The NOvel

I'm going to try to make this more brief than the epic tract I have planned on this topic. You know how modernist architecture (specifically skyscrapers) is big and Reaganomics-y? No? Um well. It is. I mean it is big and self contained and presents itself to the rest of the world with the sense of its own brilliant singularity and completeness. The positive social message is supposed to be that the rest of the city will see the towering monolith and follow suit.

Well that failed. That's how you end up with fascist dictators. It's a bad scene. So the Post-Modernists (in architecture) come along and say, no way, way it's gotta work is it is part of the city, bleeds out into it, welcomes the development of the city in, or the decay if that's the case.

Thing is with that, they still make skyscrapers. And they are skyscrapers with concessions. They bend and fold with the city. They can be really beautiful too, but thing is a skyscraper is always going to be big and formidable, just changing how it interacts isn't going to change the fact that it is some form of giant fucking monolith.

So I think about novels in the same way (didn't see that coming did you? You did? Oh...the title.) Modernist lit. required a lot of the reader and wanted you to think it was the bee's knees, the end all of lit. (see Ulysses, please see it). Then P0Mo comes along and wants to fuck with the singularity of those novels. It wants to say, whatever man, you don't need authority, you just need to be. And it was saying all this and still being the big old monolith of the novel. Sorry bub, you can't talk bad about the bear and still have the rug. Or something.

So what I want is a new genre. Something that is inclusive in a way that was previously unimaginable. This will not be short stories. But it will have plenty to do with marketing and packaging cause those things do determine context. Its context will have unity. I'm working on it. My idea is for you to work on it too. That and maybe just to think that it might be a good idea at all to abandon the form I love so dear.