual acceptance of things like washing machines and television.

Yesterday, I watched a Chinese movie from director, Edward Wang, called Yi-Yi. It takes place in Taiwan, and you could easily have substituted Western actors for the Chinese and made no difference in the story whatsoever. Except for a bit of decoration, you would not have even know you were in an Eastern city. One thing I found interesting was that when the Chinese and Japanese business men were speaking to one another, they spoke English.The Typist

I am looking forward to reading

AMDG

The same thing is happening around here with development--the fields turning into subdivisions, the roads getting more crowded. The automobile was just a big mistake. I like zipping around on my own as much as anybody, but it's a bad thing.

I haven't watched that many of Ozu's films--only two. The only reference to the war I remember is that one of the sons in Tokyo Story was killed in it.

That list is like potato chips. I need to be working but I keep going back and reading one more entry.

What is it? I mean, you're talking about fiction, right, not philosophy & criticism? Give me an example.

I know. Once you have abandoned truth and reason, where do you go from there? Maybe back in the right direction, but I don't see much of that.

A novelist has to portray the truth of real things even if he doesn't intend to if he wants to have any story at all.

AMDG

But Joyce and Woolf are counted among the great modernists. Or at least they used to be. Maybe they got retrofitted when postmodern became the thing. Pynchon and Heller, yeah, I can see them being labelled postmodern. The more recent ones I haven't read, though I know Wallace in particular is very highly regarded by some people whose judgment I respect.

#42 of the 213: "It turned out that nothing could withstand the force of the Beatles, not even the Beatles themselves." Very good line.

I finally got through all 213. Of course I disagreed with a lot of the choices but overall I thought it wasn't bad. And a pretty good tour of the Beatles' work. I haven't heard a lot of that earlier stuff since the '60s, or in a few cases maybe never heard it at all.

Woolf is modernist not postmodernist

I don't necessarily dislike McCartney's lightweight stuff, but I certainly agreed with this guy about some of it. For instance "Rocky Racoon" which I pretty much hate.

Oh. I agree about Rocky Raccoon and such ilk. It is for to play, though. Maybe i can do one of those things where you put Christin lyrics to a popular song.

Okay, maybe I don't know what Postmodern Literature is. I'll just listen to Rocky Raccoon again while having a cocktail!

Going back to Janet's comment from yesterday: "Once you have abandoned truth and reason, where do you go from there?"

For large elements of western civ, the answer seems to be "You roll over and die."

Stu - in modernism the 'subject' is at the centre of things and that's how we get stream of consciousness novels - all about what's going on inside Mrs Dalloway etc.

In postmodernism the 'subject' is said not to exist, or be dissolved.

"Even a Beatles fanatic back then would not have quite known what was going on, Mac. We keep thinking that "yesterday" was like "today"..."

No, "we" don't. :-) In the remark about Beatles fanatics knowing a lot I wasn't referring to the time of the albums's release, but to all the years since, with tons and tons of information coming out and which serious Beatles fans probably know all about. I mean I've never paid much attention to that flood of information.

I remember the years of the Beatles' heyday very clearly and we definitely didn't know what was going on. There were rumors ("Paul is dead!) and I guess there may have been some news stories suggesting problems, but not much that was specific or trustworthy. Though you could tell from listening to the album that all was not well--most of the songs were either obviously John songs or Paul songs, for instance, not much apparent collaboration.

Take it up with this guy, maybe?:

http://www.robertwhitakerphotography.com/

But I didn't have a TV. I did hear about the bed-in and maybe saw a picture in a newspaper or magazine, but that was all. It's almost strange to recall now that if something appeared on TV and you missed it, it was gone. There was no way to access any sort of recording. Forget the internet--the VCR was yet to come.

I've ordered 'The Typist' from the library. I gave up on the current novel I was reading due to its unnecessary hyper-realism, of which more anon.

re: the Beatles, I think I've discovered a reason for my indifference, and it has to do with my age. I was born in 1961 and thus was a fairly young child throughout their heyday. I can remember my older cousins being smitten with some measure of Beatlemania, but I was a little too young.

By the time I started listening more seriously to music in the mid-70's the Beatles, while still loved by slightly older fans, were, like much 60's pop music, considered somewhat "out-of-date." And not enough time had gone by for them to be appreciated retrospectively like they would be by somewhat younger listeners.

I find this to be true of most of my friends. No one in the 50-59 age group is a Beatles fan. The fans are the guys who are 60+ (original fans) and younger than 50 (retro fans). So might we posit a sort of "Beatles gap" wherein people are too young to be part of the heyday, but too old to catch on retroactively?

For comparison sake, it's perhaps interesting to note that the first pop artist I liked and paid any real attention to was Elton John, and that this was his early stuff (1971-1975). By the time I entered high school in 1977 I was mostly listening to what they used to call AOR -- "album-oriented rock."

Interesting thought about the Beatles gap. Makes sense. Possibly the general reaction that produced punk has something to do with it too.

Elton John--ugh. I did sort of like his first album, but it didn't take long for him to wear out his welcome completely for me, notwithstanding his gift for appealing tunes.

Interesting experience a few nights ago: watching the last episode of The Americans with captions on, with "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on the soundtrack, I encountered, via the captions, lyrics beyond the title and something about a penthouse for the first time ever, despite the fact that I worked in a record store when it came out and heard it a hundred times. I never had one moment's curiosity about the lyrics, which I guess is indicative of the extent to which I'd written him off.

I want to thank you for that yellow brick earworm.

AMDG

I freely admit that my dislike of EJ is completely subjective. It starts with the sound of his voice. Obviously he's very talented.

You're welcome, Janet. If it's any consolation, I have it too.

I absolutely did not see where that was going, even though we were just talking about him. I was expecting Ted Nugent.

I have to say that it would not in the least surprise me to learn that H-D is active in gay rights etc etc. It's what corporations do now.

http://www.wislgbtchamber.com/release050416

Not surprised by the "hyper-realism", either. I mentioned The Americans earlier. In the same episode there's a scene where somebody is listening to a clandestine recording that's mostly useless irrelevant conversation. We see him fidgeting, pacing, etc., because he's bored. But we also see him going to the bathroom. Not just going in, but standing there urinating, and of course we get to hear it too. This is *extremely* frequent now. It's like the directors go out of their way to work it in. In another series, I'm not sure which one now, there was a scene where a conversation is taking place between a man and a woman who have just ******. "Made love" doesn't exactly desribe it. There's absolutely no artistic reason why part of the conversation has to take place with the woman sitting on the toilet, but there it is.

It seems self-evidently some kind of Statement, but I find myself unwilling to dwell on it long enough to try to figure it out.

Go ahead--just because I don't like it doesn't mean other people don't. Or can't. :-)

I watched Silence last night, and though it was probably longer than it needed to be I thought it quite powerful. I was wondering if anyone had seen the 1971 Japanese version, since you all are big on Japanese movies. Scorsese did not show anyone relieving themselves.

I am not convinced about the 'Beatles gap.' Certainly, as a 57 year old, I'm a bit unusual since I grew up listening to the Beatles in my mother's Greenwich Village shop. But in my 1970s English boarding school, a number of people had Beatles tapes and people listened to it. Certainly, it was not the biggest thing teenagers listened to it in the 1970s, but it was there and people liked it.

Elton John: my confession is that I never bought an EJ album in my teenage years because it was insufficiently grungy. I didn't like the sequins phase of pop music - I didn't like Bowie either. I liked Neil Young and grungy stuff. Today I get Pandora on my phone and I have to say I do enjoy EJ's songs. I enjoy 'I hope you don't mind' and 'Tiny Dancer' got stuck in my mind for ages.

Rob G wrote: My question is, why is this sort of repulsive detail necessary? Isn't simple basic realism good enough without going into all the "gory details"? If Clare in his insanity had a fixation on oral sex do you really have to describe it? Or can't you just say that another mental patient had an irrational fear of going to the bathroom, without describing in loving detail how the asylum staff had to deal with it? This is one aspect of modern literature I just don't get.

I once heard a good talk at a Stratford Caldecott Conference in Oxford about this. I hesitate to say the speaker was Debra Murphy, because she may have just been the only speaker on the bill whose name I recollect. Whoeveritwas gave a paper on hyper-realism, and said the direct purpose of it is to convince the reader by saturation that empirical reality is all there is. It was a kind of fictional vanguard of the new atheism, from the 1990s onward. I thought that was such a great point. If empirical reality is all there is, then describing every pork chop in a Butcher's window is just what a fiction writer needs to be doing.

Janet said that the agricultural land around her house is being turned into an estate. That happens so much in South Bend - its as if the town simply eats the land around it.

I didn't like the glitter era of pop music, either, but EJ's association with that only sealed his fate for me, as I didn't much like him even before that side of him became prominent. I don't know..it's irrational and I can't really explain it, but somehow his music seemed unreal to me.

the Butcher shop illustration is from a novel by Antonia Byatt.

I have not seen Silence btw. I sort of feel like I don't need to because I've read so much about it.

The idea was that the senses simply fill and saturate our experience, because sensation is all there is. But its a *saturation* with physical sensations that the new atheist hyper fiction writer is aiming for, as a way of showing that sensation literally fills the picture and there is nothing else. In a sense, it's not a subjectivist move. Its not showing that subjectivity or consciousness is all there is. Rather the reverse. All there is is this objective flow of empirical data into the recipient of empirical data.

Photo-realism is the opposite of the subjectivism of, say, Impressionism or Virginia Woolf.

Yes I think its very plausible that London based novelists like Antonia Byatt or Ian McEwan or (and perhaps especially, the most brilliant practitioner of hyper-realism that I have read) Hilary Mantel are deliberately presenting a naturalist and naturalized world. They know enough to do that.

I just substituted photo-realism so I didn't have to keep writing hyper realism

I was just thinking of Philip Roth as an American author who's doing the same -- "deliberately presenting a naturalist and naturalized world" -- and then found this article on him by A.S. Byatt, no less -- "The dying animal: In the post-religious world of Philip Roth's fiction, humans do not have immortal souls":

Philip Roth is the great recorder of Darwinian Man - "unaccommodated man", who is no more than "a poor, bare, forked animal", as old King Lear observed. Roth has understood what it means to be a conscious creature, driven by sexual desire towards the death of the body, nothing more.

Hyper-realism is not necessarily a feature of post-modernism, then. The grand materialist-empiricist narrative doesn't fit with post=modernism if the latter is about subverting grand narratives of any sort. The aesthetic leveling (black metal = Bach) is another story. But there are strains of modernism that could very easily accomodate that (Dada etc.)

I just read the Roth review that Marianne linked to. Wow, I can't wait to read that novel. :-/

My first exposure to that sort of extreme realism was in some of the horror fiction I read in the 80's (Stephen King, Peter Straub, etc.). At the time I didn't give it much thought, assuming that it was just part of the territory. As time went on, however, I grew to dislike it, and eventually learned to avoid authors who wrote that way.

What surprised me was coming across that sort of writing later on in contemporary literary fiction. I think my first exposure in that vein was in one of Pat Barker's novels from the 90's. I didn't read a lot of contemporary fiction at the time, and coming across that in Barker's work was an eye-opener.

What makes literary fiction so interesting is the author presenting a different worldview for the reader (I think). I am a huge Philip Roth fan, along with Saul Bellow and John Updike. They are all similar, and different, sexual themes along with religious themes. A New Jersey Jew, Chicago/Canadian Jew, and Northeastern WASP. You don't find a lot of women who read them, but in my recent trip out to NM a female friend of mine had almost an entire shelf of Roth! ????

I love Bellow - one of the greats. To me, certainly he has a lot of sexual themes, but its not comparable to Roth banging on and on and about oral sex.

MacArthur's speech at the football game. Have mercy.

AMDG

Yeah. I assumed that the speech is factually correct but didn't check.

At the end of the book there are some acknowledgements that mention historical events and I think the change of the location of the game. Can't check because it's back at the library. Can't remember whether it mentions the speech or not. But MacArthur is definitely described as the instigator of the game in the novel, which that NYT piece doesn't really support.

So maybe Macarthur's speech is one of them. If so that should have been acknowledged. It opens him up to the charge of going beyond "liberties" into falsification. Perhaps it was a speech Macarthur actually gave in some other context, or made of pieces of things he actually said? No way to know without a whole lot of research.

Well, that's fascinating. Thank you for going to all that trouble. This begins to sound a bit suspect, depending on whether he was trying to make Macarthur look bad. The speech--if I remember correctly, it's already faded--has to do with God helping the U.S. conquer the Japanese--by helping us develop the bomb, maybe?--can't remember. It's not historically implausible, though. And not necessarily so bad, though it's shocking to us.

Still, this practice of simulating history and then modifying it, without noting that one has done so, seems dubious to me. He does succeed in what he set out to do, according to what you quote.

I didn't get the sense that Knight was particularly negative about MacArthur in the novel, but rather presented him as a fairly noble man but also one of considerable contradictions.

In fact, the speech struck me as somewhat out of character with the way he portrayed MacArthur in the rest of the book, but perhaps that was intentional (i.e., the public man vs. the private man).

I'm late to the game, but postmodernism (or at least the ideas it brings forward regarding family dynamics) has been a big game changer in therapy/counseling practices. Family values are less rooted in sacred principles of church and community and more rooted in a very private mix of personal, situational beliefs.

Families have changed, partly due to the prevalence of divorce and remarriage. And that affects children in a big way, since only about half of all children reach 18 living continuously with both (biological) parents in the home. And then there's gay/lesbian families, bi-racial families, cohabitating families, etc.

And philosophically, the theories and approaches we use have changed based upon new theories about how we process reality, how we know what we know, etc. and it's led to changes in our founding philosophies and metaphorical contexts for working with people.

Of course I wasn't a therapist before postmodernism took hold, but as a provider and patient of postmodern era therapy, I cannot imagine a therapeutic process that is heavily "prescribed" with a set of rules that are placed upon you, or you're guided towards, rather than finding your own journey through self examination of personal values. Therapy used to be "overt therapeutic strategies designed to change families through technically precise interventions" (thank you old text book for that quote). It was much more influence based: the therapist takes on the responsibility of directly influencing the behavior of their patient. I am not sure I would have ever sought out therapy, as a provider or patient, if that was the experience I was going to get. To me, it seems like the provider would be heavily biased towards their own beliefs, and then those beliefs become the basis of therapy and therapeutic goals. And one sure fire way to shut down a teenager (or adult who is practically a teenager, still struggling with that id phase, such as many addicts/alcoholics) in ANY therapy session is to tell them what to do.

For me, I am more comfortable with the idea of being a guide of self exploration for a person, so they find their own truths and set their own goals, despite what I may think of all of their choices in life. Because ultimately, it's THEIR life, no matter what my bias.

But of course that may be because all I've ever known, in a real and tangible way, is postmodernism.

Ok, I'm almost done. It is ironic that therapy has moved this way, towards more of a process and less prescribed, given our healthcare system has gone the opposite. No one wants a process when it comes to being healed (understandably), they want a cure. But, because we're a more qualitative, process oriented field, funding by NIH and other bodies is getting more difficult to obtain without clear qualitative data, which isn't where we actually practice, and so many of us are having to either dump our qualitative research, or move to mixed methods to at least try and keep the process included. And further, the emphasis on "evidence based practice" largely led by the health insurance industry further goes against our process method, because it's difficult to quantify a process with numbers. And, if we're focusing on the postmodern idea of complete psyche individualism, then what works for one isn't going to work for another! (Ok well this last part turned out to be just a rant of my every day frustrations as a clinician.)

To me, it seems like the provider would be heavily biased towards their own beliefs, and then those beliefs become the basis of therapy and therapeutic goals.

But see, I think this is inescapable. The idea that a therapist should not influence the behavior of the patient is a bias, and the new theories about how we process reality are a kind of bias, and the idea that there are different truths for different people is just fallacious on the face of it unless you completely redefine the word "truth."

I'm not saying that many or maybe most of the things that you do in your practice are not good, I'm just saying there is a bias there that is the basis of your therapy and goals.

AMDG

I feel like a better definition (to me) of the shift from modern to post modern is less "out with the old, in with the new!" and more, " the old has it's valid points, but let's expand it and build upon it based upon today's societal needs, norms, research and thoughts, and accept that one truth is not going to fit every single person". This is what I mean about everyone having their truth, rather than one truth covers all people living in our land, regardless of factors such as upbringing, ethnicity, religions views, etc. (Particularly when more and more our societies are blended with so many cultures. Although I am cognizant of how that is in opposition of what many religions teach, which often involves a few particular truths that form the foundation of further teachings.)

To me it's less about rejection and more about the continuum of learning to increase the knowledge base. And it also feels rather chicken and egg whether post modernism led the charge towards greater acceptance, or whether greater acceptance led the charge of finding a label for a movement that had already been charging forward before a label formed. Meaning, post modernism wasn't a philosophical understanding of the world that was taught across the land, it evolved from our society by our society's members, gradually over time, and was given a name. I don't see it as some sort of political movement or propaganda driven device, but more as a labeled/named reflection of the growth society is going through (the good and the bad). Given that modernism (at least in therapy) was a label for the belief of one truth that can be applied to everyone, I feel like post modern is an okay name to label the expansion to more than one truth (or individual truths).

I find the bad in our society, such as increased divorce rates, to be much much more complicated and based on many more factors than postmodernism as a phenomenon. Societal stressors (such as cost of living and inability to have a livable wage) create a HUGE strain on families. Additionally, the pain medication driving opiate epidemic is a huge factor. And then there are smaller, more local factors at play, such as the crack epidemic in the DC area in the 80s which was largely ignored (other than to demonize the impoverished African Americans living in downtown DC). Drug use/abuse, financial strain, physical/verbal abuse, etc. all increase rates of divorce, because it increases rates of dissatisfaction and unhappiness within households. I'm not sure that's the "Bad" of postmodern thinking, as much as it's the "bad" that has crept out of years and years and years of no one focusing any attention on the "undesirables" of our society. Divorce rates are substantially higher among those with no college education, for example. I'm not sure any form of "one truth" would have fixed any of the train wrecks that have been bulldozing forward to demolish families in our society. Because ultimately, even given one truth, people will interpret it and use it to their advantage over others, because that's what people do.

I don't have time to make a longer comment now, but I'm not at all sure that "postmodern" as used in the world of psychotherapy is the same thing as in philosophy and literature, although they're probably connected. Sounds to me like therapists borrowed and adapted the term to apply to the whole emphasis on non-judgementalism which has been in the process of climbing to the top of our culture's list of values for fifty years or so now. It seems like an unnecessary philosophical appendage to reasonable goals like, say, the one in your most recent comment about trying to work with rather than against conditions like autism (to the extent possible).