'Let us now praise famous men'

I am not a Liberal anymore. I am a postmodernist which is somewhere beyond politics. It is a cultural, philosophical discipline that informs political action but it is only incidentally political. Yet still I remember.
The great Liberal fight that took this society from primitivism to sophistication, from ignorance to philosophy, from oppression to empowerment cannot be forgotten. The whole of postmodernism is contained in an 'infrastructure', if you will, of liberal instituitions and liberal ideals.
Liberalism is no less than the attempt to balance individual liberty with social responsibility. Those of us practicing liberty bordering on license cannot forget that we do so at the sufferance of enlightened government and within the strictures and guarantees of a liberal constitution. We owe.
We owe great debts to people like Senator Kennedy who honored a sense of community not particularly shared by postmodernists. He was a modernist and therefore beyond the characterizations of Left and Right that originated with the French revolution of the 19th century. He was a man of his time and of his country.
We shall miss him.

The New Industrial State

It does not exist. J.K. Galbraith did not dream of the conditions that exist in today's world when he penned that interesting volume. It is about centralization, economies of scale and regimentation of behavior and it informs modern liberalism to an unfortunate degree.

Today we are global, flexible and empowering of the individual. We are, in dialectical terms, in pursuit of the antithesis to the thesis stated by Galbraith. The world we live in today is a dynamic synthesis of those two exclusional conceptual frames of the nature of existence.
J.M. here. Basil has the day off, drinking his espresso, listening to Corelli and generally doing his impression of a carrot or some similiar vegetable. When writers shut down their conscious mind, they really shut it down. Creativity is so much an unconscious process that to write requires retreat. It is a solitary and anxious profession. Writers are, by nature, postmodernists. They do not appreciate regimentation. Basil likes the new synthesis.
It goes well with the world.
Do well and be well.

The Postmodern World

Basil here. I'm going to let J.M. have a turn at blogging so get ready to think
What characterizes the postmodern world? Relative truth? I would argue with the radical view of a personal myth that social existence requires shared language, relevant to and descriptive of phenomena, shared databases, for lack of a better word, and shared experience.
I would argue that truth is a variable related to strategy in game theory and constrained by the rules of the complex multi-player game we call existence. The bold statement that delusion has truth value, that insanity is a legitimate reality, hasn't been openly stated since the 1950's. The EEG, the CT scan, and the MRI have all checked in on the question with the exact same observation. Without proper medication, the cerebral cortex is dysfunctional in the insane mind.
Of course you could hold to the radical view of relative truth if you think that very large lizards are capable of legitimate performance in legitimate human games. It's up to you. It's your quarter. You can call it anyway you want. That's the way of postmodernism, isn't it?
Do well and be well.

The Novel is Dead Air

Basil L. Brylcreem here. The writer. The novel as art is dead air. You could sell it by the pound. There are no more Hugos, no more Melvilles. The only blip on the scope of art in the marketplace is Pynchon and that's only because he's technically a writer without equal. He's not a great Writer. He won't make the canon and that's a smart money bet.
The problem is that this is the age of the technico, the number and hardware specialist, and they are underrepresented to the point of disenfranchisement from the world of literature. Denial? I think maybe so.
I'm placing my bet on the novella. It's quick. I can challenge the reader with a vocabulary relevant to the argument in a few pages and not dismay them. I enjoy writing them and it shows. Take a break from graphomania and spend an hour with a novella.
Do well and be well.

Intro

Hello, my name is Basil L. Brylcreem. I write. My alter ego, J. M. Frazier, thinks. We feed off each other in a kind of multiple personality symbiosis. Whatever. It works.
I have a new book out. It's available on Amazon. I titled it 'Chances' because the moment is defined by doing something and when you're doing something in this world you're generally taking chances. Get it? It's a popular title so look for the one by Basil himself. It's a very fast, very short mystery that's perfect for a cappuchino and a quiet hour or two in an afternoon. J.M. works his way into a paragraph or two so it'll make you think. I recommend it. But then I would, wouldn't I?
The novella is fiction and the questions with fiction are twofold involving escapism and relevance. It has both. There's the romantic figures of the Private Investigator and his associates and the dark forces of the Villains. It's good entertainment.
It also addresses the modernist quest for meaning by answering, within the context of postmodernism, that there is meaning in the moment. What you are doing when you are fully engage' matters.
If the context interests you, J.M. has a crude but comprehensive paper, 'Towards a Postmodern Synthesis', available on Lulu.com. Of course his thought will be criticized, but it is convergent across disciplines and it lacks a plan for a grand narrative. That makes it Postmodern. Any comments that it is somehow not 'true' postmodernism are modernist, absurd and disengage'.
As this blog continues, J.M. will have a turn or two at topics. It could get interesting.
So enjoy the book. Enjoy the paper.
Do well and be well.