Normie Transgression: On Rob Doyle’s Cameo

Rob Doyle’s Cameo has a distinctly “postmodern” resonance that seems almost archaic in the present moment. Three decades removed from its heyday in the Gen-X literature of the 1990s, Doyle writes in the stylistic lineage of writers like Bret Easton Ellis. The aesthetic legacy of this “postmodernism” was a recuperation of certain elements rooted in the literary “avant-garde” extended to the level of pastiche, and alluding to ideas more elevated and profound than what was actually communicated at the level of text.

Nancy Cunard: An Excerpt from the Novel Ivoire

I decided to pack it in that night…being in a band. I’d probably stick to the music all the same. Didn’t need any of these other cunts holding me back! Would probably empty out ma bank account, sell my guitar and get one of those big analog synths second-hand…one of those big Soviet fuckers…Polyvox or something…would just play drones and harsh noise on it…piss every cunt off…or not, whatever. I decided I didn’t want to be in a band.

Twilight of the Clerks: On David A. Westbrook’s Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party

Julien Benda published his most famous study Les Trahision des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) in 1927. His use of the derogatory French term clerc (a medieval scribe) to denote a mediocre intellectual careerist and bureaucratic functionary was perhaps Benda’s most memorable contribution to modern thought. Yet most have forgotten the prophetic content of the book itself, and its prediction that Europe was “heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world.

Mal du Siècle: The New Romanticism and the Sickness of the Age: A Meditation on the Here and Now

In 1924, the French novelist Marcel Arland — founder of the Dadaist newspaper Aventure — wrote an article in La Nouvelle Revue Française which contained the phrase mal du siècle (the illness of the century), which he used to describe an ambivalent feeling, a dissonance, well-known to young men of his generation. Those men, many scarcely boys at the war’s beginning, had returned to a culture entirely removed from the mechanized brutality of the front from which they had emerged in 1918. It was an experience which some would try, and mostly fail, to sublimate in art and literature.