catnip?

Lately I have been finding myself fascinated by this brief touching on the subject of "pseudo-modernism," which can be classified as one step beyond postmodernism. What intrigues me the most is how much it simply makes sense to me--this "pseudo-modernism" is, I think I could argue, present everywhere in today's society, so much so that we don't really notice it anymore, if we ever did. More than that, we're okay with it. I think I touched on this a little in my last blog on here, and this isn't really the focus of my writing this week, but I just wanted to bring that up a little bit.

It is very noticeable, the fact that we rely so much on the internet nowadays. Honestly, where would we be without Google? How convenient it can prove to be. Whenever we have the simplest question, we can just type a few key words into that nifty little search bar, and the world wide web will provide us with fifty billion different ways to explain an answer.

In some ways, I really do see this as a good thing. Information is more accessible now than it has ever been before, just waiting out there, waiting for someone to reach out to it and grasp with all their might.

However, the problem that I'm seeing is that we too often are lacking in this might. We can't always reach out, with purpose, and grab exactly what we need--or if we can, we can't use it for much anyways. Sure, we've got all this useless knowledge now, floating around in our brains, bouncing off walls, getting lodged in the folds of our cerebral cortex... But do we use it?

I don't know about these claims that humans only use 10% of their brains, but I do know for positive there is a lot of what we would call "knowledge" that sits in there, molding away, stored away one day never to be used again. Why is this? As I said, knowledge is plentiful, just asking us to snap it up. So we do. And we'll hold onto it for awhile, and never look at it again. Mostly because we just don't care.

All this random information just encourages us to skim about, shuffle through the piles and piles of things, read a few words here and there, perform a surface-level analysis or sorts and take a surface-level meaning out of it all. With so much around us, our eyes roll around in their sockets, our brains are overwhelmed, our synapses try to fire too quickly. We don't retain any of it, if we even pay attention that long: it's like going to an art museum, to use a crude sort of analogy. You stare at one painting for a few seconds--take a brief moment to wonder what it means--decide it's not worth your time--move on to the next one, only to repeat the process over and over again.

Short attention spans!!! It all comes down to short attention spans. Short attention spans bred from the quick-paced nature of today's culture--all of that "pseudo-modernism," as I already hinted. I'm not sure if anyone else will remember this--but two years ago, in Honors English 10, Ms. Bennett told us that the average teenager's attention span was 12 minutes long. About how long is this, in perhaps more relateable terms? Approximately the amount of time we watch a television show until the first commercial break.

We don't really notice this kind of thing, do we? But once we do, it starts to become a little disturbing. We start to wonder, what will happen to humanity if consciousness, as we know it, as our ancestors have known it for centuries and centuries, is ultimately shrinking?

I'd like to take a moment to add to this discussion a pondering of the structure of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle; I just finished the novel this morning and found it... intriguing, to say the least.

One of the first things I noticed when I first started reading was the unusual structure. When we read a novel in an English class, the first thing we expect tends to be archaic language, extended syntax--long, long, interminable chapters (these criteria call to mind works like The Scarlet Letter and Sense and Sensibility, and any of my fellow classmates over the past few years will admit that these bring back scary, scary memories...). This book is just about the opposite of all that.

So I'm beginning to wonder, did Vonnegut foresee the shrinking of human consciousness, as I put it? Did he expect an audience with an incredibly short attention span, who couldn't focus on a single scene for more than three to four pages? I think this might be one of the main themes of the novel as a whole. It moves at a fast pace--similar to today's society, the way we know it--quick, jagged in some places. It flits from scene to scene, time frame to time frame. It can be confusing.

But we can keep up. Maybe that's the point that I am trying to make. He wrote it for us, he expected us.

And if this is the kind of book that attracts us, with its short chapters and quick-pace--completely favorable to our facilitated ADD. We don't have to think so hard. It moves quickly. Chapters don't go on for an eternity. It's "just catnip to the kids" (Vonnegut 95).

on cookies, music, and...

This week's prompt is quite wide, so I've decided to narrow it down and focus my pondering on one aspect of it. Whether this shall be detrimental or not to the flow or depth of my pondering... we shall see. Because it doesn't exist yet. ...But it's in the process!

I was fascinated by the little bit of Alan Kirby's article that we read aloud in class the other day, because, though my brain wasn't completely wrapping around it at first, one little tidbit really sharpened my focus: "Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism."

This shocked me. All at once it made perfect sense, though I'd never thought of it that way before--today is all about complete and total immersion. Maybe it was something in the back of my mind, somewhere, but I'd never thought of it as a bad thing. In fact, even now I'm not totally sure it is all bad.

I think my best way to present this is with a few real-world examples. Not just real, but... well, real, as in, right off of me. Example one: anyone who knows me [semi-well] knows of my recent obsession (is obsession the right word? I haven't figured that out yet...) with baking. Things lately are stressful. The process of baking cookies makes the world disappear for about half an hour, and all I can think about is cookies, cookies, love, cookie dough, and more cookies. As Kirby states, it "takes the world away."

Example two, and I think this is one we can all identify with (since I'm such a weirdo with the cookies): sometimes I flick on my iPod, shuffle to the perfect song, and imagine that nothing exists but the music. It's not difficult, if you don't have too much on your mind--all original thought sort of melts away, replaced by lyrics, melody, harmony, bass lines, the sound of the singer's voice. For approximately three minutes and thirty seconds, that's all that exists.

There are a billion other things we do, every day, in an attempt to exclude ourselves from the world--we don't always know it, but we do. I feel like this should be a scary thing.... But maybe it's not... Maybe it is....

So let me have a minute to try to reason it out a little bit... Maybe the bad part of it is that we feel like there's stuff out there we want to hide away from--we want the world to go away for awhile. So what's out there? Hatred, ignorance, death, despair, misunderstanding... And that's nothing we can fix, easily, quickly--that's stuff that's going to be there for the rest of our lives, somewhere, in some form, always audible, always painful.

Plus, we're really relying on that, aren't we? All the painful stuff--we can just ignore it, if we can fully immerse ourselves in something else, forget that the world around us exists. It's more than a defense mechanism, it's just what we do. What we've come to live. Just like I said--I didn't see anything wrong with it, at first. I'm still thinking it's kind of okay. It's just the way we've moved as a society. Then, of course, that brings up all the questions about how we are moving as a society: Are we progressing? Is this progress a good thing? What do we get once we've reached the tippy-top of that progress? Where will we be then? Can you progress past the tippy-top of progress??

Ahhh, good old postmodernism. Ask a simple question, and all you get for an answer are more questions.

Cat's Cradle So Far...

I'd like to open up by declaring that I really am enjoying this novel so far. I haven't gotten that far in yet... And I know there are some people who have some serious objections to whatever happens later in the book... So I'm looking forward to getting to that. Vonnegut's style is different than anything I've ever read before.

I like it.

So one thing that really jumped out at me as I was reading was Newt Hoenikker's off-hand comment at the beginning fo chapter six: "Aren't the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn't get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt" (pg 13). Then he goes on to continue his story--reminiscent of his father, I think, saying whatever may come to mind and then moving onto the next interesting thing...

I find this novel, so far, to be very postmodern in its outright discussion of lies. To me, a lot of postmodernism is sort of delving into the depths of subjects people don't really like thinking about--stuff they're uncomfortable with. And Vonnegut pointing out that religion is founded on lies definately falls into that category of discomfort. Take the first sentence in The Books of Bokonon: "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies" (pg 5).

Even the format of the novel itself adds a little to the reader's discomfort--we open a book, and more often than not expect to see tradition, as it has been laid down for centuries by all the great authors--lengthy chapters, mostly. Something about these ultra-short chapters worries us somehow. Maybe we can't quite put our finger on it... I know I certainly can't... And, like I said, to me... that's a little bit of postmodernism.

I'm definately looking forward to reading more. Onward we plunge!!!