Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...these sound just too academic for summer reading, try the Science Fantasy Bookstore (8 JFK St. St.) on top of the Wursthaus, for your favorite new, used and out-of-print science fiction paperbacks and hardcovers. And if any book at all will tax your brain past its limit, the Million Year Picnic (99 Mt. Auburn St.) and Newbury Comics (30 JFK St.) may be the perfect remedy...
...World War I, the rise of organized crime during Prohibition, the disillusionment of the Depression, all paralleled the development of the gallant equalizer. Today he is likely to deal with government corruption, financial fraud and environmental threats. "I don't consider my newest book, Barrier Island, as hard-boiled fiction," says John D. MacDonald. "It's about a land scam in islands off the Mississippi coast." The detective story is one of the few fiction forms that deal directly with the seamier side of American life. To improvise on Mencken, himself an American institution no less secure than...
...because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction that drives literate people toward Judith Krantz. "This muck cripples consciousness," he proclaimed of pop in 1968. "Therefore no concessions should be made to it." Sorry. Concessions were made. "By the late 1960s," writes Princeton Scholar Louis Menand, "popular culture had permeated every aspect of life with an inexorability that...
...high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure." Kitsch is amusing, not threatening. An ironic acceptance of pop effluvia, Sontag wrote, "makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated." Sontag's hip intellectuals did not like cheap science-fiction movies or Fabian: they "liked" them...
That kind of tutti-frutti exchange is invigorating. Now, however, pop has started feeding off itself in remarkable new ways. Sometimes the self- references are just lazy or parochial. On situation comedies, characters make jokes about other situation comedies. In Stephen King's fiction, a character in a quandary "thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head," and a forest "seemed alive with hokey B-movie jungle drums." Then there are the stranger entertainments about entertainment, from the small army of Elvis impersonators to the TV game show Puttin' On the Hits, on which ordinary folks...