The Believer is out now and some of this month’s fantastic, wide-ranging collection of literary articles are posted in their entirety online (including an online exclusive interview with artist David Shrigley). Among them, Jonathan Lethem defines and redefines in his fierce defense of postmodernism. Poet Kenneth Goldsmith (who also runs UbuWeb) shares his thoughts on language to online sharing in this interview:
“The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something ‘meaningful,’ we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which, as you say, could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning. After all, you can’t show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion. The world is transformed: suddenly, the newspaper is détourned into a novel; the stock tables become list poems.”
For more full-length articles, click here.
