Howzzat!

I’ve only recently started to count myself as a writer despite writing for more than a decade. A chance encounter with a writer I thought I’d never meet, has stopped me in my tracks and changed my life as I knew it (what an understatement). I’ve begun to feel lately that I’d die if I don’t write. And that’s the most liberating statement I’ve written in this space in all these years. Life has always been beautiful as it is torrid. It isn’t the same it was a couple of years back. A simple act of picking a book to read, jotting down thoughts has become more challenging than ever though. External factors like a loved one’s frown, meeting a deadline someone else has committed to etc., will persist and the most stoic part of my mind thinks it can live with that. It’s the internal factors that play havoc -   I wouldn’t prefer placing it under the omniscient “writer’s block”, the phrase has lost its sheen these days– palpitations that halt sleep, anxiety that builds up day after day cons...

'Literature of Exhaustion' by American writer John Barth, is generally considered the quintessential essay on post modernism. It was widely misinterpreted in his time as beckoning the death of the novel and he had to write a 'Literature of Replenishment' a decade later to counter it. Barth starts the essay with a disclaimer that it was the "used-upness" of certain forms that he wants to denounce and not the physical, moral, intellectual aspect of art. He doubts the then fashionable “intermedia” arts’ stand of rejecting not just the tradition in art but the traditional notion of the artist, whereby a controlling artist might run the risk of being considered a fascist in those terms. Why then is this essay often equated to a pamphlet on post modernism? I think it comes down to his argument – a writer whose work is technically “out of date is likely to be a genuine defect” he says, even Beethoven might sound outdated if he weren’t put forth in “the Borgesian spir...