Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Work. Life. Balance. It is a conceit I’m told is important, a requirement for a life well lived, but at this particular juncture I’m content with being the unrepentant workaholic, the metaphorical fat kid sitting firmly on the left side of the metaphorical seesaw, and it’s a malady that runs in my blood. My old man continues to love corporate culture, 180-minute commute be damned, which leaves my four-minute roundtrip with a ways to go.

I still can’t define postmodernism–neither can the public at large, apparently–and dollars to doughnuts I bet this is precisely how the philosophy would like it. Most of my postmodernist framework was acquired from one of the most fascinating professors in college, and by acquired I mean rolling into his epic three-hour seminars fully unprepared. Derrida. Fichte. Hoelderlin. Blanchot. All staunch purveyors of texts dense with pretension and impossible sentence construction, and all of them victim to the rich tenets of unreading. This is my contribution to the movement and, roughly translated from its French roots, it calls for skimming book jackets and “participating” with ideas filched from other professors.

The reason postmodernism is top of mind these days is because Arrested Development, the current staple of my media diet, allegedly lives and breathes it. It’s easy to see why the series was short-lived, with its strange contours and oddball characters, but many of the setpieces must be consumed, especially in measured doses. And let’s not forget The Bourne Ultimatum. Now there’s a guy who knows how to handle a book and channel those subtexts deep into your face.