Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks

Tatsuro Kiuchi

For those who don't remember, "P.J." stands for Philip Johnson. I picked him as my imaginary blogging buddy mostly because I've always enjoyed his trademark glasses and have respect for him as an architect. How can you not like a guy who hung out with Andy Warhol? As it so happens, I've been getting to know P.J. a little better thanks in part to my recent acquisition of The Philip Johnson Tapes. The book is a transcription of interviews with Johnson done in 1985 by Robert A.M. Stern. I have just started the book, but so far it's a very enlightening read. He really doesn't pull any punches when it comes to his opinions about anything. I anticipate a lively interview all the way through.

In other reading news, I just finished Nicholson Baker's, The Mezzanine. Though only 130 pages, it takes a while to go through in part because of Nicholson's extensive use of footnotes. I admit it got a little tiresome after a while, but his sustained concentration on minutiae is amazing. Most of the book revolved around the main character trying to figure out why both his shoelaces broke within a day of each other. He thinks about the different places of stress; at the knot, at the shoes' eye holes, along the toe, etc. in excruciating detail, but rarely do his thoughts become boring. He forces the reader to examine the everyday in a new light, often reexamining the mundane and finding something wondrous about it. How often do you read an author who cares deeply about paper towels vs. air dry hand dryers in public bathrooms? I enjoyed the book, but it is not for everyone. It takes a certain patience, one I admittedly didn't always have.

During breaks in my reading of Baker, I read a short story collection by Jim Shepard called, Like You'd Understand, Anyway. It is one of the most consistent short story collections I've read recently. Normally, a collection has a few gems, a lot of decent, but not great stories, and a couple that are just bad. Shepard held a tight grip on his material and never let it falter, even as he skipped around through history tackling such time periods as Chernobyl era Ukraine, Hadrian's Wall era Roman Empire, and the French Revolution. Shepard's stories, which largely revolve around father/son/brother relationships, always stay emotionally grounded. He never lets the historical period take control of the story. It doesn't matter what year the story takes place, relationships between men are always they same and, in Shepard's worlds, always failing. Definitely a book worth checking out, even if you aren't a big lit reader. It's very straightforward and lacks any kind of tricky post-modern elements. It's just a solid read. Period.


Last weekend Treasure Island, in the San Francisco Bay, held its second annual music festival. The island was originally built in 1939 for a World's Fair and fell into disuse shortly after World War II. There was been a lot of argument over the years about what to do with the man made island. Current plans call for a small sustainable city to be built. San Francisco always seems to be the most progressive West Coast city when it comes to social policy. Some message board posters have criticized the city for concentrating too much on environmental issue while ignoring larger concerns such as crime and safety. While I certainly don't want crime, I think that's something I'd rather put up with than cancer induced by chemical/pollutant exposure.

Forgot how I found the site, but The Projectivist is a great blog about art and graphic design.

Tatsuro Kiuchi is a Japanese illustrator of immense talent. In addition to his portfolio site, he also has a blog. Check it out, yo!

The Metro Library and Archive has an online database of Los Angeles maps, each detailing proposed public transit routes over the years. It gets depressing when you realize L.A. could have had its "Subway to the Sea" way back in the 1970's.

Syllabus for the Net Generation via McSweeney's.

San Francisco's plastic bag ban has worked and might be extended to include banning paper bags, some residents pissed.

Barnes & Noble is taking dead aim at Amazon's Kindle with their new e-reader device, Nook.

When was the last time you talked to your cousin, Frodo?

"Good Magazine" Associate Editor and all around swell guy Patrick James has a Twitter. Read it before it reads you.

Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks: Monday Edition

I finished Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands over the weekend. Not the most interesting book in the world. The first essay,"Trickster in a Suit of Light , starts the book on a high note as it explains Chabon's stance on so-called "genre fiction" and "literature." The premise of the essay was that entertainment has gotten a bad rap over the years because we have limited its definition. Entertainment has come to mean mindless action movies and formulaic sitcoms. That isn't all entertainment is and can be, that's just what we've let it become. Writing, Chabon contents, is also entertainment and that giving writing such a label isn't derogatory, but merely a description of its basic function. He says, "I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."

He goes on to define entertainment in its broader sense and finds it quite apropos when applied to writing.

"The original sense of the word "entertainment" is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of mid-air transfer of strenght, contact across a void...I can't think of a better approximation between reader and writer."

The above quote is more or less the thesis for the entire collection of essays, though I felt it wasn't always supported all that well. A couple of the essays were only five or six pages long including, "Landsman of the Lost" which was about American comic strip writer Ben Katchor. The essay gives a brief account of how and why Chabon is interested in the man and then talks about what he did for the essay's remaining four or five pages. This essay, like many in the collection, felt cursory, more recollections than analysis. Chabon often talks of his childhood and liking comics and having various religious and identity crises, but none of it felt all that personal. I never felt that I was getting to know him better as a writer. The essays felt like facts, I was getting a list of things Chabon likes without really understanding their relationship to him or his writing.

The most compelling essay, "Imaginary Homelands," deals with Chabon's Jewish identity as awriter, how that informs his writing, and how an essay he wrote about a Yiddish dictionary angered a lot of scholarly Jews. It was the first time I felt Chabon was intimately discussing something that was important to him and how personal aspects of his life affected his public output as a writer. Plus, it dealt with etymology and language, which is always a point of interest to me. I wouldn't say this essay alone is worth the cost of the book, but it does finally reveal something about the author, which I had been waiting 157 pages for. I have not given up on Chabon as a fiction author. I've read his short story collection A Model World and hope to pick up Wonder Boys sometime soon. In the meantime, I'll stick to other more convincing essayist fare.



LINKS:

Good Magazine has several good articles, one of which claiming that 2009 is one of the best years for the novel we've seen in a while. Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, is proof enough. For a list of must-read novels from 2009, none of which I've read (for shame!), click here.

The lucky bastards in Belgium have not only a kick ass train system, but a new central terminal decigned by Santiago Calatrava.

A new study has found that Mother Earth has tapped out and it's all because we put her in a choke hold. Now we're all going to die. Good going, citizens of Earth.

826 National, in addition to offering outstanding free tutoring services to children around the country, also has an unbeatable line of products including antimatter, robot emotions, and existentialist wine. To celebrate the organization's amazing products and its design/development team, 826 has put out a book entitled, Essentially Odd. It can be purchased at the 826 National website.

Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks

My reading streak continues at a rapid clip. This week's schedule includes Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and Michael Chabon's, Maps and Legends. I've found that reading three books simultaneously isn't nearly as distracting or disorienting as I had previously found it to be. I think it helps that one book is a short story collection and the other essays, making it easier to keep track of the information. I find switching between books at a whim makes their respective writing styles richer and more distinct. Each book's style helps set off the next. Plus, it allows me a break if the reading gets too intense. While entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable, sometimes the minutiae obsessed Baker can get a little taxing, so I switch over to the more direct prose of Johnson. Anyway I slice it, I feel my reading is worthwhile both in entertainment value and as templates for my own writing.

In Nor Cal news, the new Bay Bridge is rushing toward completion which means the old Bay Bridge is nearing its end. Fear not concerned citizens, the entire bridge is not being torn down, just the eastern span that stretches from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. The stretch from Yerba Buena to San Francisco is staying intact save for some seismic retrofitting. The new eastern span is being dubbed a Skyway because it lacks the caged support system of the current bridge and affords uninterrupted views of the Bay.

The official Bay Bridge construction website has all the details, including the eventual dismantling of the eastern span. However, as Newton's Third Law of Motion states, "for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction." What is the reaction you ask? Well, many forward thinking city planners are proposing to keep the old eastern span of the bridge and turn it into a hanging city of sorts, similar to that of New York's High Line. There is also some historical precedence to the idea which is outlined quite extensively in both Streetsblog San Francisco and BldgBlog.

I'm unsure of how practical it would be to build a city on a structure deemed unsafe to drive across, let alone live on. There are lots of kinks to work out, obviously, but it's a forward thinking plan that promotes reuse rather than outright destruction which works on both an economic and historic preservation level. I highly doubt that plan will ever happen, but it can only help in the ongoing fight against waste.

Last year I went to D.C. and spent a lot of time looking through the various Smithsonian museums as well as all the usual touristy places. A museum i failed to go to only because I didn't know existed until late last week was the National Building Museum. How cool is that? I feel all giddy and geeky just thinking about it. le sigh. le swoon. Perhaps if I had explored ArchiAtlas earlier I might have known.

Bonus Link:
Grain Edit is a graphic design fetish site that focuses on work from the 1950's through the 1970's. Most excellent.

Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks

Friday Night Links/ P.J.'s Picks:


I'm one essay away from finishing Consider the Lobster and I just picked up George Saunders' CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation. Reading wise, things are going pretty well. And for those who don't read, well, you're probably not reading this either so nevermind...I've been pretty hungry this past week and have been relying heavily on cold cereal for sustenance. Never underestimate the power of shredded wheat. When not eating nine bowls a day I look to a couple L.A. food blogs for restaurant tips:

Eater L.A.

Eating L.A.

The sites are pretty similar in their content; restaurant reviews, events, and gossip, but I always find myself looking at both. They help fill in the gaps of the other. They both have a slight crackberry.com feel in that they both giddily slip out rumors and discuss the possibilities of soon to open restaurants. Gossip includes the hiring of new chefs, changes in menus, the addition/removal of valet service, and new desserts rumored to be in the works. Both sites also keep track of restaurants that have a BYOB policy, which is always an enjoyable find.

L.A. Weekly's Jonathan Gold recently released his 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants. Did your favorite hot spots make the list? There's only one way to find out.


If you're a lover of local newscasts like I am you'll be thrilled to know that long time Fox 11 news anchor John Beard, who has been off the air due to Fox's decision not to renew his contract, is alive and well and (like everyone else in the world) has a Twitter. If you're tired of getting news feeds from The Man and would prefer getting your news from a man, follow his Twitter. For those of you who don't know who John Beard is, I really shouldn't be talking to your because your ignorance saddens me. However, I will tell you he is semi-famous outside of the L.A. region due to several cameos on Arrested Development.


Pitchfork is known for giving practically every album a rating of four or lower. It's like they're not even aware that there are numbers higher than five. Sometimes they come off elitist and unabashed lovers of all things obscure/indie. Haven't heard of Florence and the Machine, Mungolian Jet Set, or Nisennenmondai? Too bad. Pitchfork has and they love them more than a new pair of skinny jeans.

Those who bash Pitchfork never seem to mention that it's more than just a site for album reviews. It's full name is Pitchfork Media. As such, they have lots of exclusive video footage, interviews and cultural essays. A few of the more enlightening articles include:
The Social History of the Mp3
The Decade in Pop
Twee as Fuck: The History of Indie Pop


For the burgeoning writers of L.A., I present to you UCLA's annual Writer's Faire. It takes place on August 30 from 11-3. The full schedule can be found here and a UCLA campus map here.


And, if you enjoy vintage diners but not the high cholesterol meals they serve, come on out to DRKRM Gallery, which is hosting a photo exhibit of lost L.A. diners. It's a Googie lovers dream come true with half the fat and none of the guilt!

Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks

I picked up yet another David Foster Wallace book. This time it's Consider the Lobster, his second collection of essays. I'm not done with it and am right in the middle of an essay on lexicography and English usage in America. The essays are crammed with facts and wit and make for easy and enjoyable reading. I find the book especially refreshing after trudging through the highly neurotic and cerebral stories of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The essays in Consider the Lobster lack the excessive introspection and self-doubt and as a result are more accessible and easier to read.



It's not entirely fair to compare his short stories and essays because they each strive to do something entirely different. It's like the old cliche of comparing apples to oranges; you just can't do it. Be that as it may, I have compared the two and decided essays win out at the end. I'll be back with a more in depth look at the essays when I'm done with the book. In the mean time, here are my links:


A whole article dedicated to the history of Webster's Third Dictionary often touted as, "The Most Controversial Dictionary in the English Language."

My old buddy Logan Esdale has a brief but insightful primer on the work of Gertrude Stein.

The blog of New York based writer Molly Young. It's not often that I come across a writer's blog that actually has meaningful content.



In an effort to be topical, here are several links relating to our bum economic times.

"Atlantic" essay on health care

Having trouble finding cheap eats in L.A.? LAist's ongoing blog, Recession Obsession will help you find the goods (but not the droids) you're looking for.

Two part article on organic produce. It really helps demystify and clarify what all the labels mean and brings some balance to the whole organic vs. corporate farming debate.

Part I

Part II


Do you enjoy low cost Swedish furniture of dubious quality? Then check out Ikea Hacker, a blog dedicated to the tweaking and improving of the hard to pronounce, yet easy to love furniture of Ikea.

Carver's Beginnings

Later this month a new Raymond Carver collection will be published and will include unedited versions of the stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The compilation has been in the works for several years with much of the spearheading done by Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher. Her belief, which is shared by others, is that Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, trimmed the stories down almost to the point of suffocating them and changed their meaning entirely.

Carver: Collected Stories is intended to show Carver without the restraints of his editor and how his earlier work was just as detailed and nuanced as his late period stories such as the ones found in Cathedral. Lish, in Gallagher's eyes, did not sculpt her late husband's work so much as distort it into something entirely different. These new unedited stories are titled Beginners and are the original drafts of what became Carver's breakthrough collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As a London Times article notes, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love consists of 103 pages, while Carver's original manuscript was 204. Nearly half of the stories' contents were cut; on average it was about 70% per story.

Such judicious editing and reshaping of work begs the question of who was really behind the genius of Carver's writing. Which set of stories is the "real" Carver? Knopf, Carver's original publishers and part of the group who initially resisted the publication of the new stories, argues that,

What We Talk About requires no explanation. It is what it is – it is not standing in for some other “pure” text unsullied by messy editorial fingerprints. Every notable book...is the product of a collaboration between author and publisher, and while What We Talk About may exist at the extreme edge of editing, it is not unique.

This posthumous publishing of an author's work is nothing new. Also released this year, Hemingway's unfinished novel, A Moveable Feast, Nabakov's incomplete novella The Original of Laura, and Graham Greene's series of stories, The Empty Chair. Other unpublished works or personal documents made public include the journals and letters of Sylvia Plath, the letters of John Keats, the letters of Truman Capote etc. etc. The list goes on and on. What ends up happening, though, is these fabled pieces of work get published and then, inevitably, get reviewed as being mediocre at best and not nearly as revelatory as they had been hyped to be. Such is the nature of unpublished work. It wasn't published for a reason; because it wasn't very good.

Are Carver's unedited stories, "lesser works"? Some of that depends on one's aesthetic taste. Some prefer the stripped down style of Carver's debut collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? while others prefer the more robust stories of Cathedral. Is one style more "real" than the other? Not in my mind. I agree with Carver's publishers. A published book is a collaborative effort between author and editor, between author and friends, between the author and the world in which he lives. Authors are a product of their environment and circumstance and so is their writing. Take away any single element from any author's life and their writing will change. Writers also frequently change their style. Just look at Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and compare it to Sense and Sensibility. The self-consciousness concerning the novel as artifice present in Northanger Abbey is completely absent from her other work. Carver, like Austen, and many other authors, changed his style as time progressed and no longer desired the minimalist writing championed by Lish.

To publish a collection of stories for the purpose of vindicating an author's talent is harmful to both the author's original work and his legacy. In the case of Carver, I think Gallagher is trying too hard to portray her husband as a victim and a gifted writer stunted by his editor. That's not to say the stories shouldn't be published, I just don't think they should be published under the pretense of revisionism. Gallegher's goal seems to be to redefine people's opinion of Carver.

Instead of reshaping opinion, the collection should be used to broaden our understanding of the author and his collaborative writing process. Story drafts are much like artist's sketches in that they provide insight into the creative process that leads to the final product. Carver's story drafts are not the master key that will allow the reader to unlock his genuis, but rather one more piece of the puzzle. Carver's legacy, like Kafka and Dickinson before him, is being controlled without his consent. Thankfully, also like Kafka and Dickinson, his work is strong enough to withstand the meddling of outsider's hands and outlast even those who outlasted him.

Friday Night Links

Friday Night Lights/P.J.'s Picks:

I swear to you I'm going to put up actual blog posts, but for now you'll have to suffer through another round of links. This week's theme is loosely based around architecture, as seems to be the case quite often around here. These links are slightly more focused in that they deal with architecture and urban design within the scope of environmentalism.

Detractors of environmentally friendly urban planning projects often say that all this environmentalism talk is all attempt to stop global warming which, in their minds, doesn't exist. That, and the government is regulating business and manufacturing in ways it has no right to do. The way I see it, environmentalism is not an ethos or way of life dependent upon a belief in global warming. To me, it's just about common sense. In essence, environmentalists want to keep the world as clean as possible. We have seen that dumping trash into the ocean is not a good idea. Toxins get spread through ocean tides and fish ingest mercury and we ingest the fish and then we ingest mercury. We've seen that if air pollution is not relegated to one place and that wind patterns can carry smog across countries and continents. Dirty one part of the world and, chances are, that dirt will spread elsewhere. What environmentalism tries to do is avoid the spills and messes of the world. It is trying to keep humanity from pissing in the well from which we drink. It's a simple concept and one that promotes a hearty sense of self-preservation. We want to keep the Earth as habitable for as long as possible. As kids, our parents always told us to clean our rooms, doesn't it makes sense that we also clean our planet?

In an effort to jump on this environmental bandwagon and increase long-term sustainability, the city of Los Angeles is embarking on a series of public transportation projects, many of which have been rumored and argued about for years. Plans include more light-rail train routes or extensions of pre-existing routes, trolley service in downtown, bike rentals, and the legendary subway to the sea. All these projects are in their planning stages and require lots of money from a city going broke. While these projects might not even get started into 2011 or 2012, at least there are city planners and leaders who are trying to do something about the traffic problems in L.A. The infrastructure definitely needs some work and I'm glad freeways are being pushed aside for more environmentally feasible options.

"The New York Times" has a two part article about what to do with the inflexible infrastructure of the suburbs and how some economically downtrodden communities are dealing with the closure of "big box" stories. There is also a look at sustainable design for the future including a new phase of pre-fab homes that are vaguely reminiscent of the Case Study Project.

Slightly related and a little more hip is the promotion of chalk and white board paint. What are these marvelous products you ask? Glad you did. They are wall paints that, once dried, double as either a chalk or white board surface. For once it's permissible and encouraged to write on the walls.

And just to keep my literary peeps happy, a link to a pretty comprehensive and fairly well-known site on literature that includes interviews and book reviews.

Lastly, an in-depth article about language and how, more than just a communication tool, it also dictates your perception of the world and overall cognitive processes.

Friday Night Links

Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks

I've been trying to read more lately and that has lead me to finishing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in about three weeks. My pace is pathetic, but it is faster and more consistent than it used to be. Thank goodness for small favors.

I didn't like the book at first, finding the narrator's voice to be excessively flashy and verbose. Later, I came to see its purpose and found the style to be quite affecting. I ended up liking the novel a lot, but wouldn't rate it among my favorites. It won a Pulitzer, which I guess it deserved. I don't know which other books were contenders, so I can't really say.

Also on my reading stack is David Foster Wallace's, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Before this book the only other work of his I'd read was his short story collection, Girl with Curious Hair. I still rate the collection's final story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" as among my favorites. Brief Interviews is a less straightforward read, interspersing "interviews" with more traditional short stories. The interviews slow me down a lot because the fictional subjects tend to be men who are deeply neurotic, self-deprecating, and obsessive. Who knew a story about how annoying a baby could be would last for 25 pages? I find most of the stories rewarding and am continually amazed at how Wallace can transform seemingly pointless and neurotic obsession into something profound and illuminating. His writing takes patience, but I find the struggle worthwhile. His mix of heavy intellectualism, emotional self-flagellation, and humor, make for a very unique and awe-inspiring read. I hope to continue my DFW reading trend with Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again.

I just started Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics and am enjoying it immensely. The man can do no wrong. I'm not sure what I want to read next, though I am leaning toward something by Lydia Davis.


P.J. has been trying to get me to join Twitter, but I have held strong against him. I am willing to concede that there are some cool people to follow including, Aziz Ansari, John Hodgman, Eugene Mirman, Jim Gaffigan, and Michael Ian Black. I chose these guys specifically because they are funny comedians and they retain that humor on Twitter. As you may have noticed, Michael Ian Black is up there, but his Stella brethren, Michael Showalter and David Wain are not. As much as I love the other two guys, I found their Tweets to be more pedestrian (i.e. "I have to confess that even though it's in Los Angeles, Langers Delicatessen has by far the best pastrami in the world. I had it today!" ) Thank, David Wain! Although, in his defense he also said, "Redoing my bathroom as one huge urinal, so you can just open the door and pee anywhere. Cost me a fortune but how awesome is that?" I found it funny. Maybe it's 'cause I'm a guy with the mind of a 12 year old.

In other, slightly more important news, I stumbled upon a few cool sites dealing with print design and art.

Velhetica

PSFK

Design Observer

If you feel hungry after all that interwebs browsing, try a recipe from Sam the Cooking Guy.

Least, but certainly not last, the official homepage of professional Canadian and all around cool guy, Mr. Logan Esdale.

Friday Night Links

P.J. was jonesing for some good Mexican food, so he Yelped a few places in the area and decided on a little joint down by the railroad tracks that sells tacos for 99 cents. I was suspicious of such an amazing deal, but figured it was worthy a try. The tacos were small, but still generous considering their 99 cent price tag. I ordered a two taco/rice and bean combo for 4.99. The carne asada was all right. Tender, but heavily salted. P.J. ordered the taquitos and pretended while eating them that he was smoking a cigar. It got kinda messy when he tried to make plumes of smoke using guacamole. Sometimes I feel I can't go out in public with P.J. At least not to any place respectable. Overall, the food okay and would make do if need be, but definitely not a place I would rave about. P.J. responded more favorably to the joint because of the free jalapeno peppers. He's a sucker for the free giveaway.

Friday Night Links/ P.J.'s Picks:

Interview with author Lydia Davis

Architect(ure) themed roach coach in Venice

Trailer for documentary about architectural photographer Julius Shulman

Some of Pasadena's restaurants are starting a Bring Your Own Wine program on Wednesday nights. No corkage fee!

Charlie Rose interviews Frank Gehry

Los Angeles reading series Book Party's blog

"This Modern Thought Can Get the Best of You..."

As much as I love Modernism I must admit it has its share of radical supporters whose ideas don't always make a lot of sense (I'm looking at you, Robbe-Grillet). The goals of Modern literature, simplistically speaking, were to completely disregard the previous literary traditions and begin everything anew. The old modes of writing were considered insufficient in their ability to describe the new, highly fractured world view that came into prominence following World War I.

One major proponent of Modernist ideologies was author and critic (although he denounced the title) Alain Robbe-Grillet who, in 1963, published a compilation of essays about fiction writing titled, For A New Novel. In it Robbe-Grillet compares the literary traditions of yore to tree branches and that, "...the branch in question is actually dead of natural causes, by the simple action of time...and if all those who cling to it so desperately would glance up just once toward the top of the tree, they would discover that new, green, vigorous, hearty branches have grown out long since" ( p. 26).

He goes on later in the book to say that he is not proposing Modernism as the new, permanent style. It too will pass and something will take its place. Literature should always be alive and vital and change along with the needs of the writer. In Robbe-Grillet's mind, the writers of the period no longer needed many of the literary conventions such as linear narratives, omniscient narrators, and metaphor. And this is where I feel Robbe-Grillet went a little too far with his proposal. He confused popularity of convention with usefulness. Just because a mode of writing has fallen out of fashion it doesn't mean it's not useful.

Every writing technique is there to serve a purpose. Metaphor, for example, compares two objects in order to cast one of those objects in a new light. In Dave Eggers' short story, "On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home" he says, "...the air is gray and dense and the snow falls like ash." Eggers' description of snow forces the reader to question their preconceived notions about each object and how, according to his suggestion, they might actually be more similar than originally thought. Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, wants to get rid of metaphor completely, arguing that its use devalues the intent of the initial word. In the case of Eggers' story, he is not allowing snow to be described as it is, but instead, relies on another image (ash) to get his point across. As I stated earlier, in creating a metaphor, the author forces the reader to reassess their notions of both objects and come to a conclusion about them. If anything, the comparison invites further thought on the meaning of each word and doesn't devalue them at all.

Along with metaphor, story structure, or at least linear story structure, was also brought into question during the reign of Modernsim. Linear story structure plots a straight line from one point in time to another. A story takes place at noon and ends at five in the afternoon. Non-linear storylines jump around in time and lack structure. The plot meanders wherever it may and lacks cohesion; the events of the story may seem unrelated and arbitrary. The point of this technique is to reflect the often random nature of life and the banality of human existence. While I don't have a problem with this form of writing, I think it's unwise to completely dismiss traditional story structure as archaic. Many of the best works of literature are well-plotted and completely dependant upon that plot to work.

Playwright, Theresa Rebeck, knows all to well how much structure has fallen out of favor with the literary community. In an L.A. Times interview she says,

Last year I attended a cocktail party for a theater that was doing one of my plays. The artistic director was making a little presentation, introducing me to his staff and his board, and he said -- in front of everybody -- "Theresa's plays are always really well-structured, but don't hold that against her."

The next day I wrote him an e-mail. "Hey, is it somehow considered uncool to structure a play these days?" I asked.

"Actually," he wrote back, "my literary department kind of does think that."

She defends the rotten branches of literature Robbe-Grillet was so eager to trim by saying, "Structure is not our enemy, it is the form that makes content possible; it is the meaning that holds the image and imbues it with specificity; specificity is not our enemy; intellect without heart is not more, it is less and in the theater sometimes less is just less. Contemporary playwrights don't need to toss away all that has come before us, nor could we if we even tried."

The last line of her quote echoes an oft-repeated line in Paul Thomas Anderson's movie Magnolia which says, "We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us." Literature is not written in a vacuum. It is a product of a person's imagination, a person who, whether they like it or not, is influenced by the world around them. The changes Modernists so desperately wanted to make were in response to what had come before; the Victorian and Romantic Periods. In order for new branches to grow, there have to be roots somewhere. Nothing is created out of thin air. Structure, like metaphor, and omniscient narrators, may be part of an older tradition, but they are no less important than the new, Modernist tradition, incidentally, is pushing 100 years old. Looks like some one's outlived their usefulness ( I'm looking at you, Modernism).